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3 Enthusiasm and Love

…there is to me a charm in literary society which none other can give…

– Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime

Susanna’s poetry had many admirers in London, and in her own neighbourhood of Suffolk. In fact, she had found a patron in Andrew Ritchie, the pastor of the Congregationalist Church in the village of Wrentham, about two kilometres north of Reydon Hall. She had joined the small village church in April, a few months before leaving for London and the Pringles’ house.

Suffolk was a region of dissenters, especially local farmers and poorer families. They rebelled against what they perceived to be the moral laxity of the Anglican clergy, who seemed to prefer fox hunting to attending to their flock.

Susanna loved the chapel, one of the first “independent” chapels ever built. The setting was romantic with its beautiful lane of fine old trees and meeting yard full of lilac bushes and laburnum. Susanna had a favourite spot where she imagined she would be buried one day: under two pines through which the wind sighed a lullaby.

Mrs. Ritchie offered to teach Susanna how to paint, and they sat outside, choosing the prettiest flowers to sketch on paper. This skill Susanna used often to relax from the demands of writing and publishing.

On the night of her formal admission to the congregation, Susanna had been soaked to the skin by lashing rain as she travelled to Wrentham from Reydon. Her decision to join the Congregationalist Church had shocked her Church of England family to its roots. They had refused to accompany her, though that had not changed her mind.

Pastor Ritchie, her spiritual advisor and friend, came up to her in the vestry where she stood alone:

“Are you ready, dear?” he asked, offering his arm like a father ready to take his daughter up the aisle to give her away in marriage.

“Yes” she heard herself say with more conviction than she felt.

Susanna stood in a pew opposite the pulpit. The assembly was seated. She liked the rugged features of the farmers and their wives, mostly poor folks who gazed at her. She trembled from head to foot. Every eye was on her.

Susanna buried her face in her hands, and tears wet her fingers when Pastor Ritchie recommended her as a new member. But during the last beautiful prayer, her spirit revived. She rejoiced that the ordeal was past and she was now a member of a “free church.”

On the morning of August 12, 1830, Susanna sat at the dining table at Reydon Hall, grudgingly slipping flyers advertising her first book, Enthusiasm and Other Poems, into envelopes addressed to friends and acquaintances. She didn’t like to have to do this but that was the agreement she had made with a London publisher, Smith & Elder. She had to raise enough money by advance sales of her book to cover the cost of printing. Orders for fifty books had already been filled, but she needed to sell a lot more. Who can I possibly turn to next? Who would know a lot of people interested in poetry? Susanna asked herself.

In a flash, the name of Mary Russell Mitford, whom she had never met but corresponded with occasionally, came to her mind. Hadn’t the famous writer praised all the poems she had sent to her? Susanna now felt more cheerful and immediately reached for her pen and a fresh sheet of paper. After a few pleasantries, she swallowed hard and came to the point:

“Will you excuse the liberty I am taking, dear Miss Mitford, in enclosing the prospectus of a small volume of poetry which a friend of mine has undertaken to publish for me by private subscription? I should feel greatly obliged to you if you would circulate them among any of your wealthy friends who are unfashionable enough to be lovers of poetry…”

Whenever she could, Susanna liked to use humour to sweeten the way Miss Mitford responded positively. By year’s end, Susanna gratefully held her first volume entitled Enthusiasm and Other Poems, an elegant, plain leather-bound book embossed with gold. The forty-seven poems expressed her religious faith and her romantic love of nature. On May 28, 1831, Susanna happily read in the leading London magazine Athenaeum that Enthusiasm possessed “a tone of tender seriousness which marks a refined and reflective mind.”

John Dunbar Moodie was a prized guest at the Pringles’ London home in the summer of 1830. “What brings you back to us from South Africa?” Thomas Pringle inquired as they shared a drink in his study. His eyes were shining with pleasure at seeing his friend, after eleven years apart.

