Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [22]
Susanna never enjoyed her pregnancies; she was afflicted with nausea and a general lassitude. Nevertheless, she and John enjoyed receiving her sisters and the local “Grandees,” as Susanna termed Suffolk’s gentry. “Even Mamma forgets her resolution of never leaving home and honors our little mansion with her presence,” she noted. Neither John nor Susanna dared look much beyond the birth of their baby. They had no money and no prospects, and there were few opportunities in England for a man of John’s skills. But then a surprise visitor turned up on their doorstep. It was Robert Reid, a successful settler in Upper Canada whose daughter was the wife of Susanna’s brother Samuel. Sam had flourished in Canada as an employee of the Canada Company, a London-based organization that had bought up vast tracts of Crown land in Upper Canada to sell to incoming settlers. Sam had been a superintendent of Canada Company projects around Guelph, in the triangle of Upper Canada that jutted down towards Lake Erie, before moving east to the newly settled town of Peterborough, north of Rice Lake, of which the Reid family had been founders. Reid was gung-ho on the advantages of emigration. He boasted to the young couple about his own history—how, after a struggle of twelve years, he had the satisfaction of a family of ten children all now in a position to become wealthy landowners. Reid promised the young couple “independence and comfort on the other side of the water, and even wealth after a few years’ toil.”
Reid’s rosy picture of prospects in Upper Canada was only one element in the flood of propaganda about emigration then circulating around Britain. England was now in a crippling agricultural depression. The prices of wheat and barley had fallen by more than half between 1812 and 1830. At least one in ten of the British people was a pauper, for whom emigration offered the only escape from poverty. All around Southwold, tenant farmers were defaulting on their rents, and agricultural labourers were being thrown out of their cottages and into parish poorhouses. In the coal mines of the Midlands, naked women pulled wagons through the shafts to earn a few pennies. In the factories of the north, children of eight or nine were working twelve-hour days. Of course, the Moodies were in a different class from these casualties of the faltering economy—but they too were its victims.
The Moodies began to consider crossing the Atlantic as a way to maintain their social position despite their cramped income. By now they had realized that, even outside London, to live in the style to which an English gentleman aspired they needed at least one thousand pounds a year. John’s military pension of a hundred pounds a year, and their combined but unpredictable earnings as writers, would never amount to that sum. So when a public meeting about the advantages of emigration to Canada was advertised, John was amongst those who flocked to Norwich to hear it. He was accompanied by his friend and Southwold neighbour Thomas Wales.
The lecture was given by one of the chief Canada-boosters, William Cattermole from nearby Bungay. Cattermole had a financial interest in extolling all the golden opportunities in the New World: he was an agent of the same Canada Company that Sam had worked for, and he received a bonus for every emigrant he recruited. Cattermole rhapsodized about the cheapness and fertility of the land available to those who braved the high seas. He spoke of Canada’s salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water access, its proximity