Stephen Leacock
Stephen Leacock | |
---|---|
Born | Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock 30 December 1869 Swanmore, Hampshire, England |
Died | 28 March 1944 Toronto, Ontario, Canada | (aged 74)
Language | English |
Education | Upper Canada College |
Alma mater | University of Toronto University of Chicago |
Genre | Humour |
Subject | Sciences |
Notable works | Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich, My financial career |
Notable awards | Lorne Pierce Medal, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada |
Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock
Early life
Stephen Leacock was born on 30 December 1869 in
Peter's father, Thomas Murdock Leacock J.P., had already conceived plans eventually to send his son out to the
Stephen Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent by his grandfather to the elite private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, also attended by his older brothers, where he was top of the class and was chosen as head boy. Leacock graduated in 1887, and returned home to find that his father had returned from Manitoba. Soon after, his father left the family again and never returned.[7] There is some disagreement about what happened to Peter Leacock. One scenario is that he went to live in Argentina,[8] while other sources indicate that he moved to Nova Scotia and changed his name to Lewis.[7]
In 1887, seventeen-year-old Leacock started at
Academic and political life
Disillusioned with teaching, in 1899 he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago under Thorstein Veblen,[7] where he received a doctorate in political science and political economy. He moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Montreal, Quebec, where he eventually became the William Dow Professor of Political Economy and long-time chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University.[7]
He was closely associated with Sir
Leacock was both a
Although Prime Minister R. B. Bennett asked him to be a candidate for the 1935 Dominion election, Leacock declined the invitation.[14] He did stump for local Conservative candidates at his summer home.
Leacock is mostly forgotten as an economist; "What was for many years a virtually final judgement of Leacock's scholarly work was pronounced by Harold Innis in a 1938 lecture at the University of Toronto. That lecture, which was intended to pay tribute to Leacock as one of the founders of Canadian social studies, was eventually published as his obituary in 1944 in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. Innis glossed over Leacock's economics in the article and largely dismissed his humorous writings. For a number of years, Leacock used John Stuart Mill's text, Principles of Political Economy, in his course at McGill entitled Elements of Political Economy. According to one source, Leacock's light-hearted and increasingly superficial approach with his political science writings ensured that they are largely forgotten by the public and in academic circles.[15]
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. Between the years 1915 and 1925, Leacock was the most popular humourist in the English-speaking world.[1][16][17][18]
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 US 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.[19] His works can be described as a balancing act between cutting satire and sheer absurdity. He also wrote extensively on his chosen fields of study, political science and political economy. Leacock was professor, but in his works he reflected with wit and ingenuity on everyday situations.
During the summer months, Leacock lived at Old Brewery Bay, his summer estate in
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 Habsburgs, 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)"
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 awarded for the best at 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.[6]
Personal life
Leacock 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 consisting 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.
His first appointment was at the then Uxbridge High School in Uxbridge, Ontario, but he was soon offered a post at Upper Canada College, where he remained from 1889 through 1899. At this time, he also resumed part-time studies at the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in 1891. However, Leacock's real interests were turning towards economics and political theory, and in 1899 he was accepted for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in 1903.
In 1900 Leacock married Beatrix 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 soon became apparent 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. Beatrix died in 1925 due to breast cancer. His son remained a bachelor and died in Sutton in 1974.
Leacock was offered a post at McGill University, where he remained until he retired in 1936. In 1906, he wrote Elements of Political Science, which remained a standard college textbook for the next twenty years and became his most profitable book. He also began public speaking and lecturing, and he took a year's leave of absence in 1907 to speak throughout Canada on the subject of national unity. He typically spoke on national unity or the British Empire for the rest of his life.
Leacock began submitting articles to the Toronto humour magazine Grip in 1894, and soon was publishing many humorous articles in Canadian and US magazines. In 1910, he privately published the best of these as Literary Lapses. The book was spotted by a British publisher,
Leacock was enormously popular not only in Canada but in the United States and Britain.[22] In later life, Leacock wrote on the art of humour writing and also published biographies of Twain and Dickens. After retirement, a lecture tour to western Canada led to his book My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West in Canada (1937), for which he won the Governor General's Award. He also won the Mark Twain medal and received a number of honorary doctorates. Other nonfiction books on Canadian topics followed and he began work on an autobiography. Leacock died of throat cancer in Toronto in 1944. A prize for the best humour writing in Canada was named after him, and his house at Orillia on the banks of Lake Couchiching became the Stephen Leacock Museum.
Death and tributes
Predeceased by Trix (who had died of breast cancer in 1925), Leacock was survived by son Stevie (Stephen Lushington Leacock (1915–1974). In accordance with his wishes, after his death from throat cancer, Leacock was buried in the St George the Martyr Churchyard (St. George's Church, Sibbald Point), Sutton, Ontario.
Shortly after his death, Barbara Nimmo, his niece,
In 1947, the
A number of buildings in Canada are named after Leacock, including the Stephen Leacock Building at McGill University,[23] Stephen Leacock Public School in Ottawa, a theatre in Keswick, Ontario, and a school Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute in Toronto.
