Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (born December 17, 1796, Windsor, Nova Scotia [Canada]—died August 27, 1865, Isleworth, Middlesex, England) was a Canadian writer best known as the creator of Sam Slick, a resourceful Yankee clock peddler and cracker-barrel philosopher whose encounters with a variety of people illuminated Haliburton’s view of human nature.

Haliburton was admitted to the bar in 1820 and, as a member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly (1826–29), led a popular movement for liberal reform. He later reverted to his early Tory convictions and resigned from the Assembly. As a judge of the Supreme Court (1841–54), he maintained the strongly conservative political and social views that inform his writings. In 1856 he moved to England, where he was a member of the House of Commons from 1859 until his death.

The escapades of Sam Slick were first revealed serially in the newspaper Nova Scotian (1835) but subsequently published in book form (1836, 1838, 1840) as The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville. The dialogues between Sam Slick and the squire are satirical attacks on the shiftlessness of the Nova Scotians, mobocracy, the levelling tendencies of the age, and Yankee brashness. They are enriched by the tremendous vitality of Sam’s colloquial speech and by his fund of anecdotes and tall tales. Many of Sam Slick’s sayings, such as “This country is going to the dogs” and “barking up the wrong tree,” have become commonplace in English idiom. Haliburton shifted his attacks to a variety of other topics in his subsequent works: The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England, 4 vol. (1843–44), Sam Slick’s Wise Saws and Modern Instances; or, What He Said, Did, or Invented (1853), and Nature and Human Nature (1855).

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