PENGUIN CLASSICS
ROUGHING IT IN THE BUSH
SUSANNA MOODIE was born in Suffolk, England, in 1803. In 1831, she married John Moodie, a retired officer who had served in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1832, the Moodies and their infant daughter emigrated to Canada. Susanna’s older sister Catharine Parr Traill and her husband, Thomas Traill, arrived in Canada the same year. Moodie had been published widely before she left Britain, and she continued writing poetry and magazine articles after her arrival in the colony. Her letters and journals contain valuable information about colonial life in these early years of Canada. She is the author of a number of books, including Life in the Clearings; Mark Hurdlestone, the Gold Worshipper; and Matrimonial Speculations, but is best known for Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada. Moodie died in 1885 in Toronto, Ontario, at the home of her daughter.
SUSANNA
MOODIE
Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada
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Penguin Classics edition copyright © Penguin Group (Canada), 2006.
This edition is an unabridged reprint of the “second edition with additions” of
Roughing It in the Bush, published in 1852 by Richard Bentley in London, England.
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to
Agnes Strickland,
Author of the “Lives of the Queens of England,”
this simple tribute of affection
is dedicated,
by her sister.
Susanna Moodie.
Contents
Chronology
A Note on the Text
Advertisement
Introduction [to the original edition]
Canada
A Visit to Grosse Island
Quebec
Our Journey Up the Country
Tom Wilson’s Emigration
Our First Settlement, and the Borrowing System
Old Satan and Tom Wilson’s Nose
Uncle Joe and His Family
John Monaghan
Phoebe H—, and Our Second Moving
Brian, the Still-Hunter
The Charivari
The Village Hotel
The Land-Jobber
A Journey to the Woods
The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends
Burning the Fallow
Our Logging-Bee
A Trip to Stony Lake
The “Ould Dhragoon”
Disappointed Hopes
The Little Stumpy Man
The Fire
The Outbreak
The Whirlwind
The Walk to Dummer
A Change in Our Prospects
Adieu to the Woods
Canadian Sketches
Chronology
1803 Susanna is born on December 6 in Suffolk, England, the youngest of six daughters of Thomas Strickland, a merchant, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two sons follow the girls. The family lives at Stowe House, near Bungay.
1808 The Stricklands move to Reydon Hall, an elegant country mansion near the Suffolk coast.
1818 Thomas Strickland dies, leaving his family in genteel poverty.
1822 Susanna’s first known published work, a children’s story called Spartacus, is published.
1825 Susanna’s brother Samuel emigrates to Upper Canada to learn farming in the colony.
1822–32 Susanna’s poems, stories, and sketches appear in several London magazines, including La Belle Assemblée, the Athenaeum, and Ackermann’s Juvenile Forget-Me-Not.
1830 Susanna spends several weeks in London as a guest of Thomas Pringle, a Scottish poet and magazine editor, and his wife. Pringle is secretary of the Anti-Slavery League.
1830 Susanna becomes engaged to John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a thirty-six-year-old retired British military officer born in the Orkney Islands. He had spent several years in South Africa.
1831 Two anti-slavery pamphlets, containing first-hand accounts of the sufferings of former slaves Mary Prince and Ashton Warner transcribed by Susanna Strickland, are published in London.
1831 Susanna marries John Moodie on April 4 at St. Pancras (Anglican) Church, London. They move to a cottage in Southwold, Suffolk,
nearer Susanna’s family.
1831 Publication of Enthusiasm, and Other Poems, prompted by Moodie’s intense but short-lived conversion to Congregationalism, a Nonconformist sect.
1832 Catherine Mary Josephine (Katie) is born on February 14.
1832 Catharine Parr Strickland, Susanna’s sister, marries John Moodie’s fellow officer Thomas Traill on May 13 in Suffolk.
1832 On July 1 Susanna and John Moodie sail from Leith, Scotland, for Quebec on the brig Anne. Thomas and Catharine Parr Traill leave Greenock, Scotland, two weeks later, and arrive in Montreal two weeks before the Moodies land at Quebec City. The Traills travel straight to Lakefield to be near Sam Strickland and his wife, Mary.
