In writing the novel, Richardson made use of accounts of the siege of Detroit in and of the attack on Fort Michilimackinac Mackinaw City, Mich. As a small boy Richardson had himself encountered Norton, who had been a trading agent for John Askin, and in he appealed to Norton for assistance when he was seeking to return to full pay in London.
At the time he was writing Wacousta , Richardson was courting Maria Caroline Drayson, whom he married in the year it was published, and he doubtless heard of the Norton connection from her father, William, who was interested in genealogy. When the American edition of appeared, critic Evert Augustus Duyckinck wrote: The Canadian brothers lacked the intensity of Wacousta and was not as popular. It was published in Montreal in , the only one of his novels to appear first in Canada.
In it was issued in the United States in an altered version under the title Matilda Montgomerie: Henceforth, his books, which had been published anonymously, carried his name and rank. It was his most prized award aside from his majority. He was later to transform the role of knight into fiction in The monk knight of St. John; a tale of the Crusades , in which a Crusader named Abdallah, the monk knight, is put to the test in that era of murder and rapine.
Richardson was also left with political enemies in the Canadas when Durham was recalled. In these years he threw himself into journalism and the political fray on behalf of the conservative opposition. Once again Richardson made himself a controversial figure. Richardson hoped that the book would be used in schools, and applied to the Legislative Assembly for a grant to publish two more volumes.
In fact, he placed the remaining copies of War of on auction to pay creditors; only one was sold, and no further volumes were issued. Despite his frequent quarrels with senior political officials, Richardson repeatedly tried to win appointment to government office, but his enemies were too numerous. With only a small band of men to help him, Richardson now faced the unenviable task of maintaining order on the Welland Canal, where rioting, often politically instigated to embarrass the government, had broken out among Irish canal workers, who also protested the starvation wages paid by private contractors.
Despite the antagonism of his employer, the Board of Works, whose members were reformers opposed to Metcalfe, Richardson set out to fashion a disciplined force and end violence along the canal. He went through a series of humiliations, violent confrontations, and a farcical trial in his struggle to assert his authority before all real power was taken away from him.
In December, when it appeared that relative peace had been restored, Samuel Power, the chief engineer and an employee in favour with the Board of Works, recommended that the police force be reduced and Richardson be dismissed since his presence was no longer required. His account of the Welland Canal episode was published that year as Correspondence submitted to parliament. During this time he also did some writing for the Montreal Courier.
The troubles prompted Richardson to relocate in New York in the fall of Americans, after all, celebrated him as an author while Canadians showed little interest in his work. In New York he also wrote short stories for American periodicals and at least two songs. During the War of Westbrook led American marauding parties into the province and was branded an outlaw by the Upper Canadian courts in Although published in book form in , the novel to all intents and purposes was lost until when the newspaper serialization turned up at a book auction in New York.
He published it anonymously at his own expense, but it was a commercial failure. His friends took up a collection to pay the expenses of his funeral but there is no record of where he is buried, other than that his body was removed from the city. Throughout his life Richardson defended his individuality to a point where many considered him quarrelsome, unreasonable, and enigmatic.
Sensitive to slights, he was ever ready to fight a duel, and took part in many. Although an excellent shot with pistols, he claimed that he did not provoke confrontations but rather became involved only when it was necessary to uphold his dignity. His sharp criticism of his contemporaries and their utilitarianism sprang from his belief in the overriding need to develop the individual personality. This has placed Richardson's tales within the patriotic framework of so-called "Loyalist literature," revered for its ties to Canada's beginnings.
Canadian critics have dug deeply into both novels, and virtually every history of Canadian literature focuses on Richardson as a starting point, often finding in them precursors of later Canadian writing 20 and even a sort of basic Canadian psyche. Although Richardson's primacy as a Canadian-born novelist had long been recognized, it was only around the s that Canadians began to study his works seriously. So let us look briefly at these two novels, on which Richardson's literary fame rests today.
Their long and complex stories are filled, writes one recent scholar, with "sudden surprises, actions before explanations, mysterious happenings, terrors by night and day, deadly combats, pervading gloom, intriguing sexual encounters, haunted minds, and consuming passion Their central theme, however, is revenge—protracted, bitter, and ruthless revenge, accompanied by sex, gory violence, and even cannibalism.
In contrast to Cooper's tales of wilderness adventure, it is hard to imagine giving a Richardson novel to a child. The first, and most important novel, is—to give it its extended nineteenth century title— Wacousta; Or, The Prophecy: A Tale of the Canadas , first published in London in , in which Richardson is said to have " As we learn only in a long flashback towards its end, Sir Reginald Morton, a young British officer serving in Scotland, had in a secluded glen discovered a beautiful maiden named Clara, living alone with her father.
