The husband of Susanna Strickland Moodie, John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie was a minor author whose talents and writings have been overshadowed by those of his wife. Characterized by her (in Roughing It in the Bush, 1852) as "the poet, the author, the musician, the man of books, of refined taste and gentlemanly habits" who braved the privations of pioneer life in an unsuccessful bid to attain for his children the material comforts that eluded them in Great Britain, he recorded his Canadian experiences in the three chapters he contributed to the second edition of Roughing It in the Bush (also 1852), and in the introduction to his own Scenes and Adventures as a Soldier and Settler During Half a Century (1866), a collection of previously published pieces.

Moodie was born in the Orkney Islands of Scotland on the family estate, Melsetter, the fourth son of Maj. James Moodie, Ninth Laird of...