Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Catharine already had a new project in mind that might capitalize on her success twenty years earlier with The Backwoods of Canada. She planned a how-to manual for female emigrants on “Canadian m[anage]ment and all such things, in cooking and making and baking, as are needful.” She explained: “I want to supply a book that will give instruction in every branch that may be needed by the family of a new settler. A book such as I should have been glad to have had myself when I came out.” When she first mentioned the idea to Agnes, her elder sister commented tartly, “Be sure you warn ladies not to make the worst of everything.” Agnes was even snippier when Catharine sold some chapters to a Toronto periodical: “Nothing that is first published in Canada will sell in England. So never deceive yourself again with the idea that it will.” Jane was more helpful: she sent Catharine some recipes for food and wine that Catharine could include (“I am a famous wine maker”); an English cookbook so Catharine could copy the format; and instructions on how to compile an index (“a plague to do, but easy when learned”). But Elizabeth Strickland turned down Catharine’s request for editorial help so rudely that Agnes felt obliged to try and repair the damage. “I am very sorry Eliza has written so unkindly to you; but it is her way, and you must not let it distress your mind.”

  When Catharine had finished compiling her manual, she titled it “The female emigrant’s guide, and hints on Canadian house-keeping” and shipped it off to England. Agnes knew Catharine depended on her, so she did try to place the manuscript with several London publishers. But as Agnes had anticipated, London publishers were not prepared to purchase a work to which they didn’t have first rights. In any case, according to Agnes, they were all far too busy with the Crimean War, which had disrupted supplies of paper and preoccupied London’s chattering classes from the moment it broke out in 1852. “Nothing sells now but newspapers or books on Russia, Turkey and this horrid mess,” she wrote to Catharine in 1855.

  Catharine knew all about the British campaign against Russia in the Crimean peninsula. After the mother country, alongside its allies France and Turkey, defeated the enemy at the battles of Balaclava and Inkerman, loyal Canadians, on the other side of the world, built bonfires and set off fireworks. But Agnes was right. This obsession with military glory was diverting publishers’ attention from any other subjects. So Catharine decided to try her luck in Toronto, although the potential readership was far smaller and the handful of Toronto publishing houses that had sprung up were notorious cheapskates. They insisted that authors themselves finance the costs of publication by selling subscriptions to their friends and acquaintances, in the same way that magazines were financed. Catharine did her best. On one of her trips to Belleville, she signed up many of Susanna’s circle as subscribers. In Peterborough, she persuaded both Ellen Dunlop and Frances Stewart not only to become subscribers themselves, but also to sell subscriptions to their neighbours. Armed with supporters, she made plans to go and butter up the Reverend Henry Payne Hope of Toronto, a recently established Toronto publisher who had used extracts from Catharine’s manuscript in his monthly magazine. It was a major undertaking for Catharine to get as far as Toronto: “I have not the means either for supplying myself with decent outer clothes or to pay for a week’s board and lodging at some decent house,” she complained to Ellen Dunlop. Somehow, however, she did manage to talk the Reverend Payne Hope into publishing her complete manuscript. It appeared as The Canadian Settler’s Guide in 1855.

  The Canadian Settler’s Guide fulfilled to the letter the purpose that Catharine had in mind. It contained instructions on how to make bread, carpets, candles, cheese, pumpkin pie, soap, maple sugar, bean soup, hemlock tea, dandelion coffee, treacle beer, potato starch, rag rugs, fabric dyes … amongst other items. Sam Strickland, who was always ready to help his sisters, allowed her to use the section from his book that described how to build a log cabin and organize a logging bee. Catharine gave advice on how to furnish a log house (“A stove large enough to cook food for a family of ten or twelve persons will cost from twenty to thirty dollars”) and how to make an easy chair out of a common flour barrel. The Guide encompassed all Catharine’s hard-won wisdom, and embodied the Strickland attitude to life. “In cases of emergency,” she wrote in the chapter on house fires, “it is folly to fold one’s hands and sit down to bewail in abject terror: it is better to be up and doing.”

