Barefoot Crusoes
While the Moodies were settling in Belleville, and making important friends and enemies, Catharine and Thomas Traill were living a hand-to-mouth existence. After leaving the bush in 1839, they had rented a little frame house in Ashburnham, the village on the opposite bank of the Otonabee River from Peterborough. The house had a reliable well and an orchard that Thomas looked after. Catharine spent hours in her garden, cultivating the potatoes, carrots, turnips, currants and melons that would see them through the winter. Even in the hardest times, she could never resist planting flowers, too—marigolds, sweet peas, poppies and pinks—to brighten the view from her kitchen window. She had her good friend, Frances Stewart, close by, and Frances’s daughter Ellen Dunlop, to whom she also grew attached. She somehow found the few dollars required to hire a servant to help her with her four children and household chores. Her daughter Annie recalled of these years, “On the whole we were very comfortable.”
But the family’s only income was Thomas’s annual military pension, as he was unable to secure a government job in neighbouring Peter-borough. Susanna Moodie wrote of her brother-in-law: “He has had the mortification of seeing all the places filled up—some by men half his age—and himself passed up.” Catharine scrambled for ways to supplement the family income. She started a small school, and she also began to act as the local nurse and midwife, relying heavily on the herbal remedies on which she was already an expert. Every week her daughter Katie took a basket of eggs, from the flock of about thirty chickens the Traills always kept in their backyard, to market, where they fetched about ten-pence a dozen. Catharine also acquired a couple of geese, which she plucked regularly so she could sell the down (“the quills are not touched, so that the animal suffers but little from the operation”). But all this hard work yielded only pennies. Ever since the Traills and Moodies had arrived in Canada, the parcels that came regularly from Reydon Hall had been an important source of clothes and housekeeping items for each family. These days, Catharine was so dependent on her sisters’ handouts that she wept with relief when their letters and gifts turned up at the Peterborough post office.
Agnes’s letters to Catharine, and her activities in England, provide an interesting counterpoint to the lives of her sisters in Canada. Despite the Stricklands’ lack of means and paucity of aristocratic connections, Agnes was enjoying extraordinary success. Her career as a biographer, which started only after her sisters had arrived in Canada, must have surprised them. In the Regency London that Susanna and Catharine had left behind, the British monarchy had been deeply unpopular. They could recall the intelligentsia sneering at George IV as a lazy drunk and William IV as “Silly Billy.” But everything changed when the petite and prim figure of Victoria, eighteen years old, ascended the British throne in 1837. The young Queen was a magnet for public attention. Victoria’s subjects wanted to know about their monarch’s dresses, jewels and tastes; they adored her youth and aura of vulnerability, and the glamour of her wedding to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1840. Agnes, who had an acute eye for commercial opportunity, promptly produced a two-volume biography entitled Victoria from Her Birth to Her Bridal. The Queen herself was outraged by the book’s numerous inaccuracies (she scribbled “Not true” in the margins of nearly every page of the copy presented to her, and deleted whole paragraphs). But Agnes had hit a public nerve, and from then on she was unstoppable.
Interest in the young Queen blossomed into a more general interest in female royalty, and Agnes Strickland was there to feed the appetite. Over the next three decades, she and her sister Elizabeth produced biographies of thirty-three queens (including both consorts and female monarchs, and covering England, Scotland and France). The two women worked hard and companionably on both the writing and the extensive research for each volume. They trod new ground in historical writing. (Agnes suppressed the error-ridden biography of Victoria, and none of her subsequent books contained careless mistakes). Eliza and Agnes never relied on secondary sources. They unearthed papers that had lain mouldering in private collections, and in this way they shone a public spotlight on women whom contemporary male historians had ignored. They wrote about the past from the point of view of its spouses and victims, as well as its heroes. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a politician and author of the monumental five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II, “detested their methods,” according to Agnes’s biographer, Una Pope-Hennessy: “The emphasis was distressingly different from what he was accustomed to, for with the entry into the closet and the bedchamber, history was no longer a pompous march of massy events engineered by massive men, but a succession of intimate and homely details from which generalisations were gradually built up.”
