Thomas Chandler Haliburton


Thomas Chandler Haliburton was a Nova Scotian politician, judge, and author who was the first international best-selling fiction author from what is now Canada, and who served as a Conservative Member of Parliament in England. He was the father of the British civil servant Lord Haliburton and of the anthropologist Robert Grant Haliburton.

Life

Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born on 17 December 1796, in Windsor, Nova Scotia, to William Hersey Otis Haliburton, a judge and politician, and Lucy Chandler Grant. His mother died when he was a small child. When Thomas was seven, his father married Susanna Davis, the daughter of Michael Francklin, who had been Nova Scotia's Lieutenant Governor. He attended University of King's College in Windsor, from which he graduated in 1815 to become a lawyer who practiced at Annapolis Royal. Between 1826 and 1829, Haliburton represented Annapolis County in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly.
Haliburton's fame came from his writings on history, politics, farm improvement, and from his The Clockmaker serial, which first appeared in the Novascotian and was published throughout the British Empire, that described the humorous adventures of Sam Slick.

Relations with English Burton family

Thomas Chandler Haliburton resided in England from 1837, where he was hosted and entertained in London by his cousins Decimus Burton, Jane Burton, James Burton, the Egyptologist, Septimus Burton, the solicitor, Octavia Burton, and Jessy Burton. Thomas asked James Burton, the Egyptologist, to check the proofs of his work Letter Bag of the Great Western, with which Burton was unimpressed, in 1839, and those of the third series of The Clockmaker in 1840. The pair travelled together to Scotland to investigate their common ancestry, and intended to tour Canada and the United States of America together. Thomas Chandler Haliburton's daughter, Susannah, was impressed by James Burton, the Egyptologist: she wrote, in 1839, "Mr James I admire very much. He is one of the most well-bred persons I saw &... decidedly the flower of the flock".

Retirement and subsequent life

In 1856, Thomas Chandler Haliburton retired from law and moved to England. In the same year, he married Sarah Harriet Owen Williams. In 1859, Haliburton was elected the Member of Parliament for Launceston, Cornwall as a member of the Conservative minority. He did not stand for re-election in 1865.
Haliburton received an honorary degree from Oxford for his services to literature. He continued writing until his death on August 27, 1865 at his home in Isleworth, where he is buried in its All Saints' Churchyard.

Family

Thomas Chandler Haliburton married Louisa Neville, who was the daughter of Captain Laurence Neville of the Eighth Light Dragoons, and returned to Nova Scotia with her. Louisa's story before marriage is related in the "Haliburton Chaplet," which was edited by their son, Robert Grant Haliburton. The couple had three sons and five daughters:
  • Susannah Lucy Anne who was a well known ceramic collector
  • Thomas Jr. was an accomplished musician who became ill with an “original defect of mind” and died in an asylum in Massachusetts at the age of 26.
  • Augusta - Mrs. A. F. Haliburton who married an ironmonger
  • Emma - Mrs. Bainbridge Smith who married an Anglican Clergyman
  • Amelia, a landscape artist, married the Rev. Edwin Gilpin, Dean of Nova Scotia, in 1849; by whom she had four sons and one daughter, including Edwin Gilpin, an author
  • Robert Grant Haliburton, Q.C. D.C.L., a lawyer and anthropologist
  • Laura Charlotte, artist, who married William Cunard, the son of the shipping magnate Sir Samuel Cunard at Windsor, Nova Scotia, 30 December 1851, by whom she had three sons and one daughter. She exhibited her pictures at the Royal Academy and at the Gallery of British Artists.
  • Arthur, later 1st Baron Haliburton G.C.B., who was a British civil servant and the first native Canadian to be raised to the Peerage of the United Kingdom.

    Legacy

Haliburton promoted immigration to the colonies of British North America, and one of his first written works was an emigrant's guide to Nova Scotia that was published in 1823, A General Description of Nova Scotia; Illustrated by a New and Correct Map The community of Haliburton, Nova Scotia was named after him. In Ontario, Haliburton County is named after Haliburton in recognition of his work as the first chair of the Canadian Land and Emigration Company.
In 1884, faculty and students at his alma mater founded a literary society in honour of the College's most celebrated man of letters. The Haliburton Society, still active at the University of King's College, Halifax, is the longest-standing collegial literary society throughout the Commonwealth of Nations and North America.
The mention "hurly on the long pond on the ice", which appears in the second volume of The Attaché, or Sam Slick in England, a work of fiction published in 1844, has been interpreted by some as a reference to an ice-hockey-like game he may have played during his years at King's College. It is the basis of Windsor's disputed claim to being the town that fathered hockey.
In 1902, a memorial to Haliburton and his first wife was erected in Christ Church, Windsor, Nova Scotia, by four of their children: Laura Cunard, Lord Haliburton, and two surviving sisters.
Nova Scotian artist William Valentine painted Haliburton's portrait. His former home in Windsor is preserved as a museum.

Works

  • A General Description of Nova Scotia - 1823
  • The Clockmaker - 1836
  • The Clockmaker, 2nd Series - 1838
  • The Bubbles of Canada - 1839
  • - 1839
  • The Letter-Bag of the Great Western - 1840
  • The Clockmaker, 3rd Series - 1840
  • The Attaché; or Sam Slick in England - 1843
  • The Attaché; or Sam Slick in England, 2nd Series - 1844
  • The Old Judge, Or Life in a Colony - 1849
  • The English in America - 1851
  • Rule and Misrule in English America - 1851
  • Sam Slick's Wise Saws and Modern Instances - 1853
  • The Americans at Home; or, Byways, Backwoods, and Prairies - 1855
  • - 1855
  • The Season-Ticket* - 1860
  • Maxims of an Old Stager Not by Haliburton, but pseudonym may be "Sam Slick"

    Electronic editions

Category:1796 births
Category:1865 deaths
Category:Haliburton family
Category:19th-century Canadian novelists
Category:19th-century Canadian historians
Category:Canadian humorists
Category:Canadian male novelists
Category:Canadian people of Scottish descent
Category:Colony of Nova Scotia people
Category:Conservative Party MPs for English constituencies
Category:Historians of Atlantic Canada
Category:Judges in Nova Scotia
Category:Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for Launceston
Category:19th-century members of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly
Category:People from Windsor, Nova Scotia
Category:Persons of National Historic Significance
Category:People from Hants County, Nova Scotia
Category:UK MPs 1859–1865
Category:University of King's College alumni
Category:Novelists from Nova Scotia