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Unit 11: The Conjurers Revenge by Stephen Leacock
Notes
Arguably Stephen Leacock’s funniest book (1914), Arcadian Adventures is certainly one
of his best and most popular works. It was published two years after SUNSHINE SKETCHES
OF A LITTLE TOWN (1912), and numerous parallels between the two books in overall
structure and detail make it a companion piece. The short story cycle portrays the full
flowering in a large, unnamed American city (actually based on Montréal) of the seeds of
corrupt materialism and individualism already detected in smalltown Mariposa. The
plutocrats who inhabit Plutoria Avenue pursue money and power, and unrestricted
capitalism corrupts the city’s social, religious, educational, and political
institutions. Arcadian Adventures exposes to laughter and ridicule the human greed,
hypocrisy and pride behind such things as stock-market scams, the rage for mystical
experience, the back-to-nature vogue, financially expedient ecumenism and muck-raking
politics. Unlike Sunshine Sketches, Arcadian Adventures shows sympathy not for those it
satirizes but only for their hapless victims. In its bitter satire of the “conspicuous
consumption” and leisure of the “idle rich,” it shows the influence of The Theory of the
Leisure Class (1899) by Thorstein Veblen, Leacock’s teacher at the University of Chicago.
As the book proceeds it becomes progressively darker; in its final chapter, “The Great
Fight for Clean Government,” the triumph of plutocratic totalitarianism grimly
foreshadows the violence and tyranny of the 1920s and 1930s.
11.1.4 Memorial Medal for Humour
The Stephen Leacock Associates is a foundation chartered to preserve the literary legacy of
Stephen Leacock, and oversee the annual award of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for
Humour. It is a prestigious honour, given to encourage Canadian humour writing and is awarded
for the best in Canadian humour writing. The foundation was instituted in 1946 and awarded the
first Leacock Medal in 1947. The presentation occurs in June each year at the Stephen Leacock
Award Dinner, at the Geneva Park Conference Centre in Orillia, Ontario.
11.1.5 Personal Life
In 1900 Leacock married Beatrix (“Trix”) Hamilton, niece of Sir Henry Pellatt (who had built Casa
Loma, the largest castle in North America). In 1915 — after 15 years of marriage — the couple
had their only child, Stephen Lushington Leacock. While Leacock doted on the boy, it became
apparent early on that “Stevie” suffered from a lack of growth hormone. Growing to be only
four feet tall, he had a love-hate relationship with Leacock, who tended to treat him like a child.
His wife Beatrix Hamilton died in 1925 due to breast cancer.
Stephen Leacock, one of Canada’s leading humour writers, was born in England in 1869. His
father, Peter Leacock, and his mother, Agnes Emma Butler Leacock, were both from well-to-do
families. The family, eventually to consist of eleven children, immigrated to Canada in 1876,
settling on a one hundred-acre farm in Sutton, Ontario. There Stephen was home-schooled until
he was enrolled in Upper Canada College, Toronto. He became the head boy in 1887, and then
entered the University of Toronto to study languages and literature. Despite completing two
years of study in one year, he was forced to leave the university because his father had abandoned
the family. Instead, Leacock enrolled in a three-month course at Strathroy Collegiate Institute to
become a qualified high school teacher.
Did u know? He grew up on a farm near Lake Simcoe, Ont, and was educated at Upper
Canada College (where he taught for 9 years), the University of Toronto and the University
th
of Chicago, where he studied economics and political science (PhD 1903). On the 15 of
December, 1925, Leacock’s wife Beatrix (Trix) died of breast cancer.
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