The title of this selection of letters written from pre-Canadian Newfoundland by one of its British administrators and his wife constitutes a radical undervaluation. White Tie and Decorations is not, in fact, a book about mincing social butterflies at a vice-regal court. It is, rather, an enthralling record by two strikingly observant sophisticates of 1930s Newfoundland in all its aspects, ranging from the ravages of the Great Depression and chronic social inequities to the natural prodigies of the island and Labrador.

Peter Neary, doyen of experts on the 20th-century history of his native Newfoundland, has performed a signal service in conceiving and compiling this book. The letters by Sir John Hope Simpson and his spouse “Quita” to their family back in Britain make a first-class historical and literary document. The Hope Simpsons represented the governing stratum of the British Empire at its socially conscious best. As functionaries of the far-flung Empire, they also perpetuated a glorious non-political tradition, that of the Great Victorian Travelers.

Thus, reporting their arrival after a rough sea voyage, Lady Hope Simpson could write on a bone-chilling Newfoundland day in February, 1934: “We really are having a marvellous time and just wish we could share it with our children…. I fancy there is plenty of hard work ahead and many disagreeables & troubles to be faced, but – just now – the clear, crisp cold makes one feel so happy and so full of energy, and so ready to enjoy everything.”

This sets the tone for the whole book. The unflagging ebullience of the two imperial globe-trotters carries them to the most forbidding corners of the Newfoundland wilderness and through the “disagreeables & troubles,” candidly described, that faced Sir John as the colony’s Commissioner for Natural Resources from 1934 to 1936.

Britain had just installed the “Commission of Government” to take over from Newfoundland’s elected administration, battered by the Depression. The people were battered too, as the Hope Simpsons show – thousands workless and subsisting on a tiny dole, diseased, demoralized and, to the Commissioner’s scratching eye, shackled by medieval conditions in education and the mainstay fisheries.

A note of prim disapprobation sometimes invades these letters but it is offset by their persistent vigour. Quita’s vivid rendering of the flora, fauna, and face of Newfoundland and its denizens young and old seems extraordinary to this reviewer, born and bred there. She demonstrates a lyricism – spontaneous, direct, and effortless, her feeling for places and people haunting and poignant.

Neary’s enterprise and editorial aplomb have added a book of classic quality to the bibliography of Newfoundland. But its appeal will transcend the boundaries of provincial history and exclusively Canadian interest. There is a universal dimension to its descriptions, reportage, and sheer humanity.