The biographies made the Strickland name famous. However, only Agnes Strickland’s name appeared as the author of each book. Eliza, who actually wrote more than half the individual biographies, regarded popular acclaim as vulgar and was happy to let Agnes take all the credit. She had no interest in swanning through literary salons. The two women spent their mornings together, burrowing away in the British Museum Library or royal archives. In the afternoons, Eliza avoided all unnecessary calls and refused all invitations: instead, in her rented room in Bayswater, she read, wrote or visited with old acquaintances. Agnes, in contrast, revelled in her newfound status and acclaim. When in London, she always managed to secure an invitation to stay with smart friends in Regent’s Park or the West End. “The great gain [from the newly published third volume of the twelve-volume set The Queens of England] is that it has given me a grand place in society as well as literature,” she wrote to her Canadian sisters in 1841. “Since I last wrote I have been down to Windsor and had a long morning in the Royal Library….Yesterday I drank tea with Lady Bedingfield.” Agnes was the premier royal biographer of her age.
From now on, Agnes’s letters read like chapters from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. They were speckled with the names of minor aristocrats, junior politicians and the more literate members of the landed gentry. Agnes’s tall, mannish figure and deep voice were soon well known within the beau monde of Britain. One evening she sat next to the Duke of Wellington: “My early enthusiasm in favour of the hero of a hundred fights has not abated one chit. He was not near as deaf as I had heard.” She spent the summers writing at Reydon Hall, or as a guest in country houses. In 1846, a portrait of Agnes in the purple velvet dress she wore at court was hung in the Royal Academy. The artist, John Hayes, managed to soften the sitter’s imperious expression into something closer to a fashionably feminine simper. Further honours glimmered in the ether. “Our little queen,” as Agnes referred to Victoria with proprietorial pride, was even said to have murmured something about a royal pension. Apparently, biographical inaccuracies had been forgiven in the light of Agnes’s deluge of deference.
Given that both Susanna and Catharine were as talented as their elder sister, and Susanna was just as ambitious as Agnes, both women must have asked themselves, as they read Agnes’s accounts of literary accomplishments, “What if …?” Had they remained in England, might they too have established themselves as successful authors? Was Agnes’s success largely because she had remained “in real and single blessedness,” as she smugly put it, so could devote her time to her books, rather than to husband and children? Agnes had found her metier in the field of royal biography. Might her younger sisters have equalled her triumphs in their own (very different) genres, or might they, at the very least, have ridden her coattails to prosperity?
Catharine did not envy her elder sister. Unlike Susanna, she had never nursed a personal rivalry with Agnes. She had no interest in hobnobbing with the likes of Lady Bedingfield; she lacked the vanity to desire a portrait by a Royal Academician. However, Catharine was finding it just as hard to make ends meet in Ashburnham as she had in the bush. Her little school had failed, and Thomas was again sinking into despair. She had already tried to get a further payment for The Backwoods of Canada with a heartfelt appeal to the publisher: “While her little volume is read with pleasure by the talented and wealthy, the writer and her infant family is struggling with poverty and oppressed by many cares.” But this had only yielded a further fifteen pounds, bringing Catharine’s total income from Backwoods—one of the most widely circulated and best-known books about Canada—to 125 pounds. As Catharine sat in her parlour in Ashburnham and read Agnes’s letters, she began to hope that Agnes might help her again. It was Agnes who had found a publisher for Backwoods in 1836. Now that Agnes was such a celebrity, surely she could find a publisher for more sketches of life in Upper Canada by Catharine?
