Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock

Small-town humor from a Canadian Mark Twain

Stephen Leacock was a popular Canadian author who publish many books of fiction, humor, and essays in the early 20th century. Though not much known south of the border, he is a household name in his native Canada. One of his most popular works is Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, published in 1912. The book is a series of stories set in Mariposa, a small town in Southern Canada, presumably in Ontario (because the Maritime Provinces are mentioned as a separate entity, and no one in Mariposa is French). Mariposa may be based on Leacock’s memories of his own hometown, Orillia, Ontario, but he stressed that the locale is a fictional amalgamation of many small towns in Canada.

Is Sunshine Sketches a collection of short stories or a novel? It’s a little of both, but I think it leans more towards the latter. The stories build on one another, so they should be read in order, and sometimes a story arc will be spread over two or three chapters. In form and structure, it can be easily compared to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Sunshine Sketches is not a modernist work, however. There are no traces of Winesburg’s Freudian themes, nor will you find the cynicism of Sinclair Lewis’s depictions of small-town life. Leacock makes fun of the citizens of Mariposa, but he’s not laughing at them; he’s laughing with them, as if he counts himself among them. He writes in a style of jovial, old-fashioned storytelling along the lines of Bret Harte, with plenty of humor that calls to mind Mark Twain. Leacock, in fact, won a Mark Twain Medal in 1935 (awarded by the International Mark Twain Society). Nowadays, while the United States has a Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, inaugurated in 1998, Canada has a Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor, first awarded in the 1940s.

Leacock’s stories of Mariposa are indeed funny, sometimes hilarious, and as charming as you would expect from a book with the title of Sunshine Sketches. The tone is very light. Occasionally you’ll find the melancholy mention of a lost loved one, but there are no dark themes here. Even when Leacock dwells on suicide, he manages to find humor in it. The reader quickly becomes enamored with this little town and gets emotionally involved in the characters’ lives. Leacock profiles Mr. Josh Smith, the portly and successful hotel keeper, Jefferson Thorpe, the barber with a shrewd knack for investments, and Reverend Drone, minister of the Anglican Church. Mr. Pupkin, the bank teller, courts Ms. Zena, the judge’s daughter. The Mariposans gather for a boat outing on Lake Wissanotti, engage in a fundraising campaign for the local church, and turn out in droves on election day. In all cases, these events turn out unexpectedly and with humorous consequences.

If you’ve ever traveled through rural villages in Southern Ontario, it’s easy to imagine a picturesque life similar to what Leacock depicts in Mariposa. Of course, such ideas are partially based on preconceived bucolic and idyllic storybook stereotypes. Leacock plays up to such notions but subverts them with wry and affectionate humor. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, and I had no trouble identifying with Leacock’s Canadian characters. I suspect that my hometown, in the time of my grandparents’ generation, was probably a lot like Mariposa. I imagine many Canadian students probably read Sunshine Sketches in school, but there’s no reason why this enjoyable book should be confined to an audience of Leacock’s countrymen. American readers should definitely check it out for a fun and enchanting read.

The Mariner of St Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier by Stephen Leacock

Mostly just the wheres and whens

Jacques Cartier

The Mariner of St Malo was published in 1914 as Volume 2 of the Chronicles of Canada, a series of books on Canadian history that would ultimately amount to 32 volumes. This second volume is devoted to the French explorer Jacques Cartier, who first arrived in Canada in 1534. Cartier is popularly known as the “Discoverer of Canada,” or by some the “Father of Canada,” but to non-Canadian readers it is not readily apparent why, since he was not the first European to set foot on Canadian lands. Even if one overlooks the Norse explorers who established settlements in Newfoundland and Labrador around the year 1000, European fishing voyages to these coasts were not uncommon by Cartier’s time. Nor was Cartier the first explorer to touch upon Canadian shores. That would be Englishman John Cabot in 1497, followed by João Fernandes Lavrador of Portugal and Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine who sailed for France (all of whom are covered in the first volume of the Chronicles of Canada series). Cartier, however, was the one who first named the land Canada and claimed it for France. He voyaged beyond the Atlantic Coast into the Saint Lawrence River to the Iroquoian villages of Stadacona (at what is now Quebec City) and Hochelaga (now Montreal). Cartier made three voyages to Canada, the last of which established the first French Canadian settlement at the site of present-day Quebec City.

The author of this account of Cartier’s voyages is Stephen Leacock, a well-known and much respected writer in Canadian literary history. Though he wrote other works of history and biography, Leacock is primarily known as a humorist and author of fiction. There is certainly nothing wrong with Leacock’s writing here, but he seems a bit reined in by the format of the Chronicles of Canada series. Far from an attempt at a comprehensive or authoritative account, this reads more like a book from one of the Time-Life series that were so popular in America a few decades ago. There are only 120 pages of text, and what you get is really just a bare-bones summary. It often reads like simply a list of places where Cartier landed, and the dates in which he was anchored there.

The text goes into a little more detail regarding his interactions with the First Nations people. The events are told, however, in a very romanticized style that depicts Canada as a veritable Garden of Eden, much like America is depicted in folkloric tales of its first Thanksgiving. Cartier’s treatment of the Indigenous is less reprehensible than most other explorers of his century, but the text does mention a few questionable acts that are quickly glossed over. The most interesting chapter in the book discusses what happened after Cartier’s three voyages. The first French settlement, Charlesbourg-Royal, became Canada’s equivalent to America’s lost colony of Roanoke. Leacock also reveals indications that Cartier may have made an undocumented fourth trip to Canada.

