Knight, Ann Cuthbert, 1788-1860

Pam Perkins

Critical Essay

Ann Cuthbert Knight, a Scot who lived in and wrote about Canada, has been less kindly treated by literary history than some of the other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women who wrote about their Canadian experiences. Unlike figures such as Frances Brooke, Susanna Moodie, and Catharine Parr Traill, who have maintained a place in the Canadian canon even when overlooked in Britain, Knight has been all but entirely forgotten in both countries. Little is known about her life, although she apparently married twice and taught in Montreal after her short publishing career in Scotland; her later Canadian publications were educational works, including a book of advice for teachers and a collection of language exercises.[1] Despite the few traces that remain of Knight or her career, the two volumes of poetry that she published in Edinburgh indicate that she was a thoughtful, well-read woman who was deeply interested in both the culture in which she was raised and that of the transatlantic world in which she settled.

Even though Knight's poetic career was brief -- Home: A Poem was published in 1815, and A Year in Canada in 1816 -- she achieved a mild degree of success with both volumes. Despite being a work by a first-time, unknown author, Home was sold by Constable's in Edinburgh and Longman's in London, both high-profile publishing houses; Knight's association with them is all the most noteworthy as Archibald Constable was, at that time, very reluctant to accept new works of poetry. While any correspondence between them about the book apparently has not survived, Constable's letter books from the years during which Knight was writing indicate his considerable doubts about the saleability of any poems not by the established stars of the day. After reading Constable's views on the subject in an April 1814 letter to the Reverend William Gillespie, one might suspect either that Knight had considerable interest with him or (more charitably) that she had managed to impress him a great deal:

Regarding the publication of a Volume of Poems I hardly know what to say, there are too many Volumes of Poetry already, & to say the truth, all unsaleable excepting Campbell, Scott Byron & Crabbe. Southey publishes a Volume once a year sometimes two, but they will not sell.[2]

Admittedly, after this warning, Constable promises to do what he can "as an old friend" to bring the book into print, and in a later letter (f. 309) agrees to publish it -- but only if Gillespie can find enough subscribers to cover expenses or pays costs himself. Even more pessimistically, in January 1816, Constable assures a woman identified only by the initials F.M.A., whose manuscript he seems to have rejected outright, that "there is no class of writing of more doubtful success" than poetry, "and no time more unpropitious than the present for first productions" (f. 486). That Knight succeeded in placing her work with him at all in such a climate is more surprising than its subsequent neglect.

Of course, there is no way of knowing what financial arrangement Knight had with Constable; Home is merely "sold by," not "printed for" him, but he was presumably sufficiently interested in the work to involve his London partner Longman in sales of it. Nor is it clear how financially successful the book was, although the fact that A Year in Canada was printed for the lesser-known Edinburgh firm Doig and Stirling suggests that Home did not do sufficiently well to interest Constable in a second work by Knight. Of course, Knight does not seem to have been publishing simply to earn money; in her dedication to the Earl of Buchan, she describes Home as being the work of "A Muse that owns no sordid aim, / Unknown to Censure and to Fame" (iv). Yet whatever her motive for publication and however successful or unsuccessful she might have been, she was clearly confident enough in her abilities to publish a second volume, and that confidence might have been justified. Despite the apparent lack of interest in it on Constable's part, surviving evidence suggests that A Year in Canada, which received at least five reviews in British periodicals, was the more successful of the two volumes. Knight might, admittedly, have owed that increased attention as much to the title as to the contents of the book. As Constable told F.M.A. in the letter rejecting her volume of poems, the "great & leading features" that attract readers "are strong & powerful delineations of national Customs & manners" (f.486).

A delineation of national manners is more or less what Knight offers her readers in Home, however; the poem is at least in part an exploration of the direction in which British culture is moving. It is a wide-ranging and ambitious work, in which Knight, like other women writers among her contemporaries (including her fellow Scot Anne Grant and Englishwomen of such varied outlooks as Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld) links domestic and national concerns. The "home" that she describes refers to both the nation and the family, and the two entities soon become inextricably linked. Love of home fuels love of the nation, even though Knight makes clear that the former might have to be sacrificed to the latter. That does not mean that patriotism absorbs all domestic affections; on the contrary, the poem insists upon the suffering of those far from their homelands, even when absent for their country's good. Indeed, Knight initially defines home as being whatever produces emotion troubling "the exile's bosom" (3), a definition that helps to explain why she chooses to open a poem called Home by focusing on Anson's exploration of the Pacific Ocean. Home might be the foundation of tranquil happiness, but Knight's immediate emphasis on the impulses driving travellers and explorers suggests that such tranquillity is, almost inevitably, recognized only in its absence. Finishing the first book of the poem by evoking what was at the time the famous devotion of the Swiss to their homeland, a devotion so intense that their homesickness could supposedly become a physical, even fatal, disease, Knight also implies that love of home can be a source of at least as much pain as pleasure. Both patriotism and domestic ease are thus troubled concepts in this world, even as Knight ostensibly sets out to celebrate them in what might appear from the title to be a cosily sentimental poem.