Agnes tried. There was every reason to anticipate a warm reception for a manuscript by Mrs. Traill. The Backwoods of Canada had been well reviewed, and its first printing of eleven thousand copies had sold quickly. It had been reprinted in 1838, 1839 and 1840, and translated into German in 1838 and French in 1843. Moreover, there was now a vogue for improving and educational material. In 1823, Dr. George Birkbeck had founded the first “Mechanics’ Institute” in London—an early form of public library—to feed what he called “the universal appetite for instruction,” and soon after, every city boasted a similar institute. As literacy spread in the new industrial towns of Victorian England, so did demand for the printed word. The wives of the newly wealthy manufacturing class were not only unprepared to run large family houses, with servants lurking behind green baize doors, they were also ignorant of the manners required in the polite society to which they had been elevated. Even a book with the unappetizing title What to do with Cold Mutton went into a second printing. There was an epidemic of encyclopedias for the common man, and of series with titles like Valpy’s Family Classical Library, the Edinburgh Cabinet Library and The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, the series in which Backwoods had been published. Memoirs and travel books often commanded advances as high as 250 pounds and could make their publishers profits running into four figures.
If anyone could have helped Catharine, it would have been Agnes. Agnes knew the importance of personal contacts and self-promotion. She was an indefatigable hustler and a canny businesswoman: she harangued publishers to issue and distribute her books and secure good reviews for them. As her reputation grew, she negotiated a share of sales revenue in addition to a flat fee for every book she produced. But Agnes had no luck with her sister’s manuscript. Her own success reflected the popular demand for history, but the new industrial class didn’t want to read about remote forests and North American flora. Catharine was out of touch with English tastes and English publishers. She lived beyond the edge of the known universe for London literary types. Agnes confided to Susanna, “I have failed to obtain anything for [Catharine’s] mss. as yet,” and she decided that Catharine must dismember the manuscript and peddle the sketches piecemeal to various periodicals in Britain and Canada. Agnes did manage to place several of the sketches, including two to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. But Catharine waited for months for payment, and there is no evidence that Chambers ever sent a fee to their Canadian contributor.
Traill fortunes spiralled downwards with each passing year. In 1840,a fifth baby was born, but Catharine’s joy was short-lived: Mary Ellen Bridges Traill died before her first birthday. Catharine had another baby in 1841, a fourth daughter, named Mary Elizabeth Jane, who survived. But within months, Catharine was pregnant again, and her fifth daughter died as an infant in 1843. All her children were constantly sick with earaches, boils, coughs, burns, infected cuts—hardly surprising, since they were starved of protein and fresh fruit and vegetables for most of the year. “Anxious nightwatchings over the cradle of suffering infants have brought down my strength and health,” wrote Catharine. No woman in this period took the survival of a child for granted. Both Catharine and Susanna drew heavily on the Christian certainty that their infants’ short lives were not without purpose, and that their babies would live again in heaven. “They are … like sparks struck from the iron to sparkle fly upwards, gladden the eye by their brightness for an instant and be lost in space,” Catharine believed. “Who can say how often the loss of the young child has been the light sent by God to guide the sorrowing parent to the mercy seat of Christ.”
Although Catharine never forgot her dead babies, she had to suppress her own grief for her husband’s sake. With each setback, despair weighed more heavily on Thomas. A crescendo of demands from creditors in England, Peterborough and Cobourg forced the Traills into financial crisis. Reluctantly, they left Ashburnham and moved into a run-down farmhouse three miles out of town. Catharine hoped they could achieve self-sufficiency on this modest acreage. Thomas put a down payment on the house and spent his scanty remaining funds on seed and livestock. Catharine insisted everything would be fine, planted yet another garden of marigolds and mallow, and named the house Saville—the name of one of the Traill properties in the Orkneys. Stuck in the bush once again, she drew heavily on her faith that the Lord would provide. She never revealed her loneliness to her husband, who had again withdrawn into the dark recesses of chronic depression. Instead, she fell back on her faith. As she dug and weeded in the kitchen garden, or lifted heavy cast-iron pans of porridge from the stove, she would pause briefly, straighten her aching back, close her eyes and utter silent prayers. She confided to Ellen Dunlop, “There is no privation I feel more than not having the means of going to church.”
