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Behind the hedges: Stephen Butler Leacock, writer, humourist & humanist

June 23, 2024

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Daryl Urquhart, Series Editor

Hidden behind the luxuriant cedar hedges that shroud the lakeside St. George’s Cemetery on Hedge Road where it ends at Sibbald Point is found the Leacock family gravestone that marks, on its west facing elevation, the gravesite of Stephen Butler Leacock one of Canada’s foremost writers, and one of Georgina’s most famous sons.

In 1876 Stephen, aged seven, arrived from England at a handsome 100-acre farmstead near the hamlet of Egypt southeast of the village of Sutton in Georgina Township. He remarked, “My parents emigrated to Canada, and I decided to go with them.”

Decades later at St. George’s Cemetery, Stephen Leacock was interred in his family’s plot beneath an ancient weeping Camperdown Elm, overlooking his beloved Lake Simcoe. In so doing he joined his venerated mother Agnes. He was seventy-four years of age. Just days earlier he had been taken ill across the lake at his summer house on Old Brewery Bay which is now a National Historic Site owned by the City of Orillia.

Described worldwide as Canada’s Mark Twain, at the time of his death he had written some sixty-three books, authored hundreds of essays and articles, and had lectured internationally.

According to his definitive biographer Ralph Curry, Leacock was better known in the English-speaking world during his time than Canada itself.

Furthermore, the eminent Canadian Senator Eugene Forsey was known to have opined that Leacock could be anything he wanted to be, including prime minister. It has been reported that the writer retorted, “I never wish to be a member of a club that would have me.”

As the writer/broadcaster Peter Gzowski reminded his national radio audience that regardless of Stephen Leacock’s international fame, extensive foreign lecture tours, Georgina Township and “the smiling beauty of Lake Simcoe, in his phrase, were to pull him so powerfully all his life.”

Apropos the lure of the lake, the wreck of Leacock’s fabled steamship the Mariposa Belle (that the writer modelled on the excursion steamer Enterprise of Jackson’s Point as he revealed in his essay “Some Odd Notes About Lake Simcoe”) which lies off the cemetery, was discovered in 1998 by the marine explorer Scott Williamson of the Lake Simcoe Marine Heritage Society.

Subsequently, the discovery was broadcast nationally on CBC Radio as “Leacock’s Mariposa Belle Found” with an on-air commentary by Peter Sibbald Brown. As serendipity would have it the writer of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town could ostensibly, should he so wish, sit up and glance through the Leacock Lookout, to see the final resting place of his famous vessel that was scuttled in his childhood fishing grounds.

A noble free-standing plaque, dedicated to the “internationally-known author and humourist,” of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town was erected at the lychgate entrance to St. George’s by the Province of Ontario to act as a permanent waymark.

David Staines the convivial scholar, literary critic and frequent visitor to Leacock’s gravesite, has cited Stephen Leacock extensively, as in “I am chiefly interested in getting out a book of little stories, not essays, but sketches each of which is a story.” The sketches were aimed “to make people glad, to take people out of themselves.”

The celebrated collection of short stories, Sunshine Sketches, being Leacock’s 1912 account of the comic happenings in the fictional town of Mariposa were, as the novelist Mordecai Richler averred, “easily the most cherished of Leacock’s books, as much good honest fun to read today as when first published.”