Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  The greatest excitement came in February, when an engraved and crested invitation arrived for Catharine from Rideau Hall. His Excellency the Governor-General, and his wife Lady Lansdowne, requested the pleasure of the company of Mrs. Traill at a winter soirée. On the evening of Saturday, February 23, Catharine, the Chamberlins and Maime Fitzgibbon swaddled themselves in buffalo robes for the short drive through the icy evening air under a star-studded sky. Catharine was in ecstasy: “The drive through the avenue among the snow laden trees was delightful …a splendid young moon just above the dark pine woods gave light enough to make every old leafless oak and silvery birch stand out from the darker evergreens in bold relief.” As the party neared the Hall, they saw “a great vapoury cloud of smoke rising into the still air and spreading in fold after fold upwards above the trees, the lower part gilded till it appeared like a golden veil over the great solid banks of snow.” The next turn in the driveway revealed the flames of a giant bonfire leaping skyward and illuminating the toboggan slide. The toboggans “flashed past on their downward descent with a speed that almost took my breath to see their lightning-like swiftness as they flew past us,” Catharine wrote to Sarah Gwyllim.

  Lady Lansdowne made the old lady feel very welcome. She took her arm and escorted her along a path, illuminated by Chinese paper lanterns hung from tree branches, to see the skating rink. The belles of Ottawa, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling in the cold air, spun around as a brave little band played Viennese waltzes: “It was a pretty lively sight, the girls skating on this wood-encircled sheet of ice lighted up by torches on a little islet in the far end of the rink.” By now, Catharine was feeling chilled, so she and Lady Lansdowne went into what the latter called the “log cabin” to warm up by the stove. Catharine chuckled as she compared this Petit Trianon fantasy of life in the woods with her own memory of the real thing. “It was not a real log cabin, for it was … handsomely panelled with varnished wood inside … not rough and chinked and plastered as log houses used to be. This would have been a palace for a settler in the old settlement days of the Backwoods. We should have been thought too luxurious altogether and the house out of keeping with the rude furniture, diet and dress of that time.”

  The 1884 skating party at Rideau Hall, organized by the Governor-General. Catharine found the log cabin “a palace …far too handsomely panelled.”

  Up until this moment, Catharine had been enjoying herself. But she suddenly realized that people were staring and pointing at her. She heard people whisper, “That’s her, that’s Mrs. Traill.” Several of the voices spoke in the kind of aristocratic English accents that she thought she had left far behind her when she waved goodbye to England. A tidal wave of self-consciousness rushed through her. She felt out of her element, just as, years ago, she had felt unsettled within the unfriendly class system of Britain. Had her sister Susanna been the literary lion at this gathering, she would have watched with cool amusement the Henry James world of cigar smoke, rustling silk skirts and social nuance, as she had once enjoyed them in Thomas Pringle’s house in Hampstead. Susanna would have risen to the occasion and revelled in being the centre of attention. But Susanna at that time was close to death in Toronto, and Catharine was acutely uncomfortable. Perhaps her nonchalance about her own appearance caught up with her in this plummy crowd; her coiffure might have suddenly felt dishevelled and her black silk gown (another Agnes hand-me-down) shabby. “Short people stood on tiptoe, and others peered over shoulders and pushed those before them aside peering at poor me as if I had been the shewpiece of the play,” she confessed to Ellen Dunlop a couple of days later. “The poor old lioness squeezed herself into a corner (I believe some people expected her to roar or wag her tail) not being accustomed to be gazed at in that way—it was a little oppressive.”

  Kind Lady Lansdowne rescued her guest and took her into Rideau Hall for refreshments. Catharine admired the platefuls of cakes and fruit, but contented herself with a cup of hot coffee. She was not impressed by the manners of her fellow guests: “all seemed bent on making the most of the liberal hospitality of His Excellency.” But she herself made quite an impression on others. When Agnes Chamberlin told her friend Mrs. John Thorburn, wife of the librarian of the Canadian Geological Survey, that her elderly aunt was present, Maria Thorburn made a beeline for Catharine and introduced herself. “I do love nice old ladies,” Maria wrote in her journal. “And she is so interesting, over eighty … I wonder if it is her love of nature that has kept her young and cheerful. Mrs. Traill has that pretty pink complexion that you see sometimes in old English ladies, a nice forehead and soft white hair.”

