SOURCE: Panofsky, Ruth. “Breaking the Silence: The Clockmaker on Women.” In The Haliburton Bi-centenary Chaplet: Papers presented at the 1996 Thomas Raddall Symposium, edited by Richard A. Davies, pp. 41-53. Wolfville, N.S.: Gaspereau Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Panofsky compares Haliburton's derogatory treatment of women in the The Clockmaker series to the societal norms of the nineteenth century.

In a recent overview of African-Canadian literature, George Elliott Clarke refers to Thomas Chandler Haliburton as “Canada's most vaunted early writer” (7). More than 160 years following the appearance of The Clockmaker sketches, which established Haliburton as British North America's premier writer, Clarke reaffirms the author's unrivaled, hallowed position in Canadian letters. From the moment of conception, it would seem, Sam Slick ensured Haliburton's renown as a comic genius and a writer of political vision. In fact, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary historians and critics alike—from his earliest biographer...