Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This handsome new edition of Leacock’s 1912 comic classic about the
little town of Mariposa (alias Orillia, Ontario) is enlivened by Wesley
Bates’s art. His shrewd and whimsical engravings feature individuals
as well as some melodramatic scenes (such as the mad trading of penny
mining stocks and “Cuban lands”).

Stephen Leacock followed Literary Lapses (1910) with a stream of
titles, but Sunshine Sketches remained the public’s favorite. Readers
found in Mariposa the amalgam of 70 or 80 small towns that Leacock
claimed it to be. Certainly the talkative barber, the naive and timorous
bank clerk Peter Pupkin, and the hard-nosed hotel owner are enduring
literary archetypes.

Born in England and educated in Canada, Leacock became a professor of
economics at McGill University. He loved to make fun of his profession,
defining the holder of a Ph.D. as one who was “completely full” and
incapable of holding any new information.

Similarly, he insisted that “the writing of solid, instructive stuff
fortified by facts and figures is easy enough ... But to write something
out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous
contrivance.” Leacock fans will welcome this very attractive
illustrated volume.