  Once again, Catharine’s book did well and Catharine did badly. The Reverend Mr. Hope was a smart businessman: he persuaded the minister of agriculture of the United Provinces to purchase six hundred copies of the guide, and the British government to make a large bulk purchase for distribution to encourage emigration. Soon copies of Catharine’s guide were being passed around on the emigrant ships that continued to cross the Atlantic and dock at Grosse Ile. Catharine rapidly became the Martha Stewart of the backwoods, setting standards of taste and endurance that few other women could achieve. But Henry Payne Hope himself behaved in a thoroughly unchristian fashion. He printed more than ten editions of The Canadian Settler’s Guide, and he used Catharine Parr Traill’s name ruthlessly to promote his own career as an adviser on immigration. However, he withheld almost all the proceeds of her sales from the author.

  Catharine struggled on through the 1850s, sending manuscripts to publishers in England, Scotland and Canada and receiving rejection slips for most of them. The scant rewards she received from her pen demoralized her. Little sympathy was forthcoming from her sisters in England, who were irritated with her constant pleas for help and still nursed their grudges against Susanna. But Susanna was always willing to offer consolation. She knew the uphill struggle that writers in Canada faced. “I can sympathise with you on the rejection of your ms. as Horace Bentley brought back mine,” she wrote in a reassuring note to Catharine. “In these times, people want bread more than books. Authors have but a poor chance of success.” She empathized with her fellow author when Catharine confided her fear that she had “no brains left” and that her writing talents were in decline. By 1858, Susanna herself was in the same fix: her own income from writing had dwindled away to nothing, John’s job was getting more and more difficult, Aggie Fitzgibbon’s husband was sick, and the Moodies had summoned Donald home from McGill. “Poor Aggie is penniless and I have not the means to help her, even with clothes of my own, for I am literally in rags—a misfortune which has seldom happened to me before,” Susanna wrote to Catharine.

  But during these years, Susanna had found a diversion from day-today anxiety. She had a new interest in her life, which provided her with the kind of catharsis that, when she was stuck in the bush, writing had once supplied. She and John were caught up in one of the nineteenth century’s more bizarre trends and she was already using the language of the movement. “May better and brighter days be in store for us both,” she wrote to Catharine, when they were both going through a difficult period. “And may we so improve the material present, that it may open the door of the dear spirit land to our weary longing souls.”

  Catharine would soon be swept along too in what her sister recognized as a “glorious madness.”

  Chapter 15

  Rap, Rap, Who’s There?

  As Susanna Moodie sat at her writing desk on a September day in 1855, she heard her Irish servant Jane clattering out of the kitchen to answer a knock at the front door of the Moodies’ house on Bridge Street. A few minutes later, Jane stuck her head into the drawing room and announced that a Miss Fox and her cousin were on the front step and would like a word with Mrs. Moodie. Jane had tried to tell them that Mrs. Moodie was busy right now, but Miss Fox had explained that she was leaving Upper Canada the next day and insisted that Jane at least let Mrs. Moodie know they were here.

  Jane was astonished to see how fast Mrs. Moodie, who always discouraged social calls, threw down her quill pen and swept past her to greet her visitors. But Susanna had wanted to meet this afternoon’s visitor for a long time. Kate Fox was one of the famous Fox sisters. She and her sister Maggie had ignited a
n extraordinary transcontinental flare of interest in “spirit adventures” in 1848 when they gave a public demonstration of their psychic abilities. By 1850, the new practice of spiritualism was already claiming an estimated two million adherents across North America—a fantastic figure considering that the total population was only twenty-five million. The Fox sisters and their followers claimed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead.

  The spiritualist “religion” had begun when Maggie, then thirteen, and Kate, twelve, moved with their parents from Upper Canada to northern New York State. Strange sounds began to plague the family at night—raps and knockings for which there were no obvious causes. The noises always occurred around the girls. Neighbours crowded into the Foxes’ cramped parlour to hear the mystery raps. Mrs. Fox insisted that it was a “disembodied spirit” which would answer questions—three raps for “yes,” silence for “no.” Next, the “spirits” that the girls attracted extended their conversational range, thanks to an ingenious device invented by the girls’ brother David that allowed the spirits to go through the alphabet. When the appropriate letter was reached, the spirits rapped. It was laborious, but it eventually yielded whole sentences.

