Aristocratic Education

Stephen P H Butler Leacock FRSC was born on the 30th December 1869 in Swanmore, near Southampton, England, the third of eleven children. The family emigrated to Canada in 1876 to live on a 100-acre farm in Sutton, Ontario. There Leacock was home-schooled and later enrolled into the elite private school Upper Canada College in Toronto. Academically he was very strong and enrolled at the University of Toronto to study languages and literature. He left there after his alcoholic father abandoned the family and finances were too stretched to continue his attendance. He now enrolled in a three-month course at Strathroy Collegiate Institute to become a qualified high school teacher and with it a regular income. Leacock published humorous articles in many Canadian and US magazines but his real passion was economics and political theory. In 1899 he enrolled for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago and earned his PhD in 1903. His marriage to Beatrix Hamilton produced a single child 15 years later. Over time father and son developed a love-hate relationship, partially caused by his son’s diminutive stature of only four feet. He accepted a post at McGill University and kept it until he retired in 1936. His work ‘Elements of Political Science’, was adopted as a standard textbook for two decades and was also his most profitable. He now also began public speaking and lecturing. In 1910, he privately printed some articles as ‘Literary Lapses’. It was then released by a recognised publisher, and he became a commercially successful writer. His collections of light-hearted whimsy, parody, nonsense, and satire were now frequently published along with biographies and several award-winning volumes on Canada. Politically Leacock was a difficult creature. He opposed women’s right to vote, was a champion of Empire but advocated social welfare legislation and wealth redistribution, but he often caused friction with his racist views. Leacock has been forgotten as an economist, but it’s often said that in 1911 more people had heard of him than had heard of Canada. For the decade after 1915 Leacock was the most popular humorist in the English-speaking world. Stephen Leacock died on 28th March 1944 of throat cancer in Toronto, Canada. He was 74.