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Literary Lapses
(1910)
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- My Financial Career
- Lord Oxhead's Secret
- Boarding-House Geometry
- The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones
- A Christmas Letter
- How to Make a Million Dollars
- How to Live to be 200
- How to Avoid Getting Married
- How to be a Doctor
- The New Food
- A New Pathology
- The Poet Answered
- The Force of Statistics
- Men Who have Shaved Me
- Getting the Thread of It
- Telling His Faults
- Winter Pastimes
- Number Fifty-Six
- Aristocratic Education
- The Conjurer's Revenge
- Hints to Travellers
- A Manual of Education
- Hoodoo McFiggin's Christmas
- The Life of John Smith
- On Collecting Things
- Society Chat-Chat
- Insurance up to Date
- Borrowing a Match
- A Lesson in Fiction
- Helping the Armenians
- A Study in Still Life
- An Experiment With Policeman Hogan
- The Passing of the Poet
- Self-made Men
- A Model Dialogue
- Back to the Bush
- Reflections on Riding
- Saloonio
- Half-hours with the Poets
- A, B, and C
- Acknowledgments
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Humour
I've just re-read 'My Financial Career' and while the laughter is still on me I thought I'd just say how marvellous Leacock was. Like Neil Munro he had a genuine sense of fun. He was an ironist and very clever yet there is nothing nasty or malicious in his writing. It's a gentle shared humour. There is a self-deprecatory tone often present which draws the reader to him. He was quite as witty and more concise than Dickens and not driven by Dickens rather self-important crusading zeal. But if you smile with Dickens and are impressed by his skill, Leacock makes you laugh and his learning seems hidden at first. Wit like his could dart off down anarchic lanes of absurdity. The first paragraph of 'Gertrude the Governess' is much parodied and paralleled but Leacock got there first.
Posted By ennison at Mon 20 Nov 2006, 4:15 AM in Literary Lapses || 2 Replies