  Catharine enjoyed her glimpse of viceregal life, but she had a particular motive for attending the Governor-General’s party. She knew that James Fletcher, a botanist and entomologist who was then sub-librarian in the Parliamentary Library, was likely to be present, and she wanted to ask his advice about her plant manuscript. Towards the end of the evening, wrote Maria Thorburn, “Mr. Fletcher made his appearance. I vacated my seat to him and left him and the old lady to consult on the matter.”

  Catharine had got to know James Fletcher in the early 1880s, when she had tentatively sent him her manuscript for comment. Fletcher, who was born in Kent, England, was still a young man, but he became an instant ally to Catharine because he was a natural historian of the old school. “I am charmed with your style and find it so attractive after the irreverent materialistic philosophy, falsely so-called, of too many of our contemporary naturalists,” he had replied. “It is very charming for me to see such love for our beneficent creation, and reverence for His perfect works.” He read her manuscript carefully, marking with a red tick those flowers that he thought she had identified incorrectly, or for which she had given the wrong geographic locale. But he was a tactful editor. He suggested he send her specimens of the plants he had queried, so she could check. And he assured her that he had “seldom enjoyed any ‘communing with nature’ more than I have the perusal of your thoroughly and patently original notes on our loveliest treasures, the flowers of the field.”

  Catharine’s Ottawa visit in 1884 allowed her to see other prominent scientific men in the capital. An extraordinary collection of self-educated and gifted engineers, geologists and biologists had gravitated to Ottawa after Confederation. These were men eager to participate in the great enterprise of discovering, mapping and developing the vast territories at Ottawa’s doorstep. Many were associated with the Geological Survey of Canada, which had moved from Montreal to Ottawa in 1881; most were charter members of Canada’s Royal Society, founded in 1882. Armed with specimen boxes and notebooks, they accompanied each other into the Gatineau Hills on the congenial field trips organized by the Ottawa Field Naturalists’ Club (of which James Fletcher was secretary-treasurer). In 1884, and during a handful of visits Catharine subsequently made to Ottawa, these distinguished scientists went out of their way to pay homage to the old lady who had written The Wild Flowers of Canada. They recognized the value of Catharine’s own painstaking efforts to record and celebrate Canada’s native plants and Indian folklore.

  The most significant of Ottawa’s scientists to call at 52 Alexander Street was Sandford Fleming. Fleming, the surveyor and engineering genius behind the Pacific Railway, bubbled over with ideas to improve mail service, science education and communications. At the time of Catharine’s visit, he was going full bore on the campaign for which he is best remembered: the need for global uniformity in time-keeping. (Before the nineteenth century drew to its close, the whole world would adopt his idea of dividing the world into one-hour time zones, with a mean time based on the prime meridian through Greenwich, London). He was also a generous teddy-bear of a man: instead of trying to remember the individual birthdays of his many grandchildren and their friends, he sent them all presents on his own birthday.

  Fleming had met Mrs. Traill years ago in Peterborough, where he had arrived as an eighteen-year-old Scottish immigrant in 1845. When he heard she was in town, he immediately ca
me calling. He cut a wonderful figure, with his huge bushy beard and powerful gait, as he strode through record-breaking snowdrifts from his mansion in Sandy Hill to the Chamberlins’ house. Catharine was thrilled by his visit. “He was so kind and cordial it was pleasant to meet with the old dear and he said he would come again soon.”

  A brilliant engineer, Catharine’s friend Sandford Fleming (1827–1915) was the inventor of Standard Time and a man of irrepressible charm and boundless energy.