1832 On September 9, upon arrival in Cobourg, Upper Canada, the Moodies buy a cleared farm near Port Hope.
1833 In February Moodie’s first Canadian poems appear in the New York Albion.
1833 Birth of Moodie’s second daughter, Agnes Dunbar, on June 9.
1834 In February Moodie receives a modest legacy from an English relative. The Moodies move to a bush farm on Lake Katchewanooka, near Douro Township north of Peterborough, to be near Sam Strickland and Catharine Parr Traill.
1834 Birth of first son, John Alexander Dunbar (“Dunnie”), on August 20. The whole Moodie family is sick with “the ague,” or malarial lake fever.
1835 John Moodie’s Ten Years in South Africa is published in London by Richard Bentley.
1835–37 The Moodies gradually deplete their capital against the backdrop of an economic depression in Europe and North America.
1836 In January, thanks to the efforts of the Strickland sisters in England, Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada is published in London. Its common-sense advice for immigrants to British North America makes it a bestseller.
1836 Birth of second son, Donald, on May 21.
1837 Outbreak of rebellion in Upper Canada on December 4, led by William Lyon Mackenzie. Sam Strickland and Thomas Traill join the Peterborough Volunteers and march to Port Hope to help put down the uprising.
1837 On December 8 John Moodie, who has a broken leg, follows his two brothers-in-law to the front and is made a captain in the Northumberland Militia.
1837 Moodie’s poem “Canadians, Will You Join the Band—a Loyal Song” appears in the Palladium, a prominent Toronto newspaper, on December 20. It is widely reprinted in both Upper and Lower Canada. Several more of her patriotic, pro-British poems are published in subsequent weeks.
1838 John Moodie, now a captain in the newly formed Queen’s Own Regiment of Toronto, is stationed first in Toronto, then along the U.S. border near Niagara in anticipation of cross-border raids by rebels. Susanna remains with her four small children in Douro Township. She writes to Sir George Arthur, the newly appointed lieutenant-governor, requesting a permanent appointment for her husband so that the Moodies can pay their debts. As rebel activity continues to splutter, John obtains a six-month appointment as paymaster to the militia in the Victoria District (later Hastings County).
1838 The Durham Report is published in April, recommending limited responsible government for the Union of the Canadas (a merger of Upper and Lower Canada), with a single legislature. The Moodies begin to realize that their interests align with those of Reformers rather than Tories.
1838 Birth of third son, John Strickland, on October 16.
1838 Full abolition of slavery finally instituted in all colonies.
1838–51 Moodie is a regular contributor to the Literary Garland, edited and published in Montreal by John Lovell.
1839 In January Moodie falls seriously ill with mastitis.
1839 The Traills sell their farm in March and move to Lakefield—a severe wrench for Susanna who is now, she writes to John in Belleville, “doubly lonely.”
1839 In October John Moodie finally obtains a permanent job as sheriff of Victoria District.
1840 Susanna and her children leave the backwoods on January 1 to join John in Belleville.
1840 Birth and death of fourth son, George Arthur.
1840 The Moodies’ Belleville home burns down; they lose furniture, clothing, and winter stores.
1840–48 Agnes Strickland, Moodie’s sister, gains literary fame in England with her twelve-volume series Lives of the Queens of England.
1842 John Moodie, as returning officer in the parliamentary elections, gets caught up in the bitter partisan rivalries between Belleville’s Tory and Reform voters during an election in which the prominent reformer Robert Baldwin is defeated. John is forced to call in government troops.
1843 Birth of fifth son and seventh child, Robert Baldwin.
1843 Susanna’s four-part newspaper series, “Richard Redpath. A Tale,” is published in Montreal and Toronto. It contains a clearly anti-Semitic portrait of George Benjamin, the editor of the Belleville Intelligencer who regularly disparaged John Moodie.
1844 Johnnie Moodie, aged five, drowns in the Moira River on June 18.
1847–48 Susanna and John Moodie write and edit Victoria Magazine, a periodical for farmers and mechanics.
1850 The Moodies’ second daughter, Agnes, marries Charles Thomas Fitzgibbon, a Toronto lawyer and speculator.
1852 January 9 publication in London by Richard Bentley of the first edition of Roughing It in the Bush, in two volumes, much of which had already been published in the Literary Garland and Victoria Magazine. It is dedicated to Agnes Strickland, who is, however, appalled to be associated with a book about subsistence farming in a primitive colony.
1852 In July a pirated version of Roughing It in the Bush appears in the United States to widespread American acclaim and Canadian criticism.
