Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  The manuscript in question was a four-part story entitled “Richard Redpath. A Tale” for publication in 1843. The story began innocently enough, with the shipwreck of two English gentlemen, Richard and Robert Redpath, off Jamaica. Most of the tale then centres on the Jamaican slave trade, for information about which Susanna drew on the two booklets she had written about slaves while living with the Pringles in 1831. But in the third episode, the pace of the story picks up as Robert encounters the “Jew editor” of the Jamaica Observer, Benjamin Levi. Into the portrait of Levi, Susanna poured her detestation of George Benjamin’s politics and her fury at the slanders spread about her husband by the Intelligencer. This was much harsher than the amusing malice that often tinged Susanna’s character sketches. Despite Susanna’s open-minded approach to both blacks, like Mary Prince, and native people, like the Chippewas near Peterborough, she smouldered with racism when she spoke of George Benjamin. The portrait of Levi resonated with the kind of anti-Semitism that characterized English society in the nineteenth century, and which kept Jews out of the Westminster Parliament until 1858. Benjamin Disraeli, the future British prime minister, was allowed to take his seat in 1837 ONLY BECAUSE, AS A baptized Christian, he was prepared to swear the Christian oath of office.

  Any Belleville citizen who picked up a copy of the Literary Garland in November 1843 would have instantly recognized George Benjamin in the description of Benjamin Levi. Like Benjamin, Levi was “a short, fat man, with broad shoulders, a head and neck like a bull” and an unusually large head covered in “a quantity of coarse, curling black hair.” All Benjamin’s defining features were given the most negative spin possible. The easygoing smile that Benjamin habitually wore was, in Levi, a “perpetual grin, which though meant for a smile, was but an acquired contortion to hide the evil workings of the spirit within.” Benjamin’s teeth, which he displayed every time he laughed, became “a malicious looking set of strong white teeth, which seemed as if they were formed to bite and worry his species.” Benjamin’s firm mouth was transmuted into a “hardened and audacious expression” that made Levi “an object of disgust and aversion.” Moodie’s local readers, instantly linking the fictitious Levi with the real Benjamin, would have learned that their newspaper editor was “a living, laughing, impersonation of gratuitous mischief ” and a “sort of moral hyena.”

  Benjamin cannot have enjoyed the ridicule, particularly after it received even wider circulation when “Richard Redpath. A Story” was reprinted in the Toronto Star. Ten years later, it was reprinted yet again as part of a collection of Susanna’s work entitled Matrimonial Speculations. There is no record of how much Susanna’s attack wounded him; few issues of the 1840s Intelligencer have survived. The rule of thumb amongst Upper Canadian editors of the time was that, if you dished it out, you had to be prepared to take it, too. Benjamin had shrugged off other insults, such as the British Whig’s description of him as “the slandering Belleville Jew.” He had also taken steps to shield his family from overt prejudice by having most of his fourteen children baptized at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church. (There would not be a synagogue in Belleville for another hundred years, but Benjamin carefully noted the births of his first eight children in the back of his Hebrew prayer book). He himself would be baptized a few months before his own death in 1864, and he was buried in St. Thomas’s graveyard.

  There was an obvious logic to the Moodies’ decision to make a friend of Baldwin and an enemy of Benjamin, but their behaviour showed their hopeless lack of political smarts. As the 1840s drew to a close, it began to dawn on Susanna and John that Robert Baldwin’s friendship was not going to assist John. Baldwin had no local roots in Belleville, and he had far too much on his mind to worry about the town’s ineffective sheriff. After his defeat in Hastings in 1842, Baldwin changed constituencies and ran elsewhere for the rest of his career. With dogged loyalty, John Moodie continued to regard him as his patron. He wrote to him regularly, offering him advice on land and judicial reform. “My family—none of my children have forgotten you—still speak of you with great affection,” he assured Baldwin in 1845. “Friends are scarce in these times, and we cannot afford to lose any.” When Susanna gave birth to a fifth son in 1843, he was named Robert Baldwin Moodie. However, Baldwin did nothing to secure a new job for John where he might escape his persecutors. John yearned to be registrar of the Niagara region, but Baldwin was unwilling or unable to satisfy Moodie’s petitions for help.

