There was a vivid immediacy to Susanna’s descriptions. In a passage describing the Moodies’ arrival at their first home in Hamilton Township, she wrote, “I was perfectly bewildered—I could only stare at the place, with my eyes swimming in tears; but as the horses plunged down into the broken hollow, my attention was drawn from my new residence to the peril which endangered life and limb at every step. The driver, however, was well used to such roads, and, steering us dexterously between the black stumps, at length drove up, not to the door, for which there was none to the house, but to the open space from which that absent but very necessary appendage had been removed. Three young steers and two heifers, which the driver proceeded to drive out, were quietly reposing on the floor….I begged the man to stay until [my husband] arrived, as I felt terrified at being alone in this wild, strange-looking place. He laughed, as well he might, at our fears, and said that he had a long way to go, and must be off; then, cracking his whip … he went his way, and Hannah and myself were left standing in the middle of the dirty floor.”
Susanna also included anecdotes that capture the community humour of life in the bush. For all her disgust at the behaviour of some of her neighbours at logging bees, her prose dances with her love of regional accents and earthy humour when she writes about one that took place on the Moodies’ property. One of the Irish settlers who helped at the bee was “Old Wittals … with his low forehead and long nose [who] ate his food like a famished wolf.” A fellow logger was “funning Old Wittals for having eaten seven large cabbages at Mr. Traill’s bee, a few days previous. His son, Sol, thought himself as in duty bound to take up the cudgel for his father. ‘Now, I guess that’s a lie, anyhow. Father was sick that day, and I tell you he only ate five.’… Malachi Chroak had discovered an old pair of cracked bellows in a corner, which he placed under his arm, and applying his mouth to the pipe, and working his elbow to and fro, pretended that he was playing upon the bagpipes, every now and then letting the wind escape in a shrill squeak from this novel instrument. ‘Arrah, ladies and jintlemen, do jist turn your swate little eyes upon me whilst I play for your iddifications the last illigant tune which my owld grandmother taught me. Och hone! ’tis a thousand pities that such musical owld crathers should be suffered to die, at all at all, to be poked away into a dirthy, dark hole, when their canthles shud be burnin’ a-top of a bushel, givin’ light to the house.’ And here he minced to and fro, affecting the airs of a fine lady.”
Susanna wrote of herself as a wife and mother: there was always a baby in her arms or a child by her side as she faced the challenges of bush life. In a chapter set in the bitterly cold winter of 1837 (“During the month of February, the thermometer often ranged from eighteen to twenty-seven degrees below zero”), she recorded how she coped alone when the roof of her log cabin caught fire. “Large pieces of burning pine began to fall through the boarded ceiling….The children I had kept under a large dresser in the kitchen, but it now appeared absolutely necessary to remove them to a place of safety. To expose the young, tender things to the direful cold was almost as bad as leaving them to the mercy of the fire. At last I hit upon a plan to keep them from freezing. I emptied all the clothes out of a large, deep chest of drawers, and dragged the empty drawers up the hill; these I lined with blankets, and placed a child in each drawer, covering it well over with the bedding, giving to little Agnes the charge of the baby to hold between her knees, and keep well-covered until help should arrive. Ah, how long it seemed coming!”
Roughing It in the Bush was more than a collection of “events as may serve to illustrate a life in the woods,” as Susanna modestly claimed. It was the dramatic story of her own journey of self-discovery, as she faced the rigours and disorientation of pioneer life. She presented herself as the delicate young lady that she had been when she arrived in Canada, and with whom English readers would identify, rather than the toughened, middle-aged woman who had survived the loss of two children and now lived in a prosperous town. When the hopelessly naive Moodies arrive in the New World, “All was new, strange and distasteful to us; we shrank from the rude, coarse familiarity of the uneducated people among whom we were thrown; and they in return viewed us as innovators, who wished to curtail their independence by expecting from them the kindly civilities and gentle courtesies of a more refined community.” Susanna dwelt on her incompetence as a farmer’s wife, her inability to bake bread or organize a bee. She didn’t brag about the fact that, before they all left the woods, Catharine acknowledged her as the best baker of breads and pies in the district.
