Hannah Hatherly Maynard (1834–1918) learned photography after emigrating from England to Bowmanville, Ontario. In 1862, she moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where she established her own successful photographic studio. From babies to convicts, fanciful tableaux vivants to dignified family portraits, for nearly fifty years Maynard’s studio captured a growing and dynamic Victoria and its citizens. The studio also gave her a place to engage with photography as a creative practice, and over the course of her career, she experimented with the photographic innovations of her time. Maynard’s technically skillful—and immensely playful—photographs were unique among studio photographers in Canada and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century.
The Photographer and the Shoemaker
Hannah Hatherly (later Hatherly Maynard) was born on January 17, 1834, in Bude, Cornwall, a town on the Celtic Sea in southwest England. Historically a working harbour, Bude became a popular tourist destination for beach excursions during the Victorian era. Hannah’s family was middle-class, with her father, John, listed in the 1851 census as a master mariner, the highest grade of seafarer licence for commercial vessels. The teenaged Hannah met Richard Maynard (1832–1907), listed in the same 1851 census as a shoemaker living with his father, Thomas, a cordwainer, just over two kilometres inland in nearby Stratton. Hannah and Richard were married on March 24, 1852.
The invention of the medium of photography was formally announced only five years after Maynard’s birth. Often referred to as a “simultaneous invention,” the process of fixing an impression of the world using light and chemicals was put forth by both the English Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) and the French partnership of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851). The daguerreotype produced a singular yet highly detailed image, while the talbotype (also known as calotype) produced a grainy, yet reproducible image that would establish the basis of the negative-positive process. Whether French or British, both had in common the fact that their invention was precipitated by increasing interest in observational science and a previous century of industrialization, a development that also shaped the mining and shipping industries of Maynard’s Cornwall throughout the eighteenth century.
Map of Canada West, c.1850. Includes Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and part of Lake Huron with Georgian Bay.
Perhaps inspired by her father’s adventures as a mariner, or the prospect of finding new opportunities as Cornwall’s tin mining industry declined in the mid-nineteenth century, the newlywed couple left home for Canada.2 By 1853, the Maynards had settled in Bowmanville, a small but growing town on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, just east of Toronto. The Maynards were two in a sizable wave of settlers to Ontario from Cornwall, many of whom settled just twenty kilometres away in nearby Oshawa.3 Bowmanville was a microcosm of the British settlements springing up across what was then Canada West. Founded by United Empire Loyalists attracted to its fertile land and natural harbour, the town grew steadily, becoming a mercantile centre with mills and other small businesses, and eventually a station on the Grand Trunk Railway. Richard established himself as a shoemaker with a shop at the corner of King Street and Silver Street. It was during this time that Hannah and Richard started their family, with the births of their children George (1852–1926), Zela (1854–1913), and Albert (1857–1934).
In 1858, Richard joined thirty thousand other gold seekers headed for the Thompson River in present-day British Columbia, where prospectors had discovered gold in 1856. The event served as a catalyst for European-Canadian settlement in the region, while also drawing in prospectors and miners from China, the United States, Mexico, and the West Indies. As the final place to resupply before heading into the goldfields, the small, unincorporated town of Victoria swelled in population from mere hundreds to more than five thousand almost overnight.
Hannah, who remained in Bowmanville with their three children while also pregnant with their fourth, Emma (1859–1893), took up her own prospects during Richard’s absence. It’s not known what may have inspired her to take up photography in this moment or to where she turned to learn the skills she needed. There were no photographic societies or photography schools in Bowmanville, though it was home to at least one professional woman photographer in the 1860s, Pauline (Polly) Ann Hayward Henry (1825–1913), whose studio was based in nearby Oshawa.4 The town also boasted the larger professional firm of R. & H. O’Hara: Photographers, Booksellers, Insurance Agents, Etc. Perhaps she learned photography from either of these; at the very least, she had access to the cameras, equipment, and chemicals she would need.
From the outset of photography’s invention in 1839, many women picked up the camera for creative, leisurely, or entrepreneurial reasons. As early as 1841, a Mrs. Fletcher in Pictou, Nova Scotia, was advertising her daguerreotype photographic practice in a local newspaper. In Quebec City in the 1850s, Élise L’Heureux (1827–1896) and her husband Jules-Isaï Benoit Livernois (1830–1865) established a photographic studio that over the next one hundred years would become one of the most prolific in the nation.5 Photography studios like that of Montreal’s William Notman (1826–1891), which had locations across Canada and the United States, employed women in photographic printing rooms. Outside of professional practices, countless women took up photography as a leisure pursuit documenting their families and travels, thoughtfully compiling their images into richly-decorated and annotated private albums.
Maynard was one of many women picking up the camera, but one of a few who would embrace photography as an entrepreneurial as well as creative pursuit. When Richard returned to Bowmanville from the west Hannah had committed herself fully to her photographic practice. Richard had done well in the goldfields—so well that his success would later be noted in Biographical Dictionary of Well-known British Columbians, an 1890 publication about the province’s prominent citizens.6 Between the windfall from Richard’s prospecting and Hannah’s creative endeavours, the two must have felt an itch for new opportunities. When news of British Columbia’s most famous gold rush, the Caribou Gold Rush, made its way to Bowmanville in 1861, the shoemaker, the photographer, and their family relocated to the Pacific Coast.