Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [118]
Catharine knew all about the British campaign against Russia in the Crimean peninsula. After the mother country, alongside its allies France and Turkey, defeated the enemy at the battles of Balaclava and Inkerman, loyal Canadians, on the other side of the world, built bonfires and set off fireworks. But Agnes was right. This obsession with military glory was diverting publishers’ attention from any other subjects. So Catharine decided to try her luck in Toronto, although the potential readership was far smaller and the handful of Toronto publishing houses that had sprung up were notorious cheapskates. They insisted that authors themselves finance the costs of publication by selling subscriptions to their friends and acquaintances, in the same way that magazines were financed. Catharine did her best. On one of her trips to Belleville, she signed up many of Susanna’s circle as subscribers. In Peterborough, she persuaded both Ellen Dunlop and Frances Stewart not only to become subscribers themselves, but also to sell subscriptions to their neighbours. Armed with supporters, she made plans to go and butter up the Reverend Henry Payne Hope of Toronto, a recently established Toronto publisher who had used extracts from Catharine’s manuscript in his monthly magazine. It was a major undertaking for Catharine to get as far as Toronto: “I have not the means either for supplying myself with decent outer clothes or to pay for a week’s board and lodging at some decent house,” she complained to Ellen Dunlop. Somehow, however, she did manage to talk the Reverend Payne Hope into publishing her complete manuscript. It appeared as The Canadian Settler’s Guide in 1855.
The Canadian Settler’s Guide fulfilled to the letter the purpose that Catharine had in mind. It contained instructions on how to make bread, carpets, candles, cheese, pumpkin pie, soap, maple sugar, bean soup, hemlock tea, dandelion coffee, treacle beer, potato starch, rag rugs, fabric dyes … amongst other items. Sam Strickland, who was always ready to help his sisters, allowed her to use the section from his book that described how to build a log cabin and organize a logging bee. Catharine gave advice on how to furnish a log house (“A stove large enough to cook food for a family of ten or twelve persons will cost from twenty to thirty dollars”) and how to make an easy chair out of a common flour barrel. The Guide encompassed all Catharine’s hard-won wisdom, and embodied the Strickland attitude to life. “In cases of emergency,” she wrote in the chapter on house fires, “it is folly to fold one’s hands and sit down to bewail in abject terror: it is better to be up and doing.”
Once again, Catharine’s book did well and Catharine did badly. The Reverend Mr. Hope was a smart businessman: he persuaded the minister of agriculture of the United Provinces to purchase six hundred copies of the guide, and the British government to make a large bulk purchase for distribution to encourage emigration. Soon copies of Catharine’s guide were being passed around on the emigrant ships that continued to cross the Atlantic and dock at Grosse Ile. Catharine rapidly became the Martha Stewart of the backwoods, setting standards of taste and endurance that few other women could achieve. But Henry Payne Hope himself behaved in a thoroughly unchristian fashion. He printed more than ten editions of The Canadian Settler’s Guide, and he used Catharine Parr Traill’s name ruthlessly to promote his own career as an adviser on immigration. However, he withheld almost