My Discovery of England by Stephen Leacock

When I went to Toronto in October 2017, there was only one site that I really, really wanted to go to. Well, two including Niagara Falls – but the place I was most excited to visit was a little town called Orillia. Mention that to anybody in Toronto and they will be baffled – and, having spent a day there, I can see why they might be. It’s a small, perfectly pleasant town, but not the sort of place tourists from England would usually make a beeline for – unless, of course, they love Stephen Leacock. Or are the twin brother of someone who loves Stephen Leacock.

So we spent a day there, and I got to visit his house. Not many people were doing the same, but I found it very moving. I’ve loved Leacock since I started loving books aimed at grown ups, more or less, and it was a dream come true to be in the house where he wrote.

I’ve read a fair amount of Leacock, and had even more unread, but I had not come across My Discovery of England (1922). As soon as I knew it existed, I had to get my hands on it. In the early twentieth century, there were lots of books written by British authors about North America – often on the back of a few weeks travelling between hotels. They repeatedly answered the same sorts of questions about American culture, American women, America’s future – you might remember it being teased in E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in America.

Well, Leacock decides to beat the writers at their own game – and writes the reverse, coming to England to ‘jot down his impressions’, always bearing in mind comparisons with the places he knows and loves in ‘America’ (he often refers to Canada and America interchangeably as ‘America’ in the book, mentioning in a footnote that he uses it as shorthand for North America).

By an arrangement with the Geographical Society of America, acting in conjunction with the Royal Geographic Society of England (to both of whom I communicated my proposal), I went at my own expense.

The resulting book is (a) very funny and (b) frequently shows how little has changed in the UK in the intervening century. For instance, here he is not long after his arrival, taking a train journey:

The journey from Liverpool to London, like all other English journeys, is short. This is due to the fact that England is a small county; it contains only fifty thousand square miles, where the United States, as every one knows, contains three and a half billion. I mentioned this fact to an English fellow-passenger on the train, together with a provisional estimate of the American corn crop for 1922; but he only drew his rug about his knees, took a sip of brandy from his travelling flask, and sank into a state resembling death. I contented myself with jotting down an impression of incivility and paid no further attention to my fellow-traveller other than to read the labels of his luggage and to peruse the headings of his newspaper by peeping over his shoulder.

It was my first experience of travelling with a fellow-passenger in a compartment of an English train, and I admit now that I was as yet ignorant of the proper method of conduct. Later on I became fully conversant with the rules of travel as understood in England. I should have known, of course, that I must on no account speak to the man.

A lot of the humour in the book comes from comparing the way English writers were treated in provincial towns in North America with the way he is treated in England’s major cities – he notes sadly, for instance, that he is not met by the mayor for a tour of the local soap factory. It’s all dry and I enjoyed it a lot.

Curiously, the one time he does seem not to be dry is when writing about co-education – and, despite being a professor at McGill University and teaching both men and women, he launches into quite an odd and unconvincing line of argument against women receiving degrees. Try, if you can, to put that to one side – and then there is much to enjoy in his cursory exploration of Oxford University (from the vantage of the Mitre pub which, one hopes for his sake, was nicer in 1922 than it is today). The university certainly doesn’t seem to have changed much…

In the second half of the book, he focused more on the disadvantages of being a visiting speaker – again, very amusing, but I preferred the first half of the book. But overall it was exactly the sort of mildly silly, gently biting book that I have come to expect and love from Leacock. Something fun for lockdown, certainly.