Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Catharine’s determination to keep writing was unquenched, despite Agnes’s failure to market her sequel to The Backwoods of Canada. She still wanted to publish a book in England, for the audience with whom she had been most popular when she lived there: children who shared her love of nature’s bounty. She had been mulling over a particular idea for a young people’s novel for nearly ten years. In 1837, she had copied into her journal an advertisement from the Cobourg Star that had sparked the idea. “50 pound REWARD,” read the headline, and in smaller print below: “Lost on Saturday last the 29th of July on the road leading from Bowskill’s mills to Foe’s tavern, near the Rice Lake Plains a child about six years old the daughter of Mr. Thos. Eyre of Hamilton near Cobourg. She wore a blue plaid cotton frock and was without her bonnet. Whoever will return the child to her parents or give such information as may lead to her discovery shall receive the above reward. Thomas Eyre.”

  The spectre of children lost in the forest was common among Canada’s early settlers. It was a real threat, when paths were few, forests dense, and children as young as five were sent off to find lost cattle or take a lunch-pail to men working in the bush. Contemporary newspapers were filled with such heartbreaking tales. The story in the Cobourg Star had a happy ending. Mr. Eyre’s daughter (improbably called Jane) was found four days later, after a search involving nearly a thousand people. But there were plenty of other youngsters who were never seen again. Both Catharine and her sister Susanna collected anecdotes of such ghastly occurrences. The nightmare of missing youngsters struck to the core of their maternal beings. Such a prospect, in Susanna’s view, was “more melancholy than the certainty of [the child’s] death.” It also symbolized the deeper anguish of leaving behind familiar scenes and losing oneself in new and unknown territory.

  The details of Jane Eyre’s disappearance haunted Catharine’s imagination. She brooded over what it would be like to be the little girl who had wandered away from a picnic and suddenly realized that the sun was sinking and she could no longer hear human voices. She put herself in the place of the mother, screaming her child’s name into the black wall of silent trees and beating her chest with anguish and self-reproach for having allowed the child out of her sight. By the time she arrived at Rice Lake, Catharine had sold two different versions of the story to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and a third to the London annual Home Circle. (Like any professional writer, she had no scruples about recycling her material). By the time the third version appeared in 1849, Catharine was well launched on a full-length novel about children lost on the plains on the south shore of Rice Lake.

  Catharine first developed the narrative of what was to be Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains as a story for her own children. During picnics at the Big Stone, or at bedtime in Wolf Tower, her brood would sit wide-eyed as their mother spun a tale about the world they lived in. The landscape she described was the landscape the Traill children knew—the Big Stone, the wild rice beds of Rice Lake, the local hills and ravines. In the evenings, Catharine would sit at her writing desk and put the story on paper. Writing was both therapy and catharsis for her, as it was for Susanna: an escape from day-to-day anxieties. In March 1850, Catharine reported to Ellen Dunlop, Frances Stewart’s daughter, that “I have been writing a little now every night at my Canadian Crusoes, and hope if I keep tolerably well to have the volume ready by the middle of May….I am in good hope of winning fifty pounds when it is ready and that cheers me up to persevere in my work.” By September she was able to write to Ellen, “I have yesterday finished my arduous and fatigueing task of copying the MS of the Canadian Crusoes—354 pages besides some notes.” Two weeks later, Catharine sent off her manuscript to Agnes, so she and Jane could edit the text and place it with a publisher.

  Canadian Crusoes has the kind of conventional happy-ending adventure plot that children’s authors such as E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton have relied on. Set in the late eighteenth century, it involves three plucky youngsters—half-Scottish, half-French siblings called Hector and Catharine Maxwell, and their French-Canadian cousin Louis—who get lost in the bush. Together the trio rescue Indiana, a young Mohawk woman, from death, and (largely thanks to Indiana’s skills at canoeing, hunting and fishing) they survive for two years in the bush. When the children are finally rescued, they discover that they have been no more than eight miles from home. At the end of the story, Louis marries Catharine and Indiana marries Hector, the happy foursome representing a blending of Canada’s British, French and native heritages.

