After the first Clockmaker set in Nova Scotia won surprising acclaim overseas, Thomas Haliburton wrote to a former colleague living in New Brunswick, “I have another volume ready for the press, which is not so local as the other, and I think better suited for English readers.”¹ Consequently, the second and third Clockmaker and the four-volume Attaché feature the transatlantic “sayings and doings” of Haliburton's famous character, Sam Slick. In these works Haliburton emphasized the need for close ties between the mother country and her colony. But politics were only part of a larger study of the relations between the new and old world in his writing. Using the documentary approach of the travel books popular at the time, Haliburton also satirized the social conventions of Britain, her North American colony, the United States, and occasionally Europe as well. In keeping with these objectives, throughout The Clockmaker and The Attaché the Yankee pedlar plays several roles: political analyst, critic of foreign manners, and exemplar of the sort of American behaviour that the travelogues had made notorious.

The wider scope of both series is defined at the end of the second Clockmaker. Here Sam urges the Nova Scotian squire, who is the book's ostensible author, to send a copy of it to the Minister of the Colonies with a letter praising its impartial view of Englishmen, Americans, and colonists:

Says you, minister, says you, here's a work that will open your eyes a bit. … It gives the Yankees a considerable of a hacklin', and that ought to please you; it shampoos the English, and that ought to please the Yankees; and it does make a proper fool of Blue-nose, and that ought to please you both, because it shows it's a considerable of an impartial work.²

Clearly Haliburton wished to avoid any charge of prejudice that might rebound from his persona to himself. Such a disavowal of bias was all the more necessary because he was in fact intensely partial, especially in political matters. A review of the first Clockmaker that appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and that Haliburton considered exceptionally flattering,³ entreated him to cauterize folly and vice in England. “Or,” continued the writer, “if he must remain on the other side of the Atlantic, can he not give some share of his talents to the illustration of our affairs in Canada?”⁴ As the volumes that succeeded the first Clockmaker attest, the invitation did not go unheeded. Haliburton was a vigorous supporter of the imperial connection, and had embraced the cause as a politician long before he did so as a celebrated author. In the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, for example, he had debated the right of the Royal government to fix Customs House salaries, predictably throwing his support on the side of the Royal prerogative. To avert a split between the Nova Scotian and the British authorities, Haliburton made reference to the tie of blood that united them. He rejected the notion of a “tyrannical government and an oppressed colony,” insisting that the problems arising between the two were merely family disagreements to be handled with “the same affection, the same amenity of language, which would be used in discussing between relatives in private life their conflicting interests.”⁵ A supplement in the Novascotian on March 1, 1827 records Haliburton's distress at hearing the word “Englishman” used pejoratively by the opposition. Although he had no relations in England, Haliburton said,

… when he touched its shores he felt he had arrived at his father's house, at the cradle and grave of his ancestors, at the old mansion with which the honours had descended to the oldest brother; and he could feel a generous pride that all the great men assembled at last side by side in the great monumental Abbey of Westminster, that the glorious and immortal band of heroes, poets, orators, statesmen, patriots, had all sprung from the same family, and although a colonist, that the splendour of their flame cast a ray over him.⁶

This metaphor of England as the colonist's family home occurs in Haliburton's fiction. Upon sighting the hills of Wales in The Attaché, one of Sam's travelling companions, an American clergyman named Rev. Hopewell, notes regretfully to the Nova Scotian squire, “… when I was a colonist, as you are, we were in the habit of applying to [England], in common with Englishmen, that endearing appellation ‘Home,’ and I believe you still continue to do so in the provinces.” On landing, the squire breaks into a paean of praise for this country that he calls his own: “Is this England? that great country, that world of itself; Old England, that place I was taught to call home par excellence, the home of other homes, whose flag, I called our flag?” He then extols the virtues of his fatherland: “I love Old England. I love its institutions, its literature, its people. I love its law, … I love its church, … I love its constitution. …”⁷ A similar infatuation with England is expressed in a letter that Haliburton wrote from Windsor, Nova Scotia, to Richard Bentley, his publisher: “I have nothing and see nothing in this damned country, this ‘dead Sea.’ Would to God I could live in dear old England, which is the only country this side of Paradise worth living in.”⁸ Although he finally left Nova Scotia altogether in 1856 and took up permanent residence in England, where he served for a time as Member of Parliament, he never lost interest in the colonies, and throughout his writing career he contrasted their superior monarchical government with the republican model to the south of them.