Adaptations
Two Leacock short stories have been adapted as
Canadian stage actor
Stark also later produced a television film adaptation of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, as well as a stage musical based on Leacock's short story "The Great Election".Bibliography
Fiction and humour
- Literary Lapses (1910)
- Nonsense Novels (1911)
- Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
- Behind the Beyond (1913) – illustrated by Annie Fish.[21]
- Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914)
- Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)
- Further Foolishness (1916)
- Essays and Literary Studies (1916)
- Frenzied Fiction (1918)
- The Hohenzollerns in America(1919)
- Winsome Winnie (1920)
- My Discovery of England (1922)
- College Days (1923)
- Over the Footlights (1923)
- The Garden of Folly (1924)
- Winnowed Wisdom (1926)
- Short Circuits (1928)
- The Iron Man and the Tin Woman (1929)
- Laugh With Leacock (1930)
- The Dry Pickwick (1932)
- Afternoons in Utopia (1932)
- Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill (1936)
- Model Memoirs (1938)
- Too Much College (1939)
- Stephen Leacock's Laugh Parade: A new collection of the wit and humor of Stephen Leacock (1940)
- My Remarkable Uncle (1942)
- Happy Stories (1943)
- Last Leaves (1945)
- The Leacock Roundabout: A Treasury of the Best Works of Stephen Leacock (1946)
- The Man in Asbestos: An Allegory of the Future
Non-fiction
- Elements of Political Science (1906)
- Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government (1907)
- Practical Political Economy (1910)
- Adventurers of the Far North (1914)
- The Dawn of Canadian History (1914)
- The Mariner of St. Malo: a chronicle of the voyages of Jacques Cartier[31] (1914)
- The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (1920)
- Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks (1926)
- Economic Prosperity in the British Empire (1930)
- The Economic Prosperity of the British Empire (1931)
- Humour: Its Theory and Technique, with Examples and Samples (1935)
- The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936)
- Humour and Humanity (1937)
- Here Are My Lectures (1937)
- My Discovery of the West (1937)
- Our British Empire (1940)
- Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (1941)
- Our Heritage of Liberty (1942)
- Montreal: Seaport and City (1942)
- Canada and the Sea (1944)
- How to Write (1944)
- While There Is Time (1944)
- My Lost Dollar
Biography
- Mark Twain (1932)
- Charles Dickens: His Life and Work (1933)
Autobiography
- The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946)
Notes
- War And Humour [32]
- ^ a b Lynch, Gerald. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Foundation.
- ^ Inter. Simple Eng. (Fd. Board, Part II) (2012). My Financial Career. Lahore: Simple publishing. p. 569.
- ^ MacMillan 2009, p. 173.
- ^ "National Library of Canada: Stephen Leacock". Retrieved 10 December 2017.
- ^ My Uncle Stephen Leacock – Elizabeth Kimball, 1983
- ^ a b "stephenleacock.png". The Leacock Associates.
- ^ a b c d e Stephen Leacock (20 June 2011). "My Discovery of the West". Gutenberg.ca. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
- ^ Robert Fulford (7 February 2012). "CBC's new Stephen Leacock movie visits author's troubles". National Post. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
- ^ "My Discovery of the West, by Stephen Leacock".
- ISBN 9780771091698.
- ^ Kathryn Blaze Carlson (14 May 2011). "What happens when the heroes of the past meet the standards of today?". National Post. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
- ^ Francis, Daniel (23 August 2010). "Stephen Leacock's Dark Side". The Tyee. Retrieved 25 March 2019.
- ^ MacMillan 2009, pp. 114–116.
- ^ Curry, Ralph L. (1959). "Stephen Leacock, humorist and humanist".
- ISBN 978-0-7766-1694-0.
- ISBN 1-55002-216-4.
- ISBN 1-55002-521-X.
- ISBN 1-55111-049-0.
- ^ Anobile, Richard J., The Marx Bros. Scrapbook, New York, Outlet, 1973
- ^ "Stephen Leacock Museum". leacockmuseum.com.
- ^ a b Mark Bryant, 'Fish, (Harriet) Annie (1890–1964)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 7 April 2017
- ^ MacMillan 2009, pp. 2, 41.
- ^ "Stephen Leacock Building". McGill University. Retrieved 20 March 2017.
- ^ National Film Board of Canada. "My Financial Career". NFB.CA.
- ^ "National Film Board of Canada". nfb.ca.
- ^ "Canadian Communications Foundation – Fondation des Communications Canadiennes". broadcasting-history.ca. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016.
- ^ "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town". 2 March 2012.
- ^ Jordan Bosch (25 July 2018). "Sunshine Sketches in Moose Jaw". Moose Jaw Independent. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
- ^ Carole Corbeil, "Stark as Leacock is skillful and witty". The Globe and Mail, 23 April 1980.
- ^ Liam Lacey, "McKenzies vs. Rush for best album Juno". The Globe and Mail, 2 March 1982.
- ^ Leacock, Stephen (1 January 1914). The mariner of St. Malo : a chronicle of the voyages of Jacques Cartier. Toronto : Glasgow Brook.
- ^ Penguin Books "Canadian Accent" Published 1944, First Published by Dodd Mean and Company 1942
References
- Ferris, Ina (6 June 1978). "The Face in the Window: Sunshine Sketches Reconsidered". ISSN 1718-7850.
- Legate, David M. (1970). Stephen Leacock: A Biography. Toronto: OCLC 1036976678.
- OCLC 302060920.
- Moritz, A. F.; Moritz, Theresa Anne (1985). Leacock: A Biography. Toronto: OCLC 12555441.
External links
- Guide to the Stephen Butler Leacock Papers 1901-1946 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
Libraries
- National Library of Canada
- Leacock at "English-Canadian writers", Athabasca University, by Lee Skallerup, with add. links
Electronic editions
- Works by Stephen Leacock in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
- Works by Stephen Leacock at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Stephen Leacock at Faded Page (Canada)
- Works by or about Stephen Leacock at Internet Archive
- Works by Stephen Leacock at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Works by Stephen Leacock at Open Library
- Works by Stephen Leacock at The Online Books Page
- Works by Stephen Leacock at Digital Archive (Toronto Public Library)
- Sunshine Sketches Radio Play CBC Radio Adaptation 1946
- Index of twenty-nine Stephen Leacock stories read in Mister Ron's Basement Podcast