Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [99]
Susanna also intended to demand from Wilson complete control over all editorial contributions. No matter what Wilson was prepared to pay her, she had no intention of associating her name with material she didn’t like. Susanna was always generous to younger writers, and now she was keen to use this opportunity to promote new talents, such as the romance writer Louisa Murray who lived near Kingston, and who had sent the revered Mrs. Moodie examples of her work for comment. Susanna was happy to aim the periodical at “yeomen and mechanics” (as she referred to them, with artless condescension) because in her contributions to the Literary Garland she had already begun to experiment with a new style and subject matter. She had broken out of the literary conventions of fiction and was producing personal accounts of her early years as an immigrant. She knew such sketches would resonate with anybody who had shared such experiences, and two-thirds of Upper Canada’s citizens had been born elsewhere. But she would do nothing to jeopardize her continuing relationship with John Lovell and the Literary Garland,a consistently reliable source of income. She didn’t want to compete with Lovell’s more upmarket, Montreal-based readership.
As Susanna sat in Wilson’s office, laying out her demands, Wilson nodded happily. Within the past few months, several new magazines had appeared in Cobourg, Hamilton, Toronto and Montreal, for circulation throughout the United Provinces. An entrepreneur, Wilson would have agreed to anything (other than payment for contributors) that would bring the famous Mrs. Moodie onto the masthead, giving his new venture an edge in an increasingly crowded market. Wilson was eager to get started. By the time Susanna left his office, they had decided that the publication should be called The Victoria Magazine: A Cheap Periodical for the People. “Victoria” combined the district’s original name most satisfactorily with that of the beloved Queen. It had a regal ring that balanced the less-attractive connotations of the word “Cheap.” The first issue would appear in late summer.
The first challenge facing the editors of any new publication in Upper Canada was to find subscribers. It would be another thirty years before periodicals started covering their costs by selling advertising space. Wilson wrote a prospectus for The Victoria Magazine which appeared in local newspapers and promised a monthly publication of “twenty-four pages in each number, printed on new type and upon good paper.” The annual subscription, to be paid in advance, was one dollar: “The low price at which the Periodical is placed is in order that every person within the Colony, who can read, and is anxious for moral and mental improvement, may become a subscriber and patron of the work.” The Moodies assured their readers that they would “devote all their talents to produce a useful, entertaining and cheap Periodical … Sketches and Tales, in verse and prose, Moral Essays, Statistics of the Colony, Scraps of Useful Information, Reviews of New Works, and well selected articles from the most popular authors of the day, will form the pages of the Magazine.”
The prospectus was sufficiently attractive (and Susanna’s name sufficiently well known) to bring in 781 subscriptions. About one-third were from Belleville’s population of 3,000, but a smattering came from as far afield as Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. The Moodies’ good friend Robert Baldwin subscribed: so did the Governor-General, Lord Elgin. It is unclear how many genuine yeomen and mechanics embraced the idea of paying for “Moral essays [and] Scraps of Useful Information”; literacy standards