But Haliburton was aware that British handling of colonial affairs was imperfect, and he condemned particular injustices in his fiction. Unfortunately, when doing so he often lapses, as George Eliot would have said, from the picture to the diagram. Overcome by a sense of political urgency, he editorializes through either the squire, the sententious Rev. Hopewell, or a Sam whose remarks, while instructive, are less entertaining than usual. Didactic monologues run unchecked for pages on end, occasionally for entire chapters. But if the tie between Britain and her North American colony gives rise to some dull writing in The Clockmaker and The Attaché, it also inspires sketches of lively invention. In the best of these Haliburton lets illustration, rather than ponderous commentary, make the point. Significant here is Sam's fondness for proverbs, which he describes as

… distilled facts steamed down to an essence. They are like portable soup, an amazin deal of matter in a small compass. They are what I valy most, experience. … experience is every thing; it's hearin, and seein, and tryin, and arter that a feller must be a born fool if he don't know.⁹

Proverbs thus conceived recall Kenneth Burke's description of them as equipment for living. Paradigms of all literature, they encapsulate experience and provide strategies for dealing with it. In this way, Burke argues, the particular instance can shape a reader's opinion, even his conduct.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, then, Sam deals with international problems most effectively when he does so in concrete terms, whether aphorism, metaphor, anecdote, or analogy.

In the third Clockmaker, for example, the Yankee disabuses a British politician of the notion that the colonies are “useless and expensive encumbrances”¹¹ in a graphic way. The nameless politician doubtless represents other like-minded Englishmen. Douglas Woodruff points out:

Through the thirties and the forties and the fifties, the general attitude of responsible public men was that the Colonies should be encouraged to become as independent as possible. Utilitarians like James Mill, [George] Grote, and [Henry] Warburton, Radicals like [Richard] Cobden and [Joseph] Hume, evangelicals with missionary interests like Sir James Stephen, the permanent head of the Colonial Office, Parliamentarians like [John Arthur] Roebuck, all looked on the Colonies as problems which in time would solve themselves by walking away.¹²

The politician in Haliburton's sketch does not exaggerate the problem of cost: Woodruff records that, by 1846, the defence budget for the colonies had mounted to four million pounds a year.¹³ Sam's refutation is in the form of an anecdote, a useful tactic as the squire observes: “Tabular accounts few men read, and still fewer know how to appreciate. A personal application like the present … establishes beyond all doubt this important fact, that these provinces are as much dependent on England for every article of manufacture used in them, as Oxford or Cambridge is. …”¹⁴ What follows is the life of a colonist told in terms of the English products that he buys. To show how faithful a customer Blue-nose is, Sam enumerates every English commodity that he uses from the time he is born until he dies. In fact his purchase of English goods extends even beyond death:

No, sir, the grave don't part 'em, nor death shut his pan nother, for, as soon as he is stiff, he is dressed in an English shroud, and screwed down with English screws into his coffin, that is covered with English cloth, and has a plate on it of English ware, for the worms to read his name and age on, if they have larned to spell. The minister claps on an English gown, reads the English sarvice out of an English book, and the grave is filled up agin with airth shovelled in with an English shovel, while every man, woman, and child that bears his name pulls out an English handkerchief, to wipe their eyes and blow their noses with, and buy as much English black cloth, crape, and what not, as would freight a vessel a'most. …

Sam further notes that the tradition of buying English goods is continued by Blue-nose's children. “And yet,” he exclaims in amazement, “John Bull says, colonies are no good. Why the man is a drivelin', snivelin', divelin' idiot, an everlastin' born fool, that's a fact.”¹⁵

Throughout the Sam Slick books Haliburton faults England for treating colonists as second-class citizens. When the squire speaks of British institutions with the pride of ownership, Sam mocks him for “strut[ting] under borrowed feathers.” Never say “our,” Sam warns, until colonists are represented in Parliament and invited to fill posts in the imperial service.¹⁶ If the Minister from the Colonial Office remain indifferent to these grievances, Sam tells the squire to intimidate him with a show of force. When the Minister, cowed, then asks the squire his business, the answer that Sam recommends is emphatic: “I don't want nothin'; but I want to be an Englishman. I don't want to be an English subject; … If you don't make Englishmen of us, the force of circumstances will make Yankees of us, as sure as you are born.”¹⁷

