by Toby Litt
I once heard Dr. Chenier, who fell at Eustache, address a great number of habitans at the church door after service – in the French of course – at considerable length on this subject. The peroration was uttered in these words: – “And what, my countrymen, are those with whom you will have to contend? Do they not live on oats like horses and pigs? And do you think they can stand before brave Canadians, who live upon bread and pork?” These words were highly applauded; the argument was considered unanswerable; and they departed, swearing they would never live like pigs, and complimenting each other upon the implied bravery of well-fed Canadians…
Any Canadian today would know Dr Jean-Olivier Chenier. He is a martyr of the glorious, failed revolution.
I visited the statue to him, in Montréal’s Viger Square. In oxidized bronze, he strides forward, pointing toward the future with his right hand whilst carrying in his left hand – nothing. The long-barrelled rifle has been broken off and not replaced. The statue’s message has been changed, by this vandalism. Progress through violence, it used to imply – the tip of the rifle being ahead of the pointing hand. He exemplifies will and force, heading in the same direction.
When – in the last of his ‘Letters on Canada’ – William referred to ‘the late rebellion’, he was drastically underplaying the events. They had been bloody; they had been brief; the British forces had terminated the armed uprising with extreme prejudice.
After a patriote victory at St Denis, and a loss at St Charles, Dr Chenier and his forces were tracked by the forces of Commander-in-Chief John Colborne to St Eustache. The date was 14th December 1837. A contemporary painting shows the British soldiers on the left, disciplined, lined up, the patriots falling back, chaotic, in mufti, on the right.§
Around eighty of the patriots barricaded themselves in St Eustache church – a very high, handsome building with two towers. Today, its frontage is pockmarked in seven or eight places where cannonballs hit, ineffectually. These are the delicate reminders of two hours’ British bombardment. After this, impatient, Colborne created a diversion by torching nearby streets, sent troops round the back to set fire to the sacristy and then waited.
Dr Chenier did, indeed, ‘fall’ at Saint Eustache – he jumped from a rear right window of the blazing church and was cut down fighting. The place where he died is now a parking lot.
Subsequent rumours, still the subject of angry debate in Quebec, had it that his body was desecrated – his heart dug out and placed on display, for several days, in a local pub. Whether true or not, this remains a point of disgust at the British.
What is not debated is what the British troops did. They pillaged houses then burned them down. When they moved on to St Benoit, very little of St Eustache was left – only the houses known to belong to Protestants.
In his final Letter, William said exactly this, ‘The late rebellions in Lower Canada have caused much misery in the disaffected districts… It often happens in such cases that the greatest rascals escape, and comparatively innocent individuals suffer’. This is what has happened, he asserted, around where he lived. ‘Many of the simple habitans were sued for the property they were ordered, and in some degree forced to take, and nearly beggared. Others were imprisoned, their houses burned, and property plundered; and in all this there was perhaps not much injustice. But what is the case with many who bore commissions among them, and who laboured for years to excite the less knowing to insurrection?’ Men like Louis-Joseph Papineau, a rebel leader who had fled to America. ‘Why, after concealing themselves for a while, they have now returned, and are in the full enjoyment of their property, without being called upon to contribute one farthing more than the loyalest men in the province towards repairing the damages they caused; and this certainly is unjust’.¶
If William lived near St Eustache, with a Protestant family, then after this violence they would have found themselves surrounded by hostility. If he lived with a Catholic family, his house may have been burned down. This most likely explains why William wrote in the Letters of living in that part of Canada in the past tense. It may also explain why we have none of his writings or possessions from that time; they may have ended in flames set by British troops.
Although clearly not on the side of the patriotes, William was sympathetic toward their sufferings. I got the sense that men he knew and liked, perhaps farmers he had traded with or lived beside, were feeling this injustice.
Towards the end of his final letter, his final publication of any sort, although he was to live for another ten years, William asked and then answered the question his Cumbrian readers must have had. ‘..is it advisable for able bodied labourers with families, or farmers with small capitals, to emigrate to Canada? I answer yes!’
And why? Had all this talk of liberty infected him? After a life of Toryism, is it possible Canada had got to William?
I think so.||
His final Letter was a kiss-off. In his typically boat-burning way, he decided to let loose. Goodbye to the old world. Sod you, Lonsdale. Sod you, Dad.
[One] can purchase, and be the owner of as good a farm at the end of six years, for a less sum than he would have to pay in rent and taxes in England, where he would be perhaps poorer than when he commenced; while in Canada, he would be master of his own property, with full liberty to hunt, shoot, or fish, without fearing any man, and therefore surely a more independent gentleman than any farmer in the United Kingdom.**
Liberty! Independence!
This was almost William’s last word. It reminded me of his son’s disgusted remarks on the Centenary Burns’ night. That dinner had been a place where, like Canada, there would be ‘no fawning on those in power, no profit derived from flattering the titled or the rich’††.
How many things I could read into that phrase ‘without fearing any man’! After all this time, William is finally confessing to having been kept in his place by the Lowthers.
In Canada, he would be ‘a more independent gentleman’.
