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Unit 11: The Conjurers Revenge by Stephen Leacock

grandson of Admiral James Richard Dacres and a brother of Sir Thomas Dacres Butler, Usher of Notes
the Black Rod. Leacock’s mother, Agnes, was the half-sister of Major Thomas Adair Butler, who
won the Victoria Cross during the Indian Mutiny.
Peter’s father, Thomas Murdock Leacock J.P., had already fostered plans to eventually send his
son out to the colonies, but when he discovered that at age eighteen Peter had married Agnes
Butler without his permission, almost immediately he shipped them out to South Africa where
he had bought them a farm. The farm in South Africa failed and Stephen’s parents returned
to Hampshire, where he was born. When Stephen was six, he came out with his family came
to Canada, where they settled on a farm near the village of Sutton, Ontario, and the shores
of Lake Simcoe. Their farm in the township of Georgina in York County was also unsuccessful,
and the family was kept afloat by money sent from Leacock’s paternal grandfather. His father
became an alcoholic; in the fall of 1878, he travelled west to Manitoba with his brother E.P.
Leacock (the subject of Stephen’s book My Remarkable Uncle, published in 1942), leaving behind
Agnes and the children.
Stephen Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent by his grandfather to the elite private
school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, also attended by his older brothers, where he was
top of the class and was chosen as head boy. Leacock graduated in 1887, and returned home to
find that his father had returned from Manitoba. Soon after, his father left the family again and
never returned. There is some disagreement about what happened to Peter Leacock; some suggest
that he went to live in Argentina, while other sources indicate that he moved to Nova Scotia and
changed his name to Lewis.
In 1887, seventeen-year-old Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto,
where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity. His first year was bankrolled by a small
scholarship, but Leacock found he could not return to his studies the following year because of
financial difficulties. He left university to work as a teacher — an occupation he disliked
immensely — at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally in Toronto. As a teacher at Upper Canada
College, his alma mater, he was able simultaneously to 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.

Task Give a speech on Stephen Leacock and his works.

11.1.2 Academic and Political Life

Disillusioned with teaching, in 1899 he began graduate studies at the University of
Chicago under Thorstein Veblen, where he received a doctorate in political science and political
economy. He moved from Chicago, Illinois to Montreal, Quebec, where he eventually became
the William Dow Professor of Political Economy and long-time chair of the Department of
Economics and Political Science 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 giving women
the right to vote, disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration and supported the introduction of
social welfare legislation. He was a staunch champion of the British Empire and the Imperial
Federation Movement and went on lecture tours to further the cause.

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