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few weeks in Finsbury. Susanna continued to mingle with her literary friends and write for the annuals. John had just published an account of his adventures as a youthful soldier ( A Narrative of the Campaign of 1814) and was now negotiating with the publisher Richard Bentley about a book on his experiences in South Africa. It would finally appear in 1835, under the title Ten Years in South Africa, Including a Particular Description of the Wild Sports, and consisted of enthusiastic descriptions of shootin’ with the boys, interspersed with a few brief throat-clearing passages about farming methods. John and Susanna were already finding it hard to make ends meet, and the question of how to support themselves became more acute in early summer when Susanna realized that she was pregnant. They decided to reduce their costs by leaving London and renting a cottage in Southwold so that Susanna could be near her mother, sisters and friends.
    Susanna never enjoyed her pregnancies; she was afflicted with nausea and a general lassitude. Nevertheless, she and John enjoyed receiving her sisters and the local “Grandees,” as Susanna termed Suffolk’s gentry. “Even Mamma forgets her resolution of never leaving home and honors our little mansion with her presence,” she noted. Neither John nor Susanna dared look much beyond the birth of their baby. They had no money and no prospects, and there were few opportunities in England for a man of John’s skills. But then a surprise visitor turned up on their doorstep. It was Robert Reid, a successful settler in Upper Canada whose daughter was the wife of Susanna’s brother Samuel. Sam had flourished in Canada as an employee of the Canada Company, a London-based organization that had bought up vast tracts of Crown land in Upper Canada to sell to incoming settlers. Sam had been a superintendent of Canada Company projects around Guelph, in the triangle of Upper Canada that jutted down towards Lake Erie, before moving east to the newly settled town of Peterborough, north of Rice Lake, of which the Reid family had been founders. Reid was gung-ho on the advantages of emigration. He boasted to the young couple about his own history—how, after a struggle of twelve years, he had thesatisfaction of a family of ten children all now in a position to become wealthy landowners. Reid promised the young couple “independence and comfort on the other side of the water, and even wealth after a few years’ toil.”
    Reid’s rosy picture of prospects in Upper Canada was only one element in the flood of propaganda about emigration then circulating around Britain. England was now in a crippling agricultural depression. The prices of wheat and barley had fallen by more than half between 1812 and 1830. At least one in ten of the British people was a pauper, for whom emigration offered the only escape from poverty. All around Southwold, tenant farmers were defaulting on their rents, and agricultural labourers were being thrown out of their cottages and into parish poorhouses. In the coal mines of the Midlands, naked women pulled wagons through the shafts to earn a few pennies. In the factories of the north, children of eight or nine were working twelve-hour days. Of course, the Moodies were in a different class from these casualties of the faltering economy—but they too were its victims.
    The Moodies began to consider crossing the Atlantic as a way to maintain their social position despite their cramped income. By now they had realized that, even outside London, to live in the style to which an English gentleman aspired they needed at least one thousand pounds a year. John’s military pension of a hundred pounds a year, and their combined but unpredictable earnings as writers, would never amount to that sum. So when a public meeting about the advantages of emigration to Canada was advertised, John was amongst those who flocked to Norwich to hear it. He was