“Dying to a melancholy wail that echoes into the woods”—Stephen Leacock’s “sensitive” romance of small-town Canada

Abstract

Hailed as one of Canada’s most complex and contradictory literary figures, Stephen Leacock rose to international fame through Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), a classic of early twentieth-century Canadian literature and an enduring example of gentle, affectionate satire that draws upon the tradition of Victorian social critics such as Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In this paper, we propose a revaluation of Leacock as a humourist by examining the function of description in constructing a “sensitive” romance of small-town Canada, with a view to highlighting both connotations of the word—a sensorial account of everyday experience and a highly responsive assessment of communal life. By referring to a number of relevant textual excerpts, we argue that Leacock’s descriptions of places and people, fundamentally dependent on sensorial elements, have a double function. On the one hand, they provide for what McDonagh (2007) described as “the sense of place” that characteristically underpins realist fiction, “mediating, or even making, readers’ relationships with the world” (50, 51). On the other, they invite the audience to partake in the critical exercise by formulating the moral message of the story. Thus, Leacock’s sense-mediated accounts are essential to readers’ comprehension of the text as a mirror of a society captured in its transition from infancy to maturity and its subsequent search for a distinctive national character. In Leacock’s sketches, sights and sounds testify to the author’s conservative outlook and faith in empire while eloquently illustrating his satirical stance on both “provincialism” and “globalism”.