Susanna knew from Catharine’s letters that the Traills were in a bad way. Catharine poured out her worries to Susanna: “I feel…like a vessel without a pilot drifting before an overwhelming storm on every side rocks and shoals and no friendly port in sight.…The game of life seems to me a difficult one to play …” Through mutual friends, Susanna heard how Catharine’s six children (an eighth baby, William Edward, was born in 1844) were rarely able to leave the house because their clothes were in rags. James, thirteen, and nine-year-old Harry had only one pair of broken and patched boots between them, so they took it in turns to go out into the snowdrifts and bitter winds to find firewood or draw water from the well. The older girls, Kate (now ten) and Annie (eight) could not attend school because they had no shoes, and because Catharine, crippled with rheumatism, relied on them to do the work of the servants that she could no longer afford. Poor little Mary, her youngest daughter, suffered constantly from infected eyes and ears, and cried so much that she wore her mother’s patience “to rags.” The little girls helped wash and patch their worn garments, feed the baby, preserve fruits and vegetables and prepare the boiled potatoes, gruel and porridge that was their diet. The Traills were so poor that they could not even afford tallow for candles; at night, Catharine burned pine knots, rich in resin, to provide light.
Susanna could not leave her young family in Belleville to help Catharine, who was two days’ journey away. But as often as possible, the Moodies sent the Traills packages of castoff clothes and supplies of tea and sugar. Susanna urged her sister to submit a steady flow of material to Lovell’s Literary Garland. Grinding poverty was hardly the environment in which the composition of light-hearted articles and stories flourished, but with dogged professionalism, Catharine struggled on, acknowledging that the five-pounds-per sheet fee helped pay off “small annoying debts that we cannot leave unsettled.”
When news of the Traills’ move back to the bush reached Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Sarah Strickland, the English sisters were all anxious about Catharine. Unlike Susanna, however, they had no understanding of the brutal hardships she faced. Poverty for the childless Stricklands in Suffolk and London meant frayed cuffs and cheap cuts of meat. They couldn’t even imagine the icy horror of barefoot children in a Canadian winter, the sad whimper of a hungry infant or the struggle of a malnourished ten-year-old boy to drag home firewood.
Agnes had never forgiven Catharine for marrying Thomas. She was convinced that all the Traills’ troubles were his fault. “Ah, why did she involve her bright days in such a sea of trouble,” Agnes wrote to Susanna in 1841, about Catharine. “There was neither hope nor reason in marrying such a man as our poor brother Traill notwithstanding his many amiable qualities …my heart bleeds at the sacrifice she has made.” But a couple of years later, Agnes was jolted out of her complacency. A rumour reached England that the Traills were “in the last state of destitution and misery.” Agnes was horrified, both by the heart-wrenching details of her sister’s poverty and by the idea that her family was the subject of gossip on her own side of the Atlantic. She quickly sent off several parcels of fabric and second-hand clothes. Agnes knew that her parcels were also precious to the Moodies in Belleville, but she explained to her youngest sister that, “The dire straits which poor Kate’s circumstances appear to have reached makes it imperatively necessary for me to make a personal sacrifice in order to send her some money, little enough but more than I can spare. Consequently, I have nothing to send for you except a little French cambric …”
Agnes resurrected all her old prejudices as she considered Catharine’s problems. “Of course I must give to her who wants the means of existence as I knew she would with that disastrous and ill-judged marriage….I wish I had not been so true a prophetess. It is heartbreaking to think of our poor Kate, who was so kind and deserving of a better fate, becoming the victim of such a marriage. My only wonder is that she has kept the wolf from the door for so long.… I think Mr. Traill’s own kindred ought to try and help him.” But Mr. Traill’s own kindred in the Orkneys were already shouldering the responsibility of raising the two sons of his first marriage. They assumed that the grand and well-connected Agnes Strickland would subsidize the Traill ménage in Canada.