  Canadian Crusoes is really a barely disguised survival manual, a kind of Backwoods of Canada for British children. In fiction as in conversation, Catharine burned with the impulse to pass on useful tips. When one of the girls makes tea from a wild fern, for instance, the reader not only learns what the fern looks like and where to find it (“a graceful woody fern, with a fine aromatic scent like nutmegs; this plant is highly esteemed among the Canadians as a beverage, and also as a remedy against the ague; it grows in great abundance on dry sandy lands and wastes, by waysides”), but there is even a footnote giving its Latin name (“comptonia asplenifolio”). Every chapter of Canadian Crusoes is packed with information about flora and fauna native to Upper Canada, Mohawk and Ojibwa history and culture, and hunting practices. And Catharine endowed the two British children with all the missionary zeal so popular amongst Victorians as they set out to convert Indiana: “Simply and earnestly they entered into the task as a labour of love, and though for a long time Indiana seemed to pay little attention to what they said, by slow degrees the good seed took root and brought forth fruit worthy of Him whose Spirit poured the beams of spiritual light into her heart.”

  To Catharine’s dismay, it took Agnes nearly two years to find a publisher. Part of the reason was that Agnes spent some time on the manuscript adding a preface and once again rewriting illegible sections. But Agnes was also preoccupied with another issue. In 1850, the Pope had appointed Cardinal Wiseman, an extremely aggressive cleric, as Archbishop of Westminster—head of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain—and a large new body of distinguished converts, including the Reverand Henry Edward Manning of the Church of England, went over to Rome. The whole of London was in an uproar over the perceived threat to the established Church of England. This was just the kind of furor that Agnes, now the acknowledged expert on Victoria, loved: her opinion on the Queen’s role as head of the Anglican Church was sought from one end of Mayfair to the other. She was much too busy to devote attention to a tale of scruffy children lost in the bush. She wrote to her sister that nothing could be done while “the whole attention of the public is taken up with the Catholic question, which has ruined literature for the present.” An anxious Catharine confided in her friend Frances Stewart that she had replied to Agnes’s letter, “hinting at our necessity—though I dared not tell her how pressing it really was.”

  Canadian Crusoes finally appeared in London in 1852. Its didactic tone and overtly Christian message found an appreciative audience. Elizabeth Strickland wrote to Catharine to tell her that her “Crusoes are very much admired,” and the book was well reviewed. The Observer praised the “freshness” of the text and the “truth and gracefulness” of its “description of American backwood scenery, animal and vegetable productions.” John Bull said it was “a prettily-conceived tale,” and “elegantly illustrated” (there were twelve engravings by William Harvey, a well-known illustrator). Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine was as enthusiastic as it had been for Backwoods. The reviewer was intrigued by descriptions of Indian settlements that were “very different from the delineations of the American novelists, and are probably nearer to the truth.” According to Sharpe’s London Magazine, Canadian Crusoes was “a very pretty book … full of interest and information.”

  Despite the critical success of Canadian Crusoes, the book did not solve the Traills’ financial problems. Her London publishers paid Catharine only fifty pounds for the first English edition. Five years later, Agnes tried to negotiat
e a further fifty-pound payment for the second edition, which appeared in 1858. However, Arthur Hall, of Hall, Virtue, discovered he could get a far better price if he dealt directly with penniless Catharine rather than her virago of a sister. He managed to beat Catharine down to twenty-five pounds. Agnes was furious with Hall’s deviousness and Catharine’s naive interference in business negotiations: “My poor unlucky Catharine, I cannot say how annoyed I am at the cold-blooded villainy of that wretched man, and the worst of it is that I cannot do you any good because you have invalidated my agency…. Alas! that all my pains should have been thus circumvented! It is for you I grieve for it would have done me no other good than the pleasure of getting you out of your pecuniary straits through my good management of your books.”

