Summary

This celebrated collection of sketches sparkles with Stephen Leacock's humour and shines with the warmth of his wit. The comical E.P., star of the title essay, "My Remarkable Uncle," is a classic Leacock character. He is president of a railway with a letterhead but no rails, and he heads a bank that boasts credit but no cash whatsoever all of which trouble E.P. not in the least. My Remarkable Uncle, a wonderful smorgasbord of mirth served up by a master of comedy, includes several essays, a short story, a political parable, and personal reflections on a dizzying array of subjects. Here, in rich abundance, are the inspired nonsense and the unerring eye for human folly that have made Stephen Leacock Canada's most celebrated humorist.

Author Biography

Stephen Leacock was born in Swanmore, Hampshire, England, in 1869. His family emigrated to Canada in 1876 and settled on a farm north of Toronto. Educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, Leacock pursued graduate studies in economics at the University of Chicago, where he studied under Thorstein Veblen.

Even before he completed his doctorate, Leacock accepted a position as sessional lecturer in political science and economics at McGill University. When he received his Ph.D. in 1903, he was appointed to the position of lecturer. From 1908 until his retirement in 1936, he chaired the Department of Political Science and Economics.

Leacock’s most profitable book was his textbook, Elements of Political Science, which was translated into seventeen languages. The author of nineteen books and countless articles on economics, history, and political science, Leacock turned to the writing of humour as his beloved avocation. His first collection of comic stories, Literary Lapses, appeared in 1910, and from that time until his death he published a volume of humour almost every year.

Leacock also wrote popular biographies of his two favourite writers, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. At the time of his death, he left four completed chapters of what was to have been his autobiography. These were published posthumously under the title The Boy I Left Behind Me.

Stephen Leacock died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1944.

From the Paperback edition.

SOME MEMORIES
My Remarkable Uncle
The Old Farm and the New Frame
The Struggle to Make Us Gentlemen

LITERARY STUDIES
The British Soldier
The Mathematics of the Lost Chord
The Passing of the Kitchen
Come Back to School
What’s in a Name?
Who Canonizes the Classics?
Among the Antiques

SPORTING SECTION
What Is a Sport?
Why Do We Fish?
When Fellers Go Fishing
Eating Air

STUDIES IN HUMOUR
The Saving Grace of Humour
Laughing Off Our History
War and Humour

MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS
Christmas Rapture
Christmas Shopping
War- time Santa Claus
War- time Christmas

GOODWILL STUFF
Cricket for Americans
Our American Visitors
A Welcome to a Visiting American
Why Is the United States?

The Transit of Venus
Migration in English Literature
Three Score and Ten
Index: There Is No Index
L’Envoi: A Salutation Across the Sea

Afterword

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

MY REMARKABLE UNCLE
A PERSONAL DOCUMENT

The most remarkable man I have ever known in my life was my uncle Edward Philip Leacock – known to ever so many people in Winnipeg fifty or sixty years ago as E.P. His character was so exceptional that it needs nothing but plain narration. It was so exaggerated already that you couldn’t exaggerate it.

When I was a boy of six, my father brought us, a family flock, to settle on an Ontario farm. We lived in an isolation unknown, in these days of radio, anywhere in the world. We were thirty-five miles from a railway. There were no newspapers. Nobody came and went. There was nowhere to come and go. In the solitude of the dark winter nights the stillness was that of eternity.

Into this isolation there broke, two years later, my dynamic Uncle Edward, my father’s younger brother. He had just come from a year’s travel around the Mediterranean. He must have been about twenty-eight, but seemed a more than adult man, bronzed and self-confident, with a square beard like a Plantagenet King. His talk was of Algiers, of the African slave market; of the Golden Horn and the Pyramids. To us it sounded like theArabian Nights. When we asked, “Uncle Edward, do you know the Prince of Wales?” he answered, “Quite intimately” – with no further explanation. It was an impressive trick he had.

In that year, 1878, there was a general election in Canada. E.P. was in it up to the neck in less than no time. He picked up the history and politics of Upper Canada in a day, and in a week knew everybody in the countryside. He spoke at every meeting, but his strong point was the personal contact of electioneering, of bar-room treats. This gave full scope for his marvellous talent for flattery and make-believe.

“Why, let me see” – he would say to some tattered country specimen beside him glass in hand – “surely, if your name is Framley, you must be a relation of my dear old friend General Sir Charles Framley of the Horse Artillery?” “Mebbe,” the flattered specimen would answer. “I guess, mebbe; I ain’t kept track very good of my folks in the old country.” “Dear me! I must tell Sir Charles that I’ve seen you. He’ll be so pleased.” . . . In this way in a fortnight E.P. had conferred honours and distinctions on half the township of Georgina. They lived in a recaptured atmosphere of generals, admirals and earls. Vote? How else could they vote than conservative, men of family like them?

It goes without saying that in politics, then and always, E.P. was on the conservative, thearistocraticside, but along with that was hail-fellow-well-met with the humblest. This was instinct. A democrat can’t condescend. He’s down already. But when a conservative stoops, he conquers.

The election, of course, was a walk-over. E.P. might have stayed to reap the fruits. But he knew better. Ontario at that day was too small a horizon. For these were the days of the hard times of Ontario farming, when mortgages fell like snowflakes, and farmers were sold up, or sold out, or went “to the States,” or faded humbly underground.

But all the talk was of Manitoba now opening up. Nothing would do E.P. but that he and my father must go west. So we had a sale of our farm, with refreshments, old-time fashion, for the buyers. The poor, lean cattle and the broken machines fetched less than the price of the whisky. But E.P. laughed it all off, quoted that the star of the Empire glittered in the west, and off to the West they went, leaving us children behind at school.

They hit Winnipeg just on the rise of the boom, and E.P. came at once into his own and rode on the crest of the wave. There is something of magic appe