This was as close to republicanism as William ever came.
*
There was a limit, though. My image of William in his log cabin was right in one way – wherever he lived was probably made of wood. But it was also wrong. He was no frontiersman. When he wrote in order to put his fellow countrymen off taking on the ‘bush’, he became energetically disgusted:
Respecting Cumberland and Westmorland men emigrating, with a design of taking up Bush lots, I advise them not to do so. It is work they know nothing about, and quite at variance with their habits and manners; – a wilderness swarming with mosquetoes – felling trees – digging among stumps – breathing an overshaded atmosphere, with squirrels, skunks, foxes, wolves, and bears for neighbours, and half starved, will entail nothing but misery upon them. My advice certainly is, not to think of it!‡‡
A word here or there in the Letters glanced back to William’s Cumberland dialect. In Letter 6, grain was described as less ‘pubble’ that elsewhere – what a lovely word! The definition given in The Folk-Speech of Cumberland is ‘plump’. An Old Saying is used as example. ‘At Michelmas a pubble goose – at Kersmas, standin’ pie’.
Letter 7 described a particular style of threshing wheat as done ‘cat under’t lug’. William seemed to be reaching out, to say he still belonged. He referred to ‘my own… county’, still meaning Cumberland.§§
When I leave Henry and George, even for a few days, I think about what it would be like never to see them again. Perhaps William did keep in touch with Betty, writing monthly letters, sending what money he could. But he was far away from his sons and daughters. As William Jnr grew up, and started to train as a vet – William wasn’t there. As his other children sank lower in society than he or his father had done – William couldn’t help.
There was a harsh poetry in scientific fact. William observes: ‘The 21st [of June] is the longest day; the sun rises twelve minutes past four, and sets forty-eight minutes past seven. On the shortest day, the 21st of December, the sun rises
forty-one minutes past seven and sets nineteen minutes past four’. During winter ‘the thermometer ranges from twenty-two to thirty-six degrees below zero’.¶¶
Writing of sheep farming, William notes the flock will always have to be housed at nights to secure them from the wolves.
The exiled Cumbrian’s melancholy came through strongly in one line. ‘Twilight is always much shorter in Canada than in England’.
But William’s Canadian twilight was to last a full decade.
* Letter No. 4.
† Letter No. 6.
‡ In Letter No. 8, William wrote that he lived on a shared farm in 1836. In Letter No. 6, he said of the Canadians, ‘Being for some time, and during the two years of the rebellion, a resident among them…’ And in Letter No. 5, said, ‘When I resided a few miles from St. Eustache…’
§ ‘Back View of the Church of St. Eustache and Dispersion of the Insurgents – Dec. 14, 1837’, by Charles Beauclerk (1813–1861), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saint-
Eustache#/media/File:Battle_of_Saint-Eustache.JPG.
Also ‘Front view of the Church of St. Eustache Occupied by the Insurgents. The Artillery Forcing an Entrance – Dec. 14, 1837’, http://habitantheritage.org/yahoo_site_admin/
assets/docs/Beauclerk_Charles.12254023.pdf.
¶ Letter No. 8.
|| It’s ridiculous to compare William to Rimbaud as a writer, or as a man, but I can’t help but think of Rimbaud in Africa when I think of William in Canada – that complete departure both men made, from who they had been before.
** Letter on Canada, No. 8.
†† ‘A Hensingham Gentleman’s Speech at Burns’s Centenary in Shrewsbury’, The Whitehaven News, 3 March 1859.
‡‡ Letter on Canada, No. 8.
§§ Letter on Canada, No. 4.
¶¶ Letter 7. How did William know this so accurately? I think I have found an explanation.
20
EXILE’S RETURN
What proof is a poem? Of anything?
As far as can be proved, by non-poetic evidence, William Litt sailed for Canada in March 1832, and never returned. He died eighteen years later and was buried on Laval island without seeing his wife or any of his seven surviving children again.
William, in this version of his life, remained a stranger to his adopted village and his native fells.
But as I neared the end of my research, chasing up the last few references, that wasn’t what I came to believe. I had a strong suspicion that at some time, probably in early 1839, William did return from Canada, and was for a short while reacquainted with Cumberland and reunited with his family. My evidence was circumstantial.
The United Kingdom Census of 1871 lists ‘Elizabeth Mossop’ as a widow who had been ‘Blind 34 years from accident’. (I will pause, to say how sorry I was that I couldn’t make anything more of this – there was a novel, at least, in this detail; but it was one I wasn’t able to write, and not just because I didn’t know what really happened.) This gave a date of 1837 or 1838 for the blinding. Here, then, was a possible motive, to explain William’s return. He felt compelled to come back and make sure his family was coping with this disaster.
Another piece of evidence was that, soon after the time he would have been in Whitehaven, the Cumberland Pacquet began once again to publish William. Several poems and then the ‘Letters on Canada’ appeared.
I imagined a meeting with the newspaper’s editor. In 1839, that was still Robert Gibson, the friend who had edited and published Wrestliana and Henry & Mary. During their reunion, William either proposed or was asked to write something of utility to his fellow countrymen, at least to those who were considering emigrating to the New World. With a handshake, William was welcomed back into the pages of the Pacquet. At the very least, the money would have been welcome.
