Roughing it in the Bush

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.

Its salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country, and last, not least, its almost total exemption from taxation—that bugbear which keeps honest John Bull in a state of constant ferment—were the theme of every tongue, and lauded beyond all praise. The general interest, once excited, was industriously kept alive by pamphlets, published by interested parties, which prominently set forth all the good to be derived from a settlement in the Backwoods of Canada; while they carefully concealed the toil and hardship to be endured in order to secure these advantages.

Susanna Moodie was raised in a solidly middle-class family in rural, coastal Suffolk. By the 1830s, emigration from England to its colonies, including Canada, had become a popular option for the ambitious and the adventurous seeking to improve their fortunes. Moodie came to Canada in 1832 with her husband and daughter. Her sister, Catherine Parr Traill, came to Canada at about the same time, as did Susanna and Catherine's brother, Samuel Strickland. Between 1832-1834, Susanna and Catherine's families settled on adjacent bush farms along the eastern shore of Lake Katchewanooka, immediately north of present-day Lakefield near Peterborough, Ontario.

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