Susanna carefully reworked the sketches to appeal to English sensitivities, and she gentrified her language: “face” became “countenance,” “bite” became “masticate.” In an 1847 issue of the Literary Garland, she had revelled in the gory details of a man who had tried to cut his own throat in a botched suicide attempt, and quoted the words of Ned Layton, the rescuer, directly: “I then saw that it was a piece of the flesh of his throat that had been carried into his windpipe. So, what do I do, but puts in my finger and thumb, and pulls it out, and bound up his throat with my handkerchief … ” But Susanna decided that a British reader wouldn’t have the stomach for such a vivid description. In the account of the same incident in Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna prudishly remarked: “Layton then detailed some particulars of his surgical practice which it is not necessary to repeat.”
A decade after she had lived through these experiences, Susanna was able to put some distance between herself and her life. She was candid about the hardships of the immigrant life. She explained that Canada was the country for the “industrious working man” who knew how to work the land and could tolerate hardship as he slowly acquired property and prestige that were out of his reach back home. However, she warned, a penniless gentleman with no experience of manual labour could never prosper. Addressing the reader directly, she explained that any gentleman who crossed the Atlantic in order to reestablish social position lost at home would be ruined and disappointed: “If these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from sinking their property, and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house, and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.” She confessed that she and her husband had discovered that sustained effort and faith in God’s goodness were no guarantee of success in the backwoods.
Susanna had high expectations for sales of Roughing It in the Bush. She deliberately flagged her famous connections by dedicating it as “a simple Tribute of Affection” to “Agnes Strickland, Author of the ‘Lives of the Queens of England.’ ”
The London reviews were everything that the Moodies had hoped for. The Athenaeum praised the author’s ability to present “the dark side of the emigrant’s life” without being “needlessly lachrymose.” The Literary Gazette admired the author’s patience, noble mind and unaffected outlook and recommended the book for its “great originality and interest,” despite its occasional coarseness. Blackwood’s Magazine carried lengthy extracts, interspersed with lavish praise of the author’s moral courage and good humour in the face of adversity and rude neighbours. The magazine beseeched its female readers to “behold one, gently nurtured as yourselves, cheerfully condescending to rudest toils, unrepiningly enduring hardships you never dreamed of.” Bentley quickly ordered a second printing of Roughing It in the Bush, paid Susanna an additional fifty pounds and asked her to send him more material to publish. He published further editions in 1854 and 1857.
Within weeks of its appearance in England, a pirated edition of Roughing It in the Bush was published in New York. The American publisher, George Putnam, brought out a two-volume version, in which most of the poems were omitted, in his Semi-Monthly Library for Travellers and the Fireside series. The reviewers were equally enthusiastic there. The New York Albion praised the book’s “obvious stamp of truth.” American writers commented with admiration on the author
’s bravery in the remote “wilds of Canada,” as though the district Susanna wrote about was in the High Arctic rather than just across Lake Ontario from New York State.
Susanna was buoyed up by her sales. Within a year, Roughing It in the Bush was close to outselling one of the all-time bestsellers in nineteenth-century America: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Chapter 13
Mortification and Madness
In 1852, the year that Susanna’s Roughing It in the Bush and Catharine’s Canadian Crusoes were published, their sister Agnes Strickland was at the height of her fame in England and grand beyond belief. Whenever Agnes visited her publisher Blackwoods in Edinburgh, “the Scottish papers announce all my arrivals and departures as if I was a Queen myself,” she told Susanna. When she travelled from Reydon to Norwich to make some purchases, the tradesmen begged her to accept without payment any goods she fancied. She was a permanent fixture of gatherings at London’s Kensington Palace, where, she gloated, she met “rooms full of lords and ladies.”
