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