Haliburton's devotion to England was in fact intensified by his fear of annexation by the United States. He disliked the American political system because of its levelling and anarchic tendencies. His own position is spelled out by Rev. Hopewell in a debate with Sam's patriotic father. As Sam later recounts (his own dialect colouring the speech somewhat), the minister on that occasion flatly stated his preference for the monarchy: “I'd rather live onder an absolute monarch any day than in a democracy, for one tyrant is better nor a thousand; oppression is better nor anarchy, and hard law better nor no law at all.”¹⁸ The fear that republicanism might creep into the colonial system from within resulted in Haliburton's almost lifelong opposition to the movement for responsible government. In the second Clockmaker, the squire refers to the group promoting it as “a party advocating republican institutions, and hostility to everything British.”¹⁹ The War of 1812 still cast its sinister shadow: in more than one place in Haliburton's fiction, the American eagle is described as a bird of prey. Absorption by the United States could only be prevented, Haliburton insists, by a tighter connection to England.

For a strong imperial tie to be achieved, however, a more enlightened treatment of the colonies was needed than that which had prevailed. Many colonists, Haliburton among them, believed that the representatives of the British Crown who had sat down at the conference table with the Americans had not gained for them the rights merited by their efforts in the War of 1812. This feeling is reflected in “Shampooing the English,” an allegory which simplifies the elaborate transactions of the Treaty of Ghent (1814) and the Convention of 1818 into a confrontation between Brother Jonathan and John Bull. Gleefully Sam tells how the American Jonathan gulled, or “shampooed” his British counterpart into relinquishing colonial territory and fishing privileges to him. His story enforces the point that when easily duped Englishmen negotiate with clever, or “cute,” Americans, it is the colonist who is likely to suffer. In this episode Americans apply “soft sawder” to John Bull, his usually sour expression melting into benevolence, his face “like a full moon … and lookin' about as intelligent all the time as a skim milk cheese.” Then the American diplomat, modelled on John Quincy Adams, cajoles him into conceding “a little strip of land, half fog, half bog, atween the State of Maine and New Brunswick … nothin' but wood, water, and snakes, and no bigger than Scotland.” John Bull genially yields it up to him: “Take it, and say no more about it … I hope it will be accepted as a proof of my regard. I don't think nothin' of half a colony.”²⁰

The colonists felt that the clause concerning offshore fishing rights also went against them. Sam boasts, “… our diplomatists shampoo the English and put 'em to sleep. How beautiful they shampoo'd them in the fishery story!” Article I of the Convention of 1818 did allow American fishermen ample coastal territory for fishing, drying, and curing, as well as permission to enter any bays or harbours of British North America for the purpose of shelter, repairing damages, or obtaining wood or water. Historian A. L. Burt writes that the British ministers who took part in the negotiations claimed that they accepted the generous measures drafted by the Americans, with only minor changes, out of concern for the American fishermen whose livelihood had for generations depended upon access to colonial fisheries. The real reason, Burt suggests, was that they feared another war with the United States.²¹ The result, as Haliburton conveys with bitter irony, was a return to the status quo ante. Sam smugly relates how this was done:

It was agreed we was to fish within three leagues of the coast; but then, says Jonathan, wood and water, you know, and shelter, when it blows great guns, are rights of hospitality. You wouldn't refuse us a port in a storm, would you? so noble, so humane, so liberal, so confidin' as you be. Sartainly not, says John Bull; it would be inhuman to refuse either shelter, wood, or water. Well, then, if there was are a snug little cove not settled, disarted like, would you have any objection to our dryin' our fish there? they might spile, you know, so far from home;—a little act of kindness like that, would bind us to you for ever and ever, and amen. Certainly, says John, it's very reasonable that—you are perfectly welcome—happy to oblige you. It was all we wanted, an excuse for enterin', and now we are in and out when we please, and smuggle like all vengeance: got the whole trade and the whole fishery. It was splendidly done, warn't it?²²

