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Haliburton's International Yankee DARLENE KELLY fter 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 fourvolume Attache 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 TheAttache 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 1. As quoted by A. Wylie Mahon, "Sam Slick Letters," Canadian Magazine, XLIV (November 1914), 78. A 136 to pleaseyou; 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'shouse, 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 TheAttache, 2. The Clockmaker; ortheSayings and Doings of 5. As quoted by V.L.O. Chittick, Thomas Samuel Slick, of Slickville, II, 4th ed. (London: Chandler Haliburton...

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