Susanna Moodie

Roughing it in the bush; or, Life in Canada. By Susanna Moodie

Roughing It in the Bush (Full title: Roughing It in The Bush: or, Forest Life in Canada) is an account of life as a Canadian settler by Susanna Moodie. Moodie immigrated to Upper Canada (soon to become Canada West), near modern-day Peterborough, Ontario during the 1830s. At the suggestion of her editor, she wrote a "guide" to settler life for British subjects considering coming to Canada. Roughing It in the Bush was first published in London in 1852 (then Toronto in 1871). It was Moodie's most successful literary work. The work is part memoir, part novelization of her experiences, and is structured as a chronological series of sketches. Publisher Richard Bentley's foreword to the third edition published in London in 1854 describes the "Canadian mania" that "pervaded the middle ranks of British society" in the 1830s. Immigrants paid a hefty fee to ship's agents who took them across the Atlantic, and these agents did their best to drum up business by marketing Canada as a British emigrant's utopia: Canada became the great land-mark for the rich in hope and poor in purse. Public newspapers and private letters teemed with the unheard-of advantages to be derived from a settlement in this highly-favoured region.