This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880

What personal vendetta motivated a group of men, labelling themselves a Vigilance Society, to enter the Donnelly farmhouse in southwestern Ontario on that night in February 1880 and brutally bludgeon the family to death? According to the author, this is the wrong question to ask. In This Side of Heaven, a phrase he takes from the verse on the Donnelly family gravestone, Norman Feltes suggests that this legendary event cannot be fully understood through conventional narrative, but only as the historical product of the diverse economic, socio-political, and ideological conditions that underlay Biddulph Township during the late nineteenth century.

Factors such as the way the region was surveyed and settled, the emerging pattern of its canal and railroads in competition with those of the United States, its distinctive wheat trade, and the patriarchal gender relations in its villages and towns, all converged in a unique set of forces that ‘overdetermined’ both of the murders and the trials at which the vigilantes were acquitted. Using a rigorous marxist structuralist methodology, the book draws the reader into a compelling web of economic, social, and geographical structures, showing how human actions, sometimes murderous, arise from forces larger than the individual.