“I need a wife to help me on the farm,” John had shot out, his honesty always bracing. Tm afraid I’m becoming too much of a hermit.”

Moodie was a Scot, from the Orkney Islands, and at thirty-three years old, he had a lame arm due to an injury suffered while fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. He’d emigrated to South Africa soon after the war in the hope of earning quick money, but that hope had been dashed. As a retired officer on a small pension, Moodie had little to offer a wife, yet deep in his heart he knew there was someone for him. His trip to London had another purpose: to find a publisher for his manuscript of African tales, mostly about hunting wild animals.

At the Pringles’ Moodie regaled their feisty red-headed boarder, Susanna, with his anecdotes. Susanna, tall and thin, didn’t mind that John was short and stocky, for he had thick hair that framed a face she thought noble. She liked that he was a writer and that he openly admired her poems, which she gladly read to him.

John fascinated her. She looked forward to the evenings, when he would play his flute after their meal with the Pringles. Sometimes he invited her for a walk on Hampstead Heath, where they lingered under the shade of the ancient oak trees. On a walk in the early autumn, under a cool blue sky, John was deep in thought. Then he turned to her and asked tenderly:

“Beloved Susie, would you marry me and come to South Africa?”

Susanna shivered, from the cool breeze and from excitement. These were the words she had both dreaded and dreamed of hearing. She was tempted to marry John, whose chivalrous and poetic nature she had come to love in such a short time, but she didn’t want to emigrate to South Africa. She couldn’t imagine being near the leopards, elephants – and worst of all, the snakes – that John hunted around his farm. She loved John more than anyone, except perhaps Catharine, but she had some thinking to do before she gave her answer.

Despite her fears, Susanna soon accepted Johns proposal of marriage. He immediately left for Scotland to meet with relatives and request inheritance money to help support a bride. John was a member of the gentry, but his estate, Melsetter, had gone bankrupt.

Left alone, Susanna began to doubt whether she would be able to bring herself to emigrate to the faraway farm. She’d thought she could be happy anywhere with John, whether beneath the burning sun of Africa or building a nest among the eagles of the storm-encircled Orkneys, but by January 1831, Susanna chose to break the engagement by sending a “Dear John” letter. The Pringles, and other friends like James Bird and Reverend Ritchie, counselled Susanna not to abandon her writing career in London. They reminded her that South Africa was a colony where slavery, which she abhorred, was legal.

Susanna rented a back room in a house five minutes from the Pringles. To keep the rent affordable, she had to share the room with Miss Jane Jones, an acquaintance of the Harrals. Susanna pursued the literary life and was herself pursued by men who admired her for being a published poet and author of lively reviews and articles.

By the time John returned to London, Susanna had grown tired of the rounds of parties and agreed to meet with him. When John declared that he had given up any plans to live on his farm in South Africa because he wanted to stay near her, Susanna was overjoyed. She accepted, without any more doubts, his second proposal of marriage.

On April 4, 1831, Susanna and John were married in a modest ceremony at St. Pancras Church in London. The guests had first gathered at the Pringles’ house. A wedding breakfast was served, and then Mr. Pringle helped Susanna into the carriage, which whisked them to the steps of the church.

Susanna missed her father, who should have been the one to give her away. She had insisted her mother and sister’s not travel to London for the short ceremony as she wanted only Catharine as her bridesmaid. “Black Mary” was also present, in a brand-new dress.

At the altar, John anxiously awaited his bride. He feared Susanna might change her mind at the last minute, but he was reassured when he caught a glimpse of her. She smiled at him saucily and thought, John looks very, handsome in his wedding suit.

The organist began to play. Mr. Pringle offered Susanna his arm and then led her down the narrow aisle. Her bouquet of white roses and lilies of the valley sweetened the air. Catharine, holding back tears, followed close behind. She was feeling vulnerable because her engagement to Francis Harral had been broken. However, she did approve of John Moodie as her sister’s choice.

