33 Facts About Stephen Leacock

Stephen P H Butler Leacock was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humourist.

Stephen Leacock was born on 30 December 1869 in Swanmore, a village near Southampton in southern England.

Stephen Leacock's mother, Agnes, was born at Soberton, the youngest daughter by his second wife of the Rev Stephen Leacock Butler, of Bury Lodge, the Butler estate that overlooked the village of Hambledon, Hampshire.

Stephen Leacock's mother was the half-sister of Major Thomas Adair Butler, who won the Victoria Cross at the siege and capture of Lucknow in India.

The farm in South Africa failed and Stephen Leacock's parents returned to Hampshire, where he was born.

When Stephen Leacock was six, the family moved to Canada, where they settled on a farm near the village of Sutton, Ontario, and the shores of Lake Simcoe.

Stephen Leacock graduated in 1887, and returned home to find that his father had returned from Manitoba.

In 1887, seventeen-year-old Stephen Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity.

Stephen Leacock moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Montreal, Quebec, where he eventually became the William Dow Professor of Political Economy and long-time chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University.

Stephen Leacock was closely associated with Sir Arthur Currie, former commander of the Canadian Corps in the Great War and principal of McGill from 1919 until his death in 1933.

Currie had been a student observing Stephen Leacock's practice teaching in Strathroy in 1888.

Stephen Leacock was both a social conservative and a partisan Conservative.

Stephen Leacock opposed giving women the right to vote, and had a mixed record on non-British immigration, having written both in support of expanding immigration beyond Anglo-Saxons before World War II and in opposition to expanding Canadian immigration beyond Anglo-Saxons near the close of World War II.

Stephen Leacock was a staunch champion of the British Empire and the Imperial Federation Movement and went on lecture tours to further the cause.

Stephen Leacock is considered today by some a complicated and controversial historical figure for his views and writings.

Stephen Leacock was a longtime believer in the superiority of the English and could be racist towards blacks and Indigenous peoples.

Stephen Leacock did stump for local Conservative candidates at his summer home.

Early in his career, Stephen Leacock turned to fiction, humour, and short reports to supplement his regular income.

Between the years 1915 and 1925, Stephen Leacock was the most popular humourist in the English-speaking world.

Stephen Leacock opened correspondence with Benchley, encouraging him in his work and importuning him to compile his work into a book.

Stephen Leacock was puzzled as to why Leacock's work was no longer well known in the United States.

Stephen Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, nominally for his academic work.

Stephen Leacock became the head boy in 1887, and then entered the University of Toronto to study languages and literature.

In 1900 Stephen Leacock married Beatrix Hamilton, niece of Sir Henry Pellatt, who had built Casa Loma, the largest castle in North America.

Stephen Leacock's son remained a bachelor and died in Sutton in 1974.

Stephen Leacock was offered a post at McGill University, where he remained until he retired in 1936.

Stephen Leacock began public speaking and lecturing, and he took a year's leave of absence in 1907 to speak throughout Canada on the subject of national unity.

Stephen Leacock typically spoke on national unity or the British Empire for the rest of his life.

Stephen Leacock began submitting articles to the Toronto humour magazine Grip in 1894, and soon was publishing many humorous articles in Canadian and US magazines.

Stephen Leacock was enormously popular not only in Canada but in the United States and Britain.

In later life, Stephen Leacock wrote on the art of humour writing and published biographies of Twain and Dickens.

Stephen Leacock won the Mark Twain medal and received a number of honorary doctorates.

In 1947, the Stephen Leacock Award was created to meet the best in Canadian literary humour.