Indeed, distant or failed homes occupy more of the speaker's attention than do successful, happy ones. She repeatedly portrays soldiers, sailors, and emigrants who are tormented by their memories of lost homes, in some cases to the point that life becomes impossible for them. The poem includes, for example, anecdotes about a sailor who goes mad when the blissful homecoming he had imagined is shattered by the death of his sweetheart and about a schoolboy who dies of homesickness when detained at school as a punishment. (Knight adds a note attesting to the truth of this unlikely story.) The speaker in the fourth part of the poem, which focuses on marriage, is at least as fascinated by couples that marry unhappily or for the wrong reasons as with those who exemplify the virtues of domestic life. Artistically, this interest in the dysfunctional seems entirely justifiable, since when Knight does celebrate domestic pleasures, she appears unable to do so except in the most conventional of terms. An admirable husband in Knight's world is, for example, predictably stalwart and honourable:

His mind in nature's noblest mould was cast,
And culture finish'd what her pencil trac'd;
The glance of thought, the hero's soul was there,
Prompt to decide, and resolute to dare.... (48)

His wife, meanwhile, is a model of perfect femininity, whose "sympathy refin'd" is matched by a "faultless form, that ow'd no charm to art" and "yielding sweetness" that "charm[s] the brave" (48-49). Knight is so extremely conventional in this section that she even includes a repudiation of Wollstonecraft, belatedly attacking a cause that would, by then, have found few if any defenders. Such clichéd imagery and outdated polemic might indicate a failure of imagination or ability on Knight's part - after all, domestic happiness is notoriously difficult to represent - but it might also alert us to the poem's thematic tangle. Making too strong a case for the attractions of home risks undercutting the patriotism that Knight sees as inspiring the voluntary exile of explorers, and thereby reinforcing the idea that domesticity and patriotism, far from being continuous, are at least potentially at odds. Nor is this conflict simply a result of having to sacrifice the private for the public good. The sweet domestic wife might make home attractive, but when she makes it so appealing that those who are deprived of it die of grief or lapse into madness, she saps the national strength she is supposed to foster. Given the intense celebration of domestic womanhood in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it is perhaps not surprising to find Knight lapsing into stereotype rather than pursuing the logic of this argument.

This insistence upon her allegiance to cultural norms does not, however, mean that Knight entirely sidesteps questions about women's place in the household -- or the nation. Indeed, by being so conventional and by attacking what was, by 1815, the very easy target of Wollstonecraft, Knight establishes her respectability before moving on to propose a renovated version of women's domestic life that stresses its centrality to the larger political world. Many of the examples she gives of failed and successful marriages emphasise this connection, particularly as she chooses to focus on royal matches, in which the household is undeniably linked to the nation. The result is to stress women's potential contributions to public matters, as kings who fail to listen to their wives go down in history as tyrants, while Edward III, giving into the merciful femininity of Queen Phillipa, enters popular legend. One should not make too much of this point, of course, as Knight reduces queens' roles, both political and domestic, to pleading causes. The need to make such pleas in the first place also implies previous conflict, even in the happy marriages of just kings, and thus suggests that there has been at least temporary instability in both the marriage and the kingdom: domesticity is not necessarily a refuge from the troubles in the outer world. This argument works against the more sunnily stereotypical presentation of virtuous femininity in the passages about an ideal marriage, but of course it does so at the cost of implying that both home and nation are always potentially fragile.