Sometimes Thomas must have felt singled out by misfortune. Fired up with fellow feeling for another Scottish immigrant, he had backed a loan for the young Scot to build a mill on the Otonabee River. The young man was drowned, and Thomas found himself obliged to pay his friend’s debts. Even run-down, shabby Saville was now beyond his means. Catharine had to pack up her meagre possessions and move out before Thomas had a chance to harvest the crops he had planted. By now, the threat of bankruptcy had rendered him catatonic. “The harrassing state of uncertainty in which we are kept about our future plans is preying dreadfully on Traill’s mind,” Catharine wrote to Susanna in 1846, “nor can I rouse him from it.”
Perhaps a benevolent deity did hover over the Traills, as Catharine believed, shielding her family from complete disaster. It must have seemed that way when the Reverend George Wilson Bridges, an eccentric English cleric, stepped into their lives to rescue them from homelessness. Somehow a copy of The Backwoods of Canada had found its way to Jamaica several years earlier, where it had fallen into the hands of Bridges, then rector of the Parish of St. Anne’s. Bridges had just suffered a series of bizarre and devastating family tragedies. After nineteen years of what he had thought was a happy marriage, his wife had abruptly deserted him, his own family had turned against him, and his four daughters were drowned in a freak sailing accident. Bridges was left in Jamaica with a three-year-old son. Shattered by loss, Bridges read The Backwoods of Canada and decided to abandon the tropical climate and comforts of Jamaica for the chilly and tangled backwoods of Canada. Perhaps he was persuaded by the cheerful warmth of Catharine’s observations, written long before hardship had ground her down. Perhaps a revulsion for the languid, self-indulgent white élite of Jamaican society propelled Bridges to seek a more bracing, self-sufficient life. Whatever the reason, he decided to make Mrs. Traill his model and follow her to Upper Canada. He wrote in a memoir that if he had not “gone wild he would doubtless have gone mad.” In 1837, he arrived in the newly settled community of Gore’s Landing, on the south shore of Rice Lake, twenty-two miles by road and steamer from Catharine.
George Bridges must have cut an extraordinary figure in the wilds of pre-Confederation Canada. A tall, bony man who swept about in brocaded robes and smoking jackets, he was completely out of place among its shabby-coated farmers and merchants. Bridges’s idea of luxury was well-aged port; his neighbours’ idea of luxury was enough chairs in their own homes for every family member to have a seat. Bridges’s neighbours in Gore’s Landing thought the newcomer was indeed mad when he started building a house on the lakeshore. Recklessly oblivious to the extremes of Canada’s climate, Bridges hired local carpenters to erect a six-floored octagonal structure with barred windows and an underground entrance. Then he himself put together tables, chairs and shelves out of red cedar, so the whole house smelled like a Finnish sauna. When the peculiar residence was finished he invited his heroine to visit. In wine made by Bridges from local grapes, he and Catharine toasted his new home and she named it Wolf Tower.
Given Bridges’s history (and his rumoured propensity for opium), it is not surprising that he didn’t last long in the backwoods. His house was a stifling conservatory in the summer months, as the sun beat down on its glass windows, and a lethal icehouse in the winter, when freezing drafts whistled up its six levels and round its open floors. After four years, Bridges had had enough and once again walked away from his life, heading this time to England. But he stayed in touch with Catharine. When he heard how tough things had become for the Traills by April 1846, he offered them Wolf Tower as a rent-free residence.
The offer of free lodgings came in the nick of time for Catharine. She immediately wrote to Susanna, describing just how grim their circumstances had been before Bridges had stepped in: “My dear husband was fretting himself to death and me too, for both my health and spirits were sinking under the load of mental anxiety more on his account than the circumstances, and want of strengthening diet.” She had run out of wood for the stove, flour to make bread, and meat or fish other than the perch that her sons caught in the Otonabee. But now Thomas had set off for Wolf Tower “in high spirits for Traill,” with their nine-year-old Harry, to plant some spring wheat. A few days later, Catharine and the other five children, plus their furniture, two cows and two sheep, boarded a noisy steam-driven paddle-wheeler, the Forester, which took them from Peterborough down the Otonabee River and across Rice Lake to Gore’s Landing.
