Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  On that blustery spring day in 1847, Susanna was on her way to tell Wilson that she would accept his invitation to edit a publication, but only on her own terms. It was nearly ten years since Susanna had written from their farm on Lake Katchewanooka to John, while he was serving as paymaster, suggesting that they might co-edit a newspaper: “I could take all the light reading Tales, poetry &tc. and you the political and statistical details.” Whenever she had dreamed of her own publication, she had envisaged a partnership with her beloved John. Susanna recognized that, although she was the more creative writer, her husband had supplementary strengths. His knowledge of facts and figures strengthened the framework for Susanna’s lively narratives.

  Susanna also intended to demand from Wilson complete control over all editorial contributions. No matter what Wilson was prepared to pay her, she had no intention of associating her name with material she didn’t like. Susanna was always generous to younger writers, and now she was keen to use this opportunity to promote new talents, such as the romance writer Louisa Murray who lived near Kingston, and who had sent the revered Mrs. Moodie examples of her work for comment. Susanna was happy to aim the periodical at “yeomen and mechanics” (as she referred to them, with artless condescension) because in her contributions to the Literary Garland she had already begun to experiment with a new style and subject matter. She had broken out of the literary conventions of fiction and was producing personal accounts of her early years as an immigrant. She knew such sketches would resonate with anybody who had shared such experiences, and two-thirds of Upper Canada’s citizens had been born elsewhere. But she would do nothing to jeopardize her continuing relationship with John Lovell and the Literary Garland,a consistently reliable source of income. She didn’t want to compete with Lovell’s more upmarket, Montreal-based readership.

  As Susanna sat in Wilson’s office, laying out her demands, Wilson nodded happily. Within the past few months, several new magazines had appeared in Cobourg, Hamilton, Toronto and Montreal, for circulation throughout the United Provinces. An entrepreneur, Wilson would have agreed to anything (other than payment for contributors) that would bring the famous Mrs. Moodie onto the masthead, giving his new venture an edge in an increasingly crowded market. Wilson was eager to get started. By the time Susanna left his office, they had decided that the publication should be called The Victoria Magazine: A Cheap Periodical for the People. “Victoria” combined the district’s original name most satisfactorily with that of the beloved Queen. It had a regal ring that balanced the less-attractive connotations of the word “Cheap.” The first issue would appear in late summer.

  The first challenge facing the editors of any new publication in Upper Canada was to find subscribers. It would be another thirty years before periodicals started covering their costs by selling advertising space. Wilson wrote a prospectus for The Victoria Magazine which appeared in local newspapers and promised a monthly publication of “twenty-four pages in each number, printed on new type and upon good paper.” The annual subscription, to be paid in advance, was one dollar: “The low price at which the Periodical is placed is in order that every person within the Colony, who can read, and is anxious for moral and mental improvement, may become a subscriber and patron of the work.” The Moodies assured their readers that they would “devote all their talents to produce a useful, entertaining and cheap Periodical … Sketches and Tales, in verse and prose, Moral Essays, Statistics of the Colony, Scraps of Useful Information, Reviews of New Works, and well selected articles from the most popular authors of the day, will form the pages of the Magazine.”

  The prospectus was sufficiently attractive (and Susanna’s name sufficiently well known) to bring in 781 subscriptions. About one-third were from Belleville’s population of 3,000, but a smattering came from as far afield as Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. The Moodies’ good friend Robert Baldwin subscribed: so did the Governor-General, Lord Elgin. It is unclear how many genuine yeomen and mechanics embraced the idea of paying for “Moral essays [and] Scraps of Useful Information”; literacy standards were low in the colony. But there were plenty of doctors and lawyers on the subscription list. The Moodies started to map out the first issue.

  Since there was no budget for contributors, most of the material in The Victoria Magazine would come from the pens of Susanna and John Moodie. They aimed high, describing themselves as “literary philanthropists wishing hearty and heartfelt success, to every sincere pioneer in the exalted and noble cause of mental improvement.” Despite (or, perhaps, because of) all the scars they carried from John’s unhappy experiences as sheriff, they also hoped to avoid political controversy. Any writing “which awakens angry and resentful feelings, rarely tends to improve the heart, or produce those great moral changes, which must take place before we can hope to realise a permanent improvement in mankind individually or in the mass.”

  The first month’s issue included Susanna’s account of her arrival at Grosse Ile in 1832, with its vivid description of the hairy Irishman who had shouted, “Whurrah! my boys! Shure we’ll all be jontlemen!” In later issues, she wrote about her first view of Quebec City from the St. Lawrence River and a hurricane in Douro. But Susanna quickly found that she had little time to shape and polish these “Canadian” pieces, as she and John struggled to fill twenty-four pages each month. The Moodies fell back on formulaic historical tales and romance to provide the promised “entertainment” for readers. Most were set in England and Scotland, but several more that they wrote were set in exotic locales, like Italy and Persia, that they had never visited. Susanna recycled tales she had published in the London annuals fifteen years earlier. John reused anecdotes about the Cape Colony that he had already published in Ten Years in South Africa. Susanna also put the squeeze on her sisters for articles. Catharine, now living in Wolf Tower and eager to help her “beloved Suze,” obliged by sending to Belleville stories she had been unable to sell elsewhere. Agnes sent several pieces, including one of her stirring and sycophantic odes to royalty, entitled “Death of Edward, Prince of Wales.” John tried to spice up the pages (and fill in space) with puns, riddles, acrostics and funny rhymes. “Whizz, whizz—buzz, buzz—dotti, dot, dot, dot, dot, / Here’s lots of news, but we can’t read a jot,” read his cheerful verse entitled “The Magnetic Telegraph.”