  The famous Fox sisters: Maggie, Kate and Leah Fox Fitch. Pretty Kate Fox (centre) was John Moodie’s “spiritual muse.”

  Soon tales of the Fox girls’ strange powers were being passed round at every general store, church hall and drinking house scattered through upstate New York. A public demonstration of their powers was staged in Rochester’s splendid Corinthian Hall. Several of the city fathers were deeply sceptical, insisting that the raps must be made either by ventriloquism, a newfangled machine or lead balls sewn into the girls’ hems. But each hypothesis was proved wrong, and nobody could furnish any proof that the girls were frauds. Their lucrative careers as spiritualist mediums were launched. They moved to New York City and conducted seances at P. T. Barnum’s Hotel; participants paid one dollar each to attend. Big names such as Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, and the author James Fenimore Cooper became converts to their cause. Others quickly jumped on the bandwagon: clairvoyants, hypnotists, trance-speakers, levitationists, table-tappers.

  Why did the spiritualist faith catch on with such fury? Why did an essentially mystical movement thrive during an age dedicated to scientific innovation and engineering triumphs—steam-driven ploughs and railways, gas lamps, suspension bridges and daguerreotypes? In London, the Great Exhibition of 1851 celebrated the glorious products of the Industrial Revolution: mass-produced lace, electroplated silverware, steel surgical implements, Lisle stockings—all housed in the Crystal Palace, a giant glass house. William Makepeace Thackeray described the show as “A noble awful great love-inspiring gooseflesh-bringing sight … the vastest and sublimest popular festival that the world has ever witnessed.” Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland toured the Crystal Palace and were captivated with its glories. Yet in the midst of all this machine-made production, interest in the occult flourished.

  Ironically, it was the ability of spiritualism’s supporters to talk about phenomena like the “Rochester rappings” in quasi-scientific terms that gave the activity a bogus scientific credibility. At a time when scientists were investigating invisible sources of energy, spiritualists argued that the Fox sisters were harnessing another kind of unseen force, which could connect souls of this world to those that had already reached the next. Samuel Morse’s invention of the electrical telegraph allowed thoughts to travel mysteriously from one location to another; perhaps the Foxes were operating a kind of spiritual telegraph.

  Such a theory was particularly tenable in a deeply religious society that believed in a life after death, and nowhere was the population more prone to religious excess in the mid-nineteenth century than in the state of New York. It had experienced so many religious revivals (usually during the cold, dark days between Christmas and spring) that it was known as the “burned-over district”—burned over by Holy Rollers preaching fire-and-brimstone sermons to labourers, storekeepers and farmers assembled in lonely barns. Gothic horrors had an equal appeal for the educated: throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe, master of the Gothic frisson, published stories in newspapers up and down the East Coast. The most chilling effects in Poe’s tales centre on the blurring of the boundaries between life and death, the “fatal frontier.” The paraphernalia of the Fox sisters’ seances—mysterious rappings, darkened rooms, voices from beyond the grave—combined the notion of scientific inquiry with both a steadfast belief in the immortality of the soul and the fascination of the occult.

  It didn’t take long for interest in spiritualism to spill over the border. At the Belleville Mechanics’ Institute, Susanna and John regularly heard lectures on “mesmerism, phrenology, biology, phonography, spiritual communication &tc.,” according to Susanna. At first, John admitted, he thought that the “Rochester Knockings” were so “utterly ridiculous and puerile, that I only looked upon it as a money-making scheme.” However, he started to wonder whether spiritualism’s success demonstrated God’s benevolent interest in their well-being: was it, as he put it, “a great instrument ordained by God to harmonize the human race”?

