Thomas Chandler Haliburton (17 December 1796 – 27 August 1865) was a Nova Scotia-born judge, author, novelist, and Conservative MP in Britain. He was the first internationally bestselling fiction author from what is now Canada.
He was a cousin of the pre-eminent London property developer James Burton, whose sons James Burton Junior, the Egyptologist, and Decimus Burton, the architect, hosted him in London.
He was the father of the British civil servant Lord Haliburton, who was the first native Canadian to be raised to the Peerage of the United Kingdom, and of the anthropologist Robert Grant Haliburton, who founded the Canada First organization that contended that English Canadians were the "heirs of Aryan northmen" and that French Canadians were a "bar to progress".
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, farming, and from his The Clockmaker serialised novel,which first appeared in the Novascotian and was published throughout the British Empire, that described the humorous adventures of Sam Slick.