“When I came to reside at Wolf Tower,” Catharine would recall in later years, “I came in weak health having scarcely recovered from a long and terrible fit of illness, but so renovating did I find the free, healthy air of the beautiful hills that in a very short time I was quite strong and able to ramble about with my children among the picturesque glens and wild ravines of this romantic spot, revelling in this rich and rare flower garden of nature’s own planting. The children were never weary of climbing the lofty sides of the hills that surrounded the ravine, forming the bed of one of those hill torrents to which they have given the name of ‘The Valley of the Big Stone’ from a huge boulder of grey granite that occupies the centre of it.”
The romance of Wolf Tower lifted Catharine’s spirits. In her mid-forties, Catharine was overweight and unhealthy, and on damp days she complained of aching joints. A network of broken spider veins covered her round cheeks, her blond hair was thinning and stringy, and her eyes were ringed with dark shadows. But now her gurgling laugh echoed up Wolf Tower’s spiralling staircases, and she recovered the sparkle in her bright-blue eyes. During the warm summer months, she enjoyed teaching her children their letters in the fifth-floor conservatory, with its panoramic views of green hills and blue water. She persuaded the newly appointed Anglican minister of St. George’s Church, Gore’s Landing, to conduct open-air church services at the big grey lump of granite her children had named “the Big Stone.” Catharine’s eyes filled with happy tears as she looked around her and thought of the words of her favourite psalm: “The pastures of the wilderness drip; and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks: the valleys also stand so thick with grain that they laugh and sing.” Perhaps the flocks were missing, and the grain was sparse, but as she always liked to insist, “The sight of green things is life to me.”
As an adult, Annie Traill would recall that she and her siblings were “happy as larks” during these years: “We children used to scramble over the hills and ravines, delighting over the beautiful flowers and shrubs which grew so luxuriantly everywhere, and my dear mother, when able, used to accompany us.” Agnes continued to send generous parcels, despite her exasperation with her brother-in-law. One year the parcel contained table cloths, children’s books, German silver spoons, a metal teapot, two coats for the boys, needles, thread, a pair of cutting shears, towelling, a Scottish plaid gown for which Agnes had no more use, six pairs of white stockings, some boots for Catharine and lengths of calico, muslin, blue-check shirting and flannel. “Very acceptable the things will be,” Catharine told Susanna, “for I was beginning to think with wonder how I would find clothing for these poor children, now reduced to worse than bareness.” Agnes had also sent along the latest volume of her Queens of England series, and a copy of the Juvenile Scrapbook: A Gage d’Amour for the Young, an anthology edited by Jane Strickland which contained several pieces by Agnes.
In retrospect, Annie would realize how difficult her mother’s life was during these years. She and her sister Kate did much of the baby care and domestic work, but “the burden fell on [mother] and she was not strong.” James and Harry Traill, in their early teens, worked almost full-time in the fields, because Thomas was a wreck of his former self. Looking at the emaciated and melancholic figure who barely spoke above a clipped whisper, it was hard to believe he had once been a cosmopolitan, well-groomed gentleman. His teeth were stained and his hair matted; he looked haunted by anxieties. A Scottish visitor described Thomas as wearing “a shawl around his neck that one would not have picked out of the gutter and that had not been washed for a month—a nose very much smeared with snuff, hands and face evidently in want of soap and water yet with all this unprepossessing exterior evidently a kind hearted and well informed man.” But Catharine, recalled Annie, was “ever cheerful and ready to tell stories or sing to our dear father in the evening.”
