Highways of Canadian LiteratureLogan, J. D. (John Daniel)
History
Highways of Canadian Literature
Logan, J. D. (John Daniel)
Canadian literature -- History and criticism
President Felton, of Harvard University, in 1842, writing in _The North
American Review_, and George William Curtis, writing later in _Harper’s
Magazine_, were only partially right in attacking Haliburton for having
burlesqued and caricatured in _The Clockmaker_, and, particularly in the
character of Sam Slick, American culture and civilization. It was
mis-representation by sectional and class typification; the illogic of a
part for the whole. But they were wrong in their fundamental
presumption, namely, that the English people would accept Sam Slick and
his sayings and doings as typical Americanism. Cultivated English people
no more accepted Sam Slick as the typical American than cultivated
American people accepted the London Cockney, Sam Weller, as the typical
Englishman. What really happened was a two-fold result in literary
appreciation. That such an uncultured and socially inferior creature as
Sam Slick should appear as the social and political critic of
Anglo-Saxon institutions and civilization struck the imagination of the
English people as a most novel and daring creation in satiric comedy,
and Sam Slick himself as the most egregiously comic figure in modern
literature. The second result was that since the English people accepted
Sam Slick and his sayings and doings as a novelty in creative comedy and
the American people took it all as a caricature of their culture and
civilization, Haliburton’s satiric humor enjoyed, as it does to this
day, an ‘unprecedented popularity’ in England but had less popularity in
the United States. Haliburton’s unprecedented popularity in England had
also the effect of causing the English people for the first time to look
across the Atlantic to America for novel literary creation and
entertainment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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