The Mariner of St Malo provides an adequate overview of Cartier’s discoveries, but the minimal level of detail makes for a largely unsatisfying exploration narrative. Leacock is not entirely at fault since part of the blame can likely be attributed to Cartier himself for the scant source material he left behind. This book piqued my interest enough, however, to make me want to read Cartier’s original account. The Public Archives of Canada published an annotated English translation of Cartier’s writings in 1924 entitled The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, edited by H. P. Biggar, which promises a more thorough history than this Chronicles of Canada volume.
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Cavalcade of the North, edited by George E. Nelson

Showcase of Canadian literature circa the World Wars
Published in 1958, Cavalcade of the North is a volume of fiction and essays by 26 Canadian writers, edited by George E. Nelson. Prior publication information is not provided for every entry in the collection, but for the roughly half that do include copyright notes the original publication dates range from 1912 to 1956, with the majority falling in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Among the 26 works included here are two full-length novels. Hugh MacLennan’s 1941 novel Barometer Rising is a gripping dramatization of the tragic Halifax Explosion of 1917, in which a ship full of munitions destined for European battlefields exploded in the city’s harbor, leveling entire neighborhoods. The second novel, Jalna by Mazo de la Roche, was originally published in 1927 and became the first book in an extensive series chronicling the multigenerational saga of a farming family in southern Ontario. This Cavalcade also includes one novella-length work, The School on the Little Water Hen by Gabrielle Roy, about a family residing on a remote island in northern Manitoba and their quest for a decent education. Fortunately, all three of these longer works are very good, and they alone amount to almost 450 pages of worthwhile reading.

The remaining shorter works vary greatly in quality, and not all are fiction. A few are stories from the history of Canada, such as “Vignettes of French Canada” by Thomas B. Costain, an assortment of biographical sketches from the 17th and early 18th centuries; “This Stubborn Breed” by Joseph Lister Rutledge, concerning the Acadians in the 1750s; and “The Awakening” by Bruce Hutchison, about Canada’s entry into World War II. Also in the nonfiction category is “Read!” an essay by Lord Beaverbrook about self-education and individualism.

Of the remaining fictional selections, two of the best are related to World War II. In “The Czech Dog” by W. G. Hardy, a Canadian woman befriends a Czech refugee and former member of the anti-Nazi underground, while “Resurrection” by Thomas H. Raddall is a thriller about shot-down pilots trapped on the coast of Greenland. “Four Men and a Box” is a brief but excellent tale about jungle explorers in an unnamed, exotic locale. Closer to home, Patrick Waddington delivers a charming, Twilight Zone-ish yarn about a mysterious forgotten neighborhood in Montreal, “The Street That Got Mislaid.” “The White Mustang” by Edward A. McCourt is a John Steinbeck-ish story about a mythical white horse, while “The White Musky” by Scott Young (Neil Young’s dad) is a fisherman’s tale about a mythical white fish. The scope of the selections cover a wide variety of settings, populations, and walks of life. Canadians of French and British extraction get about equal time, with a wee bit of the Irish thrown in. Only one story features First Nations characters: the Jack London-esque “A Prairie Vagabond” by Sir Gilbert Parker.

Had such a collection been published a half century earlier, one probably couldn’t have discerned much difference between Canadian, British, and American literature. By World War II, however, a distinctively Canadian literature had begun to come into its own, drawing from the British and French cultural traditions but with healthy doses of homegrown North American individualism, boreal naturalism, and nationalistic pride. This maturing Canadian style is showcased admirably in this collection. For American readers with little knowledge of the literary scene north of their border, Cavalcade of the North is a very good introduction to the world of Canadian letters. Not every story is great, but the volume is full of fortuitous discoveries. I will definitely be reading more of MacLennan, de la Roche, and Roy.

Stories in this collection
(Novel-length works have been reviewed individually. Click on titles below.)

Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan

Rigamarole by Morley Callaghan 

Mrs. Golightly and the First Convention by Ethel Wilson

A Prairie Vagabond by Sir Gilbert Parker 

The Worker in Sandalwood by Marjorie Pickthall 

The Czech Dog by W. G. Hardy 

Read! by Lord Beaverbrook 

Jalna by Mazo de la Roche 

Dieppe by Lionel Shapiro 

The Princess and the Wild Ones by W. O. Mitchell 

Resurrection by Thomas H. Raddall 

The Street That Got Mislaid by Patrick Waddington 

We Hire a Witch by Kenneth McNeill Wells 

The Awakening by Bruce Hutchison 

The Movies Come to Gull Point by Will R. Bird 

The School on the Little Water Hen by Gabrielle Roy

White Musky by Scott Young 

Vignettes of French Canada by Thomas B. Costain 

The Little Ghost by Gwen Ringwood 

The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe by Stephen Leacock 

Some Are So Lucky by Hugh Garner 

Beating the Smuggling Game by Thomas Chandler Haliburton 

This Stubborn Breed by Joseph Lister Rutledge 

The White Mustang by Edward A. McCourt 

Four Men and a Box by Leslie Gordon Barnard 

The Wake by Patrick Slater 

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