Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [38]
Most of the original population of Cobourg was composed of Loyalists, who had lived in North America for several generations but had fled north during the 1790s after the American War of Independence. Next to arrive, during the 1820s, was a wave of half-pay British officers interested in free land and a new start. By 1832, Cobourg had a population of around one thousand and aspirations to a cultural life. There was a printing office and a book society. James McCarroll, a talented Irishman who had recently immigrated with his father, had just opened a music school promising “the sublime studies of such spirits as Carolin, Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, &c.” There were regular tea parties for which the wives of Cobourg’s leading citizens dressed up in their best flounces and furs to discuss the same topics that would have galvanized similar gatherings in England—new brides, new babies and the servant problem. There was a Methodist Academy. A sandy beach gently curved around the bay, cradling the high-masted lake schooners as they bobbed about on the water. Cobourg’s weekly newspaper, the Cobourg Star (“a friend and welcome guest at every fireside”), was edited by R.D. Chatterton, an English journalist familiar with both Susanna’s poetry and the London literati that Susanna and Catharine had left behind. The Reverend Mr. McAulay gave his sermons in St. Peter’s Anglican Church in such a fruity English accent that he might have been standing in the pulpit of the church in Reydon. Catharine insisted that Cobourg lived up to expectations. She wrote home happily about its “very pretty church and select society,” and commented that “many families of respectability [had] fixed their residences in or near the town.”
This was raw Upper Canada, however, not pastoral England. Beyond the cleared fields surrounding the little lakeshore town was the gloomy, impenetrable bush. Black bears often strolled through backyards. No newcomer could ignore the town’s gimcrack appearance: most of its one hundred and fifty houses were little more than wooden shanties. And to anyone familiar with Suffolk’s ecclesiastical gems, St. Peter’s looked more like a cowshed than an Anglican church. The only two buildings of any substance were the new stone courthouse on the town’s outskirts and a splendid brick mansion recently erected by the lawyer George Boulton. There was such a shortage of coins in the colony that half the money in circulation in the Cobourg stores consisted of brass buttons torn off discarded uniforms. And there always seemed to be at least one dishevelled pioneer making an exhibition of himself in the middle of town, half-sozzled at eleven o’clock in the morning. Cobourg boasted three taverns and several distilleries, but only two churches.
Susanna was far less generous—and more incisive—than her sister in her assessment of Cobourg. It didn’t take her long to realize that Cobourg’s culture was skin-deep. Her heart sank as she heard how the book society read Walter Scott’s novels or Lord Byron’s poetry over and over again, because it took at least two years for the latest London best-seller to arrive. Her nose crinkled as she took in the shabby state, including perspiration stains, of many of the ladies’ gowns. Her eyes widened as she glanced through the pages of the Cobourg Star. She was horrified by “the freedom of the press [which is] enjoyed to an extent in this province unknown in more civilized communities.” Upper Canadian periodicals were notorious for the abuse and invective they heaped upon their targets. “It is the commonest thing in the world,” Susanna noted with alarm, “to hear one editor abusing, like a pickpocket, an opposition brother; calling him a reptile, a crawling thing,