He was the protégé of Joseph Howe; and when Howe founded ‘The Club,’ a coterie of Nova Scotia wits, Haliburton contributed his share of the skits in political and personal satire for which ‘The Club’ was famous. These skits were derivative in manner. But in 1835 Haliburton invented a method of his own and definitively set out on his career as a systematic humorist, presenting his thoughts, ‘as the sunny side of common sense,’ in a series of sketches entitled The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick of Slickville. These sketches were published in Joseph Howe’s newspaper The Novascotian (1835-36). There were twenty-three of them. These were augmented to thirty-three, and were published in book form by Joseph Howe, at Halifax, in 1837, and by Richard Bentley, at London, in the same year. Bentley published a second Series in 1838, and a third Series in 1840. Reprints appeared in the United States, and translations in France and Germany.
His reputation as a satiric humorist having been made by The Clockmaker, Haliburton became a thorough systematic creative humorist, publishing The Letter-Bag of the Great Western (1840), The Attaché; or Sam Slick in England (1843-44), The Old Judge; or Life in a Colony (1849), Sam Slick’s Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1853), Nature and Human Nature (1855), and The Season Ticket (1860). Besides these works in creative satire and humor, Haliburton applied himself to editing humorous works, and published Traits of American Humor by Native Authors (1852), and a sequel, The Americans at Home (1854). All his creative works and his compilations of humor were published on both sides of the Atlantic and ran into innumerable editions and pirated reprints, and The Clockmaker and some others were translated into French and German. So that, on the face of original production, Haliburton appears as the first and foremost systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.
The core of all his works in creative humor is some problem of the larger politics—British Connection, Imperial Federation, Free Trade, the Independence of the British North American Colonies, their Annexation with the United States, Anglo-Saxon Alliance or Union, Responsible Government in the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas, Confederation of the Provinces, Voting by Ballot, Universal Suffrage. For instance, in The Clockmaker (second series) he presented the desirability of British connection, but in Nature and Human Nature declared for the independence of the British North American Colonies as against their annexation with the United States, because he fancied independence would be better for them and the motherland. In The Clockmaker (second series) he advocated Imperial Federation in the form of a union or alliance of the Anglo-Saxon peoples for reciprocal security and economic development. But in the same work and in The Attaché he opposed Responsible Government for the Colonies out of a fear of mobocracy, a fear that had been engendered in his heart by the Rebellion of 1837. An inherited prejudice against republican institutions and a dread of mobocracy caused him to oppose Confederation of the Provinces and Universal Suffrage. In every one of his works of humor or satire we find some special thesis, but chiefly satiric arguments for the union or unity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to which he bends all his power of humor, satire, ridicule, and epigram.
Hitherto Haliburton’s originality and greatness have been based on two claims. He created one of the perduring or unique comic characters of humorous literature; and he is regarded as the ‘father’ of American humor. Neither of these distinctions constitutes his real originality and greatness as a satiric humorist and man of letters. He is really great on account of his distinct and definable influences on three literatures.
Beginning with Canadian Literature, we remark that Haliburton’s influence in Canada is popularly conceived, not as literary, but as political. It is true that Haliburton’s themes or theses were highly social and political. It is also true that, so far as his humor is concerned, he was unappreciated and even unread in Canada. It is true, still further, that he has had no successors as a humorist in Canada (for Stephen Leacock is not a successor, neither being a native son nor following the method of Haliburton). Nevertheless, Haliburton achieved two important results for Canadian Literature. Along with Joseph Howe, Haliburton ushered in the Epoch of the New or Independent Prose Literature of Canada. Again: he not only produced an original prose literature but also wrote it with such originality and novelty of matter and style that Haliburton’s prose, that is, Canadian prose, has a significant and permanent place in English and World Literature.
It may sound strange or startling to learn that Haliburton’s work in satiric humor and comic characterization actually displaced in England the vogue of such popular American prose writers as Irving and Cooper. The fact is important, but the reason is more important. Between 1820 and 1840 Irving, with The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall, and Cooper, with The Spy, The Pioneers, and his Leatherstocking Tales, won popular appreciation in England. By 1840 two Canadian authors, John Richardson, with his historical romance Wacousta, and Thomas Chandler Haliburton, with The Clockmaker series, also won popular appreciation. But Haliburton’s work was appreciated for an altogether different reason from that which caused the vogue of Irving, Cooper, and Richardson. The English were caught by the new matter in the work of Irving, Cooper and Richardson, but they felt that it was all in an old manner, the manner respectively of Goldsmith and Sir Walter Scott. They were reading, they felt, English Literature, done by two Americans and one Canadian. Save in mere matter and ‘properties’ there was nothing in the work of Irving, Cooper, and Richardson that might not have been done by a visiting Englishman who had gone to the United States or to the Canadas for new material and local color. It was English, not strictly original American, literature. And so it had a mere vogue.
When, however, the English people read Haliburton’s satiric comedy and comic characterization, they came, for the first time, upon an absolute or sheer literary novelty—literature that was not English, not English-American, not English-Canadian, but an original American species, absolutely new and unique. Here in Haliburton’s work was literature in the English language, but not English in matter, manner, or tone. Here were such novel satiric humor, such arresting and vitalized comic characterization, and such a strange medley of practical wisdom in moral maxims and epigrams, and all expressed in a unique lingo, that the like of it never was before in any literature which had come even from America.
At once a change took place in the minds of the English people in England. Hitherto America had looked across to England for fresh literature, and had based its own literature on English models. But when Haliburton produced a wholly original American literature, England looked, for the first time in history, across to America both for fresh and original literature, and for models which the English writers might follow. At least in one instance English humoristic literature actually modelled itself on Haliburton. There is no argument possible in the matter. For the fact is that Dickens did read The Clockmaker, which appeared serially a year earlier than Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and that Sam Weller is an English version of Haliburton’s Sam Slick (not conversely).
It is a literary phenomenon by itself that Haliburton’s work enjoyed an ‘unprecedented popularity’ in England but also displaced in popularity the work of Irving, Cooper and Richardson. The popularity of Haliburton’s work was not a mere vogue. It remains to this day. His Sam Slick has been admitted to the gallery of the chief comic characters, not only in English, but also in world, literature—to a place beside Sterne’s Uncle Toby, Dickens’ Pickwick and Micawber, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Daudet’s Tartarin, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It is also a fact that Haliburton’s epigrams and moral maxims have become part of the English colloquial speech and at least English popular literature.
Most remarkable were the influences of Haliburton and his works on American Literature. Rightly to appreciate these influences, it is necessary to understand what Haliburton was not. He was not, as has been alleged, ‘the father (or founder) of American humor.’ He was not ‘the creator of the American type in literature.’ He was not ‘the first American in literature.’ His Sam Slick is not ‘the typical American.’ These alleged distinctions are half-truths and are based on ambiguities.