Her elaborate costumes were reported in The Times: on one occasion she wore a “robe of rich Lyons brocade à l’antique, yellow roses, buds, and foliage, on pale silver-coloured ground,” a long lace train and “double skirts of white glacé silk, edged with mauve velvet and covered with a tunic and deep flounce of Honiton point lace.” Fearless of gilding the lily, Agnes wore both a tiara and a plume of white ostrich feathers on her head. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, sought out this fearsomely well-upholstered figure at a Park Lane soirée to compliment her on her “graceful and romantic pen.” Clearly, Thomas Strickland’s mercantile origins had been left far behind: at a Scottish gathering of peers, Agnes was suffused with snobbish relief to see “an assembly of genuine nobles of gentle blood, no dirty cotton-spinners or stock-jobbers.” And the market for royal biographies appeared bottomless. Now that The Queens of England series was completed, she and Elizabeth had already embarked on another set of carefully researched hagiographies, The Lives of the Queens of Scotland, which appeared between 1850 and 1859.
Agnes’s three sisters in England—Elizabeth, her antisocial writing partner who lived in London; Jane, the dumpy homebody at Reydon who adored Agnes; sweet-tempered Sarah, now living in Northumberland and married to Richard Gwillym, a Church of England clergy-man—were content to sit on the sidelines, basking in the reflected glories of this Lady Bracknell figure. They knew that Agnes’s cultivation of blue-blooded friends was as much strategic as snobbish: it gave her access to the fabulous, and uncatalogued, collections of official and personal papers at stately homes all round the country. Her friendship, for instance, with William George Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, allowed her to root around in the archives of Devonshire House in London and in his two homes in Derbyshire: Hardwick House and Chatsworth House, the famous “Palace of the Peaks.”
Agnes Strickland, premier royal biographer in Victorian England, and a woman of commanding presence.
In August 1851, Agnes was happy to include a fourth sibling in her admiring family audience in England. Her brother Sam, nine years her junior, had returned with his eldest daughter, Marie Beresford, on an extended visit. Both father and daughter had recently lost their spouses. Ostensibly they were in England to visit Sam’s mother, confined to her bedroom at Reydon Hall in Jane’s care. Mrs. Strickland was now a crusty eighty-year-old, and from her old-fashioned four-poster bed she continued her lifelong habit of issuing a barrage of orders, disapproval and complaints. However, the real reason for Sam’s return was to woo another wife—his childhood sweetheart, Katherine Rackham.
Sam’s English sisters were all swept off their feet by their brother. Twenty-six years earlier, they had waved goodbye to an unruly, curly-headed twenty-year-old; now they found themselves embracing a stout and prosperous Canadian landowner. He was “so frank, good-natured and intelligent,” reported Jane, “and so full of sense and sensibility.” Agnes adored playing the grande dame of Suffolk and showing her brother what strides the county had made in his absence. When Sam wasn’t paying his respects to the Rackham household, he was available to accompany his sisters to church, to the market, or to London. And since Katherine Rackham’s elderly mother refused to release her middle-aged daughter into matrimony, Sam was often available. He had to wait until Mrs. Rackham died, in 1855, before Katherine was able to join him in Canada.
In January 1852, a parcel arrived at Reydon Hall that shattered all this cosy Strickland congeniality. Inside, Agnes found a copy of Roughing It in the Bush, hot off the press and sent by the publisher Richard Bentley. Initially, she was pleased to feel the quality of the leather binding. She smiled as she read the warm inscription: “to Agnes Strickland … this simple Tribute of Affection is dedicated by her sister, Susanna Moodie.” However, as she read on, her smile evaporated. The book was full of disgusting scenes and ghastly people. While Agnes had been writing about glorious coronations and royal maidens, her sister had chosen to describe vulgar foreigners living in squalor. While Agnes had been mingling with the mighty, Susanna had been mixing with servants, farm labourers, drunks and “barbarous Yankee squatters.” While Agnes had stayed at Chatsworth, Susanna had lived in a pigsty. Susanna had written pages about tasks that no lady would be interested in, let alone perform: making sugar from maple trees, milking cows, digging potatoes. It was all too mortifying for Agnes Strickland. What would her good friends the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, or Countess Newburgh, or Dean Pellew of Norwich Cathedral, or Bishop Monk of Gloucester think?
