Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [88]
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