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With the American Declaration of Independence and the revolution, there resulted in sentiment and aim a political separation between the British people of one section in America and the people of the Old Country. For the first time the British ‘family spirit’ was disintegrated. In 1786, with the granting of the independence of the Atlantic Old Colonies, a real political separation of the British in North America was permanently established. There was effected a separate United States and a separate British North America (Maritime Provinces and Canada). Thus there were, politically viewed, two Anglo-Saxon peoples in America, and one in the United Kingdom. For the first time in history the phrase ‘the Anglo-Saxon peoples’ denoted a real distinction in political and social entities. The process of time, of course, only increased the sense of separation of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

Unless we think of this 18th century division of the Anglo-Saxons into three separate peoples, politically as well as sentimentally, we shall regard Jonathan Swift as the first systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This is impossible, however, for the reason that Swift’s satires—The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of The Books (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—were not only written prior to the revolution in America but also were addressed solely or specifically to the English people of the United Kingdom. Further, Swift was not a consciously systematic satirist. He simply wrote, as occasion demanded, satiric pièces-a-thèse. For the same reasons Laurence Sterne cannot be regarded as the first systematic humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) were published before there was a United States Republic and a British North America as separate political entities. When Charles Dickens published his Pickwick Papers (1836-37), the Anglo-Saxon peoples as such—in the United States, in British North America, and in the United Kingdom—had been a political fact for more than fifty years. Yet Dickens cannot be regarded as the first systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. He definitively addressed the English people in England. He was a benevolent humorist, aiming by comic characterization to create sympathy with our common humanity. He also aimed to bring about certain social reforms, but his method was that of the kindly humorist. The satirist aims to cause pain as a remedial measure. But, above all, Haliburton had anticipated Dickens both in time and in method. For The Clockmaker, with Sam Slick as the central comic character, was published serially in The Novascotian in 1835, or a year before the publication of the first of The Pickwick Papers, and was in method a combination of humor and satire, with a distinct political and social thesis, namely, to promote a zollverein of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Dickens aimed mostly to entertain his own people. Haliburton aimed to change the vision of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in the United States, British North America, and the United Kingdom, and thus, if possible, to effect a world-wide Anglo-Saxon union or unity. In short, Haliburton’s works in satiric humor were not conceived and written primarily as literature, but as social and political propaganda. The humor in them—the ‘soft sawder’—was introduced to relieve the pain of the satiric truth just as the comic episodes in Shakespeare’s tragedies relieve the emotional poignancy of the tragic strain.