Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (2 page)

Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time
. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, 1932.

Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
. London: John Lane, 1914.

Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government
. Toronto: Morang & Company, 1907.

Behind the Beyond and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge
. London: John Lane, 1913.

The Best of Leacock
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1958. Edited and introduced by J.B. Priestley.

The Boy I Left Behind Me
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1946.

The British Empire: Its Structure, Its History, Its Strength
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1940.

Canada and the Sea
. Montreal: Alvah M. Beatty, 1944.

Canada: The Foundations of Its Future
. Montreal: Gazette Printing Company, 1941.

The Case Against Social Catastrophe
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1945.

Charles Dickens: His Life and Work
. London: Peter Davies, 1933.

College Days
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1923.

The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada and the Coming of the White Man
. Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Company, 1914.

The Dry Pickwick and Other Incongruities
. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1932.

Economic Prosperity in the British Empire
. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, 1930.

Elements of Political Science
. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906.

Essays and Literary Studies
. New York: John Lane Company, 1916.

Frenzied Fiction
. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918.

Funny Pieces: A Book of Random Sketches
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1936.

Further Foolishness: Sketches and Satires on the Follies of the Day
. New York: John Lane Company, 1916.

The Garden of Folly
. Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1924.

The Greatest Pages of American Humor
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1936.

Happy Stories, Just to Laugh At
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943.

Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1936.

Here Are My Lectures
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1937.

The Hohenzollerns in America; with the Bolsheviks in Berlin and Other Impossibilities
. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1919.

How to Write
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943.

Humour and Humanity: An Introduction to the Study of Humour
. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937.

Humour: Its Theory and Technique
. London: John Lane, 1935.

The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, with Other Such Futurities
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1929.

Last Leaves
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1945.

Laugh Parade: A New Collection of the Wit and Humor of Stephen Leacock
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1940.

Laugh with Leacock: An Anthology of the Best Works of Stephen Leacock
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1930.

Lincoln Frees the Slaves
. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1934.

Literary Lapses
. Montreal: Gazette Printing Company, 1910.

Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks
. London & Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1926.

The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier
. Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Company, 1914.

Mark Twain
. London: Peter Davies, 1932.

Model Memoirs and Other Sketches from Simple to Serious
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1938.

Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
. New York: John Lane Company, 1915.

My Discovery of England
. London: John Lane, 1922.

My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West in Canada
. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1937.

Montreal: Seaport and City
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1942.

My Remarkable Uncle, and Other Sketches
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1942.

Nonsense Novels
. London: John Lane, 1911.

Our Heritage of Liberty: Its Origin, Its Achievement, Its Crisis: A Book for War Time
. London: John Lane, 1942.

Over the Footlights
. Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1923.

The Pursuit of Knowledge: A Discussion of Freedom and Compulsion in Education
. New York: Liveright Publishing, 1934.

“Q”: A Farce in One Act
(with Basil Macdonald). New York: S. French, 1915.

Short Circuits
. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, 1928.

Too Much College; or, Education Eating Up Life
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1939.

The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice
. New York: John Lane Company, 1920.

Wet Wit and Dry Humour: Distilled from the Pages of Stephen Leacock
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931.

Winnowed Wisdom: A New Book of Humour
. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1926.

Winsome Winnie, and Other New Nonsense Novels
. Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1920.

The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones
. National Film Board of Canada, 1983. 7 minutes, 48 seconds, colour, animated. Directed and animated by Gerald Potterton; voice and narration by Mavor Moore.

How We Kept Mother’s Day
. National Film Board of Canada, 1994. 9 minutes, 53 seconds, colour, animated. Directed and animated by Eva Szasz; voice and narration by Brian Richardson.

Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas
. National Film Board of Canada, 1995. 8 minutes, 38 seconds, colour, animated. Directed by Eva Szasz; voice and narration by Alan Maitland.

My Financial Career
. National Film Board of Canada, 1962. Distributed by Sterling Educational Films. 6 minutes, 30 seconds, colour, animated. Directed by Gerald Potterton; animated by Gerald Potterton and Grant Munro; voice and narration by Stanley Jackson.

This Penguin Classics edition of
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
has been reset from its first Canadian edition, published by Bell and Cockburn in 1912.

Stephen Leacock began work on
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
in early 1912, after he’d been commissioned by the
Montreal Star
to write a series of connected pieces. The first of these appeared in the
Star
on February 17, with the series continuing into June on alternating Saturdays. For the book version, Leacock added a preface and reorganized some of the sketches; he also altered the names of various characters that were based on real people. The first English edition was published by John Lane, The Bodley Head in August 1912. The American and Canadian editions appeared that September.

I know no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to the extenuating circumstances of his life.

I was born at
Swanmoor, Hants
, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not aware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at the time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them. My father took up a farm near
Lake Simcoe
, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired men and, in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the next year’s crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm labourers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.

I was educated at
Upper Canada College
, Toronto, of which I was head boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where I graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in the acquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing of the outside world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten the languages, and found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words I was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took to school teaching as the only trade I could find that need neither experience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff of Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profound sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled to spend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst paid profession in the world. I have noted that of my pupils, those who seemed the laziest and the least enamoured of books are now rising to eminence at the bar, in business, and in public life; the really promising boys who took all the prizes are now able with difficulty to earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck hand on a canal boat.

In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowing enough money to live upon for a few months, and went to the
University of Chicago
to study economics and political science. I was soon appointed to a Fellowship in political economy, and by means of this and some temporary employment by
McGill University
, I survived until I took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree is that the recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life, and is pronounced completely full. After this, no new ideas can be imparted to him.

From this time, and since my marriage, which had occurred at this period, I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as lecturer in Political Science, and later as head of the department of Economics and Political Science. As this position is one of the prizes of my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate. The emolument is so high as to place me distinctly above the policemen, postmen, street-car conductors, and other salaried officials of the neighbourhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the business men of the city on terms of something like equality. In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a business man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business man can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.

I have written a number of things in connection with my college life—a book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so on. I belong to the
Political Science Association of America
, to the Royal Colonial Institute, and to the
Church of England.
These things, surely, are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connection with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the
Union of South Africa
, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the
Turco-Italian war
, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance. In Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of national ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.

Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called “Literary Lapses” and the other “Nonsense Novels.” Each of these is published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings and sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for many years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fell back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but the intervention of the linotype machine—or rather, of the kind of men who operate it—made it possible to print these books. Even now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books should never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health.

Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written “Alice in Wonderland” than the whole
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from
Lake Superior
to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope.