Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  John’s inclination to revel in danger and regale listeners with his adventures was a mixed blessing. His intention had been to sweep his bride off her feet. He wanted to take her back to his property in South Africa immediately after they were married and he had wangled some capital out of his family. At first, Susanna fell in with these plans and worked harder than ever to churn out stories for the annuals. “I must depend on my wits to buy my wedding clothes,” she explained to friends. But although John’s braggadocio about shooting elephants and leopards at the Cape, not to mention his spine-tingling descriptions of snakes, amused the habitués of London drawing rooms, they started to unnerve Susanna. While John was scouring Scotland for rich relatives, she got cold feet. She began to wonder whether the literary lions of London weren’t more her style than the tawny-maned lions of South Africa. She asked herself why she would move to a colony in which slavery was still permitted, when the Mary Prince story had made her a fervent abolitionist. In January 1831, while John was still in Scotland, she abruptly broke off the engagement: “I have changed my mind. You may call me a jilt or a flirt or what you please.…I will neither marry a soldier nor leave my country for ever …”

  What happened to the great love affair? Susanna, it seems, had found herself in a very modern dilemma. She had recognized that if she followed her heart, she would probably be abandoning her ambitions. “[I] feel happy that I am once more my own mistress,” she admitted to a confidant. Her writing career had taken off: that year she had managed to place stories in several publications, including Harral’s monthly, La Belle Assemblée, the weekly Athenaeum and the annuals The Amulet, Friendship’s Offering and Juvenile Forget-Me-Not. She was meeting or corresponding with kindred spirits such as Mary Russell Mitford, a single woman sixteen years her senior who was supporting herself as a professional writer. And the more Susanna heard about the empty, arid grasslands of the Cape, the less attractive they sounded—especially when she compared them to the streets of London.

  It is not difficult to imagine the appeal to Susanna Strickland of the London of the early nineteenth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the capital had been transformed from a conglomeration of villages, such as Westminster and Chelsea, linked by muddy lanes and narrow streets, into a magnificent city traversed by paved roads. Six new bridges across the Thames River, built between 1750 and 1827, had supplemented London Bridge, and by unclogging the city’s arteries had enormously increased commerce. The population had doubled in the previous fifty years: with two million citizens, it was now not only the largest city in the world but also its principal financial exchange, the “Rialto of the age” in James Morris’s phrase. Private developers had built grandiose terraces of large houses, like the Nash Terraces on the south side of Regent’s Park, and elegant rows of shops along Oxford Street and Bond Street. Men of business and letters congregated in the coffee houses, book shops and clubs of Piccadilly. Susanna could wander down busy thoroughfares, listening to the noisy cries of vendors selling lavender, cherries, hot loaves or gingerbread, as she admired shop windows full of the latest furniture designs or Paris fashions.

  Moreover, the world was opening up for talented young women like the Strickland sisters. The capital was exploding with the kind of cultural activities in which, following the example set by Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Mary Russell Mitford, Susanna could envisage a future. Elizabeth was already editing her periodical; Agnes was frequently mentioned as a “poetess” in society columns; Catharine was a popular writer of children’s books. The booksellers, engravers and publishers who had offices in St. Paul’s Churchyard, Paternoster Row, Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street were eager for material. The introduction of steam printing after 1814 had lowered costs and multiplied the number of copies of a publication that could be printed in a short time. There were close to three hundred newspapers circulating through the United Kingdom. Did Susanna really want to exchange this buzz of literary activity for the isolation of a South African farm, surrounded by hostile “Kaffirs” and truculent Boers? Did she really want to leave a city in which women were playing an increasingly important public role to live in a country that still endorsed the inhumane practices that Mary Prince had described?

  It is clear that “Papa” Pringle influenced Susanna’s decision to forsake romance and devote herself to the literary life. Thomas and Margaret Pringle had lived in South Africa for seven years; that’s where they had met John Dunbar Moodie. But they had returned to England in 1826, sickened by the way the British government condoned slavery in the colony and exasperated by the way it blew hot and cold in its policies towards the Boer majority. Thomas attached more importance to his hopes for Susanna than to his friendship with Moodie. He painted a dispiriting picture of colonial life to his young protegée and encouraged her to reconsider her engagement. A young woman of her talent, he argued, would thrive in the publishing world—especially with himself as her mentor. “By the strong recommendation of my friends,” Susanna reported home, “I have been induced to board with a family for the next three months and to try my fortune in the world of letters….I hope to get on and prosper.” Her new London lodgings were in Middleton Square, in the district of Finsbury—a respectable but unassuming address. Like Islington to its north, and Bloomsbury to its west, Finsbury was a pleasant neighbourhood of spacious Georgian squares, filled with flower-beds, trees and lawns and surrounded by beautifully proportioned terraces of four- or five-storeyed houses. Susanna’s rooms overlooked the newly consecrated St. Mark’s, a fine stone church with a splendid tower. And she was just around the corner from “Papa” Pringle, in Claremont Square.

  For three exhilarating months in 1832, Susanna lived the life of a bluestocking in Middleton Square, London.