  Catharine, indefatigable as ever, packed in plenty of sightseeing in the capital. She saw the fish hatchery organized by Samuel Wilmot, the Dominion’s superintendant of fish culture, where trout, salmon, whitefish, herring, bass and pike were being bred to stock lakes and rivers. She admired the Dominion collection of stuffed animals and birds, and the collection of Indian canoes and artifacts, in the newly built Victoria Hall. Leaning heavily on Agnes Chamberlin’s arm, she walked through the marble corridors of the Parliament Buildings and into the ornately carved elegance of the Parliamentary Library. She was almost overwhelmed when the Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, appeared “and greeted me very cordially.” These glimpses of scientific inquiry and national purpose were of much greater interest to her than Viennese waltzes.

  The best news came when, largely thanks to James Fletcher, the Ottawa publisher A.S. Woodburn agreed to publish her manuscript under the title of Studies of Plant Life in Canada. It would be a more modest production than Wild Flowers of Canada: Woodburn wanted to bring it out as a quarto-sized volume, with twenty chromo-lithographs from drawings by Agnes Chamberlin. The introduction was quintessential Catharine, and encapsulated all the themes she had developed in half a century of botanical study. She wrote how, during her early years in the backwoods, forest flowers and shrubs “became like dear friends, soothing and cheering, by their sweet unconscious influence, hours of loneliness and hours of sorrow and suffering.” She insisted that her careful catalogue of plants, which included the Latin name for each plus a host of botanical and literary references, was “not a book for the learned.” The flowers of the field, she wrote, were good reminders of the teachings of Christ. And she deplored the fact that so little effort was being made to record native plants before they vanished “as civilization extends through the Dominion.”

  Studies of Plant Life in Canada appeared in 1885, a couple of months before Catharine travelled down to Toronto to sit with her dying sister. The book’s reception lightened Catharine’s mood as she watched Susanna’s steady decline and heard her sad, unhappy rantings. The Toronto Globe wrote of Catharine’s publication: “There is in it enough of technicality to make it extremely useful to the student, while there is about it a literary charm that will lead even the reader most ignorant of botany to go through that book from one end to the other.” The Week acknowledged Catharine as “an authority upon the flora of this country” and praised her for her “simplicity of style.” The Marquis of Lorne, who had been Governor-General of Canada from 1878 to 1883, and to whom the book was dedicated, told Agnes Chamberlin that Catharine’s work “will add a great deal to our pleasure in discerning the different species.” And Professor Fletcher wrote her: “With regard to your disclaiming the title of botanist, all I can say is, I wish a fraction of one percent of the students of plants who call themselves botanists, could use their eyes half as well as you have done. I think indeed your work of describing all the wild plants, in your book, so accurately that each one could have the name applied to it without doubt, is one of the greatest botanical triumphs which anyone could achieve, and one which I have frequently spoken of to illustrate how one can develop their powers of observation.”

  Catharine knew how she wanted her “little work,” as she called it, to be regarded. She opened with a verse from Sir Walter Scott, and she addressed her “dear reader.” In the introduction, she stated that she hoped the book might become “a household book, as Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne is to this day among English readers.” White’s eighteenth-century classic was an anachronism to muscular post-Darwinian botanists at the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet Catharine always understood the book’s gentle appeal, based on literary as well as scientific merit. Had Studies of Plant Life in Canada been received as a literary rather than a scientific text, it might have been seen alongside works by contemporaries who shared her concerns. Catharine Parr Traill would have been comfortable in the company of the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman, who wrote, “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books,” or the Russian writer Anton Chekhov who, in Uncle Vanya, bemoaned the fact that, “Whole Russian forests are going under the axe. …We’re losing the most wonderful scenery for ever, and why?” Studies of Plant Life in Canada, however, was assessed not as a literary work but alongside straightforward field-guides. It had a short shelf-life: it was reprinted in 1906, then virtually forgotten.

  In the short term, Catharine’s age alone gave Plant Life a novelty value that led to sales. Most octogenarian authors would have regarded this triumph as their last hurrah and retired to rest on their laurels. But Catharine couldn’t. Her impulse to tell the next generation of Canadians about the natural beauty around them remained unquenched.

