Besides moral or tragic stories, sometimes it is also needed to just laugh at a story. To lighten up this collection of stories a little bit, I want to add a book that is fun to read. It is easy to understand and is humorous in its own way. If you are interested in the happenings in Mariposa, which still present the opportunity to analyze, then keep reading!
Stephen Leacock or Stephen Butler Leacock was born on December 30th 1869 in Hampshire, England. At the age of six, Leacock moved to Canada with his parents where he later attended Upper Canada College from 1882 to 1887. In 1891 Stephen Leacock received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto. With this degree, he taught at the Upper Canada College for eight years and then continued his studies to receive a PhD in 1903. From 1903 until his retirement in 1936, he worked at McGill University in Montreal. From 1915 to 1925 Leacock was considered to be the best-known humorist in the world. His most famous works include “Literary Lapses” from 1910, “Nonsense Novels” from 1911 and “Sketches of a Little Town” from 1912. I will get back to the latter in this article.
Why Stephen Leacock is a controversial author:
During his lifetime Leacock considered himself a conservative and was against giving women the right to vote. Later women finally gained the right to vote in 1918 in Canada. He was a great advocate for the British Empire and believed in the “superiority of the English”. This led to him having racist views against black and indigenous people. While reading Stephen Leacock’s works it is important to keep his political and human rights views in mind and approach his stories critically.
Summary
In his book, Stephen Leacock writes about the community in the fictional town Mariposa, based on his own experiences of living in a small town. It is a collection of twelve stories in total and falls into the genre “Humor”. In general, the book is about the problems in the lives of the people that seem funnily insignificant for any bystander but immensely important and dramatic for the inhabitants. The stories represent the parts that make up a community and the human flaws that can come up during an interaction like greed, arrogance, jealousy, and hunger for power. The narrator tells the story from the third-person view as a subjective narrator. This specifically shows in his judgment and criticism of the characters, which makes him unreliable and makes it more difficult for the audience to form their own perception of what is happening.
Current topics include the businessman that got fined and opens a café, the barber who lost a lot of money on a scam mining company or an unrequited romance. Furthermore, a big focus lies on the dramatic sinking of the “Mariposa Belle” into Lake Wissanrotti which left numerous people stranded. The author drags the story into the ridiculous by waiting till the end to reveal that the water was only 1, 8 meters deep.
For the original story, click here! https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3533/3533-h/3533-h.htm
“Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town” introduces the universal experience of living in a small community in a way that makes the characters appear close and real and present the chance to identify with the story as a whole. If you want to learn something about the way that Stephen Leacock perceived his life in his Canadian hometown and you enjoy funny stories then I definitely suggest giving this collection a read!
