John Galt

Artist Info

John GaltIrvine, 1779 - 1839, Greenock

Lc name authority rec. n78092852

LC Heading: Galt, John, 1779-1839

Biography:

Galt, John (1779–1839), novelist, was born on 2 May 1779 in Irvine, a port on the west coast of Scotland. His father, also John Galt (d. 1817), was the captain and owner of a ship trading to the West Indies. He is described by the son in his Autobiography (2 vols., 1833) as ‘one of the best, as he was one of the handsomest of men’ but of ‘easy nature’ and ‘only passable ability’. On the other hand Galt speaks very highly of his mother: ‘a very singular person with great natural humour’, who indulged ‘in queer metaphysical expressions’. She discouraged, fortunately without success, Galt's ‘bookish propensities’, for his poor health kept him from the usual pursuits of boys of his age (Galt, Autobiography, 1.16–7). It was probably from her and from the conversation of the old ladies of the neighbourhood, to which Galt listened avidly, that he acquired his mastery of Scots speech and knowledge of human character which are the great strengths of his novels. She lived until 1826.

Education and early life

Galt's early education was at home because of the state of his health, but he went later to the grammar school of Irvine. When he was about nine years old the family moved to Greenock, a more important port on the Clyde estuary, about 30 miles from Irvine. It was in this corner of Scotland, between these two places, that Galt was to place the most successful of its novels, which he called Tales of the West. He spent the next fourteen or fifteen years in Greenock and he retired there in 1834 for the last five years of his life.

In Greenock, too, Galt joined a subscription library which became in effect his university. It was, he says in the Autobiography, ‘a selection of books formed with uncommon judgement and taste. The useful predominates in the collection and to this circumstance, probably, should be attributed my habitual partiality for works of a solid character’ (1.17). It included the standard works of the Scottish Enlightenment, Robertson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Reid, Beattie, and the Statistical Account (later an important source for his Annals of the Parish), as well as Malthus, Bentham, Godwin, Burke, Condorcet, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Franklin. When the fear of intellectual contagion from revolutionary France was at its height Galt successfully led a revolt against a proposal to remove ‘dangerous’ books from the shelves.

Like Burns, Scott, and Stevenson, Galt followed the practice of joining a society for debate and intellectual exercise. It is to this society that we owe the first reference in literature to the young Galt. Early in 1804 Galt and his friends invited James Hogg to a dinner in his honour. Hogg, a remarkable self-taught genius, had by this time published only his first collection of poems. He recorded his impressions of Galt in his ‘Reminiscences of some of his contemporaries’. Galt, he says:

managed his part in the conversation with such good nature and such strong emphatic reasoning, that my heart whispered to me again and again, ‘this is no common youth’. Then his stories of old-fashioned and odd people were so infinitely amusing, that his conversation proved one of the principal charms of that enchanting night. (Hogg, cxv)

At about this time Galt first ventured into print. He wrote an essay on John Wilson as an introduction to an 1808 edition of his poems. Galt's own verse, including extracts from The Battle of Largs: a Gothic Poem, began to appear in the Scots Magazine. He also wrote a tragedy about Mary, queen of Scots. He continued to write verse and plays at various times in his life, but work in neither genre represents his enduring work. He remarked in his Autobiography that it was a ‘curious coincidence’ that he had the idea of ‘illustrating Scottish history by tales and poems’ at about the same time as Walter Scott. There was, he added, a ‘still more singular anticipation’ (1.58). This was a reference to the historical novels, set in Scotland in the recent past, which he started to write shortly before Scott.

London experiences and European travels

Galt at first directed his ambitions mainly to commerce. In the Autobiography he is dismissive of writing as a livelihood: ‘a poor trade ... It has been only when I had nothing else to do, that I have had recourse to this secondary occupation’ (1.84–5). This may have been a fashionable pose; Walter Scott at times said much the same. Galt between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five was a junior clerk with a firm of merchants in Greenock. After a brush with a client, whom he thought rude and insulting, he suddenly decided in June 1804 to try his fortune in London. He arrived there with a pile of letters of introduction which did him little good. His account of hawking them around the recipients is strongly reminiscent of the well-known painting on the subject by Sir David Wilkie, which may well be more than a coincidence, as the two men were in London at the same time and they corresponded and no doubt met. Certainly contemporaries perceived a link: Lord Byron told Lady Blessington, for instance, that the characters in Galt's novels reminded him of Wilkie's pictures (Blessington, 74).

Galt spent three years trying to establish himself in business in London. One of his partners was his brother, Thomas, who had inherited, Galt said, their mother's ‘relish of the ridiculous and her ... incomparable Scottish phraseology’ (Galt, Autobiography, 1.112). John's novels were to prove that he had done so as well, but he was still engaged in writing of a different kind, beginning at this time a life of Wolsey. For the Philosophical Magazine he wrote ‘An essay on commercial policy’ and, in unconscious anticipation of his later involvement, a ‘Statistical account of Upper Canada’. The magazine was edited by another émigré Scot, Alexander Tilloch, whose daughter, Elizabeth, Galt married on 20 April 1813.