Nor were injustices limited to the past. Especially galling to Haliburton was the awarding of colonial posts to Englishmen rather than to colonists. In the second Attaché, Sam likens the administration of inept British officials to the American sport of gander pulling. The Attaché, Haliburton wrote to his publisher, Richard Bentley, was designed for “the illustration of English topics, by Yankee anecdotes, or Yankee topics in juxtaposition.”²³ The Yankee anecdote in this case is based upon a tale that Haliburton included in one of two anthologies of American humour that he edited.²⁴ Players take turns at swooping down on an upended gander whose legs are tied and whose neck is greased, the object of the game being to pull off its head. This cruel sport is analogous to the slippery grasp that English governors and secretaries have of colonial affairs. Pointing the moral, Sam says, “It's the greatest fun out there you ever did see, to all except poor goosey colonist.”²⁵ The story of the Prince de Joinville's horse in the same volume provides the clockmaker with another example of British discrimination. The prince's horse lies down on a lieutenant who had stretched out to drink at the edge of the stream, all but stifling him there. The prince and other officers laugh uproariously at the plight of the lieutenant who, but for Sam's intervention, might have perished. This incident suggests another to Sam. Soberly he remarks,

… Prince, whenever a colonist goes for to drink at a spring of the good things in this world, (and plaguy small springs they have here too,) and fairly lays down to it, jist as he gets his lips cleverly to it, for a swig, there is some cussed neck or another, of some confounded Britisher, pops right over him, and pins him there. He can't get up, he can't back out, and he can't drink, and he is blacked and blued in the face, and most choked with the weight.²⁶

Not all of Haliburton's writing about international subjects is as narrowly political as the excerpts discussed so far might suggest. In response to the extension of his readership into England and the United States, and in an attempt to sustain interest in book-length works, Haliburton enlarged upon diverting new—and old-world differences. He derived much of this comedy of manners from travel documentaries. That he had read these popular books extensively is shown by his many allusions to them, as well as by his adaptation of their protean form.²⁷ It is not surprising that Haliburton should base his fiction upon factual accounts of life on both continents: many of those to which he refers were written by skilled novelists, such as Mrs. Trollope, Captain Marryatt, and James Fenimore Cooper, and abounded in lively dialogue, memorable character sketches, and vivid dramatic conflict. Moreover, the comparative study they provided of American and European civilization—everything from the influence of topography to etiquette and queer pronunciations—had a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. As Haliburton shrewdly perceived, a full-blown fictional treatment of these same topics was guaranteed to find a ready audience. Rev. Hopewell tells Sam, “If the English have been amused by the sketches their tourists have drawn of the Yankees, perhaps the Americans may laugh over our sketches of the English. Let us make both of them smile, if we can, and endeavour to offend neither.”²⁸

The minister's admonition was likely inspired by the bitter attacks to which the travelogues gave rise. Americans expressed outrage over the portraits of their “domestic manners,” while the British responded in kind. Nevertheless, in spite of Rev. Hopewell's advice, Haliburton sought, rather than avoided, controversial issues. Sam's father, for instance, is said by his son to have “some o' them country-fied ways that ryle the Britishers so much. He chaws tobaccy like a turkey, smokes all day long, and puts his legs on the table, and spits like an enjine.”²⁹ British travel writers had in fact almost universally condemned these habits. Mrs. Trollope, for one, noted the “astonishing rapidity” with which Americans ate, the only sound heard at table being the clink of utensils.³⁰ Haliburton features this unappetizing trait in “Yankee Eating and Horse Feeding” from the first Clockmaker. The story describes the insult suffered by the American dignitary, Alden Gobble, when he seeks a cure for indigestion from a British physician. For the problem to disappear, the physician bluntly says, Gobble would have to eat like a Christian and not “bolt his food whole like a Boa Constrictor.” Elaborating upon the point, he strikes out at other famous, equally disagreeable American characteristics:

You Yankees load your stomachs as a Devonshire man does his cart, as full as it can hold, and as fast as he can pitch it with a dung fork, and drive off; and then you complain that such a load of compost is too heavy for you. Dyspepsy, eh! infernal guzzling you mean. I'll tell you what, Mr. Secretary of Legation, take half the time to eat, that you do to drawl out your words, chew your food half as much as you do your filthy tobacco, and you'll be well in a month.