  In contrast, George Benjamin, now a key player in Belleville, nursed his grudge against the Moodies. By now, Mrs. Moodie was a writer to be reckoned with: she was the most important and prolific contributor to the Literary Garland, her battle songs from the 1837 Uprising were still whistled on the streets of Upper Canada, and her sharp tongue was legendary within Belleville. Buoyed up by success, Susanna blithely assumed that her literary contretemps with Benjamin was par for the course in a life of letters. She even took a mischievous delight in her character Levi’s wickedness. “I don’t know what we should do without Benjamin Levi,” remarks a character in the story. “He keeps us all alive.” She was too taken with her creation to reconsider either the substance or the tone of her depiction. In 1854, she boasted to her London publisher that, “The Jew Editor is a true picture drawn from life which so closely resembles the original that it will be recognized by all who ever knew him, or fell under his lash, a man detested in his day and generation.”

  To George Benjamin, however, Susanna’s story was not just an amusing little joke. He was not universally detested: he was a vigorous and imaginative politician who worked hard for his Belleville voters. In 1847 he was elected as the senior official in the area, responsible for all roads, schools and public works. And in 1856 he was elected as a Member of the Parliament of the United Provinces—the first Jew to sit in Parliament anywhere in the British Empire. John A. Macdonald, the Tory leader, told him that, “You may be a leetle wanting in Suaviter. However, your ability is well known to us all.” As Benjamin’s career went from strength to strength, and his influence grew, he waited for an opportunity to settle his scores with a sheriff he had always opposed and the writer who had penned such a venomous caricature.

  Chapter 11

  Barefoot Crusoes

  While the Moodies were settling in Belleville, and making important friends and enemies, Catharine and Thomas Traill were living a hand-to-mouth existence. After leaving the bush in 1839, they had rented a little frame house in Ashburnham, the village on the opposite bank of the Otonabee River from Peterborough. The house had a reliable well and an orchard that Thomas looked after. Catharine spent hours in her garden, cultivating the potatoes, carrots, turnips, currants and melons that would see them through the winter. Even in the hardest times, she could never resist planting flowers, too—marigolds, sweet peas, poppies and pinks—to brighten the view from her kitchen window. She had her good friend, Frances Stewart, close by, and Frances’s daughter Ellen Dunlop, to whom she also grew attached. She somehow found the few dollars required to hire a servant to help her with her four children and household chores. Her daughter Annie recalled of these years, “On the whole we were very comfortable.”

  But the family’s only income was Thomas’s annual military pension, as he was unable to secure a government job in neighbouring Peter-borough. Susanna Moodie wrote of her brother-in-law: “He has had the mortification of seeing all the places filled up—some by men half his age—and himself passed up.” Catharine scrambled for ways to supplement the family income. She started a small school, and she also began to act as the local nurse and midwife, relying heavily on the herbal remedies on which she was already an expert. Every week her daughter Katie took a basket of eggs, from the flock of about thirty chickens the Traills always kept in their backyard, to market, where they fetched about ten-pence a dozen. Catharine also acquired a couple of geese, which she plucked regularly so she could sell the down (“the quills are not touched, so that the animal suffers but little from the operation”). But a
ll this hard work yielded only pennies. Ever since the Traills and Moodies had arrived in Canada, the parcels that came regularly from Reydon Hall had been an important source of clothes and housekeeping items for each family. These days, Catharine was so dependent on her sisters’ handouts that she wept with relief when their letters and gifts turned up at the Peterborough post office.

  Agnes’s letters to Catharine, and her activities in England, provide an interesting counterpoint to the lives of her sisters in Canada. Despite the Stricklands’ lack of means and paucity of aristocratic connections, Agnes was enjoying extraordinary success. Her career as a biographer, which started only after her sisters had arrived in Canada, must have surprised them. In the Regency London that Susanna and Catharine had left behind, the British monarchy had been deeply unpopular. They could recall the intelligentsia sneering at George IV as a lazy drunk and William IV as “Silly Billy.” But everything changed when the petite and prim figure of Victoria, eighteen years old, ascended the British throne in 1837. The young Queen was a magnet for public attention. Victoria’s subjects wanted to know about their monarch’s dresses, jewels and tastes; they adored her youth and aura of vulnerability, and the glamour of her wedding to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1840. Agnes, who had an acute eye for commercial opportunity, promptly produced a two-volume biography entitled Victoria from Her Birth to Her Bridal. The Queen herself was outraged by the book’s numerous inaccuracies (she scribbled “Not true” in the margins of nearly every page of the copy presented to her, and deleted whole paragraphs). But Agnes had hit a public nerve, and from then on she was unstoppable.