  However, the Moodies were keener on “moral and mental improvement” than on amusement, and there was a tut-tutting tone to The Victoria Magazine. Even an article on practical jokes is a finger-wagging catalogue of public ridicule and humiliation. Their thinly disguised editorial priority was to promote a system of “common schools” in Upper Canada.

  The Moodies had the best of intentions in their campaign to establish an educational system in the United Provinces. They realized that the colonies desperately needed men of education to fill all the public offices. The colonial government relied on immigrants educated in Britain to become the registrars, attorneys, sheriffs and court officials in cities like Montreal and Toronto, and towns like Peterborough, Belleville and Cobourg. Most first-generation Canadians, especially those raised in the backwoods, were barely literate. Susanna and Catharine had taught their own children to read and write, but in their letters, they bemoaned the sketchy education of their offspring. The children attended local public or private schools (usually run by enterprising widows who charged tiny fees) only when they had decent clothes and weren’t needed at home. Catharine’s eldest son, James, wrote despairingly to his aunt Susanna that his only option in life seemed to be to remain at home, “droning out my existence on an uncultivated farm, merely doing work that a common Irish servant can do much better.” He envied his mother’s education: “What I would not give to have sufficient talent and education to employ myself in writing.” Catharine’s second son, Harry, spent a few months at a Peterborough grammar school, but Catharine worried that all he learned was “moral evil” from his “low companions.” The two women winced when they compared their five daughters’ and seven sons’ knowledge
of literature, languages, mathematics or history with what they themselves had acquired in Suffolk. The English sisters —Agnes, Elizabeth, Sarah and Jane—would have regarded their Canadian nieces and nephews as little better than ignorant savages. When The Victoria Magazine advocated universal training in the three Rs, its editors had their own children in mind.

  But there was a larger motive at work, too. If children of dramatically different backgrounds all attended the same common schools, a new cohesion would develop within a fractious society. Public schools would break down class barriers and create a “meritocracy based on education and manners,” Susanna wrote in an early issue of her magazine, “composed of the well-educated, not necessarily of the well born and wealthy.” Class tensions imported from the Old Country would crumble. “The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between different classes of men,” the Moodies insisted. And it is no coincidence that such a system of common schools would also elevate and guarantee the Moodies’ own position at the top rather than the bottom of the New World’s social scale. By British standards, the Moodies had sunk low—they had scarcely any money, and the genteel accents that gave them status in Britain were worthless in Canada. But if the key to social position in Canada was education, the Moodies—like the cream they always felt themselves to be—would rise to the top. They would be among the most respected and socially established citizens of Belleville.

  The Victoria Magazine’s lofty idealism was received warmly. The Cobourg Star described it as “well worth a whole year’s subscription.” The Huron Signal considered that John Moodie possessed “shrewd practical common-sense….We love his manner and the honest goodness of his heart.” The Montreal Weekly Pilot praised the publication as an “excellent journal of polite literature.” But Joseph Wilson quickly realized that he had a major problem: the publication was yawningly polite. Readers found the periodical stuffy and boring, and most did not renew their subscriptions. They wanted the political gossip and polemics that were regularly provided by editors like William Lyon Mackenzie, George Benjamin of Belleville’s Intelligencer and John Edward Barker of Kingston’s British Whig. These gutter polemicists, eager to deploy low blows in defence of high ideals, ripped into opponents with reckless slanders. Susanna abhorred “low and vulgar abuse”—but it sold well. Royalism, romance and sermons about education didn’t. After thirteen issues, The Victoria Magazine was forced to fold.

  However, Susanna had learned a lot as the magazine’s editor. The Victoria Magazine was produced for a native Canadian audience, not the distant British audience she knew from her London days, or the upmarket, urban readers of the Literary Garland who liked stories that reminded them of home. Susanna had managed to banish from her imagination the ringing tones of Agnes, her elder sister and literary rival, who insisted that Stricklands were ladies and should act and write accordingly. In her autobiographical contributions to both The Victoria Magazine and the Literary Garland, she had written for her neighbours. Susanna had found a new voice as a writer.

  By the time that The Victoria Magazine folded, Susanna Moodie had already published several Canadian sketches within the colony, two in her own magazine and six in the Literary Garland. Now John urged her to publish in England a book about her experiences in the Canadian bush. She had plenty of material; she had kept copious notes.