In a burst of colourful Americanisms, Sam vows that, to avenge his dishonoured countrymen, he would in Gobble's place have levelled the physician as flat as a flounder, fixed his flint good, and forced him to make tracks as a dog does a hog from a potato field.³¹

This kind of aggressive nationalism often appears in travelogues written by Americans. The invidious comparisons that Sam is forever making—his claim that the United States is the greatest nation “atween' the poles, and that the British who could lick all the world were themselves licked by the Americans”—exemplify it. Such vauntings capture the young Republic's defensiveness and insecurity, but also its post-revolutionary ebullience. As early as 1786, Abigail Adams insisted upon her country's superiority to Europe on all counts, large and small. “Do you know,” she wrote a friend, “that European birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous?”³² It was only a short step from such contrasts to the more exuberant sort found, for instance, in James Kirke Paulding's A Sketch of Old England, by a New England Man (1822). Paulding's travelogue disparaged the mother country as ruthlessly as British tour books had America, although the author wrote it without ever leaving American soil. In it he boasts: “Our Lake Superior, with its hundred rivers, is alone named in the language of the superlative degree, because you could empty all the lakes of Britain into its bosom, as a drop in the bucket, without raising its surface the breadth of a hair.”³³ Hyperboles of this type are common in the period's chauvinistic travel literature. Haliburton is thus using a familiar convention when, in the third Clockmaker, he has Sam try to persuade an English lady of her country's inferiority to America:

I have seed a nateral park, says I, to home, stretchin' clean away across from the Atlantic right slap thro' to the Pacific Ocean all filled with deer, and so big, these English parks of dwarf trees look like a second growth of sprouts on the edge of a potato diggin' in a new clearin', or a shelter grove in a pastur'. Then, says I, your lakes is about as big as our duckponds, and your rivers the bigness of a siseable creek when there is no freshets.³⁴

Sam's nationalistic belligerence while abroad is patterned, as he himself points out, after that found in James Fenimore Cooper's Gleanings in Europe, a multi-volume work whose series entitled England: With Sketches of Society in the Metropolis (1837) outraged English society and elicited the wrath of Britain's major quarterlies. That it appeared under the imprint of Haliburton's own publisher, Richard Bentley, may have intensified the author's sense of rivalry towards one whose republican views he would in any case have found uncongenial. Rev. Hopewell, functioning again as Haliburton's wise (if tedious) spokesman, disapprovingly notes Sam's determination to follow where Cooper had led. In doing so he quotes a passage that Haliburton had lifted, word for word, from Cooper's England:

[Sam] has been reading that foolish book of Cooper's “Gleanings in Europe,” and intends to shew fight, he says. He called my attention, yesterday, to this absurd passage, which he maintains is the most manly and sensible thing that Cooper ever wrote: “This indifference to the feelings of others, is a dark spot on the national manners of England. The only way to put it down, is to become belligerent yourself, by introducing Pauperism, Radicalism, Ireland, the Indies, or some other sore point. Like all who make butts of others, they do not manifest the proper forbearance when the tables are turned. Of this, I have had abundance of proof in my own experience. Sometimes their remarks are absolutely rude, and personally offensive, as a disregard of one's national character, as a disrespect to his principles; but as personal quarrels on such grounds are to be avoided, I have uniformly retorted in kind, if there was the smallest opening for such retaliation.[”]³⁵

Further in the chapter, the minister advises Sam not to emulate Cooper. Sam eschews for the most part the controversial subjects named above, but he himself embodies those traits which reviewers found especially offensive in Cooper's book. These included such characteristics as national arrogance, extreme susceptibility to slight, and an unmannerly disregard of old-world conventions.

The Quarterly Review notes, for instance, that “with all his avowed malignity against England … [Cooper] is a much more effective libeller of his own country,”³⁶ a remark that perfectly describes Sam. William Thackeray's sardonic portrait of Cooper touches upon episodes from Gleanings that were thoroughly canvassed by the British press at the time that Haliburton was writing. Among other matters Cooper's book set forth, to quote Thackeray, “How he received every little act of hospitality as a simple right—how he construed every mark of politeness into an effort of servile homage—how he denounced every little symptom of neglect or indifference as a positive lèse majesté. …”³⁷ These very attitudes are writ large in a chapter from the third Clockmaker depicting Sam's meeting with an English Lord and Member of Parliament. The deference shown to him at a staircase by an official Sam perceives as tacit acknowledgement of his innate superiority: “… [the official] hung back quite modest (seein' that an American citizen ranks with the first man livin'). …” The Lord's dismissal of his clerks in honour of Sam's visit the Yankee regards as patronizing, and their obedience servile: “… [the Lord] jist gave a wave of his hand and pointed to the door, as a hunter does to his dogs, without speakin', and the people writin' got up and went out backward, keepin' their faces to him and bowin'.” Also reminiscent of Cooper is Sam's angry conviction that there is a political innuendo in the Lord's invitation to him to sit down while he himself remains standing:

