2 - Tory Humanism, Ironic Humor, and Satire: Stephen Leacock, “The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias” (1912)

Summary

In 1910, Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), a one-time schoolmaster who had become a professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, started a second, complementary career as a creative writer with the publication of Literary Lapses, a collection of short and often humorous sketches, anecdotes, and stories he had previously published in various American magazines. Born in Hampshire, England, Stephen Leacock had come to Canada at the age of six. His career as a writer was the first major Canadian literary success story, with Leacock becoming the first Canadian author of world fame.

Leacock made a significant contribution to Canadian literature as a writer of short stories and as a humorist only after he had already published a number of scholarly works. His first book, Elements of Political Science (1906), quickly became a standard textbook in its field and was only one of his altogether more than sixty books, which, in addition to studies in political science, included fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Leacock was an exceptionally prolific creative writer. In 1911 he published Nonsense Novels, a collection of ten parodic short stories, and one year later what is generally regarded as his masterpiece, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. With this, as with his subsequent collections of short stories, he took up existing and formed new traditions of the Canadian short story as well as of humorous writing. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town was the book that made Leacock world-famous. This collection of interconnected short stories, all set in the fictitious small Ontario town of Mariposa, is a quintessentially Canadian book that takes up and carries on the Anglo-Canadian tradition of the short-story cycle, which had already been practiced successfully by Duncan Campbell Scott in The Village of Viger (1896) and would later also be used by Jessie Georgina Sime, Frederick Philip Grove, Emily Carr, George Elliott, Norman Levine, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro, to name but a few. Moreover, Leacock's Sunshine Sketches are one of the foremost examples of Canadian literary humor in short fiction, and they continue the tradition of such illustrious forerunners as Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Thomas McCulloch (Rasporich 1982, 227–28, 236–40), a tradition that would later be taken up by such Canadian humorists as Antonine Maillet, Paul Hiebert, Robert Kroetsch, Jack Hodgins, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, and Thomas King.