“…but Henry Dear, I leave this to yourself you have some idea which of the two countries would be best. It would be very hard for me to take the children as I know of no person going to that country at present but if you wish me to go, I will go without any hesitation.” – Jane Johnson’s letter to Henry Johnson, Jan. 9, 1849
The correspondence between Jane Johnson (née McConnell) and her husband Henry Johnson vividly illustrates one family’s immigration journey to Canada during the Great Famine – detailing the uncertainty, hardship and hope of Irish immigrants preparing to move to Canada.
These letters, carefully preserved in the Archives and Research Collections Centre (ARCC) at Western, served as the inspiration behind award-winning author Emma Donoghue’s new play The Wind Coming over the Sea at the Blyth Festival.
Donoghue, LLD’13, first came across the letters as a footnote in a text she was researching in 1999, when she was Western’s writer-in-residence. She had been looking to learn more about the immigrants who had come before her, especially Irish immigrants. The letters inspired her to write a short story about the Johnsons. Years later, when the Blyth Festival approached her to write a play about Irish immigrants, she immediately thought back to the letters because they were so “eloquent, sturdy, practical and yet emotionally expressive.”
In hopes of writing about the letters in more detail, she travelled 5,566 km to Belfast in an effort to find the original copies, only to learn the letters had been in her own city – in the same archives where some of her own work and archival records are kept.
“I was so moved to be laying my hands at last on the actual pages. Not only had Jane and Henry written to each other, but they had managed to keep the letters safe on their travels all that time. Some of them were dirty, some were tattered, some with pages missing and some entire letters were missing,” said Donoghue. “I think the letters were so important to the couple, to keep them going. They were an emotional lifeline so they each carefully preserved the ones that they had.”
For Amanda Jamieson, a Western archivist at ARCC, the letters stand out among the 19th-century collections. Often records capture one side of a story, because the person only has the correspondence they received, not the ones they sent.
“With these letters, we can read the back and forth. It’s a conversation. You can see two sides of a story, and you also get the family connection as well,” said Jamieson. “They’re from the 1840s predominantly and our collection only has a small number of letters from that timeframe. These letters are so detailed. There’s so much yearning and hyperbole and they’re so well written.”
The collection includes correspondence from Jane’s father and other relatives of the couple. Preserved with unusual completeness, the letters provide insight into the family’s private lives and the broader context of mid-19th century immigration.
“It was around that turbulent time of immigration. Their town, Antrim in Ireland, was becoming destitute and people were becoming so impoverished they had to leave the country. I think that’s why the letters are so emotional as well, because they were leaving under such duress,” said Jamieson, who noted that about 200,000 people fled the country in 1847.
She pointed out the physical documents themselves are striking. Made of high-quality cotton rag paper, the letters have endured with minimal damage. Even the addresses, often as simple as “Post Office, Canada West, North America,” reveal a glimpse of a world where mail still reached its intended recipient across the Atlantic.
“We have such a large archives program for the region, and we have the ability to provide really great access with a wonderful reading room and resources to preserve and digitize one-of-a-kind records,” said Jamieson.
The letters were safeguarded for generations by their descendants, including Jane’s great-granddaughter Louise Wyatt, a teacher in London, Ont. who published some of the letters in Ontario History. The donation of the letters to Western in the 1970s ensured their story can continue to be shared with the wider public.
“I’m so thrilled by archives,” said Donoghue, who will speak about the play as well as her latest book at a Western Alumni event on Nov. 13. “But researching archives is quite a solitary experience, and every now and then I come across something that I feel needs to go to a wider audience, sometimes in the form of a novel and in this case in the form of a play.”
From the archives to the stage
Donoghue used fragments and details from the letters to build monologues that honour the family’s voices while shaping a narrative for the stage.
“Their marriage was this living thing where they both brought skills and strength. This is not what we think of as a classic sort of Victorian marriage. He wasn’t making the decisions for the family, so these letters are a rich source that lends itself well to a 21st century play about two equal parties, full of humour, satire and human warmth,” said Donoghue.
The play is a musical featuring traditional Irish ballads and folk music.
Donoghue described watching her words take shape on the stage for the first time as everything she had wanted.
“It feels particularly alive. Watching these actors play Jane and Henry, it’s sort of like we’re letting the dead walk again. It’s a kind of thrilling magic,” she said. “At the very origin of theatre is having people let themselves get kind of possessed by either imaginary people or dead people or people far away.”
The Blyth Festival, known for championing Canadian and rural stories, proved an ideal home for the production.
“It’s extraordinary that this play has managed to find such an audience and people are relating to it so much based on their own history of their families coming to Canada from many different places – it seems to have touched a real nerve. It’s celebration of the ups and downs of immigration,” said Donoghue.
Following a sold-out summer run, the production returns for a rare, limited engagement Sept. 25 to Oct. 5 at the Blyth Festival.