I didn't see as I had any occasion to put up with his nonsense, do you? for there is nothin' I hate so much as pride, especially when any of them benighted insolent foreigners undertake to show it to a free and enlightened American. So I jist put up my feet on his fender, free and easy, to show him he couldn't darnt me by his airs and graces, and then spit right atween the polished bars of the grate on the red hot coals till it cracked like a pistol.³⁸

Then, in a levelling gesture typical of the Republic that shaped him, Sam orders his host to sit down, dialogue being otherwise impossible when one so “lords” it over another.

But, while Sam is a target for Haliburton's satire of Americans, he is also the means by which the author makes fun of the English. The Yankee's demand that the squire “clap the currycomb” as liberally to John Bull as to Brother Jonathan in the interest of fair play underlines the point. In “Dining Out,” from the first volume of The Attaché, and “Life in the Country,” from the second volume, the squire complies, for the stories he tells here flatter neither the American nor his English hosts. At the dinner party in the first episode Sam's conduct is, as usual, rough-edged. When the butler mistakes him for a servant, he displays a Cooper-like pugnacity: a sharp poke and the injunction, “Wake Snakes and walk your chalks,” even the score. Like Cooper at a similar party described in Gleanings, Sam has no companion to escort to table,³⁹ but unlike him, he grabs the first vacant chair, determined not to be slighted in the seating arrangements.⁴⁰

The Americans in Haliburton's work may lack manners, but the English, it is suggested, have them in excess. In “Dining Out,” Sam stresses how artificial, how counter to nature, upper-class life really is, echoing Cooper's repeated complaint about artifice and the tyranny of custom in English society.⁴¹ Upon his arrival at the party the clockmaker's name is passed down a line of at least seven or eight servants to the hosting couple. Once admitted to their presence, Sam bows, or as he irreverently puts it, makes a “scrape” before old uncle and aunty “as solemn as if a feller's name was called out to take his place in a funeral.” Conversation here is tightly laced, because an “arbitrary tyrannical fashion” forbids the introduction of any interesting topics. The entertainment is equally unnatural: the voice of a vocalist who “stretches her mouth open, like a barn door, and turns up the whites of her eyes, like a duck in thunder” emerges deep as a man's, while her male companion sings a high-pitched ‘falsetter.’ Even the food is dissembling:

Veal, to be good, must look like any thing else but veal; you musn't know it when you see it, or it's vulgar; mutton must be incog. too; beef must have a mask on; any thin' that looks solid, take a spoon to; any thin' that looks light, cut with a knife; if a thing looks like fish, you may take your oath it is flesh; and if it seems rael flesh, it's sure to be fish; nothin' must be nateral, natur is out of fashion here.⁴²

In chapters such as this Haliburton deftly criticizes several parties at once. The satire is like a seamless garment: in this case, for instance, it is difficult to tell where the artificiality of the English leaves off and the Yankee's ingenuousness begins.

Yet writing for an international audience was not without its problems. Throughout the episodes that take a satiric look at cultural differences, Haliburton tries to balance insults with compliments, or at least apologies. Sam's dissection of London society in “Dining Out,” for example, occurs in the final chapter of the first volume of The Attaché; Rev. Hopewell begins the first chapter of the second volume of that series by saying that Sam's comments at the end of the last book should be read in the light of his tendency to exaggerate. English readers who were offended by particular references or by the general drift of Sam's remarks would, Haliburton may have hoped, be conciliated by the minister's declaring his own experience quite the reverse: “I think [London society] the most refined, the most agreeable, and the most instructive in the world.”⁴³ The trick is repeated in the second Attaché where Sam charges the landed gentry with living as artificial and unnatural a life as their London counterparts. In the chapter immediately following this portrait, another apology is tendered, this time by the squire who tries to soften Sam's offensive remarks by saying that the pedlar's business pursuits have prevented him from “accommodating himself to the formal restraints of polished society.”⁴⁴