  Interest in the young Queen blossomed into a more general interest in female royalty, and Agnes Strickland was there to feed the appetite. Over the next three decades, she and her sister Elizabeth produced biographies of thirty-three queens (including both consorts and female monarchs, and covering England, Scotland and France). The two women worked hard and companionably on both the writing and the extensive research for each volume. They trod new ground in historical writing. (Agnes suppressed the error-ridden biography of Victoria, and none of her subsequent books contained careless mistakes). Eliza and Agnes never relied on secondary sources. They unearthed papers that had lain mouldering in private collections, and in this way they shone a public spotlight on women whom contemporary male historians had ignored. They wrote about the past from the point of view of its spouses and victims, as well as its heroes. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a politician and author of the monumental five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II, “detested their methods,” according to Agnes’s biographer, Una Pope-Hennessy: “The emphasis was distressingly different from what he was accustomed to, for with the entry into the closet and the bedchamber, history was no longer a pompous march of massy events engineered by massive men, but a succession of intimate and homely details from which generalisations were gradually built up.”

  The biographies made the Strickland name famous. However, only Agnes Strickland’s name appeared as the author of each book. Eliza, who actually wrote more than half the individual biographies, regarded popular acclaim as vulgar and was happy to let Agnes take all the credit. She had no interest in swanning through literary salons. The two women spent their mornings together, burrowing away in the British Museum Library or royal archives. In the afternoons, Eliza avoided all unnecessary calls and refused all invitations: instead, in her rented room in Bayswater, she read, wrote or visited with old acquaintances. Agnes, in contrast, revelled in her newfound status and acclaim. When in London, she always managed to secure an invitation to stay with smart friends in Regent’s Park or the West End. “The great gain [from the newly published third volume of the twelve-volume set The Queens of England] is that it has given me a grand place in society as well as literature,” she wrote to her Canadian sisters in 1841. “Since I last wrote I have been down to Windsor and had a long morning in the Royal Library….Yesterday I drank tea with Lady Bedingfield.” Agnes was the premier royal biographer of her age.

  From now on, Agnes’s letters read like chapters from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. They were speckled with the names of minor aristocrats, junior politicians and the more literate members of the landed gentry. Agnes’s tall, mannish figure and deep voice were soon well known within the beau monde of Britain. One evening she sat next to the Duke of Wellington: “My early enthusiasm in favour of the hero of a hundred fights has not abated one chit. He was not near as deaf as I had heard.” She spent the summers writing at Reydon Hall, or as a guest in country houses. In 1846, a portrait of Agnes in the purple velvet dress she wore at court was hung in the Royal Academy. The artist, John Hayes, managed to soften the sitter’s imperious expression into something closer to a fashionably feminine simper. Further honours glimmered in the ether. “Our little queen,” as Agnes referred to Victoria with proprietorial pride, was even said to have murmured something about a royal pension. Apparently, biographical inaccuracies had been forgiven in the light of Agnes’s deluge of deference.

  Given that both Susanna and Catharine were as talented as their elder sister, and Susanna was just as ambitious as Agnes, both women must have asked themselves, as they read Agnes’s accounts of literary accomplishments, “What if …?” Had they remained in England, might they too have established themselves as successful authors? Was Agnes’s success largely because she had remained “in real and single blessedness,” as she smugly put it, so could devote her time to her books, rather than to husband and children? Agnes had found her metier in the field of royal biography. Might her younger sisters have equalled her triumphs in their own (very different) genres, or might they, at the very least, have ridden her coattails to prosperity?