With the onset of winter, it became evident that Wolf Tower was a hopelessly impractical residence to keep warm, and the Traills soon moved on. But they liked the area so much that they didn’t move far. For the next couple of years, they rented another house, which they called Mount Ararat, near the Rice Lake Plains, as the lake’s rolling south shore was known. Catharine’s stamina, not to mention her good humour, was extraordinary: her ninth and last baby was born in 1848, when she was forty-five. (He was named Walter in memory of Thomas’s oldest son, who had died at age thirty, three years earlier.) She was constantly bothered by excruciating attacks of rheumatism. “I cannot now lift my hand to my head without great pain,” she wrote to Susanna in 1849, “nor can I put it back without being forced to scream out with the agonising pain I endure in moving it….I suffer at times great pain in my right knee …” Yet her children could always bring a smile to her face. One day, her daughter Annie would later recall, her mother discovered that a set of silver teaspoons, each bearing the Traill family crest, had disappeared. The set was one of the few possessions from home that Thomas and Catharine still possessed. When Catharine questioned her children, each in turn denied that he or she had touched the precious spoons, until the inquisiton reached five-year-old William. The little boy confessed that he had planted the spoons in the garden, to make them grow. His father and elder brothers rushed outside to dig them up, but the child could not recall where he had buried them. They never turned up, but Catharine loved to tell the tale for the rest of her life.
In 1849, Catharine saw a wooden house just east of Gore’s Landing that she decided they must buy. Oaklands was a large log cabin, which meant it had pokey windows and was dark inside, but it had a substantial stone chimney. It was also cheap, because it stood on the top of a windy hill and was miles from the woodlot. Raising the down payment was a problem for the penniless Traills, but Catharine found a way. For years, Thomas had clung to his officer’s commission as the qualification that would secure for him the elusive government job. Now his wife persuaded him that, at fifty-two, he would do better to cash the commission in and use the proceeds to buy the house. Thomas raised some additional funds by borrowing from his brother-in-law Sam Strickland and from John Moodie. After ten wretched years of rented, borrowed or mortgaged houses, in 1849 the Traills once again had their own home. It was not ideal: bitterly cold north winds swept across the hills, reminding Catharine of the east winds that swept along the Norfolk coast in January, and Oaklands was a difficult house to heat. Catharine wrote to a friend one January, “We sit in the small parlour and keep but two fires, consequently the bedrooms are cold.” But the Traills finally felt settled.
The move did little for Thomas, however, who remained in a permanent and paralyzing state of depression. “I cannot endure to see my poor husband so utterly cast down,” Catharine wrote to Susanna in Belleville. “I wish that he could look beyond the present and remember that the brightest of earthly prospects endure but for a season—and it is the same with the trials and sorrows of life—they too come to an end.”
From time to time in her own correspondence, Catharine reluctantly confided her own bouts of despair. “There is a cloud gathering over us that I see no means of averting,” she told Frances Stewart in 1851.The following year, she wrote to Susanna of how she longed to visit her, and enjoy “the great comfort to me of seeing you and talking over many matters that I cannot write.” But she was a resilient woman who had learned to escape gnawing anxieties by taking refuge in nature: the huge maple trees, the scampering chipmunks, the delicate saxifrage and white violets that she carefully pressed between layers of cotton in one of Thomas’s books. She also knew what was expected of an English lady: she had seen how her own mother had coped with the loss of her husband when she was forty-six, how she had managed to put a brave face on adversity. Catherine rarely indulged in grumbles. Instead she forced herself to look on the bright side, reminding herself often that God’s grace would protect her. In her daily entries in her journal, Catharine often sounds like the wife of a prosperous gentleman-farmer in Surrey. Gazing out at the distant lake, and watching a cloud of passenger pigeons careen across the mother-of-pearl sky, she noted: “I know of no place more suitable for the residence of an English gentleman’s family. There is hardly a lot of land that might not be converted into a park.”
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 negotiate 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.