The poem is not, however, as pessimistic in tone as this account might make it sound. Knight's measured heroic couplets and formal poetic diction give the work an air of elegant, neo-classical sophistication that grounds its exploration of foreign and unsettling worlds in a comfortingly familiar literary style. The intellectual context of Knight's work is just as familiar. The poem draws on a series of literary works that were part of the popular canon of late eighteenth-century literature: Anson's Voyages (which also inspired "The Castaway," one of Cowper's most famous short poems), Télémaque, and Jane Porter's Scottish Chiefs in the first part alone. These three works -- one French, one an account of previously unknown territory, and one a romance from the distant Scottish past -- might not seem particularly homelike in an eighteenth-century British context, but Knight is clearly able to assume a shared literary culture among her readers, no matter what the subject of that literature. More importantly, this wide-ranging taste suggests the flexibility of the home culture that Knight is celebrating, and implies that the alternative to the deracinated misery Knight evokes in some parts of the poem is not necessarily a narrow focus on the local.

Indeed, Knight almost insistently avoids any focus on narrow local interest. The poem might be called Home, but it has almost as much to do with life overseas as does the later poem about Canada. Part Four of Home includes an indignant attack on American policy and motives in the War of 1812; a note explaining that it was composed while Knight was living in Canada during that conflict links the concerns of her old home and her new one. While in Part Two, the Scottish narrator fondly looks back to her homeland and dreams of it while living abroad, in Part Four, the narrator's lament for Canada extends the sense of what might constitute home and thus leads quite naturally into the concerns of her next volume - or at least it might appear to do so if one looks simply at the title. A Year in Canada, while it received more attention than the earlier book, is in some respects less ambitious and wide-ranging. It is a pastoral, in Spenserian stanzas, and the narrator is more an observer of than a participant in the new world that she describes. The British Critic conveys both the charm and the conventionality of the poem in its brief review:

The poetry in this little volume is exceedingly pretty, and shews a correct and cultivated taste. We are pleased to listen to the lay of a Trans-atlantic muse, especially when she sings in so pleasing and unaffected a style. The American scenery is well described, and the mode of life presented to our view much in the style of Thomson, though Miss Knight has adopted, and wisely we conceive, the stanza of Spenser.[3]

Likewise, the Eclectic singles out the descriptions of "[t]he scenery on the banks of the river St. Lawrence, the manners of the Indians and of the Canadian Peasants, the seasons and their attributes, with appropriate reflections" for praise.[4]

This pleasure in the "appropriate" comments that Knight makes about the seasons and her resemblance to Thomson is worth attention, as it suggests that what readers are getting in this book is in no way the product of "a Trans-atlantic muse." The subject may be Canada, but Knight uses thoroughly British style and imagery to portray an unfamiliar culture. Even in her choice of Spenserian stanzas, rather than the heroic couplets of the earlier poem, Knight seems to be treating the landscape and people as part of a Romance world, a literary decision that reinforces the sense that she is writing about Canada from the perspective of a Briton rather than a Canadian. While the Spenserian stanza was by no means used only for works of romance, it was seen as particularly well suited to that genre, as The British Critic's comments about Knight's debts to Thomson and "wise" choice of verse form might remind us. After all, while Thomson uses blank verse for his more realistically descriptive Seasons, he turns to the Spenserian stanza for his romance, The Castle of Indolence.[5]

While Home is built around a series of reflections on the contemporary state of the nation, A Year in Canada offers what would have been, in Knight's era, a rather old-fashioned style of descriptive poetry. The Monthly Review emphasises this point by regretting that "mere picturesque description" would not be likely to appeal to "readers of modern poetry," even as it praises "the seeming accuracy of the delineations" in the poem.[6] This conventionality in the form of A Year in Canada is reinforced by what would be, to readers who knew any of the previous British writing on Canada, very familiar scenes and images. Indeed, some of the passages would have been familiar even to those who knew nothing of that literature, as Knight gives her British audience a version of Canada that is fully assimilated to British poetic tastes. When, for example, she describes it as a place "[w]here Winter ling'ring chills the vernal day, / And April's gentle showers fall in the lap of May" (31), she is giving her readers a near quotation of Oliver Goldsmith's description of Switzerland[7] and thereby assimilating Canada to a very generic British concept of the foreign. Even when Knight does use specifically North American details, she tends to choose ones that had long been familiar in British writing on the subject. The "gay humming-bird on radiant wing" (16) for example, is a typically exotic bit of North Americana that had been attracting the attention of travel writers for decades before Knight began writing. More specifically, complaints about the ignorance of French Canadian peasants or comments on their carefree delight in dancing and singing (see in particular 44-45, 26) go back at least as far as Wolfe's siege of Quebec. Frances Brooke's popular History of Emily Montague (1769) helped to establish these stereotypes in the British mind, while closer to her own time, Knight could have found support for her comments about the peasantry of Quebec in accounts as different as Excursions to North America (1806), an adventure book for children by Priscilla Wakefield, and Hugh Gray's politically pessimistic Letters from Canada (1809). Perhaps most conventionally - and most tendentiously from a twenty-first century perspective -- Knight's descriptions of Native Canadians combine stereotypically nervous accounts of their fierce pitilessness with a sentimental celebration of their "fearless courage" and "patient fortitude" (20).