  Catharine did not envy her elder sister. Unlike Susanna, she had never nursed a personal rivalry with Agnes. She had no interest in hobnobbing with the likes of Lady Bedingfield; she lacked the vanity to desire a portrait by a Royal Academician. However, Catharine was finding it just as hard to make ends meet in Ashburnham as she had in the bush. Her little school had failed, and Thomas was again sinking into despair. She had already tried to get a further payment for The Backwoods of Canada with a heartfelt appeal to the publisher: “While her little volume is read with pleasure by the talented and wealthy, the writer and her infant family is struggling with poverty and oppressed by many cares.” But this had only yielded a further fifteen pounds, bringing Catharine’s total income from Backwoods—one of the most widely circulated and best-known books about Canada—to 125 pounds. As Catharine sat in her parlour in Ashburnham and read Agnes’s letters, she began to hope that Agnes might help her again. It was Agnes who had found a publisher for Backwoods in 1836. Now that Agnes was such a celebrity, surely she could find a publisher for more sketches of life in Upper Canada by Catharine?

  Agnes tried. There was every reason to anticipate a warm reception for a manuscript by Mrs. Traill. The Backwoods of Canada had been well reviewed, and its first printing of eleven thousand copies had sold quickly. It had been reprinted in 1838, 1839 and 1840, and translated into German in 1838 and French in 1843. Moreover, there was now a vogue for improving and educational material. In 1823, Dr. George Birkbeck had founded the first “Mechanics’ Institute” in London—an early form of public library—to feed what he called “the universal appetite for instruction,” and soon after, every city boasted a similar institute. As literacy spread in the new industrial towns of Victorian England, so did demand for the printed word. The wives of the newly wealthy manufacturing class were not only unprepared to run large family houses, with servants lurking behind green baize doors, they were also ignorant of the manners required in the polite society to which they had been elevated. Even a book with the unappetizing title What to do with Cold Mutton went into a second printing. There was an epidemic of encyclopedias for the common man, and of series with titles like Valpy’s Family Classical Library, the Edinburgh Cabinet Library and The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, the series in which B
ackwoods had been published. Memoirs and travel books often commanded advances as high as 250 pounds and could make their publishers profits running into four figures.

  If anyone could have helped Catharine, it would have been Agnes. Agnes knew the importance of personal contacts and self-promotion. She was an indefatigable hustler and a canny businesswoman: she harangued publishers to issue and distribute her books and secure good reviews for them. As her reputation grew, she negotiated a share of sales revenue in addition to a flat fee for every book she produced. But Agnes had no luck with her sister’s manuscript. Her own success reflected the popular demand for history, but the new industrial class didn’t want to read about remote forests and North American flora. Catharine was out of touch with English tastes and English publishers. She lived beyond the edge of the known universe for London literary types. Agnes confided to Susanna, “I have failed to obtain anything for [Catharine’s] mss. as yet,” and she decided that Catharine must dismember the manuscript and peddle the sketches piecemeal to various periodicals in Britain and Canada. Agnes did manage to place several of the sketches, including two to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. But Catharine waited for months for payment, and there is no evidence that Chambers ever sent a fee to their Canadian contributor.

  Traill fortunes spiralled downwards with each passing year. In 1840,a fifth baby was born, but Catharine’s joy was short-lived: Mary Ellen Bridges Traill died before her first birthday. Catharine had another baby in 1841, a fourth daughter, named Mary Elizabeth Jane, who survived. But within months, Catharine was pregnant again, and her fifth daughter died as an infant in 1843. All her children were constantly sick with earaches, boils, coughs, burns, infected cuts—hardly surprising, since they were starved of protein and fresh fruit and vegetables for most of the year. “Anxious nightwatchings over the cradle of suffering infants have brought down my strength and health,” wrote Catharine. No woman in this period took the survival of a child for granted. Both Catharine and Susanna drew heavily on the Christian certainty that their infants’ short lives were not without purpose, and that their babies would live again in heaven. “They are … like sparks struck from the iron to sparkle fly upwards, gladden the eye by their brightness for an instant and be lost in space,” Catharine believed. “Who can say how often the loss of the young child has been the light sent by God to guide the sorrowing parent to the mercy seat of Christ.”