  Chapter 20

  The Oldest Living Author in Her Majesty’s Dominion

  Catharine was seated in her favourite rocking chair near the French windows of Westove’s parlour. From this vantage point, she could look out at the lilacs in her garden and watch the plump Canadian robins strutting about on the grass. On one side of her chair was a sewing basket, filled with brightly coloured scraps of fabric from which she was making a patchwork quilt for the Indian Missionary Auxiliary. On the other side was a knitting bag, in which was tucked a half-finished woollen hat for one of her grandsons. Today, however, Catharine was busy with the activity she most enjoyed of all her pursuits: writing. On her lap was a portable writing desk, with a fresh sheet of paper and an inkwell filled with thick black ink. Her steel-nibbed pen hovered over the page as her mind drifted back to her Suffolk childhood.

  She was trying to capture in words the atmosphere of Reydon Hall in the early years of the century, when she and her five sisters were growing up there. In 1887, her sister Jane Margaret Strickland had published Life of Agnes Strickland. Jane’s book was an adulatory account of her sister’s biographical achievements, describing Agnes in glowing terms as a sort of literary Madonna: “We must remember that Agnes Strickland was really more of the woman than the author. She had a feminine love of dress and female employments, was fond of fine needlework, and, till she had a maid, mended her own stockings.” Jane’s biography of Agnes received some cruel reviews. The Athenaeum announced that it was “one of those books which might as well not have been written …[the author] is perpetually reminding us of the number of balls to which her sister was taken, the number of country houses which she visited, and the number of genteel persons who drove her out in their own carriages.” Jane’s loving, but banal, memories of her dauntingly intelligent older sister provided an excuse for Agnes’s male rivals to dismiss her achievements with misogynist glee. “We have not yet arrived,” sniffed The Northern Whig, “at that stage of evolution when women can rank as historians of the first order.” Jane was crushed by these comments. Her health, already poor, suffered. Within a few months, she was laid in a grave next to Agnes’s splendid marble monument in the graveyard of St. Edmund’s Church, Southwold.

  Catharine didn’t want to belittle Agnes’s leather-bound royal biographies. She was too fond of Jane, and had too much experience herself of misogynist brushoffs from professional men, to reply to these unkind reviews on Jane’s behalf. However, she was saddened by Jane’s book because Jane had scarcely mentioned either Susanna or Catharine herself. Samuel Strickland was allowed a walk-on part as the author of Twenty-seven years in Canada West, “which contains everything necessary for a settler to know.” But there was no reference to the literary achievements of Agnes’s youn
gest sisters, who had written much better, more helpful books about Canada. Catharine wanted to record a fuller picture of the gifted Strickland family.

  Agnes and Jane Strickland’s gravestones in the graveyard of St. Edmund’s Church, Southwold. A great-niece of Catharine sent her this picture.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch … the steel nib started moving quickly across the page. Catharine had always been a fluent and fast writer, and old age had not slowed her down. “We passed our days,” she wrote, smiling at the Reydon memories, “in the lonely old house in sewing, walking in the lanes, sometimes going to see the sick and carry food or little comforts to the cottagers; but reading was our chief resource.” Catharine enjoyed penning these “pictures of old world life,” as she described them to one publisher, “which will amuse if not astonish the reader taking him back into bygone scenes even to the past days of the former century …” At the other end of her own lifetime and on the other side of the Atlantic, she acknowledged that she and her sisters had been part of an extraordinarily rich literary tradition, a uniquely Old World legacy which she had absorbed, and of which her own children and grandchildren had no notion. Before Thomas Strickland’s death, the household at Reydon Hall had included servants to cook, clean, launder, press, garden, dust, sweep, preserve and bake. Thomas’s young daughters had the time to furnish their minds from his library. Catharine scribbled down her memories of how they had penned historical dramas, “embellished according to the invisible genius of their fertile minds,” and “ransacked the library for books.” She described how Agnes, when only twelve, could recite from memory whole scenes from Shakespeare and lengthy passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost. She smiled as she remembered how she had thrown herself into the role of Ariel in a Reydon Hall production of The Tempest.