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Elective English—IV

Notes Although he was considered as a candidate for Dominion elections by 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.

11.1.3 Literary Life

Early in his career, Leacock 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. Also,
between the years 1915 and 1925, Leacock was the most popular humourist in the English-
speaking world.

A humourist particularly admired by Leacock was Robert Benchley from New York. Leacock
opened correspondence with Benchley, encouraging him in his work and importuning him to
compile his work into a book. Benchley did so in 1922, and acknowledged the nagging from
north of the border.

Near the end of his life, the American comedian Jack Benny recounted how he had been introduced
to Leacock’s writing by Groucho Marx when they were both young vaudeville comedians. Benny
acknowledged Leacock’s influence and, fifty years after first reading him, still considered Leacock
one of his favourite comic writers. He was puzzled as to why Leacock’s work was no longer well
known in the United States.
During the summer months, Leacock lived at Old Brewery Bay, his summer estate in Orillia,
across Lake Simcoe from where he was raised and also bordering Lake Couchiching. A working
farm, Old Brewery Bay is now a museum and National Historic Site of Canada. 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.
Although he wrote learned articles and books related to his field of study, his political theory is
now all but forgotten. Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal in
1937, nominally for his academic work.

“The proper punishment for the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and
the Muckendorfs, and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should be made to work; and
not made to work in the glittering and glorious sense, as generals and chiefs of staff, and
legislators, and land-barons, but in the plain and humble part of labourers looking for a job.
(Leacock 1919: 9)”

Notes His 2 masterpieces are SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN (1912)
and ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH (1914) Sunshine Sketches of a Little
Town, by Stephen (Toronto, New York, London, 1912), is a series of vignettes dramatizing
the comedy of day-to-day life in Mariposa, a bustling and big-time small town on the
shores of the magnificent Lake Wissanotti. Thrumming with self-importance, endowed
with a solemnly quirky populace, Mariposa is modelled on ORILLIA, Ont; for generations
of readers, it has also been the centre of Leacock’s fondest and most amusing portrait of
small-town life. Leacock’s humour depends on his gift for creating a straight-faced
storyteller, an earnestly deadpan narrator who cannot imagine what his readers are
laughing about. Nowhere is this gift more apparent than in Leacock’s warm but gently
mocking scrutiny of both the foibles and pretensions of his Mariposan Canadians.
Contd...

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