Within days, an angry letter was on its way to Belleville, insisting that the dedication to Agnes be removed from all subsequent editions of Roughing It in the Bush. Agnes also rebuked Susanna for rehashing old experiences simply to make money. In her eyes, Susanna’s discovery of her own “Canadian” voice was simply a whining account of past wretchedness which would have been better forgotten. Agnes herself knew better, she wrote, than to make such a silly move: “I had the prudence to commit four whole volumes to the flames years ago, and many a production has followed it that might have proved a scorpion to myself and others when the money they would have realized would have been expended and nothing but vexation left.” Agnes reported that she had seen some Suffolk friends of the Stricklands, whose nephew was the Moodies’ fellow emigrant Tom Wales. In Roughing It in the Bush Susanna had described meeting Tom (whom she called “Tom Wilson”) in Cobourg, and his complaints about the poor diet, the blackflies and swamp fever. She ridiculed him as “a man as helpless and as indolent as a baby [who] would have been a treasure to an undertaker … he looked as if he had been born in a shroud, and rocked in a coffin.” Agnes knew that Susanna’s book would cause trouble within the Reydon Hall neighbourhood. “What they will say about Tom Wales, alias Wilson, I don’t know,” she sniffed.
Removing her name from the frontispiece and ticking off her sister wasn’t enough for Agnes. She also wanted the good name of Strickland, and the family’s position as landed gentry, restored. So she sat Sam down and told him that he was to write his own pioneering memoirs—and she and Jane would be his editors. Agnes then negotiated a deal with Richard Bentley, Susanna’s London publisher, whereby Sam would receive one hundred pounds per thousand copies of his book—far more than Susanna, conducting her negotiations by transatlantic mail, had managed to get for Roughing It.
Sam Strickland’s house in Lakefield, “The Homestead,” represented his sister Agnes’s idea of how a pioneer gentleman should live.
Sam’s memoir, Twenty-seven years in Canada West, is a no-nonsense account of emigration, adventure and success. Sam had none of the professional writing skills that his two sisters in Canada had spent over thirty years polishing; he shared neither Catharine’s powers of observation nor Susanna’s wit. The prose is stiff, and Sam’s repertoire of adjectives for his fellow emigrants is limited. Most of the men are characterized as “a jolly set of fellows”; women, “the fair sex,” are perfunctorily complimented as wives and mothers
. Sam’s prose flows most easily when he is describing his success as a sportsman. His stories of adventures while hunting bears, deer and wolves had their origins in the belly-laugh anecdotes with which he regaled his fellow members of Peterborough’s Orange Lodge.
Sam spent an agonizing few weeks sitting in the damp and dilapidated dining room at Reydon Hall, staring out at the old sycamore tree as he tried to compose while Agnes and Jane chivvied him to keep writing. Their influence pervades most of his book’s 655 pages. Agnes insisted that Sam call himself “Major Strickland” on the title page, although he never called himself “Major” at home. She helped him shape a preface that contradicted Susanna’s account of the misery of a colonist’s life. “Unless [an author] has experienced all the various gradations of colonial existence,” wrote Sam, “from that of a pioneer in the backwoods and the inhabitant of a shanty, up to the epoch of his career, when he becomes the owner …of a comfortable house and well-cleared farm, affording him the comforts and many of the luxuries of civilization, he is hardly competent to write on such a subject.” The implication was clear: since Susanna had never reached the upper echelons of such an existence, she must be “incompetent.” Both Agnes and Jane Strickland made Sam clean up his language, so that many of his merry hunting stories sound rather pompous. (“Jane … insisted on turning out everything that she considered vulgar,” Susanna reported to her publisher Richard Bentley, after a conversation she had had with her brother. This had “shorn the work of its identity,” she added smugly. “Rough Canadians don’t use the fine language of an English drawing-room.”) And Agnes put her own name on the title page twice, as both editor and the author of a short verse:
And when those toils rewarding,
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