  Her sisters’ achievements undoubtedly spurred her on. After all, Catharine had published her breezy account of her own immigration, The Backwoods of Canada, only three years after setting foot in the New World and was now hard at work on Canadian Crusoes. And in England, Agnes and Elizabeth were forging their way through The Queens of England with terrifying speed; the ninth volume had just appeared, after the two Strickland sisters had spent months in the royal archives of England, Scotland and France reading old letters and documents. Agnes Strickland’s prose grew more lush with every crowned head she chronicled. Mary Beatrice of Modena, wife of James II, “comes before us,” the author claimed in the throbbing introduction to the new volume, “in her beauty, her misfortunes, her conjugal tenderness, and passionate maternity, like one of the distressed queens of tragedy, or romance struggling against the decrees of adverse destiny.” Perhaps it was the relentlessly uplifting tone of her sisters’ work that turned Susanna Moodie into a cold-eyed realist. If Susanna was going to be a myth-maker, her myths would be darker and more menacing than Agnes’s and Catharine’s rosy visions. Susanna had never shown any tolerance for hypocrisy and pretension. The young woman who had turned her back on the Church of England because it was too smug was not going to pretend that Upper Canada was a Wordsworthian paradise of charming rustics and noble empire-builders.

  With customary single-mindedness, Susanna embarked on a record of her first seven years as a settler in Canada, from 1832 to 1839—“this great epoch of our lives,” as she called it. She jigsawed together into a coherent narrative the sketches and poems that had already been published, along with various anecdotes that she had been polishing for years. In addition, John prepared four chapters (covering such “factual” material as the operation of village hotels and land sales). By 1850, the Moodies had completed a manuscript that contained twenty-five chapters, eleven of which had already appeared in Canada. The bulky package of several hundred handwritten pages was sent off to the London publisher Richard Bentley, who had published John Moodie’s book, Ten Years in South Africa, fifteen years earlier.

  Bentley, a clever, cosmopolitan man who always dressed immaculately in starched wing collar and cuffs, had the most prestigious list of authors in the English-speaking world. He had bought up the copyrights to Jane Austen’s six novels, and he published works by Anthony Trollope, Maria Edgeworth, Wilkie Collins and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Bentley’s office on New Burlington Street, close to Piccadilly, hummed with literary gossip as authors and literary patrons came and went. So it was a coup for Susanna when Bentley offered her fifty pounds as an initial payment for the new manuscript, plus a share of the profits. It was a modest advance: Bentley paid most of his authors between two hundred and three hundred pounds. But Susanna, it appears, was satisfied. The book was published in two volumes, priced at a one pound, one shilling, under the title Roughing It in the Bush, in 1852, the same year that Catharine’s children’s novel, Canadian Crusoes, appeared.

  Susanna Moodie would never have claimed that her sketches added up to autobiography (such a term was barely known outside literary London in these years). She didn’t even have the temerity to call them “memoirs” or “reflections.” Her only non-fiction model was the kind of travel writing exemplified by Anna Jameson’s account of a visit to Canada, Winter studies and summer rambles in Canada, published in London in 1838. But she knew her own strengths as a writer. “A scene or picture strikes me as a whole, but I never can enter into details,” she explained to her publisher. “A carpet must be very brilliant, the paper on a wall very remarkable before I should ever notice either, while the absurd and the extravagant make lasting impressions, and I can remember a droll speech or a caricature face for years.” In her description of pioneer life, she exploited to the full her sense of the ridiculous, her ear for dialogue and her fascination with human behaviour. She strayed close to fiction at some points, as she obscured the identities of her subjects, stretched the facts to make a better story, and skewed the truth by filtering it through her own sensibility. The result is an enthralling account of life in the bush, featuring characters that are as fresh today as when Susanna wrote about them more than 150 years ago. Roughing It in the Bush is a far livelier, more original work than any of the clichéd poetry and sentimental fiction she had been churning out for more than twenty years. Of all the books that she and Catharine wrote, it is the best.

  Susanna’s stated intention in Roughing It in the Bush was to describe the experience of emigration without the misrepresentations that hucksters like Cattermole had spread in the early 1830s. “Oh, ye dealers in wild lands—ye speculators in the
folly and credulity of your fellow men—what a mass of misery …have ye not to answer for!” Susanna wrote in her introduction. She accused the land speculators of persuading the gullible that “sheep and oxen … ran about the streets [of the New World] ready roasted, and with knives and forks upon their backs.” She was committed to the truth, as she made plain in her opening epigraph:

  I sketch from Nature, and the picture’s true;

  Whate’er the subject, whether grave or gay,

  Painful experience in a distant land

  Made it mine own.

  Susanna was at pains to show the dark underbelly of experiences that her own sister Catharine had written about with gentle joy. In The Backwoods of Canada, for example, Catharine had described the “bee” during which the Traills’ neighbours had helped the newcomers raise the walls of their first log cabin. Catharine had made the communal feast of whisky, salt pork and rice pudding sound like a dainty tea party: “In spite of the difference of rank among those that assisted at the bee, the greatest possible harmony prevailed, and the party separated well pleased with the day’s work and entertainment.” In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna told a very different story. Bees presented “the most disgusting picture of a bush life. They are noisy, riotous, drunken meetings, often terminating in violent quarrels, sometimes even in bloodshed.”