Stephen Butler Leacock was born on December 30, 1869, and died on March 28, 1944. He was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Between 1915 and 1925, he was the most well-known English-speaking humorist in the world.
Early life
Stephen Leacock was born on December 30, 1869, in Swanmore, a village near Southampton in southern England. He was the third of eleven children born to Peter Leacock (1834–1940), who grew up at Oak Hill on the Isle of Wight. This estate was purchased by Peter’s grandfather after returning from Madeira, where his family earned money from plantations and a wine business started in 1760. Stephen’s mother, Agnes, was born in Soberton. She was the youngest daughter of Rev. Stephen Butler, who was married to Caroline Linton Palmer. Rev. Butler owned Bury Lodge, an estate overlooking the village of Hambledon, Hampshire. Stephen Butler, after whom Leacock was named, was the maternal grandson of Admiral James Richard Dacres and a brother of Sir Thomas Dacres Butler, who held the title of Usher of the Black Rod. Agnes was also the half-sister of Major Thomas Adair Butler, who received the Victoria Cross during the siege of Lucknow in India.
Peter’s father, Thomas Murdock Leacock, planned to send his son to the colonies. However, when Peter married Agnes without permission at age eighteen, Thomas sent them to South Africa, where he had bought a farm. The farm failed, and the family returned to Hampshire, where Stephen was born. At age six, the family moved to Canada, settling on a farm near Sutton, Ontario, and near Lake Simcoe. Their farm in Georgina also failed, and the family received money from Leacock’s paternal grandfather to survive. Peter, Stephen’s father, became an alcoholic. In the fall of 1878, Peter traveled west to Manitoba with his brother E.P. Leacock (the subject of Stephen’s book My Remarkable Uncle, published in 1942), leaving Agnes and the children behind.
Stephen Leacock, who showed clear intelligence, was sent by his grandfather to Upper Canada College in Toronto, an elite private school attended by his older brothers. He was the top student in his class and was chosen as head boy. Leacock graduated in 1887 and returned home to find his father had returned from Manitoba. Soon after, his father left the family again and never returned. There is disagreement about Peter Leacock’s later life. Some say he moved to Argentina, while others claim he relocated to Nova Scotia and changed his name to Lewis.
In 1887, seventeen-year-old Leacock began studying at University College, part of the University of Toronto, where he joined the Zeta Psi fraternity. He received a small scholarship to pay for his first year but could not return to school the next year due to financial difficulties. He left university to work as a teacher in Strathroy, Uxbridge, and finally Toronto, a job he strongly disliked. While teaching at Upper Canada College, his alma mater, he also attended classes at the University of Toronto part-time and earned his degree in 1891. During this time, his first writing was published in The Varsity, a campus newspaper.
Academic and political life
In 1899, he left teaching and began advanced studies at the University of Chicago under Thorstein Veblen. He earned a doctorate in political science and political economy. Later, he moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Montreal, Quebec, where he became the William Dow Professor of Political Economy and led the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University for many years.
He worked closely with Sir Arthur Currie, who was the former commander of the Canadian Corps during the Great War and principal of McGill University from 1919 until his death in 1933. Currie had once been a student who observed Leacock teaching in Strathroy in 1888. In 1936, Leacock was forced to retire by the McGill Board of Governors. This outcome was unlikely if Currie had still been alive.
Leacock supported conservative political ideas and opposed giving women the right to vote. His views on non-British immigration were mixed: he wrote in favor of expanding immigration beyond Anglo-Saxons before World War II but later opposed it near the end of the war. He strongly supported the British Empire and the Imperial Federation Movement, traveling to promote these causes. Despite his conservative beliefs, he supported laws that provided social welfare and redistributed wealth. Today, some people consider him a complex and controversial figure due to his views and writings. He believed in the superiority of the English and sometimes held racist attitudes toward Black people and Indigenous peoples.
Although Prime Minister R. B. Bennett invited him to run in the 1935 Dominion election, Leacock refused. However, he supported local Conservative candidates during his summer vacations.
Leacock is not widely remembered as an economist. In 1938, Harold Innis, a professor at the University of Toronto, gave a lecture honoring Leacock as a founder of Canadian social studies. This lecture was later published as an obituary in 1944 in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. Innis focused more on Leacock’s contributions to social studies and downplayed his work in economics and humorous writings. For many years, Leacock used John Stuart Mill’s book Principles of Political Economy in his McGill course called Elements of Political Economy. His writings on political science became less detailed over time, which may explain why they are not well remembered by the public or in academic circles.
Literary life
At the start of his career, Leacock used fiction, humor, and short reports to add to (and eventually surpass) his regular income. His stories, first published in magazines in Canada and the United States and later in book form, became very popular worldwide. Between 1915 and 1925, Leacock was the most well-known humorist in English-speaking countries.
A writer who admired Leacock was Robert Benchley from New York. Leacock wrote to Benchley, offering support for his work and urging him to collect his writings into a book. Benchley did this in 1922 and credited Leacock for encouraging him.
Near the end of his life, the American comedian Jack Benny shared how he was introduced to Leacock’s writing by Groucho Marx when they were both young vaudeville performers. Benny recognized Leacock’s influence and, fifty years after first reading his work, still considered him one of his favorite comic writers. He was confused about why Leacock’s writing was no longer widely known in the United States.
