Stephen Leacock - A Short Story Collection

Stephen P H Butler Leacock FRSC was born on 30th December 1869 in Swanmore, near Southampton, England, the third of eleven children. The family emigrated to Canada in 1876, settling on a 100-acre farm in Sutton, Ontario. There he was home-schooled until, funded by his grandfather, he was enrolled into the elite Upper Canada College in Toronto. Academically he was very strong and thence proceeded on to the University of Toronto to study languages and literature. After completing two years of study in only one, he was obliged to leave because his alcoholic father had abandoned the family and finances could not stretch to cover his education. Leacock now enrolled in a 3 month course to become a qualified high school teacher and thereby gain a regular income. For the next decade he worked at Upper Canada College. His passion was economics and political theory and in 1899 he became a postgraduate student at the University of Chicago and earned his PhD. In 1906, he wrote ‘Elements of Political Science’, quickly adopted as a standard academic textbook for the next two decades and his most profitable book. Although he had already published several humorous pieces it was only in 1910 that these works were collected and published and turned him into a commercially successful writer. Volume after volume now appeared almost annually and it was often said that more people had heard of him than of Canada. Politically he was a social conservative. He opposed women’s right to vote and was a champion of Empire but also an advocate of social welfare legislation and wealth redistribution, but often caused friction with his racist views. Stephen Leacock died on 28th March 1944 of throat cancer in Toronto, Canada. He was 74.