German Mills
Subtitle: a novel pertaining to the life & times of William Berczy, painter, adventurer, spy, speculator, pioneer & incidental founder of the city of Markham, Upper Canada
By: John Steffler
Publisher: Gaspereau Press Limited
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Kentville, Nova Scotia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9781554471485
Copyright date: 2015
Subjects: Fiction; Romans, nouvelles
Description: Talented, privileged and ambitious, the young William Berczy is disaffected with the strictures of eighteenth-century European society. Quitting Germany to pursue a future of his own making, Berczy refashions himself as a secret envoy in war-torn Poland and a portrait painter in Italy before his charisma and skill for self-invention land him the ultimate romantic role-leading a group of German settlers into the American wilderness. After abandoning his deceitful partners and fleeing from the Gennesee Valley to Upper Canada with his settlers, Berczy's facade of influence crumbles as he fails to secure either acceptance or success, his talent squandered on petitioning the powerful. Based on Berczy's compelling, hyperbolic life, German Mills is a portrait of a man entangled in the vain romanticism and restless ambition that propelled the colonial dream and yet lurks just below the surface of Canadian society.
Table of contents: title: Vienna to Poland; title: Switzerland & Italy 1780-1790; title: London & America 1790-1793; title: Williamsburg 1793-1794; title: Canada 1794-1796; title: Toronto, Montreal, London 1796-1801; title: Toronto, Montreal, New York 1802-1813.