1852 Good reviews in Britain prompt the November 9 publication of a second British edition of Roughing It in the Bush, containing additional chapters.
1852 Catharine Parr Traill’s novel for children, Canadian Crusoes, is published.
1853 Publication in London of Moodie’s Life in the Clearings, to lukewarm reviews. Meanwhile, Sam Strickland’s exuberant Twenty-seven Years in Canada West is well-received.
1853 Publication of Moodie’s Mark Hurdlestone.
1854 On March 28 Britain and France declare war against Russia. British preoccupation with hostilities in Crimea diminishes interest in Canadian publications.
1854 Publication of Moodie’s Flora Lyndsay, or Passages in an Eventful Life and Matrimonial Speculations.
1855 The Moodies’ elder daughter, Kate, marries John Joseph Vickers, a Toronto businessman.
1855 Susanna meets the Fox sisters, two celebrated mediums, and becomes intrigued by the occult. Both Moodies embark on seances and “spiritual investigations,” of which John keeps a detailed record.
1856 The first locomotive of the Grand Trunk Railway arrives in Belleville, which now has fast connections to both Montreal and Toronto.
1856 The Moncktons is published by Richard Bentley in London.
1857 Moodie’s dedication to her sister Agnes is removed from a new edition of Roughing It in the Bush.
1860–64 During the American Civil War, the Moodies are fierce critics of slavery.
1861 On July 28 John Moodie suffers a stroke, partly as a result of stress induced by a prolonged court case in which he was unfairly accused of corruption.
1862 Susanna’s eldest son, John Dunbar, marries Eliza Russell. They settle in Belleville and have two children, but relations with the older Moodies are strained.
1863 John Moodie is forced to resign his position as sheriff of Hastings County, leaving his family with no means of support.
1863 Robert, the Moodies’ youngest son, marries Nellie Russell (no relation to her sister-in-law). He eventually takes a job with the Grand Trunk Railway, and proves a devoted and reliable son.
1864 Elizabeth Strickland dies, aged ninety-two, in Reydon Hall, Suffolk.
1865 In recognition of her literary achievements, Moodie receives a grant from London’s Royal Literary Fund for impoverished British writers.
1865 Charles Fitzgibbon, Moodie’s son-in-law, dies, leaving his impoverished widow, Agnes, with six small children.
1866 Donald, the Moodies’ second son, marries Julia Anna Russell, Eliza’s sister. He drifts in and out of jobs and becomes an alcoholic. He repeatedly petitions his parents for money.
1866 John gives the Moodies’ home in Belleville to his son Dunbar in the hope that Dunbar and Eliza will look after John and Susanna in their old age. Instead, the younger Moodies sell the property and move to the American state of Delaware to farm. Dismayed and penniless, John and Susanna move to a modest frame cottage on the Bay of Quinte, just outside Belleville. They become estranged from John and Kate Vickers, who are exasperated with the Moodies for giving their house to the feckless Dunbar.
1866 John Moodie publishes Scenes and Adventures of a Soldier and Settler during Half a Lifetime.
1867 The Confederation of the six provinces of British North America is formally established.
1868 Susanna Moodie’s last novel, The World Before Them (previously serialized in the Montreal Transcript), is published in London by Bentley.
1869John Moodie dies, aged seventy-two, in Belleville on October 22. A deeply grieving Susanna never publishes again. She now divides her time between Belleville lodgings and extended stays with her daughter Katie Vickers (with whom she now reconciles) in Toronto, her son Robert Moodie in Seaforth, Southern Ontario, and her sister Catharine Parr Traill in Lakefield. She never sees her two older sons again.
1870 Agnes Fitzgibbon, Moodie’s younger daughter, marries Lieutenant-Colonel Brown Chamberlin, the Queen’s Printer.
1871 First Canadian edition of Roughing It in the Bush is published.
1872 Accompanied by her sister Catharine, Moodie revisits for the first time Stony Lake, the beautiful, unspoiled lake that she first saw in 1835 and wrote about in Roughing It in the Bush.
1884 Moodie’s health deteriorates: she loses her sight and develops dementia. Her children move her into her daughter Katie Vickers’s house on Adelaide Street, Toronto.
1885 Susanna Moodie dies on April 8, aged eighty-two, in Toronto. She is buried in Belleville Cemetery, alongside her husband John, and George Arthur Moodie and John Strickland Moodie, the two sons who predeceased her.
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