Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

Leacock contrasts imaginative literature with compendious factual knowledge, implying that a single work of creative genius can outweigh vast accumulations of information. By preferring to have authored Lewis Carroll’s fantastical children’s classic over the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, he elevates originality, wit, and enduring artistic pleasure above exhaustive reference-making. The remark also reflects Leacock’s own identity as a humorist and literary stylist (despite his academic career as an economist): he values the kind of writing that reshapes how readers see the world, not merely what they can look up. The quote thus serves as a defense of art’s cultural permanence against the prestige of institutional scholarship.