Haliburton Created Sam Slick To Voice His Own Positions
“Literature…is the voice of the people. Through its literature, the life, the soul of a people may be known.”
Thomas Chandler Haliburton is the perfect example of an historian and author who tells the life and soul of a people through his literature. More than just great literature, however, Sam Slick, The Clockmaker is a socio-political commentary. Through the clever use of his legendary character, Sam Slick, Haliburton provides a unique insight into the nature of the pressures convulsing Nova Scotian society in the early part of the 19th Century. A liberal Tory who held strongly progressive views, Thomas Chandler Haliburton created Sam Slick to voice his own position without directly ...
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format as a series of homilies that could stand on their own. More important even than that is that the lesser characters never overshadow the central theme of the episode; there is no personality (other than Slick) that outweighs the message or that is not easily recognizable within any community.
The word satire derives from the Latin satira, meaning "medley." A satire, either in prose or in poetic form, holds prevailing vices or follies up to ridicule: it employs humour and wit to criticize human institutions or humanity itself, in order that they might be remodelled or improved. Satire as an English literary form derives in large part from Greek and Roman literature. Aristophanes, Juvenal, Horace, Martial, and Petronius all wrote satires of one kind or another, and the tradition maintained a tenuous existence in England down through the Middle Ages in the form of the fabliau and the Beast-epic. The eighteenth century, however, in which poetry, drama, essays, and literary ...
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found a diamond worth 2,000 dollars; well, he sold it to a watchmaker for 50 cents – the little creature didn’t know no better. Your people are just like the nigger boy, they don’t know the value of their diamond. 1
In this episode in Sam Slick, The Clockmaker, Haliburton clearly comments
on the state of affairs in Nova Scotia. It is suggestive of contemporary
views that the Nova Scotian people are compared to African-Americans who
were still considered, 30 years before the signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation, to be no more than “babes in the woods”.
1 Haliburton, Thomas C. The Clockmaker, Series One, Two and Three, Ottawa, Carleton University Press, 1995
The three ...
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"Haliburton Created Sam Slick To Voice His Own Positions." Essayworld.com. March 21, 2006. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Haliburton-Created-Sam-Slick-Voice-His/43086.
"Haliburton Created Sam Slick To Voice His Own Positions." Essayworld.com. March 21, 2006. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Haliburton-Created-Sam-Slick-Voice-His/43086.
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