  At first, Susanna found her independence stimulating. “All my friends promise to call upon me in my new home!” She reeled off to her Suffolk friends James and Emma Bird a catalogue of the distinguished writers she had met, and the invitations to “grand converzationes” she had received. She watched a ragtag political demonstration in the streets of Islington, which she told James Bird would have made him laugh himself “into pleurisy.” Finsbury was a neighbourhood peopled with literary and artistic types, such as the cartoonist William Cruikshank. “We often met and had a chat about things,” she would recall in later years. “He was a wonderful man in his way.” One of her neighbours was Edward Irving, a prominent preacher who ranted from the pulpit in a strong Scottish accent about the need for more ritual in church services. Susanna fought through his crowds of admirers to hear him perform. “It was worth enduring a state of suffocation to see and hear him. …I never took my eyes from off this strange apparition… . Imagine a tall man with high aquiline features and a complexion darkly brilliant with long raven love locks hanging down to his waist, his sleeves so short as to show part of his naked arms and his person arrayed in the costume of old reformers.” In addition to lively letters to friends, she turned out an amazing volume of work—book reviews, stories, songs, poems. Her self-doubt, and her ambivalence about success vanished. At the Pringles’ weekly receptions, Susanna glowed as distinguished editors pointed her out to each other as one of the brightest among the new women writers.

  Susanna was particularly entertained by the egos and behaviour of those—like Irving, Pringle and the editors of the various annuals—who made their living by their wits. She observed the affectations of the young member of Parliament Edward Lytton, her exact contemporary but already an established dandy and the successful author (under his pen name Bulwer-Lytton) of two successful novels. She never forgot her first glimpse of the historian Thomas Carlyle, “but he was such a crabbed looking man that I did not care to make his acquaintance,” she told an interviewer years later. She had felt on the margins of family life as a child, while sweet-tempered Catharine got all the attention. Now, as a woman, and as someone uncertain about her own social status, she once again felt like an outsid
er in London’s beau monde. Nobody observes her fellow human beings with a more acid clarity than someone who feels she doesn’t really belong in the magic circle, and Susanna’s whole life had prepared her for this role. In letters she polished a style of cool amusement that echoes Jane Austen’s delicious sense of irony. “There is to me a charm in literary society which none other can give,” Susanna wrote to a friend, “were it only for the sake of studying more closely the imperfections of temper and the curious manner in which vanity displays itself in persons of superior mind and intellect.”

  After a few weeks of trying to support herself, however, the pressure to produce and the battles to secure adequate payment began to erode Susanna’s confidence. “A single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else,” Jane Austen had written in Emma, a few years earlier. “But a single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls!” When Susanna was in a good mood, she believed she could conquer the world. But when her spirits sank, nightmares of penury, spinsterhood and emotional starvation shrank her horizons. She had only to look at her three eldest sisters for a vision of a bluestocking future. Elizabeth lived a cramped existence, between her furnished London room and the crowded editorial offices of The Court Journal. Agnes was constantly worrying about how to afford the finery she needed for her smart parties. And Jane remained cooped up at Reydon Hall, keeping house on a pittance, scrambling for fees from annuals and caring for their increasingly crabby mother.

  When Susanna’s letter breaking off their engagement finally reached John in Scotland, he was shattered by her abrupt rejection. He rushed south to win her back. Assuring her that he loved her far too much to lose her, he declared that if the wildlife of South Africa struck such terror in her, he would abandon all plans to return there. He must have arrived soon after Susanna’s resolve to be her own mistress had started to flag and his passionate wooing soon bore fruit. Susanna recognized that, as Mrs. John Dunbar Moodie, she would at least escape the old maid stigma, if not poverty. She was reminded that she and John thought alike in many ways: both were vehemently opposed to slavery, expected deference from their social inferiors, but felt that manners were at least as important as money. And the physical presence of her suitor rekindled the ardour that had flamed so brightly the previous summer. His humour and cheerful energy provided a reassuring contrast to her self-doubt and pessimism. John made her laugh at her own uncertainties. Susanna’s determination to be independent wilted in the heat of his desire, and she agreed that they should get married as soon as possible.

  In the early nineteenth century, weddings were usually modest affairs. Perhaps that is why only Catharine, of all Susanna’s sisters, arrived to celebrate this occasion. In the absence of Susanna’s family, the Pringles showed their support for their young friend. Mrs. Pringle helped Susanna assemble an outfit for the wedding and entertained the little party to breakfast before the ceremony on April 4, 1831. The gathering at their Finsbury house was a modest but joyful affair—probably without liquor, given Mr. Pringle’s low church leanings, but with no shortage of elegant speeches and good wishes. Then Thomas Pringle helped the bride into his carriage and drove with her to the splendid Greek revival parish church of St. Pancras, Woburn Place. Sitting next to the coachman was feisty Mary Prince, the former slave who had dictated her story to Susanna. “Black Mary,” Susanna remembered, “had treated herself with a complete new suit … to see her dear Missie and Biographer wed.” Catharine Strickland acted as bridesmaid. At the altar stood Moodie, nervous until the very last moment that Susanna might get cold feet again. Thomas Pringle had evidently overcome his disappointment at Susanna’s decision, and he led her up the aisle, between the Ionian columns, to the awaiting bridegroom.