  In subsequent years, sales of Canadian Crusoes continued to go from strength to strength in Britain. Catharine was thrilled when the Edinburgh firm of Thomas Nelson showed some interest in a third edition in 1867. This time, however, Catharine had a better sense of the value of her copyright. When Nelson and Sons offered her forty pounds for both Canadian Crusoes and a second children’s book she’d published in 1856, Lady Mary and her Nurse, she considered the figure “shabby.” But she was too broke to argue, and decided that she had better accept. She was soon referring in her correspondence to her publisher as “that old humbug Nelson,” since in return for his fee Thomas Nelson also demanded extensive corrections and additions, and a change of title to Lost in the Backwoods. A Tale of the Canadian Forest (a “very stupid” title in the author’s opinion). Nelson then delayed publication, and payment, for fifteen years. By 1882, Catharine had earned from the English editions of Canadian Crusoe only 115 pounds—10 pounds less than she had earned from The Backwoods of Canada nearly fifty years earlier.

  Even on her own side of the Atlantic, Catharine received a derisory reward for her work. The American publishers C.S. Francis, of Boston and New York, brought out an American edition at the end of 1852. Initially, Catharine was happy to have Francis as publisher because he promised her fifty dollars for the copyright. In 1853, Catharine wrote a joyful letter to Ellen Dunlop: “Francis sent me a nice present, and promised me more next year, and highly praised my book which was he said likely to be of great advantage both to author and publisher.” But the absence of any international copyright law left British and Canadian authors unprotected against pirates. American publishers routinely issued low-cost editions of works that sold well in Europe before British copies had crossed the Atlantic, and without any payment to the authors or the original publishers. Canadian readers didn’t object to this flagrant piracy; it gave them easy and cheap access to popular British authors like Charles Dickens and Walter Scott. They were outraged when the British government made a half-hearted attempt to protect authors with the 1842 Imperial Copyright Act. In the end, Francis never forwarded any further royalties to Catharine, although he himself did well with Canadian Crusoes. It rapidly went through nine impressions.

  Like so many authors before and after her, Catharine raged against publishers who made more from her books than she did. But her eagerness to write made her a sitting duck for unscrupulous businessmen. And what choice did she have? Her other attempts to raise cash—needlework and knitting, selling pressed flowers to neighbours, acting as midwife—were even less lucrative. Writing was the only means she had to make some money while raising her children. And the act of putting pen to paper was her only release from the relentless pressure of daily worries.

  Chapter 12

  The Secrets of the Prison House

  In the spring of 1847, a stout figure, in black bonnet and shawl, made her way east across the bridge over Belleville’s Moira River. Susanna Moodie paused for a few minutes to watch the French-Canadian raftsmen, armed with long poles, leap from log to log as they steered rafts of timber through the foaming waters below her. Susanna’s sense of fashion had not deserted her in her mid-forties: as photos from this period show, she enjoyed wearing the latest style of collar on her dark gowns, and her hair was carefully dressed. But the years of hardship had taken their toll on her looks, as they had on her sister’s: the auburn in her hair had faded, deep grooves stretched from her nose to the corners of her mouth, and her thin lips were set in a straight, grim line. The lids of her deep-set brown eyes drooped; her shoulders hunched forward as she leaned over the balustrade of the bridge. The sight of the turbulent water brought back unhappy memories of Johnnie’s death only three years earlier. She quickly moved on, her chin thrust forward in the sharp wind. Once she reached Front Street, she turned north, ignoring the large sign over the first building she passed, advertising in large letters, “Intelligencer: George Benjamin, proprietor.” Susanna was on her way to see Belleville’s other proprietor and publisher, Joseph Wilson.

