As far as I remember, I have never met Mr. Carnegie. But I know that if I did he would tell me that he found it quite impossible to keep up with Mr. Rockefeller. No doubt Mr. Rockefeller has the same feeling.
The narrator of this story ironically posits the notion that he has never actually met a rich person because even the richest people compare themselves not to those well below their financial level, but those above it. The references here are to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, at the time probably the two richest men in America; certainly both were in the top five. This is an expression of Thorstein Veblen’s groundbreaking economic theory that he called pecuniary emulation. Today the concept is better known as trying to keep up with Joneses and it Veblen forwards it as not just a central dictum of consumer and leisure capitalism, but one upon which the entire system is structured when the weight of capitalist tension moves from production to consumption. Leacock had been student of Veblens before becoming a successful humor writer.
“‘Ha!’ exclaimed the Great Detective, raising himself from the resilient sod on
which he had lain prone for half an hour, ‘what have we here?’
“As he spoke, he held up a blade of grass he had plucked.
“‘I see nothing,’ said the Poor Nut.
“‘No, I suppose not,’ said the Great Detective; after which he seated himself on
a stone, took out his saxophone from its case, and for the next half hour was lost in
the intricacies of Gounod’s ‘Sonata in Six Flats with a Basement.’”
—Any Detective Story.
It shouldn’t take many people very long to figure out that the Great Detective and Poor Nut are supposed to represent Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. One particular genre in which Leacock puts to use his talents is literary criticism. He has taken the twist ending variety of irony that is the stock-in-trade of writer O. Henry to task as well as defended Charles Dickens for creating more exaggerate caricatures than real life characters in his novels. This particular essay is aims its shots at the conventions of the mystery/detective genre. The irony is lighter than most and the satire gentler than usual, but nevertheless the entire genre and those purveyors of it come in for some pointed criticism that can be enlarged and interpreted as a critique of any genre which has settled too comfortably into sphere of accepting stereotypes, tropes and conventions in place of pushing the limits of subversion and evolution.
In the light of our recent knowledge we know that Hump-backed Richard [the III] had no hump at all…The secret suffocation of Richard’s nephews in the Tower is not to be attributed to hm as a fault. He suffocated them secretly because to have suffocated them in any other way would have seemed needlessly ostentatious.
King Charles II remains one of the most notorious members of the British monarchy in history. He is singled out by the narrated as—the best of his knowledge—the only major figure history whose reputation has not undergone a significant alternation and revision to the opposite of what it once was. In addition to the newly discovered evidence at the time pointing to myth of Richard III as the hunch-backed embodiment of pure evil, he satirically suggests that new evidence has also proved Queen Elizabeth actually assisted the invasion of the Spanish Armada. What follows is an outline of the infamous biography of Charles II, serving the point through ironic subtext rather than the sincerity of the facts presented on the surface that he should remain, in all likelihood, as notorious a figure as ever.
Perhaps because the sincerity of the text remains unbroken by any intimation of irony or perhaps because the subject of the satire is a such an important historical figure, this essay ends with Leacock introducing something that he very rarely engages: a wink toward the reader indicating the existence of the ironic undermining of the text by the subtext. The essay ends with the narrator recalling an anecdote by Mark Twain of his trip out west and a stopover in Colorado where, while out swimming with some friends, the water of the lake was so pure and clear that a coin could be seen as at a depth of 100 fathoms, or about 600 feet. When it was clear that nobody believed this to be true, Twain offered a discounted reality: “at any rate a ten-dollar bill might have been seen floating on the surface.” Then narrator then concludes his essay with similar discount extended to his readers: “though they be conscientiously unable to digest all that I have told them of Charles II, I shall be nevertheless amply satisfied if they will believe the half of it.”
