John Galt (1779-1839)
After Tobias Smollett, John Galt is the chief novelist of the Georgian era with the strongest connection to Glasgow. In The Literary Life (1834) Galt said: ‘Although Irvine was my birthplace, and Greenock the town of my adoption, yet I have ever regarded my obligations to Glasgow as paramount to those due to every other place.’
Penning over forty works, Galt’s catalogue remains one of the greatest in Scottish literary history. His most famous work, Annals of the Parish (1821), spans fifty years and bridges the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Other major works include The Ayrshire Legatees (1820), The Entail (1820), Ringan Gilhaize (1823), and The Last of the Lairds (1826). Many of these focussed on Glasgow and other West of Scotland towns. Ringan Gilhaize, like Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816), novelized the Covenanters and the religious strife in seventeenth century Scotland.
Lawrie Todd (1830) and Bogle Corbet (1831) are novels which account for Galt’s North American activities. He was a superintendent for the Canada Company, responsible for setting up colonies in Upper Canada. Two towns, Guelph and Goderich, were founded by Galt. His ventures in business and politics led him to write The Radical (1832) and The Member (1833), rounding off an already brimming source of life experience. Overall, Galt’s strength as a writer lay in his eye for local detail; realistic provincial accounts.
While we can place Galt in the Scottish literary tradition, his transatlantic career has cemented his legacy as a businessman and coloniser more thoroughly. His Britishness is at its most crucial here, provided by the official narratives of empire; while his Scottish cultural identity, provided by his list of works, goes unnoticed beside more recognisable and memorable literary figures.