Stephen Leacock

Stephen Butler Leacock, Ph.D , FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian writer and economist.

Early life

Born in Swanmore, Hampshire, England, at age six he and his family moved to Canada, settling on a farm in Egypt, Ontario, near the shores of Lake Simcoe. While the family had been comfortable in England, the farm in Georgina Township of York County was not a success and Leacock's family was quite poor. His father Peter suffered from alcoholism, becoming violent and morose.

Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent to the elite private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he was top of the class and so popular he was chosen as head boy. His father left the house in 1887 and never returned. The same year, seventeen year-old Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, but found he could not resume the following year due to financial difficulties.

He left university to earn money as a schoolteacher - a job he disliked immensely - at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally in Toronto. As a teacher at Upper Canada College, his alma mater, he was able to simultaneously attend classes at the University of Toronto and, in 1891, earn his degree through part-time studies. It was during this period that his first writing was published in The Varsity, a campus newspaper.

Academic and political life

Disillusioned with teaching, in 1899 he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago where he received a doctorate in political science and political economy. He moved from Chicago, Illinois to Montreal, Quebec where he became a lecturer and long-time acting head of the political economy department at McGill University.

He was closely associated with Sir Arthur Currie, former commander of the Canadian Corps in the Great War and principal of McGill from 1919 until his death in 1933. In fact, Currie had been a student observing Leacock's practice teaching in Strathroy in 1888. In 1936, Leacock was forcibly retired by the McGill Board of Governors -- an unlikely prospect had Currie lived.

Leacock was both a social conservative and a partisan Conservative. He opposed women's rights and disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration. He was, however, a supporter of social welfare legislation. He was a champion of the British Empire, and went on lecture tours to further the cause.

Although considered a federal candidate for his party, it declined to invite the author, lecturer and maverick to stand for election. Nevertheless, he would stump for local candidates at his summer home.

Literary life

Although he did write learned articles and books related to his field of study, his political theory is now all but forgotten. Nevertheless, Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, nominally for his academic work.

He soon turned to fiction, humour and short reports to supplement (and ultimately exceed) his regular income. His stories, first published in magazines in Canada and the United States and later in novel form became extremely popular around the world. It was said in 1911 that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada.

During the summer months, he lived at Old Brewery Bay in Orillia, across Lake Simcoe from where he was raised and also bordering Lake Couchiching. The cottage is now a museum and National Historic Site, and he also let a small farm. Gossip provided by the local barber, Jefferson Short, provided Leacock with the material which would become Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), set in the thinly-disguised Mariposa.

Death and tributes

Leacock was predeceased by his wife and survived by his son Stephen Jr. In accordance with his wishes, after his death due to throat cancer, he was cremated and buried at Sibbald Point in Georgina Township near his boyhood home and across Lake Simcoe from his adult summer home.

Shortly after his death, Barbara Nimmo, his niece, literary executor and benefactor, published two major posthumous works: Last Leaves (1945) and The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946). His physical legacy was less treasured, and his abandoned summer cottage became derelict. It was rescued from oblivion when it was declared a National Historic Site in 1958 and ever since has operated as a museum called the Stephen Leacock Memorial Home.

In 1947, the Stephen Leacock Award was created to recognize the best in Canadian literary humour. In the 1960s, McGill University named an arts building and a library room after its well-known professor. In 1969, the centennial of his birth, Canada Post issued a six cent stamp with his image on it. The following year, the Stephen Leacock Centennial Committee had a plaque erected at his English birthplace and a mountain in the Yukon was named after him.

A public high school in Scarborough, Ontario, Stephen Leacock Collegiate, is named after the author. It is joined to John Buchan Elementary School.

A theatre in Keswick, Ontario is also named after him.

Bibliography

Elements of Political Science (1906)
Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government (1907)
Practical Political Economy (1910)
Literary Lapses (1910)
Nonsense Novels (1911)
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Behind the Beyond (1913)
Adventurers of the Far North (1914)
The Dawn of Canadian History (1914)
The Mariner of St. Malo (1914)
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914)
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)
Essays and Literary Sudies (1916)
Further Foolishness (1916)
Frenzied Fiction (1918)
The Hohenzollerns in America (1919)
Winsome Winnie (1920)
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Injustice (1920)
My Discovery of England (1922)
College Days (1923)
Over the Footlights (1923)
The Garden of Folly (1924)
Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks (1926)
Winnowed Wisdom (1926)
Short Circuits (1928)
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman (1929)
Economic Prosperity in the British Empire (1930)
The Economic Prosperity of the British Empire (1931)
The Dry Pickwick (1932)
Afternoons in Utopia (1932)
Mark Twain (1932)
Charles Dickens: His Life and Work (1933)
Humour: Its Theory and Technique, with Examples and Samples (1935)
Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill (1936)
Funny Pieces (1936)
The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936)
Here Are My Lectures (1937)
Humour and Humanity (1937)
My Discovery of the West (1937)
Model Memoirs (1938)
Too Much College (1939)
The British Empire (1940)
Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (1941)
My Remarkeable Uncle (1942)
Our Heritage of Liberty (1942)
Montreal: Seaport and City (1942)
Happy Stories (1943)
How to Write (1943)
While There Is Time (1945)
Last Leaves (1945)
The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946)

Quotable quotes

Professor Leacock has made more people laugh with the written word than any other living author. One may say he is one of the greatest jesters, the greatest humorist of the age. – A. P. Herbert

Mr Leacock is as 'bracing' as the seaside place of John Hassall's famous poster. His wisdom is always humorous, and his humour is always wise. – Sunday Times

He is still inimitable. No one, anywhere in the world, can reduce a thing to ridicule with such few short strokes. He is the Grock of literature. – Evening Standard

References

Legate, David M. Stephen Leacock: A Biography. 1970. Doubleday, Toronto.
Moritz, Albert & Theresa. Leacock: A Biography. 1985. Stoddart Publishing, Toronto.
Ferris, Ina. 1978. "The Face in the Window: Sunshine Sketches Reconsidered," Studies in Canadian Literature University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. ^*.

External links

Stephen Leacock, A Biographical Sketch National Library of Canada
Brief Chronology of Leacock's Life National Library of Canada
Chronology of Leacock's writings National Library of Canada
Commentary on Sunshine Sketches National Library of Canada
Online Books by Stephen Leacock (Gutenberg texts)
Ontario Plaques - Stephen Butler Leacock

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