‘The Bells that Hang in the Old Church Tower’ was published in the Cumberland Pacquet* with the initials ‘W.L.’ and above the words ‘Hensingham, 1839’.
Another poem, ‘The Sky is Clear’, also by ‘W.L.’ was located even more specifically: ‘Hensingham, Feb. 15, 1839’.
I wondered for a while whether ‘W.L.’ might have been William Litt Jnr. But that seemed unlikely. He would only have been 21-years-old. Would he have written this way?
At this point, I suddenly realized I was the right person to be trying to figure this out. Some of my research – reading about William Pitt the Younger and conditions in Cumbrian mines – had made me feel like a very amateur historian. But reading these poems, and trying to get stuff out of them, was something I’d been doing since O level English.
Unless he was creating a very sophisticated impersonation of his father, I don’t think William Jnr would have written of the bells:
I hear their sound on the soft winds borne,
As of old on each quiet sabbath morn, –
How ‘of old’ can a memory be, for a young man just into his twenties? The rhythms of the next lines seem exhausted.
I hear their toll – their solemn toll,
As it telleth of some departed soul, –
And then – oh! then – a spell is thrown
O’er my throbbing heart, and I feel alone;
For that knell hath long since marshall’d those,
Most lov’d on earth, to their last repose;
Yet it soothes me still – for oh! ’tis sweet
The long-lost friends of our heart to greet,
Though but in dreams: – and such is the spell
That breathes in that deep funereal bell.
I decided this was our William, writing – very simply – of his emotions upon hearing, for the first time in seven years, the bells of Cleator† or perhaps another church.
They are the words of a very lonely, death-haunted man.
All William’s words had been preoccupying me for so long that I’d started to be taken over by them. I noticed that his combative and convoluted prose style was entering into everything I was writing. And when I wrote about him, I did it in a sort of mock nineteenth century way.
For example, in the first draft of the section above, I wrote:
Either this is an act of extreme literary sophistication – the co-option of an absent father’s emotional world by a present-in-the-scene-depicted son, the total ventriloquism and then publication under initials that almost all the Pacquet’s readers would take as indicating William Snr. Either that, of which William Jnr. hardly seems capable, or this is our William writing – very simply – without Hardyesque irony – of his emotions upon hearing, for the first time in seven years, the bells of Hensingham church; bells within whose dinning reach he had grown up.
This was bad. This was showing off.
But I blamed William.
Having got so into him that I’d watched him write his poem ‘The Lakes’, it was as if things had now gone a stage further. He was taking control of my pen. The rhythms I fell into were his. When I tried to produce simple, direct sentences, he started to add asides and subclauses.
Something similarly uncanny happens, occasionally, when I’m writing very fast in a notebook – my handwriting starts to look exactly like my father’s. When I notice this, I try to stop it immediately. I make the letters less loopy, more spiky. But if I look back up the page, it’s as if he’s written that part. I really used to get creeped out by this, now I don’t mind as much.
When I was growing up, my father’s handwriting used to be particularly distinctive because he always wrote with a particular kind of blue felt-tip pen. He would sign cheques and leave notes for my mother. It was something I knew very well. And this was how I discovered that Father Christmas didn’t exist. Or rather, that my father was Father Christmas – because, one year, I realized that Father Christmas, although his handwriting was a little disguised, had left a gift tag for me written in blue felt-tip pen.
My father only wrote as Father Christmas once a year. If I didn’t take care, I would be writing full time as William. And, unless I go
t a grip on myself, I would produce something as dense and – to most people – as unreadable as Henry & Mary.
‘The Sky is Clear’ was published a few days after ‘The Bells’. When I looked at it closely, I found it could only be describing Canada, not Cumbria.
The landscape seems uninhabited, except for the poet – no populous town of Whitehaven, no farms. Instead, there are green fields and, at the same time, parched earth, and most tellingly of all the words, ‘Through the giant forest the loud wind howls’.
As far as I know, Cumberland in 1839 boasted no giant forest, whereas Canada was still mostly that very thing.
Here, I saw very clearly William confronting his isolation. As Wordsworth did in dozens of poems,‡ William forces himself to draw moral comfort from the sights of Nature.
Know that the summer’s cloud or shower
Comes but to freshen the fruit and flower –
That joy would lose its dearest zest,
If the gloom of grief ne’er touched thy breast…
There wasn’t much else but Nature that could give him comfort.
But the poem that gave William’s emotions on returning to Cumbria most directly was ‘Stanzas Written Near Black Combe’. It starts with a quotation from a travel book I was unable to track down. I thought, perhaps, that William had made the quote up – because it’s so fitting. The book was called Journal of a Tour to the Lakes and Mountains of Cumberland. The part William extracted or invented is about the towering chunk of rock known as Black Combe fell.
This mountain, in itself one of the finest in Cumberland, gains additional interest from being the last of his native hills which the outward-bound Cumberland mariner beholds, and consequently the first that meets his view on his return homewards.