  Joseph Wilson was the owner-manager of the Victoria Bookstore on Front Street. He had first appeared in Belleville around 1843 when he’d set up a bookbinding business and printing press. He loved the book trade and was eager to become a publisher as well as a distributor. In the mid-1840s he decided that the colony was ripe for some home-grown publications, and he started a whole batch of periodicals, under such titles as Wilson’s Experiment and Wilson’s Canada Casket. They were done on the cheap—Wilson just stuck into their pages any stories or news items that came his way. But his ambition was always to get on his payroll Belleville’s best-known writer, whose work was now appearing regularly in publications on both sides of the border.

  The citizens of Belleville held in awe this accomplished woman who smoked a clay pipe as she hoed her vegetable garden or scattered seed for the hens in the backyard. But Susanna was also a controversial figure. First there was her treatment of George Benjamin in her widely circulated story “Richard Redpath. A Tale.” Then there was the Moodies’ troubled relationship with the new Congregationalist Church that they had helped to found in 1844. Apparently the couple had been considered a little too keen to argue church doctrine, and reluctant to perform church duties. They were expelled for their “disorderly walk and neglect of church fellowship”—a mysterious phrase that appears in the church records, which Susanna never explained in her letters or books.

  Wilson didn’t care about ornery conduct or small-town gossip: he wanted the famous Mrs. Moodie. But Susanna, though flattered by his attention, was too hard-headed to contribute to publications that didn’t pay. She didn’t trust Wilson: he was glib, and as one of her friends suggested, too driven by “a sordid love of the ‘Dimes and Dollars.’” Susanna felt herself sufficiently established as a writer to require a certain deference. Wilson now made her an interesting offer. He told her how delighted he would be to publish a periodical edited by her. It would be cheap enough for working Canadians to afford, so that it might have a wide circulation.

  Joseph Wilson was not the only entrepreneur eager to give uncouth Upper Canada some literary polish. Magazines that included Canadian material for Canadian readers, rather than reprinted material from British annuals, were multiplying. Most of them (then as now) were short-lived. As Susanna grumbled, they folded because they had to compete with American monthlies “got up in the first style, handsomely illustrated, and composed of the best articles, selected from European and American magazines [and] sold at such a low rate, that one or other is to be found in almost every decent home in the province.” But a handful of Canadian writers were at last beginning to produce home-grown material. Whenever Susanna or Catharine received an issue of John Lovell’s Literary Garland, they saw not only their own contributions but also steel engravings of the St. Lawrence River or the port of Montreal. They read pieces by the likes of John Richardson, Charles Sangster and Rosanna Leprohon. These writers slotted accounts of life in the colony into the mélange of hack escapist fantasies about fashionable aristocrats in romantic European castles that were still the mainstay of nineteenth-century periodicals. Richardson’s contributions included an article about Indians in Upper Canada. Charles Sangster’s poetry dealt with the
familiar St. Lawrence landscape. Rosanna Leprohon portrayed life amongst the Hurons, and the trials of a destitute immigrant.

  The letters that Susanna and Catharine wrote home rarely mentioned the growing literary self-consciousness of British North America: their letters covered news of harvests, children and friends. Yet both women organized their lives very differently from any of their neighbours. They structured their days, and their family duties, around what had become their main occupation: the composition of poems, sketches and stories for publication. They saw themselves as professional writers, earning money on which their families’ welfare depended. A few other educated female immigrants kept journals of their daily lives: on Sturgeon Lake, just north of Peterborough, Ann Langton sat down each evening to record the comings and goings at her brother’s farm. But none shared what critic and biographer Michael Peterman has called the Strickland sisters’ “developed sense of literary self and attentiveness to audience.” Other women didn’t have the Stricklands’ ruthless (or obsessive) self-discipline, which enabled them to turn their backs on domestic tasks and pick up a quill pen. It often felt like a useless occupation. Susanna regretfully noted, “The low esteem in which all literary labor is held in this country renders it every thing but a profitable employment.” Yet the faint outlines of a new culture were starting to appear, and the Strickland sisters were both in its vanguard.