Roughing it in the bush

Susanna Moodie's account of settler life in Canada, Roughing It in the Bush, appeared in London in 1852, with a Toronto edition following in 1871. It was the most successful of her books.

Moodie had gone out to Upper Canada in the 1830s and settled near what is now Peterborough, Ontario. Her editor suggested she write something for British readers who were thinking of following her, and what she produced is part memoir and part a novelisation of her own experience, told as a run of sketches in the order things happened to her family.

The book also catches the mood of the emigration boom it was written for. In a foreword to the third edition, printed in London in 1854, the publisher Richard Bentley describes the Canadian mania that had seized the middling ranks of British society during the 1830s, when would-be settlers paid heavy fees to shipping agents who sold the colony as a British emigrant's utopia, and when newspapers and private letters did much of the rest of the work.