Page 84 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Unit 5: Are the Rich Happy? by Stephen Leacock

Leacock was both a partisan Conservative and social conservative. He opposed giving women Notes
the right to vote, hated non-Anglo-Saxon immigration and supported and reinforced the
introduction of social welfare legislation. He was a faithful champion of the British Empire and
the Imperial Federation Movement and went on lecture tours to take the cause forward.
Even though he was thought of as a candidate for Dominion elections by his party, the party
failed to invite the author, lecturer, and maverick to stand for election. However, he would
stump for local candidates at his summer home.

5.1.3 Literary Life

Early in his career, Stephen started writing fiction, humour, and short reports to supplement and
finally exceed his regular income. His stories which were first published in magazines in
the United States and Canada and later in novel form became very famous world-wide. In 1911,
it was believed that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than of Canada. Also, Leacock
became the most admired humourist in the English-speaking world between the years 1915 and
1925.
A humourist mainly admired by Leacock was Robert Benchley from New York. Stephen Leacock
opened correspondence with Benchley, inspiring him in his work and importuning him to
assemble his work and form a book. Benchley did so in 1922, and identified the troubles from
north of the border.
Towards the end of his life, the American comedian Jack Benny narrated how he was introduced
to Stephen Leacock’s text by Groucho Marx when they were both young vaudeville comedians.
Benny acknowledged Leacock’s impact and, fifty years after first reading his works, still
considered Leacock one of his favourite comic writers. He was confused as to why Leacock’s
work was no longer popular in the United States.
In summers, Stephen Leacock lived at Old Brewery Bay, his summer estate in Orillia, across
Lake Simcoe from where he was raised and also bordering Lake Couchiching. Old Brewery Bay
which was a working farm is now a museum and National Historic Site of Canada. As told by
the local barber, Jefferson Short, Leacock got the material which would become Sunshine Sketches
of a Little Town (1912), set in the thinly-disguised Mariposa.
Although he wrote scholarly articles and books related to his field of study, his political theory
is almost forgotten. In 1937, Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce
Medal, supposedly 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 Stephen Leacock’s two 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 LEACOCK (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
Contd....

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