Catharine Parr Traill (1802-1899) was a prolific author who published children’s books, emigrants’ guides, and popular natural histories. Under the name Catharine Parr Strickland, she published at least 15 moral tales and natural histories for children between 1818 and 1831.
Catherine had a great deal of knowledge about natural history, and in her books she shared what she had learned through hard graft about nature, survival and homesteading as a settler in the Canadian backwoods. She seamlessly amalgamated these ways of understanding the world, communicating what she saw as the natural link between Christian morality and developing an appreciation of her God’s creation through familiarity (or knowledge). Her intertwining of morality and natural history reflects the nineteenth-century ideal of the natural world as morally and physically healthful for children.
But there was another reason why she published so much. She – rather unwisely – married a Scottish Lieutenant named Thomas Traill and the pair emigrated from England to Upper Canada in 1832. They ended up having a large family, and her husband racked up debts that he was unable or unwilling to work to pay off. So over the course of seven decades, Catherine supported her large family and helped to clear her husband’s debts by publishing at least nine books for adults and children, and many articles in British and Canadian periodicals. Her final publication dates to 1895, when she was in her nineties.
Catherine had no formal scientific training, but her books and articles weave together her independent learning and reading, and her practical experience as a settler. Her books, reflecting a (not unproblematic) middle-class, Christian worldview, were much loved and widely read by generations of Canadian children.
Learn more about Traill’s books for children in my article, ‘‘My Little Readers’: Catharine Parr Traill’s Natural Histories for Children.’ Journal of Literature and Science, vol. 8, no. 1 [special issue] Ingenious Minds: British Women as Facilitators of Scientific Knowledge Exchange, 1810–1900 (2015), pp. 86–101.