  Catharine, who had watched her sister vacillate between her writing ambitions and her love for John Moodie, knew that Susanna was still uncertain about marriage. “The dear girl kept up her spirits pretty well though at times a shade of care came over her brow but she rallied as much as possible,” she told the Birds a couple of days later. “What do you now think of the vagaries of woman-kind?”

  Three days later, Susanna wrote to the same friends a letter in which she protested far too vehemently that she had no lingering doubts. “I assure you that, instead of feeling the least regret at the step I was taking, if a tear trembled in my eye, it was one of joy and I pronounced the fatal obey with the firm determination to keep it.” But she acknowledged that “the fatal obey” had already cramped her ambitions. “My blue stockings, since I became a wife, have turned so pale that I think they will soon be quite white, or at least only tinged with a hue of London smoke.”

  After their wedding, the Moodies spent a few weeks in Finsbury. Susanna continued to mingle with her literary friends and write for the annuals. John had just published an account of his adventures as a youthful soldier (A Narrative of the Campaign of 1814) and was now negotiating with the publisher Richard Bentley about a book on his experiences in South Africa. It would finally appear in 1835, under the title Ten Years in South Africa, Including a Particular Description of the Wild Sports, and consisted of enthusiastic descriptions of shootin’ with the boys, interspersed with a few brief throat-clearing passages about farming methods. John and Susanna were already finding it hard to make ends meet, and the question of how to support themselves became more acute in early summer when Susanna realized that she was pregnant. They decided to reduce their costs by leaving London and renting a cottage in Southwold so that Susanna could be near her mother, sisters and friends.

  Susanna never enjoyed her pregnancies; she was afflicted with nausea and a general lassitude. Nevertheless, she and John enjoyed receiving her sisters and the local “Grandees,” as Susanna termed Suffolk’s gentry. “Even Mamma forgets her resolution of never leaving home and honors our little mansion with her presence,” she noted. Neither John nor Susanna dared look much beyond the birth of their baby. They had no money and no prospects, and there were few opportunities in England for a man of John’s skills. But then a surprise visitor turned up on their doorstep. It was Robert Reid, a successful settler in Upper Canada whose daughter was the wife of Susanna’s brother Samuel. Sam had flourished in Canada as an employee of the Canada Company, a London-based organization that had bought up vast tracts of Crown land in Upper Canada to sell to incoming settlers. Sam had been a superintendent of Canada Company projects around Guelph, in the triangle of Upper Canada that jutted down towards Lake Erie, before moving east to the newly settled town of Peterborough, north of Rice Lake, of which the Reid family had been founders. Reid was gung-ho on the advantages of emigration. He boasted to the young couple about his own history—how, after a struggle of twelve years, he had the satisfaction of a family of ten children all now in a position to become wealthy landowners. Reid promised the young couple “independence and comfort on the other side of the water, and even wealth after a few years’ toil.”

  Reid’s rosy picture of prospects in Upper Canada was only one element in the flood of propaganda about emigration then circulating around Britain. England was now in a crippling agricultural depression. The prices of wheat and barley had fallen by more than half between 1812 and 1830. At least one in ten of the British people was a pauper, for whom emigration offered the only escape from poverty. All around Southwold, tenant farmers were defaulting on their rents, and agricultural labourers were being thrown out of their cottages and into parish poorhouses. In the coal mines of the Midlands, naked women pulled wagons through the shafts to earn a few pennies. In the factories of the north, children of eight or nine were working twelve-hour days. Of course, the Moodies were in a different class from these casualties of the faltering economy—but they too were its victims.

  The Moodies began to consider crossing the Atlantic as a way to maintain their social position despite their cramped income. By now they had realized that, even outside London, to live in t
he style to which an English gentleman aspired they needed at least one thousand pounds a year. John’s military pension of a hundred pounds a year, and their combined but unpredictable earnings as writers, would never amount to that sum. So when a public meeting about the advantages of emigration to Canada was advertised, John was amongst those who flocked to Norwich to hear it. He was accompanied by his friend and Southwold neighbour Thomas Wales.

  The lecture was given by one of the chief Canada-boosters, William Cattermole from nearby Bungay. Cattermole had a financial interest in extolling all the golden opportunities in the New World: he was an agent of the same Canada Company that Sam had worked for, and he received a bonus for every emigrant he recruited. Cattermole rhapsodized about the cheapness and fertility of the land available to those who braved the high seas. He spoke of Canada’s salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water access, its proximity to the mother country and its exemption from taxation. He told of land yielding forty bushels to the acre and log houses raised in a single day with the help of friends and neighbours. He insisted that society in York (which eventually became Toronto, but was then a muddy, ramshackle settlement) was “equal to any provincial town in Britain.” His lectures and pamphlets made Upper Canada sound like Virginia—a warm, welcoming landscape with civilized people tending fruit trees and arranging flowers.