GALT, John

Nationality: Scottish. Born: Irvine, Ayrshire, 2 May 1779. Education: Irvine Grammar School; schools in Greenock; Lincoln's Inn, London, 1809-11. Family: Married Elizabeth Tilloch in 1813; three sons. Career: Clerk, Greenock Customs House, 1796, and for James Miller and Company, Greenock, 1796-1804; engaged in business ventures in London, 1805-08 (bankrupt, 1808); traveled in Mediterranean and Near East, 1809-11: met Byron; agent for a merchant in Gibraltar, 1812-13; editor, Political Review, London, 1812, and New British Theatre monthly, London, 1814-15; secretary, Royal Caledonian Society, 1815; regular contributor, Monthly Magazine, 1817-23, and Blackwood's Magazine, from 1819; lobbyist for the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal Company, 1819-20, and later for the United Empire Loyalists and other clients; secretary, 1823-25, and superintendent, resident in Canada, 1825-29, to the Canada Company, formed for the purchase of crown land: founded the town of Guelph, Ontario, 1827; imprisoned for debt after his return to England, 1829; editor, the Courier newspaper, London, 1830; contributor Fraser's Magazine, from 1830; lived in Greenock, 1834-39. Died: 11 April 1839.

Publications

Collections

Works, edited by D. S. Meldrum and William Roughead. 10 vols., 1936.

Poems: A Selection, edited by G. H. Needler. 1954.

Collected Poems, edited by Hamilton Baird Timothy. 1969.

Selected Short Stories, edited by Ian A. Gordon. 1978.

Short Stories

The Majolo: A Tale. 1816.

The Earthquake: A Tale. 1820.

Annals of the Parish; or, The Chronicle of Dalmailing During the Ministry of the Reverend Micah Balwhidder. 1821; edited by Ian A. Gordon, 1986.

The Provost. 1822; edited by Ian A. Gordon, 1973.

The Steam-Boat. 1822.

Rothelan: A Romance of the English Histories. 1824.

Stories of the Study. 1833.

The Howdie and Other Tales, edited by William Roughead. 1923.

A Rich Man and Other Stories, edited by William Roughead. 1925.

Novels

Glenfell; or, Macdonalds and Campbells. 1820.

The Ayrshire Legatees; or, The Pringle Family. 1821.

Sir Andrew Wylie of That Ilk. 1822.

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy, edited by David M. Moir.1822; edited by Ian A. Gordon, 1970.

The Gathering of the West; or, We've Come to See the King, withThe Ayrshire Legatees. 1823; edited by Bradford A. Booth, 1939.

Ringan Gilhaize; or, The Covenanters. 1823; edited by Patricia J. Wilson, 1984.

The Spaewife: A Tale of the Scottish Chronicles. 1823.

The Omen. 1826.

The Last of the Lairds; or, The Life and Opinions of Malachi Mailings, Esq., of Auldbiggins, completed by David M. Moir. 1826; edited by Ian A. Gordon, 1976.

Lawrie Todd; or, The Settlers in the Woods. 1830; revised edition, 1849.

Southennan. 1830.

Bogle Corbet; or, The Emigrants. 1831; Canadian section edited by Elizabeth Waterston, 1977.

The Member. 1832; edited by Ian A. Gordon, 1976.

The Radical. 1832.

Stanley Buxton; or, The Schoolfellows. 1832.

Eben Erskine; or, The Traveller. 1833.

The Stolen Child: A Tale of the Town. 1833.

The Ouranoulogos; or, The Celestial Volume. 1833.

Plays

The Tragedies of Maddelen, Agamemnon, Lady Macbeth, Antonia, and Clytemnestra. 1812.

The Apostate; Hector; Love, Honour, and Interest; The Masquerade; The Mermaid; Orpheus; The Prophetess; The Watchhouse; The Witness, in The New British Theatre. 1814-15.

The Appeal (produced 1818). 1818.

Poetry

The Battle of Largs: A Gothic Poem, with Several Miscellaneous Pieces. 1804.

The Crusade. 1816.

Poems. 1833.

Efforts by an Invalid. 1835.

A Contribution to the Greenock Calamity Fund. 1835.

The Demon of Destiny and Other Poems. 1839.

Other

Cursory Reflections on Political and Commercial Topics. 1812.

Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811. 1812.

The Life and Administration of Cardinal Wolsey. 1812.

Letters from the Levant. 1813.

The Life and Studies of Benjamin West. 2 vols., 1816-20; as The Progress of Genius, 1832; edited by Nathalia Wright, 1960.

The Wandering Jew; or, The Travels and Observations of Hareach the Prolonged (for children). 1820.

All the Voyages round the World. 1820.

A Tour of Europe and Asia. 2 vols., 1820.

George the Third, His Court and Family. 2 vols., 1820.

Pictures Historical and Biographical, Drawn from English, Scottish, and Irish History (for children). 2 vols., 1821.

The National Reader and Spelling Book. 2 vols., 1821.

A New General School Atlas. 1822.

The English Mother's First Catechism for Her Children. 1822.

