ABSTRACT
Thomas C. Haliburton (1796-1865), Canadian Tory humorist with out honor in his own country, established his reputation in North America and England as the father of Sam Slick, a shrewd yankee clock peddler who used “soft sawder” to open tightly held New En gland purses, commenting all the while on human nature. From the first Clockm aker printing in 1836 through The Attache, The Letter Bag o f the Great Western, The Old Judge, two volumes of collected American comic stories, Sam Slick's Wise Saws and Modern Instances, and Nature and Human Nature, Haliburton showed a broad range of abilities in burlesque, local color narrative, dialect humor, and satireindicating that his reputation as “Sam Slick” only reflects a portion of his real achievement.
