Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [107]
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