Susanna spoke the sacred vows. When she stated “the fatal obey,” as she referred, tongue-in-cheek, to the traditional Christian promise of the wife to love, honour, and obey her husband, the tears that shone in her eyes were not from regret, but from joy.

“My blue stockings, since I became a wife,” Susanna joked to James Bird, in a letter dated April 9, 1831, “have turned so pale that I think they will soon be quite white, or at least only tinged with a hue of London smoke.”

By August, Susanna, now pregnant, wanted to be near her mother and sister’s. John found them a cottage near Reydon Hall in the village of Southwold. It was close enough that her family could walk over every day.

Soon, a visitor arrived. Thomas Traill, a boyhood friend and fellow officer of John’s, was a widower. Susanna liked him. He had studied at Oxford and loved to read. Whenever Catharine was in the room, Thomas seemed to be so cheered by her that Susanna encouraged her pretty, sweet-natured sister to visit often. But Susanna had more to keep her busy than matchmaking. In late February, she gave birth to a baby girl promptly named Catherine, later Katie for short.

Now that she and John had the baby’s future to consider, how could they better their financial situation?

John attended the popular lectures on emigration to Upper Canada, which were given by a certain William Cattermole. Cattermole was a huckster who. described the young colony in his talks and pamphlets as a paradise where people could expect to prosper easily. Thousands of desperate British citizens followed the carrot he dangled before them. John was accompanied to these lectures by his friend Tom Wales, a younger man from a wealthy background who wanted to emigrate to Canada. Susanna and her sister’s, who knew Tom Wales, found this funny.

Susanna would later describe Tom in her book Roughing It in the Bush as “a man in a mist, who seemed afraid of moving for fear of knocking his head against a tree …a man as helpless and indolent as a baby.”

When John asked him if he was qualified for a life of toil and hardship, Tom answered back:

“Are you?” and added prophetically: “Gentlemen can’t work like labourers, and if they could, they won’t. You expect by going to Canada, to make your fortune, or at least secure a comfortable independence. But the refined habits in which you have been brought up, and your unfortunate literary propensities, will make you an object of mistrust and envy…”

Another visitor to Reydon Hall dismissed Tom’s unattractive description. Robert Reid was a well-to-do settler in Upper Canada and father-in-law of Susanna’s brother Samuel, who was also doing well in the colony. Reid, who had ten children, charmed the family with his Canadian anecdotes and promises of wealth. Retired half-pay officers such as John Moodie were eligible for grants of free land, and this became the final selling point. Susanna’s brother would take care of securing land for the Moodies near his own, while the couple made their preparations to emigrate.

As the time for their departure drew near, Susanna became despondent.

The prospect of leaving her friends and native country was so intensely painful she couldn’t sleep. The woods were bursting into green leaves and the meadows and hedgerows echoed with the song of birds and the humming of bees. To leave England, Susanna mused, is dreadful – to leave in Spring is doubly so.

On May 13, 1832, Susanna and John attended the wedding of Catharine and Thomas at St. Margaret Church in the village of Reydon. The whole family was in attendance, despite the fact that Mrs. Strickland didn’t approve of Thomas, and neither did Agnes or Jane, who were bridesmaids. They saw only a tall, balding, impoverished widower, nine years older than their beautiful kind Catharine. But Susanna saw Thomas differently. As she watched him gently slip the gold band onto Catharine’s finger, she sensed that he truly loved her sister, and that alone was what mattered.

And Susanna had another reason to rejoice in the wedding. Catharine and Thomas had decided to emigrate to Canada. Thomas had attended the lectures by William Cattermole along with John and had been convinced of the benefits of leaving England as soon as possible. Susanna wouldn’t be separated from her favourite sister after all.

As Agnes and Jane stood by Catharine’s side at the altar, they couldn’t understand how she, like Susanna, could choose to go to a far-off colony where there were no theatres or libraries and where their homes would be made of crude materials.