During the summer, Leacock lived at Old Brewery Bay, his summer home in Orillia, located across Lake Simcoe from where he grew up and also near Lake Couchiching. A working farm, Old Brewery Bay is now a museum and a National Historic Site of Canada. Stories shared by the local barber, Jefferson Short, inspired Leacock to write Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), which is set in a town very similar to Mariposa.
Leacock received the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, which was given for his academic work.
The Stephen Leacock Associates is an organization created to protect the literary work of Stephen Leacock and to give the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor each year. This award is a respected honor meant to encourage Canadian humor writing and is given to the best example of Canadian humor writing. The organization was started in 1946, and the first medal was awarded in 1947. The award ceremony takes place in June at the Stephen Leacock Award Dinner, held at the Geneva Park Conference Centre in Orillia, Ontario.
Personal life
Stephen Leacock was born in England in 1869. His father, Peter Leacock, and his mother, Agnes Emma Butler Leacock, came from wealthy families. The family, which had eleven children, moved to Canada in 1876 and settled on a 100-acre farm in Sutton, Ontario. Stephen was taught at home until he joined Upper Canada College in Toronto. He became the head boy in 1887 and then entered the University of Toronto to study languages and literature. He finished two years of study in one year but had to leave the university when his father left the family. Instead, he took a three-month course at Strathroy Collegiate Institute to become a qualified high-school teacher.
His first job was at Uxbridge High School in Uxbridge, Ontario, but he soon worked at Upper Canada College, where he stayed from 1889 to 1899. During this time, he continued part-time studies at the University of Toronto and graduated with a B.A. in 1891. However, his interests shifted toward economics and political theory, and in 1899, he began postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago, earning a PhD in 1903.
In 1900, Leacock married Beatrix Hamilton, the niece of Sir Henry Pellatt, who 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. Leacock loved his son, but the boy, nicknamed "Stevie," grew only to four feet tall due to a lack of growth hormone. He had a complicated relationship with his father, who often treated him like a child. Beatrix died in 1925 from breast cancer. His son remained unmarried and died in Sutton in 1974.
Leacock worked at McGill University until he retired in 1936. In 1906, he wrote Elements of Political Science, a textbook that became a standard for 20 years and was his most profitable book. He also gave public speeches and lectures. In 1907, he took a year off to speak across Canada about national unity. He continued speaking on national unity and the British Empire for the rest of his life.
Leacock began writing humorous articles for the Toronto magazine Grip in 1894. He published many of these in Canadian and American magazines. In 1910, he privately published a collection called Literary Lapses. A British publisher, John Lane, noticed the book and published it in London and New York, helping Leacock become a successful writer. Other books, such as Nonsense Novels (1911) and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), became popular. John Lane introduced the cartoonist Annie Fish to illustrate Leacock’s 1913 book Behind the Beyond. His writing style was similar to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. His book My Discovery of England (1922) showed his lighter side, while Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) used humor to criticize city life. He continued writing humorous sketches, mixing whimsy, parody, and satire without bitterness.
Leacock was very popular in Canada, the United States, and Britain. Later in life, he wrote about humor and published biographies of Twain and Dickens. After retiring, he traveled to western Canada, which 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 received the Mark Twain medal and honorary doctorates. He wrote other nonfiction books about Canada and began writing an autobiography. Leacock died of throat cancer in Toronto in 1944. A prize for the best humor writing in Canada was named after him, and his house in Orillia, near Lake Couchiching, became the Stephen Leacock Museum.
Death and tributes
Leacock was survived by his son, Stevie (Stephen Lushington Leacock, 1915–1974), after his wife, Beatrix, died of breast cancer in 1925. He died from throat cancer and was buried in the St. George the Martyr Churchyard (St. George's Church, Sibbald Point), Sutton, Ontario, as he wished.
Shortly after his death, Barbara Nimmo, his niece, literary executor, and benefactor, published two major works after his death: Last Leaves (1945) and The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946). His summer cottage fell into disrepair and was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1958. It now operates as a museum called the Stephen Leacock Museum National Historic Site.
In 1947, the Stephen Leacock Award was created to recognize the best in Canadian literary humor. In 1969, Canada Post issued a six-cent stamp featuring his image to mark the centennial of his birth. The following year, the Stephen Leacock Centennial Committee placed a plaque at his birthplace in England and named a mountain in Yukon after him.
Several buildings in Canada are named after Leacock, including the Stephen Leacock Building at McGill University, Stephen Leacock Public School in Ottawa, a theatre in Keswick, Ontario, and a school called Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute in Toronto.
Adaptations
Two short stories by Stephen Leacock, "My Financial Career" and "The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones," were adapted into animated films by Gerald Potterton for the National Film Board of Canada. A television series called Sunshine Sketches, based on Leacock's book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, was first broadcast on CBC Television in 1952–1953. It was the first English-language dramatic series shown on Canadian television, airing on the night television was first broadcast in Toronto. In 2012, a film version of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town was shown on CBC Television to mark the 75th anniversary of the CBC and the 100th anniversary of Leacock's original collection of stories. This version included actor Gordon Pinsent playing an older version of Leacock. In the summer of 2018, a live musical theatre version of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town created by Craig Cassils and Robin Richardson was first shown at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words and the RuBarb TheatreFest in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Canadian actor John Stark was well known for performing a one-person show titled An Evening with Stephen Leacock, which ran for a long time. A recording of his performance, released by Tapestry Records in 1982, was nominated for a Juno Award for Comedy Album of the Year at the Juno Awards in 1982. Stark also later made a television film version of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and created a stage musical based on Leacock's short story "The Great Election."