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Elective English—IV

Notes
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. 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
small-town 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.

5.1.4 Memorial Medal for Humour

The Stephen Leacock Associates is a foundation hired to preserve the literary legacy of Stephen
Leacock, and manage the annual award of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
This award is a prestigious honour, given to encourage Canadian humour writing. This award
is given to the person who is best in Canadian humour writing. Instituted in 1946, the foundation
awarded the first Leacock Medal in 1947. The presentation happens in June each year at the
Stephen Leacock Award Dinner, at the Geneva Park Conference Centre in Orillia, Ontario.

5.1.5 Personal Life

Leacock married Beatrix (“Trix”) Hamilton, niece of Sir Henry Pellatt (who had built Casa Loma,
the largest castle in North America) in 1900. In 1915 which is 15 years after their marriage — the
couple had their only child, Stephen Lushington Leacock. While Leacock doted on his kid, it
became obvious early on that “Stevie” suffered from a lack of growth hormone. Growing to
become only four feet tall, the boy had a love-hate relationship with Leacock, who treated him
like a child. In 1925, his wife Beatrix Hamilton died because of breast cancer.
One of Canada’s leading humour writers, Stephen Leacock was born in England in 1869. His
father, Peter Leacock, and his mother, Agnes Emma Butler Leacock, both belonged to affluent
families. The family, consisting of eleven children, settled in Canada in 1876, living on a one
hundred-acre farm in Sutton, Ontario. There Stephen Leacock was home-schooled until he joined
Upper Canada College, Toronto. He then entered the University of Toronto to study literature
and languages. 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.

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