Modern Geography and History. 1823.

The Bachelor's Wife: A Selection of Curious and Interesting Extracts (essays). 1824.

The Life of Lord Byron. 1830.

The Lives of the Players. 2 vols., 1831.

The Canadas as They at Present Commend Themselves to the Enterprise of Emigrants, Colonists, and Capitalists, edited by Andrew Picken. 1832.

The Autobiography. 2 vols., 1833.

The Literary Life and Miscellanies. 3 vols., 1834.

Editor, The Original and Rejected Theatre, and The New British Theatre. 4 vols., 1814-15.

Editor, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vols.3-4, by Lady Charlotte Bury. 1838.

Editor, Records of Real Life in the Palace and Cottage, by HarrietPigott. 1839.

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Critical Studies:

Galt by Jennie W. Aberdein, 1936; Galt and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Philosophy, 1954, and Galt's Scottish Stories, 1959, both by Erik Frykman; Susan Ferrier and Galt by William M. Parker, 1965; Galt: The Life of a Writer by Ian A. Gordon, 1972; The Galts: A Canadian Odyssey by H.B. Timothy, 1977; Galt by Ruth I. Aldrich, 1978; Galt, romancier ecossais by H. Gibault, 1979; Galt edited by Christopher A. Whatley, 1979; Galt by P. H. Scott, 1985; Galt: Reappraisals edited by Elizabeth Waterston, 1985; "John Galt's Review of Howison's Canada in Blackwood's Magazine" by David Groves, in Notes and Queries, December 1993, pp. 471-72.

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John Galt, who was born in the west of Scotland, was a man of many aspirations and achievements. He was a contemporary of other remarkable Scottish writers, like Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Lord Byron. Like them, he produced writings that were voluminous and diverse. This was by no means his only activity. He engaged, without much success, in commercial ventures. He traveled in the Mediterranean, where he met Byron, of whom he wrote one of the first biographies. And in Canada he played a considerable part in the settlement of Ontario.

Galt's work included poetry, plays, biography, history, and economics, but his reputation rests on his fiction, more than a dozen novels and many short stories. They were varied in length, style, and subject and were often highly innovative. The Entail is a tragedy of greed and obsession, but with much verbal exuberance and comedy. Ringan Gilhaize is an historical novel of great range, a study of the nature and consequences of political or religious intolerance and violence. Sir Andrew Wylie of That Ilk is a mixed bag of comedy, social observation, political satire, and (then still an unusual theme) crime and detection. Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet also broke new ground in exploring the early days of Canada and the United States. From his own experience, Galt admired the enterprise, energy, and egalitarian spirit of North America.

Despite the interest of these longer novels, published in three volumes as was then customary, much of Galt's finest work is in his shorter novels and short stories. His special strength is in imaginary autobiographies, full of apparently unconscious irony, in which the supposed narrator gives away more then he realizes. The first and most famous of these works was Annals of the Parish. In this the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, minister of the parish of Dalmailing, gives an account of his ministry from 1760 to 1810, a period of rapid economic and social change in Scotland. It is a book that can be read in at least three ways: as an evocation of a period that is so accurate it can be taken as a social history, as an illustration of Scottish Enlightenment theories about the nature of social change, or simply as a highly entertaining comedy. In The Provost Galt applied the same techniques to small-town politics with sharper political satire. He dealt with the British Parliament before the Reform Act in The Member, the first specifically political novel in English.

Throughout his life Galt wrote short stories, which appeared first in magazines and then later in a book where they were connected by some device or other. An example is The Steam-Boat, in which the stories are said to have been told by fellow passengers in a steamer on the River Clyde or on a journey from Scotland to London. Many of these stories are quite slight, little more than the sort of jokes that passengers might tell one another. Some have a note of pathos and some experiment with different forms of English as well as Galt's own Scots. There are several such collections, which Galt evidently wrote with ease and fluency.

He took up the short story more seriously in the last years of his life, between 1832 and 1836, when he had returned to Scotland to live in Greenock where he had spent much of his youth. (Most of these pieces are included in John Galt: Selected Short Stories.) In his fiction set in Scotland, which is the best part of it, Galt had always made effective use of the Scots tongue. In the introduction to one of these stories, "The Seamstress," he explained why, "No doubt something may be due to the fortunate circumstance of the Scotch possessing the whole range of the English language, as well as their own, by which they enjoy an uncommonly rich vocabulary."

In his Autobiography Galt said that he spent much time in his childhood listening to the conversation of the old ladies of the neighborhood. It was from them that he acquired his fluency in Scots, and it is no doubt from this source also that he was able to cast women as the narrator convincingly and sympathetically in several of these stories, including "The Seamstress," "The Gudewife," "The Howdie," and "The Mem, or Schoolmistress." Others ("Our Borough" and "The Dean of Guild") are miniature variations of The Provost. Some are opening chapters of novels that he did not finish, but all read like completed works. They convey a character, an episode, or an atmosphere in a very few pages. These were early days for the modern short story, but in this, as in much else, Galt was an innovator.

—Paul H. Scott