Nor is it only his English audience that Haliburton attempts to placate. At one point in The Attaché the squire pleads that Sam was meant to caricature no one but himself, and that his ideas were his only and should not be attributed either to the author or, he says, “to my American friends, for whose kindness I can never be sufficiently grateful, and whose good opinion I value too highly to jeopardise it by any misapprehension. …”⁴⁵ One could multiply examples: mollifying comments accompany outrageous statements throughout both series. The device ultimately becomes monotonous, especially in the later books where it is used so routinely. In addition, it tends to rob certain episodes of their punch.

But neither these intrusive passages, nor the lengthy moralizings of Sam's companions, nor the extraneous material used as padding can take away the freshness of Haliburton's transatlantic sketches. In the end, he creates a type of international fiction that was unrivalled at the time he wrote. Moreover, his work originates the first significant version of the international theme in North American literature.

The point is best illustrated by examining one of Sam's humorous overseas experiences and tracing variations of it in later writers. In the second Clockmaker Sam is sent to Europe to obtain that commodity which a struggling frontier society has little time to produce: great art. Typically, he cannot fathom the worth of Titian and Guido (although he understands the value of a dollar), choosing bright new paintings over the old masters:

… the best o' the joke was those Macaroni rascals, seein' me a stranger, thought to do me nicely (most infarnal cheats them dealers too,—walk right into you afore you know where you be). The older a pictur' was, and the more it was blacked, so you couldn't see the figur's, the more they axed for it; and they'd talk and jabber away about their Tittyan tints and Guido airs by the hour. How soft we are, ain't we? said I. Catch a weasel asleep, will you? Second-hand farniture don't suit our market. We want pictur's, and not things that look a plaguy sight more like the shutters of an old smoke-house than paintin's, and I hope I may be shot if I didn't get bran new ones for half the price they axed for them rusty old veterans.⁴⁶

Mark Twain, who as a young man is said to have carried a copy of Haliburton's Clockmaker with him everywhere—even church⁴⁷—describes in The Innocents Abroad (1869) the same plight of the uncultured American. The narrator of this book stands before the original of Da Vinci's “The Last Supper,” but he is more interested in the copyists striving to reproduce it:

Wherever you find a Raphael, a Rubens, a Michael Angelo, a Caracci, or a Da Vinci (and we see them every day,) you find artists copying them, and the copies are always the handsomest. May be the originals were handsome when they were new, but they are not now.⁴⁸

The joke resonates later in the century in Henry James's The American (1877). Christopher Newman, the successful American businessman come to imbibe culture at its source, sits in the Louvre surrounded by masterpieces and copyists. “If the truth must be told,” the narrator almost reluctantly admits, “he admired the copy more than the original.”⁴⁹ In his evocation of Americans coming to terms with European art, Haliburton also preceded James's Canadian contemporary, Sara Jeannette Duncan. The heroine in Duncan's novel A Voyage of Consolation (1898) is touring Europe with her father, an American senator whose name, Wick, echoes that of Haliburton's clockmaker. Like Sam, the senator also remains unimpressed by the age-encrusted treasures of the old world: “Judging from some of the specimens here,” he remarks, “oil paintings in the Middle Ages weren't intended to be chromolithographed.”⁵⁰

Haliburton's work on subjects of international interest does not have the same meaning for us today as it did for his contemporaries. Like his other writings, much of it went fast out of vogue: in later times dialect humour becomes increasingly difficult to understand, and topical references that delighted one generation of readers are likely to irritate succeeding ones. Especially dated are the sections devoted to politics, vividly realized though they are. Not only is imperial connection no longer a burning issue, but, as Robert McDougall notes, history has moved on and left Haliburton standing on the wrong side of the fence.⁵¹ To a degree his comedy of manners also lacks immediacy, since a good deal of it is based on ephemeral travel books which describe a world that has virtually disappeared. Yet there are still enough links between the world evoked in this early nineteenth-century fiction and the world in which the modern reader lives for him to catch occasional glimpses of himself there. Moreover, the quality of the writing—notably in Haliburton's humorous study of manners, where the artist in him is less ruled by the propagandist—is so good that it needs no further justification. But at a time of almost myopic concentration upon homegrown themes, the most suggestive aspect of Haliburton's internationalism is his genius for bringing a national character to light, not by isolating it, but by placing it side by side with those of other nations. Political systems, culture, and social conventions all emerge more clearly through contrast. In this Haliburton's relevance, far from diminishing, may well increase.