They instantly fell in love, but before long she was stolen away and married by Morton's best friend, a fellow officer named Charles de Haldimar. As a result Morton has vowed eternal vengeance against the entire De Haldimar family. As the narrative begins years later, however, we know nothing of this, and the cast is filled with the De Haldimar family.
The year is , and Charles De Haldimar, who had stolen Clara from his friend Sir Reginald Morton, is now a Colonel commanding the British fortress at Detroit, which had only very recently passed from French to British control. Though his wife Clara has died, the Colonel is accompanied by his two sons, the valiant and forceful Captain Frederick and the sensitive and retiring Lieutenant Charles.
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The Colonel's lovely daughter, named Clara like her late mother, is visiting her cousin Madeline de Haldimar, who lives with her father at the British fortress at Michilimackinac on Lake Huron. The British forts are both under siege by Pontiac, an Indian Chief who has united many Indian tribes against the white British invader. And Pontiac is being advised by a mysterious white man, of gigantic stature and abilities, who calls himself Wacousta, dresses and lives like an Indian, and uses his influence to plot against the De Haldimar family.
As the story progresses, the De Haldimar family becomes the subject of a curse the prophecy of the book's title from the wife of a soldier who has been wrongfully executed by Colonel De Haldimar. She later becomes the bride of Wacousta. Pontiac, advised by Wacousta, plans to capture the British forts at Detroit and Michilimackinac by having supposedly friendly Indians play the game of lacrosse outside their gates. The ball will be hurled into the fort courtyards, seemingly by accident. The Indian players seeking to retrieve the ball will take up weapons concealed in the blankets of their wives, enter the courtyards, and massacre the unsuspecting garrisons and their families.
The scheme succeeds at Michilimackinac—as it did in real life—and Clara and her cousin Madeline barely escape with their lives. At Detroit, Colonel de Haldimar has been alerted to Pontiac's plan—as was the real-life Commander there—and the ruse fails. Nevertheless, by the end of a complicated, mystery filled, and often bloody three volumes and after we have learned that Wacousta is really Sir Reginald Morton in disguise both Wacousta and all the De Haldimars are dead, except for the Colonel's son Frederick and his cousin Madeline, who duly marry each other in the final pages.
A Tale of the Late American War. It is set during the War of , and draws heavily on Richardson's own experience as a teenage volunteer in that conflict, and as a prisoner-of-war in Kentucky. Its heroes are twin brothers, Gerald and Henry Grantham, great-grandsons of Colonel de Haldimar and the last of his line. They encounter the despicable Yankee, Jeremiah Desborough who turns out to be Wacousta's son , and the beautiful but scheming Matilda de Montgomerie who turns out to be Desborough's daughter.
Here, Richardson works into the plot events from the so-called Kentucky Tragedy of the s. By the end of the novel, the prophecy of the title has been duly fulfilled. Both brothers, Gerald and Henry, are dead indeed, one has accidentally killed the other , and Wacousta's descendants, Jeremiah Desborough and his daughter Matilda, have gotten the comeuppance they deserve.
Richardson might well have adopted Agatha Christie's famous mystery title: And Then There Were None. What does Richardson owe to James Fenimore Cooper? In the preface to an edition of Wacousta , published in New York City, he admitted that: But Richardson was familiar with the whole Leatherstocking saga.
In , as he traveled by sleigh from the St. Richardson praised Cooper, writing in that: Certainly, Richardson's novel Wacousta owes much to Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans , written six years before. The title character seems to be a deliberate combination of Hawkeye and Magua.
Wacousta is bent on revenge against the de Haldimar family, much as the Indian Magua in Mohicans is bent on revenge against Colonel Munro and his family. He is, like Natty Bumppo, a white man who lives with ease among Native Americans. But, most unlike Cooper's hero, he is a very angry white man, an outlaw in the tradition of Lord Byron, 39 who is single-mindedly devoted to the destruction of his personal enemies. In The Last of the Mohicans , the historical episode at Fort William Henry is encapsulated between the purely fictional segments that dominate Cooper's tale.
The family feud between Colonel De Haldimar and Reginald Morton, alias Wacousta, and the vengeance it inspires, dominate the plot—a vengeance reaching a grisly but logical ending in the sequel, The Canadian Brothers. Richardson succeeds, better than Cooper, I think, in portraying the alternating boredom and violence of military life, and the close comradeship that develops within military units under siege.
Major Richardson was a professional soldiers writing about situations he had experienced. Thus, as he writes early in Wacousta: It is when Richardson writes about his principal characters, in melodramatic settings, that his writing comes most alive. Inevitably, Richardson's portrayal of Native Americans has attracted much Canadian literary interest.
