A distinguished Nova Scotian of U.E. Loyalist descent who wrote popular humour, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, an uppercrust Tory who set forth the homespun views and dealings of “Sam Slick,” a fictional clock pedlar, was the first Canadian to win international repute for his comic writings of the 1830s onwards — some 80 years before another Canadian, Stephen Leacock, would do likewise.
 

Through Sam Slick, Thomas Haliburton coined such phrases as “he drank like a fish,” “the early bird gets the worm,” “it’s raining cats and dogs,” “you can’t get blood out of a stone,” “as quick as a wink,” and “six of one and half a dozen of the other.” Haliburton, Canada’s Tobias Smollett, captured the English-speaking world with his wit, humour, and satire. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/C-6087]

Born in 1796 at Windsor, Nova Scotia, into a long-rooted and prominent family (both his father and grandfather were judges), young Haliburton was educated at King’s College in Windsor, earning his B.A. there in 1815. He went on into law, establishing a thriving practice in 1820 at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia’s old capital which he represented as a member of the provincial House of Assembly from 1826 to 1829. He was increasingly Tory in a province where conservative anti-republican feelings and pro-British colonial patriotism were still strong, backed by harsh memories of the American revolutionary violence that had driven Loyalists northward from their former homes and by the long years of war against a bloody French revolutionary republic that had led to the tyranny and conquests of Napoleon and that had only ended in 1815.

In 1829 Haliburton left the Assembly to become a judge in the Nova Scotian Court of Common Pleas. Now on regular court circuits around the province, he gained a broad awareness of the life and conditions of popular society and his inborn sense of the ridiculous and his taste for punning certainly appeared in his own court proceedings.

Meanwhile, the lawyer had already become an author. As early as 1823, he published his first book, A General Description of Nova Scotia, followed in 1829 by a similar serious, but more intensive, two-volume work, A Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia. The 1830s brought a notable shift into fiction with The Clockmaker: or, the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville wherein the learned judge produced a masterpiece of down-to-earth humour among the common folk. It first appeared in 22 instalments in The Novascotian, the Halifax journal edited by Joseph Howe. When Howe later became the leader of the Reform movement in Nova Scotia, that did not end his personal friendship with the Tory Haliburton. In the series of sketches presented in the The Novascotian, Sam Slick, a sharp and talkative New Englander, travelled the province selling his wares, and in conversations marked by amusing incidents, shrewd observations, and sage, folksy maxims in Yankee dialect, expressed Haliburton’s satirical views.
 

Sam Slick was one of the most discussed literary figures of the nineteenth century. It is estimated that some 80 editions of The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick of Slickville were published in the nineteenth century. [Photo, courtesy Massey College Library, University of Toronto]

The work was not only appealing: it rang true, notably to Americans themselves. The insightful wit of the Sam Slick series was assembled and published in one well-received volume in 1836, followed by two more series published in two more volumes in 1838 and 1840; by which time the wandering clockmaker was known, and quoted, not only in the British American provinces but also from Boston or New York to London. The author Haliburton would go on further: for example, in The Attaché, or, Sam Slick in England, first produced in two series in 1843 and 1844, Sam was part of an American diplomatic mission to the British imperial government. There were also two other Slick books of humorous stories published in 1853 and 1855, but by then this vein of humour seemed to be running out. More noteworthy were Haliburton’s The Letter-Bag of the Great Western; or Life in a Steamer issued in 1840 (chronicling his own transatlantic voyage of 1839 by early steamship) and The Old Judge, of 1849, which in nostalgic rather than humorous fashion depicted colonial Nova Scotian society during a provincial tour such as Judge Haliburton would often have made.

He had been elevated to the Nova Scotian Supreme Court in 1841, but in 1856 he retired on grounds of ill health, and at age 60 moved to England. There he went into parliament once again, sitting for Launceston as a Tory from 1859 until his death in 1865. He continued to write in these later years, his writings including The Season Ticket, published in 1860 from a series of articles he had written for the Dublin University Magazine, and political critiques and pamphlets. Yet his best work had surely been done with Sam Slick — for which he would be, and still is, remembered as a pioneering Canadian author of truly international status.

J.M.S. Careless