Home Ground and Foreign Territory: Essays on Early Canadian Literature

Periodicals First: The Beginnings of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver

Home Ground Final.indd 45 14-03-19 09:54 Periodicals First: The Beginnings of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver CAROLE GERSON Where does literature begin? This question becomes especially pressing when we recognize that the contours of early Canadian literature have never been stable. The first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1964; Klinck) mapped a broad socio­cultural terrain that included the writings of poets and novelists, explorers and travellers, historians and social scientists, philosophers and theologians. Today, as the field reflects new focal points in social and cultural history, we can envision other kinds of beginnings for early Canadian literature such as Aboriginal orature, settlers’ letters, anonymous folk songs, and writings in immigrants’ home languages. The new beginning that is the topic of this article arises from the rapidly expanding research area of print culture and book history, now grounded in the three volumes of History of the Book in Canada (2004–2007; Fleming and Lamonde). This project’s fresh attention to the role of print in the lives of Canadians underlies my interest in reconsidering the first periodical appearances of texts that were subsequently reshaped into books. It is a truism of Canadian literary history that before local book publishing became viable in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, periodicals (i.e., newspapers and magazines) were a much richer site of cultural activity than were books or monographs, which were costly to produce and difficult to distribute. But because of the primacy of books Home Ground Final.indd 46 14-03-19 09:54 Carole Gerson in our usual processes of documentation, preservation and canonization, we pay relatively little attention to writers such as Louisa Murray, whose work was published only in periodicals, or to the initial magazine appearances of writings that eventually found their way into definitive volumes. Yet when we examine the contents of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver (1911) as their first readers engaged with them, we discover in their initial periodical versions an experience of the author and her text that is quite different from what is encountered in their book versions today. My discussion focuses on these two examples because of their current canonical status and because of their genre: both volumes are collections of sketches in which the author represents herself as simultaneously a subjective participant and an authoritative narrator. This complex mode of self­representation is more likely to invite readers to view the texts as history or autobiography than is the case with poems or stories that are presented as overt fiction. Hence we should be particularly interested in the author’s initial construction of herself and of her narratives for her first, local audience—readers of the Literary Garland and the Victoria Magazine in the case of Moodie, and of the Saturday Magazine weekly supplement of the Vancouver Province newspaper in the case of Johnson— before her work and her identity were reshaped for a British readership (with Moodie) or a national readership (with Johnson). Such a rereading destabilizes the hegemony of the material book and probes questions of authorial intention. I am not the first to make the case for paying greater attention to the initial periodical appearances and versions of early Canadian writings. In 1984, Bruce Nesbitt brought out his Tecumseh edition of The Clockmaker, reproducing the text “as Haliburton first saw it in The Novascotian, before it had been altered by numerous editors, suffered a myriad of misprints over the decades, and been pirated by unscrupulous publishers” (1). More recently, Dean Irvine has drawn attention to the illustrations that accompanied the original versions of James De Mille’s novels, notably the nineteen engravings created by Gilbert Gaul for the serialization of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder in Harper’s Weekly in 1888, commenting that “The removal of the illustrations . . . strips the novel of its bibliographic codes, its material ties to the American magazine and publishing industry, and to the British imperial culture of illustrated newspapers” (193). Not surprisingly, issues of authorial intention frequently arise when we consider the transition 46 Periodicals First Home Ground Final.indd 47 14-03-19 09:54 from the first periodical appearances of separate texts to their publication in a collective volume. For example...