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Unlike Cooper, who drew his Indians mostly from books, 43 Richardson had fought alongside them during the War of , and was more conscious of specific tribal differences. Aside from his idolized Tecumseh, the only really "good" Indians in his two major novels are Oucanasta in Wacousta , an Indian woman platonically in love with Colonel De Haldimar's son Frederick, who reveals and thus thwarts Pontiac's scheme to capture Fort Detroit, 46 and her unnamed brother, who aids her and eventually kills the villain Wacousta himself.
At the end of the novel, when Frederick de Haldimar marries his cousin Madeline, Oucanasta and her brother provide toys and athletic instruction to their children. But beyond their historical frontier and military settings, Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers form a continued story of an implacable search for vengeance, extending over two novels and four generations of characters.
And it is in that framework, perhaps, that they deserve further study.
Richardson rarely makes use of epigraphs, but he does place one on the title page of Wacousta. It is from Edward Young's play The Revenge , and it reads:. Among them is The Revenge , from which the epigraph was taken. It concerns an enslaved Moor, or North African, of dusky complexion, who vows revenge against a master who has humiliated him, by stirring up jealousy within the master's family in a drama ending with corpses scattered about the stage.
The similarity in theme to Shakespeare's Othello has long been noted. Though first produced in , The Revenge was still being performed regularly in the England of the early s, when Richardson was writing Wacousta.
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Indeed the lead role of Zanga, the Moor, became a specialty of Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor who performed successfully in England for many years beginning in The concept of revenge for mistreatment would unquestionably be congenial to one as conscious of his supposed injuries as Major John Richardson. But the very Gothic notion of achieving that revenge through someone's family, it seems to me, can be attributed as much to Edward Young's Zanga in The Revenge as to Cooper's vengeful Magua in The Last of the Mohicans.
And the text of The Revenge would not have been hard to find; it had long been included in anthologies of popular plays. The life of Major John Richardson, despite his posthumous promotion as a foundation stone of Canadian literature, was in many ways a failure, both personally and financially, and he never in his lifetime received the recognition he deserved in the nation he loved. Ignored in Canada, he moved to New York City in , where he lived alone, came to know other local writers, and found a publisher for several short frontier novels set during the War of , 54 as well as a tale of violence, rapine, and indiscriminate sex set during the Crusades.
It was while researching this paper that I came upon this hitherto undiscovered account of Richardson's last days in New York, in a memoir published in by George Thompson, a prolific writer of popular novels who befriended him there. A minor New York periodical, to which Richardson had been unsuccessfully trying to peddle copies of a new book, 59 reported a week later:. In Askin married Marie Archange Barthe , a French Canadian from Detroit who had as a teenager lived through the siege of Detroit by Pontiac, and from whom young John Richardson obtained much of the historical background of Wacousta.
Morley, "A Soldier's Progress: A military history covering this period is Col. IV, From to Eyre and Spottiswoode, , pp. Four Courts Press, Although the only portrait of Richardson shows him wearing the cross of this order, and he always claimed to have been granted it, his name does not appear in the listing of recipients of this order in Marquis de Ruvigny, ed. New Era or Canadian Chronicle , Vol. Henry Colburn, frequently reprinted, most recently by David Beasley: Colburn and Bentley, only recently recognized as being by Richardson, and reprinted by David Beasley: A Poem in Four Cantos.
Canadian Poetry Press, , contains both versions and extensive notes.
The Novels of John Richardson, The Canadian Cooper
For critical analysis, see D. Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press, Two years later, Richardson published a long humorous poem about London life: Kensington Gardens in Bibliographical Society of Canada, He is recorded as having, on August 12, married a Jane Marsh at the British Embassy in Paris; whether that marriage was legal, and what happened to Jane Marsh, remain a mystery. He was accompanied by his wife Maria C. Richardson, listed as a lady, aged 35 [ sic ]. As so often in his life, his tenure became controversial, and controversy followed his departure from the position.
Cunningham, Facsimile reprint New York: A satire based on Richardson's service in the British Legion in Spain, it was presented as a sequel to Theodore Edward Hook's facetious novel, Jack Brag , which ends with the title character enlisting in the British Auxiliary Legion as "Acting-Assistant-Deputy-Assistant-Commissary-General," after being assured that no real work will be required.
Unable to find a publisher, Richardson later printed it in one of his several short-lived periodicals, The New Era; or Canadian Chronicle , but only one installment has been found. This matchless woman died of Apoplexy and to the exceeding grief of her faithfully attached husband after a few days illness in St.
The Canadian Brothers, or the Prophecy Fulfilled a Tale of the Late American War — Complete
Catharines on the 16th day of Aug. John Richardson's brother Charles d. Major John Richardson, Soldier and Novelist. The Loyalist in Disguise. McClelland and Stewart, ; John Moss, ed. Volume II - Beginnings. New Canada Publications, ; Katherine L.