Notes

1. As quoted by A. Wylie Mahon, “Sam Slick Letters,” Canadian Magazine, XLIV (November 1914), 78.

2. The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, II, 4th ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), p. 319.

3. “Sam Slick Letters,” 76.

4. George Croly, “The World We Live In,” in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XIII (November 1837), 677.

5. As quoted by V. L. O. Chittick, Thomas Chandler Haliburton (“Sam Slick”): A Study in Provincial Toryism (1924; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 80.

6. Chittick, p. 86.

7. The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England, I, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1843), pp. 101, 115-116 et passim.

8. “The Correspondence of Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Richard Bentley,” ed. W. H. Bond, in The Canadian Collection at Harvard University, ed. W. I. Morse, Bulletin IV (Cambridge: Harvard University Printing Office, 1947), pp. 61-62.

9. The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, I, 4th ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1838), p. 309.

10. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, rev. ed. (Berkeley, California Press, 1941), pp. 293-304.

11. The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, III (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), p. 75.

12. “Expansion and Emigration,” in Early Victorian England 1830-1865, ed. G. M. Young, II (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 353.

13. Woodruff, p. 357.

14. Clockmaker, III, p. 74.

15. Clockmaker, III, p. 82.

16. The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England, IV, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1846), p. 212.

17. The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England, II, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1843), pp. 174-175.

18. Clockmaker, II, pp. 195-196.

19. Clockmaker, II, p. 317.

20. Clockmaker, II, pp. 157-158.

21. The United States, Great Britain, and British North America From the Revolution to the Establishment of Peace After the War of 1812 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), p. 418.

22. Clockmaker, II, p. 163.

23. Canadian Collection at Harvard, p. 68.

24. Traits of American Humour by Native Authors (1852; rpt. London: Hurst and Blackett Limited, 1880), pp. 290-296.

25. Attaché, II, p. 62.

26. Attaché, II, p. 92.

27. See Darlene Kelly, “Thomas Haliburton and Travel Books About America,” Canadian Literature (Autumn 1982), 25-38.

28. Attaché, I, p. 89.

29. The Attaché, or, Sam Slick in England, III, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1846), p. 47.

30. Mrs. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, I (London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co., 1832), p. 34.

31. Clockmaker, I, pp. 59-62 et passim.

32. Letters of Mrs. Adams, The Wife of John Adams (Boston: C. C. Little and James Brown, 1840), p. 243.

33. (New York: Charles Wiley, 1822), I, 60.

34. Clockmaker, III, pp. 227-228 et passim.

35. Attaché, I, pp. 74-75. The original passage can be found in James Fenimore Cooper, Gleanings in Europe: England (1837; rpt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 216.

36. J. W. Croker, The Quarterly Review, IX (October 1837), 329.

37. Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage, ed. George Dekker and John P. McWilliams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 299.

38. Clockmaker, III, pp. 62-64 et passim.

39. England, pp. 224-226.

40. Attaché, I, pp. 267-268.

41. England, pp. 46-47.

42. Attaché, I, pp. 264, 268-274 et passim.

43. Attaché, II, p. 2.

44. Attaché, II, p. 132.

45. Attaché, II, p. 286.

46. Clockmaker, II, p. 149.

47. Cyril Clemens, Young Sam Clemens (Portland, Maine: Leon Tebbetts Editions, 1942), pp. 37-38. A recent catalogue of Twain's library establishes that he did have The Clockmaker in his possession. Also, a study of his notebooks and journals reveals that in 1880 he planned to include “Sam Slick” in an anthology, and that in 1881 he listed “Haliburton” in a compilation of American humorists' names. See Alan Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, I (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980), p. 286.

48. The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 126.

49. The American (1877; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), p. 2.

50. (London: Methuen and Co., 1898), p. 56.

51. “Introduction,” The Clockmaker: or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville, ed. Malcolm Ross (1836; rpt. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1958), xiii.