76 OVER ON THE ISLAND

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There is deeply imprinted in the minds of Islanders the romantic story of Margaret Gordon. Her hus- band, Honourable Alexander Bannerman, too, was popular in Charlottetown, yet even he is overshadowed by the brilliance and romance of his lovely wife. Margaret Gordon’s life is strangely suggestive of the heroines of the Alger stories. Alger boys and girls struggle along and emerge eventually with wealth, power, and happiness. So did Margaret. She began poor but she lived to influence one of the greatest intellectuals of the day; and she served in high places as the wife of the king’s representative.

Margaret Gordon was the granddaughter of the Island’s first governor, Walter Patterson. She was born in Charlottetown, in 1798, and was baptized in St. Paul’s Church. Those facts alone enable her to be claimed as an Islander even if she had never returned to the scenes of her childhood. When she was two years old her father was promoted to a Nova Scotian regiment. But the forces were reduced, and Gordon was put on half pay. Three years later he left for England and, it is thought, took his two little girls with him. He died on shipboard. The two girls, Mary and Margaret, were then brought up by their aunt, Mrs. Usher, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. They lived in very reduced circumstances. There, in Kirkcaldy, Margaret met Thomas Carlyle. She was nineteen. He was twenty-two. Whether or not she became the Blumine of his masterpiece, Sartor Resartus, is a question. At any rate, she exerted a powerful influence on his life and writing.

Carlyle, in his typical mystical language, has left a