As these descriptions of French and Native Canadians indicate, this is in many respects a poem that celebrates colonization. It does not require any subtle grasp of feminist theory to explore the implications of Knight's description of the ways in which "The axe, the flame assail'd the trembling glade" and British settlements rose on "lands new ravished from the forest's shade" (8). Yet the easy grounds for criticism offered by such language is in some ways misleading. Conquering the land is not equated with making Canada "home," at least not in the sense that Knight constructs home in her earlier poem. It might be inhabited by Britons, but it is not British, a point emphasized by the speaker's perspective. She is, as she explains, merely "the passing pilgrim of a day" (60), and the title itself conveys a sense of the transitory nature of her stay. While the "year in Canada" could imply one year out of many (as indeed it turned out to be for Knight), the title can also be read as implying a limitation: she is observing the country for only a year. Knight describes the process of colonization, but the poem itself is a form of literary tourism. Even as the speaker draws on a repertoire of images that assimilates the foreign landscape to British literary tastes, the country itself remains insistently foreign. The speaker repeatedly stresses her status as an outsider, and so the poem never fully makes a place for the British observer in the colonized world that she is describing.

Colonization is thus downplayed in this poem, and that may in part have contributed to its success. Knight avoids any explicit political reflections of the sort that she makes in Home's bitter comments on American conduct during the War of 1812, and thereby, in some respects, makes her poem less demanding on the reader. It does not, for example, require any political interest or knowledge to appreciate a description of the process of making maple sugar, while a consideration of Anglo-American rivalries over British North America might involve both. Yet especially when read in conjunction with Home, A Year in Canada offers readers a version of Canadian life that might have some unsettling resonances. It is familiar in all its details, but precisely because those details are used to build up a picture of foreignness, Canada seems not to provide the British emigrant anything like the sense of home that is presented, in the earlier poem, as being central to individual and national well being - even if also potentially damaging. Knight in fact admits that she is not offering the sort of poetry that Canadians will require to build a sense of nationhood when, at the end of the poem, she calls for "a nobler Muse, on loftier wing" to represent the variety and majesty of the country (60). What such poetry would accomplish is a question that she leaves unanswered; the point being made at that moment seems merely to be that her own poem is incomplete. That might be merely conventional feminine modesty, but Home indicates that Knight was capable of writing with considerable assurance about questions of national identity. The fears of exile and deracination which underlie the earlier volume thus also haunt A Year in Canada, as the new, colonized world fails to offer the sense of rootedness in a place necessary to counteract, even briefly, the miseries of exile. This sense of alienation from Canada might have been temporary; Knight's next work, Views of Canadian Scenery for Canadian Children (1843) invokes precisely the sort of love of place that she celebrates in Home. Yet as A Year in Canada remains insistently British in its perspective, despite its title, it exemplifies the cultural dilemmas explored in Knight's first poem. Read together, Knight's two books of poetry thus offer us an exploration of early nineteenth-century ideas of home, exile, and nationhood, even if their inability to offer unproblematic celebrations of either the old home or the new might have contributed to their failure to find a permanent place in the literary history of either Canada or Scotland.

Notes

1. See Henry J. Morgan, Bibliotheca Canadensis: or, A Manual of Canadian Literature (Ottawa, 1867), p. 125, for a list of Knight's works and a very brief biography.

2. Archibald Constable, Letterbooks, National Library of Scotland, ms. 789, f. 57. The following quotations from Constable's letters are also from this manuscript.

3. Review of A Year in Canada, The British Critic, n.s., vol. 6 (July 1816), 92-93.

4. Review of A Year in Canada, The Eclectic Review, n.s., vol. 6 (Oct. 1816), 404.

5. It might be worth noting, in this context, that Geraldine, the other long poem in this volume, is straightforward romance.

6. Review of A Year in Canada. The Monthly Review 79 (April 1816), 433.

7. See The Traveller (1765), 171-2.

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