  By the mid-1850s, newspapers were full of accounts of various phenomena, and there were at least a dozen periodicals devoted exclusively to the subject. Susanna was fascinated by the ghoulish mystery of it all. She pored over books like Spiritualism, published in 1853 by Judge John Edmonds and Dr. George T. Dexter of New York, which was supposedly the product of spirit-writing, employing Dr. Dexter as the medium. She also read Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations, Demonstrating the Existence of Spirits and Their Communion with Mortals by Robert Hare, a University of Pennsylvania chemist, and E.W. Capron’s Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms; its Consistencies and Contradictions. As a girl, Susanna had believed in telepathy between friends. As a middle-aged woman, her strong religious faith made her respectful of man’s spiritual potential, while her curiosity drove her to dig deeper into these mysterious goings-on. Whenever Catharine came to stay, Susanna discussed spiritualism with her in tones of both awe and amusement. “There is a capital article in the last Albion on table turning,” she wrote to her sister in 1852. “I read it twice with infinite glee.”

  Catharine was not so sure about the whole business. Her God was a God of nature and beauty, who clothed pastures with flocks of sheep and made the valleys “stand so thick with grain that they laugh and sing.” He was not a God who rocked dining-room tables or produced discordant rappings at the bidding of adolescent girls. But she did like the idea, as she told Ellen Dunlop in a letter, that “one of the offices of the released spirit [of someone who died] may be to watch over and care for those that were united to them by bonds of love or friendship during its sojourn upon earth.”

  Susanna had been introduced to Kate Fox on the streets of Belleville in the summer of 1854, when Kate Fox (then living in New York City) was visiting her oldest sister Elizabeth Ousterhoust in the nearby village of Consecon. On that occasion, Susanna recalled, she was “much charmed with her face and manners.” The nineteen-year-old’s pale oval face, waist-length dark hair and dark purple eyes beguiled the author. “She is certainly a witch,” Susanna wrote in a letter to Richard Bentley, “for you cannot help looking into the dreamy depths of those sweet violet eyes till you feel magnetised by them.”

  Kate Fox’s visit to the Moodie cottage the following September provided Susanna’s first opportunity to see the young woman’s powers with her own eyes. After a few minutes of small talk in the dining room, Miss Fox asked if Susanna would like to hear some rappings. Susanna replied that she would: “Very much indeed, as it would confirm or do away with my doubts.” So Kate Fox closed her eyes and asked the spirits if they would communicate with Mrs. Moodie. Straightaway, there were three loud raps on the table. “In spirit language,” Susanna later wrote to Bentley, this meant yes. “I was fairly introduced to these mysterious visitors.”


  Miss Fox told Susanna to write a list of friends, some of whom were dead and some alive. The medium turned her back on Susanna as the latter wrote, then told her hostess to run her pen slowly down the list. Every time Susanna’s pen lingered on a dead friend, the spirits would rap five times; for a living friend, they would rap three times. “I inwardly smiled at this,” Susanna later wrote to Richard Bentley. “Yet strange to say, they never once missed.” Next, Susanna wrote, “Why did you not keep your promise?” under the name of Anna Laural Harral. Anna was the daughter of Thomas Harral, who had published Susanna’s work in La Belle Assemblée, and she had been Susanna’s best friend before her early death in 1830. In their twenties, the two young women had promised each other that the one who died first should appear, if possible, to the other. Susanna was startled when the spirits immediately rapped out, “I have often tried to make my presence known to you.” Susanna then asked the spirit to spell out its name. It was instantly done. “Perhaps no one but myself on the whole American continent knew that such a person had ever existed,” she wrote.

  Susanna was shaken by these revelations, but her guard was still up. So Miss Fox put the spirits to work in different ways. First, Susanna felt a table vibrate under her hands as if it had a life of its own. Then, at Kate Fox’s suggestion, she stood by a door in such a way that she could see both its sides, and felt similar vibrations in the door. Miss Fox took Susanna out to the garden, where a few Michaelmas daisies still glowed mauve in the late afternoon light. Susanna felt strange vibrations under her feet, in the stone path and in the earth. “Are you still unbelieving?” the medium inquired. Susanna was torn between her eagerness to believe and intelligent scepticism. “I think these knocks are made by your spirit and not by the dead,” she finally told her visitor. Kate Fox was determined to convince this well-known Canadian writer, who could be such a useful supporter. “You attribute more power to me than I possess,” she insisted. “Would you believe if you heard that piano, closed as it is, play a tune?” The piano was not played by invisible fingers that afternoon. But Susanna convinced Kate Fox to postpone her trip and come back for the evening two days later, when John would be present.