Sisters in the Wilderness (32 page)

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,

Broad lands at length they'll claim,

They'll call the new possession

By some familiar name.

Those of Agnes's friends who read her brother's book would know that the good major was the owner of “broad lands” on the other side of the ocean. Unlike his sister, who had written about “painful experience in a distant land,” Sam lived a thoroughly civilized life and was a credit to the Strickland name. Sam's book did well.
Bentley's Miscellany
liked the work's “rough, hearty, genuinely English tone.” The
Spectator
thought its “Robinson Crusoe character” splendid.

In Belleville, Susanna was shocked by Agnes's stinging reproaches. “Could I have foreseen her reception of [the dedication],” Susanna wrote to Richard Bentley in London, “thousands would not have induced me to place it there. She has wounded my feelings so severely… that it is to me a perfect eye sore in front of my unfortunate book.” Anger soon took the place of hurt. Susanna was furious that Agnes had dismissed
Roughing It in the Bush
in such a snobbish fashion. She thought Sam's book was pretentious and boring. “My brother is dreadfully ridiculed by the Canadian press by adopting that absurd Major.” And she was outraged when Sam, on his return to Canada, boasted of his royalties. Susanna was a fighter, and she thought up a nasty little scheme to sabotage Agnes. She suggested to Richard Bentley that he find an author in England to write a biographical work entitled “The Memoirs of Royal Favourites.” (Such a book would be direct competition for her sister's biographies. Bentley, who was in the curious position of being both Sam's and Susanna's publisher, did not take up the suggestion.)

Susanna was particularly incensed because Agnes, she suspected, had exerted her influence over many of the London reviewers. “Hers is a
ready
and a
clever
pen,” she wrote to Bentley. “It is more than probable, that to her, both my brother and I, are indebted, he for the good, I for the bad reviews of our respective works.” Most of the reviews of
Roughing It in the
.Bush
in London's influential literary papers were in fact very positive. But this was the first time since 1830, when Susanna had published her lengthy poem “Enthusiasm,” that, instead of turning out formulaic pap, she had poured out her own heart and soul to her readers in England, and she was abnormally sensitive to criticism. The most negative London review was in the
Observer,
which took exception to Susanna's anti-Irish bias: “She describes the Irish emigrants in terms which a reflective writer would scarcely apply to a pack of hounds—as ‘filthy beings sullying the purity of the air and water (of Grosse Ile)'… ‘vicious, uneducated barbarians, far behind the wild man (Indian savage) in delicacy of feeling and natural courtesy.'” The reviewer pointed out that it was thanks to Susanna's Irish servants, particularly John Monaghan and Jenny, that the Moodies survived the bush. However, the reviewer added that
Roughing It in the Bush
was “one of the most valuable books hitherto published on that ever-novel, and always interesting subject, the customs and manners of large classes of people.”

For Susanna, ten good reviews could not heal the hurt of one snarky comment. She was particularly upset because the London
Observer
's review was reprinted in the Montreal
Pilot
in March 1852. Moreover, once copies of
Roughing It in the Bush
started to arrive in Canada, Susanna found she had touched sensitive nerves in a young and self-conscious literary community, in which writers had first-hand knowledge of the bush. Charles Lindsey, editor of the
Examiner
and son-in-law of William Lyon Mackenzie, went after her for putting on airs. He called her “An ape of the aristocracy. Too poor to lie on a sofa and too proud to work for her bread.” Such a glib quip was hardly fair, and Susanna pretended to laugh it off. “I can bear the castigation,” she assured friends. Another reviewer in the
United Empire
accused her of penning “an unfaithful portrait of a settler's life”; she had either “greatly overrated her sufferings in the bush, or …very bad management must have occasioned them.” This reviewer pointed out that, by colonial standards, the Moodies were well off: they had arrived in Canada with enough money to buy a cleared farm; they had received a handsome legacy; and they had benefited from both John's
commission and then his salary as a captain in the militia. All these reviews, and their disparaging comments, left a nasty taste in Susanna's mouth. She convinced herself that Canadians hated her. “Will they ever forgive me for writing
Roughing It?
” she wrote Bentley. “They know that it was the truth, but have I not been a mark for every vulgar editor of a village journal, through the length and breadth of the land to hurl a stone at, and point out as the enemy of Canada?”