Meanwhile the business venture failed. Galt thought that he might make a career at the bar and he entered Lincoln's Inn. Again he made a sudden change of direction and he set off in 1809 to travel around the Mediterranean. He says in the Autobiography that this was for health reasons, but he also speaks rather vaguely of an attempt to break the Napoleonic blockade by exploring the prospects of exporting British goods into central Europe through Turkey. His leisurely progress of nearly three years sounds more like a prolonged holiday than anything else, financed presumably by his father. At Gibraltar he made the acquaintance of Lord Byron, of whom he later wrote one of the first biographies. He sailed in the same ship with him to Malta and met him again in Athens and some years later in London.

This acquaintance with Byron provides another view of Galt as he appeared to a contemporary. Lady Blessington in her Conversations with Lord Byron (249–50) reports that he said about Galt:

I am pleased at finding he is as amiable a man as his recent works prove him to be a clever and intelligent author. When I knew Galt some years ago, I was not in a frame of mind to form an impartial opinion of him; his mildness and equanimity struck me even then; but, to say the truth, his manner had not deference enough for my then aristocratical taste, and finding I could not awe him into a respect sufficiently profound for my sublime self, either as a peer or as an author, I felt a little grudge towards him that has now completely worn off ... There is a quaint humour and observance of character in his novels that interest me very much ... he shows a tenderness of heart which convinces one that his is the right place.

Galt was aware of the impression he made. In the Autobiography he says that Byron ‘claimed more deference than I was disposed to grant’ (1.231).

First publications and novels

Galt was back in London by 1811 and in the following year the first of his books were published: Life of Cardinal Wolsey, Voyages and Travels, and a collection of plays in blank verse. He was sent by a merchant in Glasgow to open a branch in Gibraltar, but within a year he had to return to London for surgery. Since all his business ventures had come to nothing, he decided to try to earn his living by his pen. He also accepted appointment as what should now be called a lobbyist on behalf of the company promoting the Union Canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow. This gave the familiarity with Westminster and Whitehall which was the basis subsequently both of his involvement in Canadian affairs and of his political novels.

At this point in his life, after much miscellaneous writing and many false starts, Galt suddenly found his métier. For some years he had been thinking about an idea which eventually became Annals of the Parish. In 1813 he made a proposal to the publisher Archibald Constable, but he rejected the notion of a novel about life in rural Scotland. Soon after, however, the literary climate changed with the dramatic success of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814). Galt had been writing articles for the Edinburgh magazine Blackwood's, and in 1820 it started to publish in monthly parts The Ayrshire Legatees, his epistolary novel about the visit of the family of an Ayrshire minister to London to collect a legacy. For the first time Galt was drawing on his knowledge of life in the west of Scotland, his comic invention, and his exuberant Scots dialogue.

In the next two years Galt produced other Tales of the West at an astonishing pace: The Steamboat and Annals of the Parish in 1821, and Sir Andrew Wylie, The Gathering of the West, The Provost, and The Entail all in 1822. In that year alone Blackwoods published ten volumes of Galt in seven months. At least three of these novels were masterpieces. Both Annals and The Provost were ‘imaginary biographies’ in which a character writes in the first person and reveals himself with greater frankness than he realizes. They are so accurate in their account of social change that historians such as G. M. Trevelyan have recommended them as authentic social history. Left to himself Galt might have continued to write short novels of this kind, compact, coherent, and without a surplus word or episode. The publisher, William Blackwood, however, wanted three-volume best-sellers with an involved plot and striking episodes. As Galt himself said, Sir Andrew Wylie was marred by the inclusion of events ‘too romantic and uncommon to my taste’ (Galt, Literary Life, 1.244). The same is true of The Entail, although it is a novel of great emotional depth and wealth of characters; it was admired by both Scott and Byron.

Galt gave his next novel, Ringan Gilhaize (1823), which he regarded as his finest work, to another Edinburgh publisher, Oliver and Boyd. This is an account of the Scottish Reformation and religious wars of the seventeenth century, in which the imaginary narrator spans nearly two centuries by recalling conversations in his boyhood with his grandfather. It was a conscious riposte to Walter Scott's handling of the covenanters in Old Mortality. To Galt they were heroes in the Scottish tradition of the right of resistance to unjust authority, and he thought that Scott had treated them ‘with too much levity’ (Galt, Literary Life, 1.254). To emphasize his point Galt quoted as an appendix the declaration of Arbroath of 1320, the classic text of Scottish independence.

Canadian projects

In spite of the success of his novels Galt had not abandoned his ambitions in other directions. His parliamentary lobbying experience and his childhood interest in Canada came together in his next venture. Canadians who had suffered losses when the United States invaded in 1812 had been trying in vain to extract compensation from the British government. In 1820 Galt had agreed to act on their behalf, but after two years of effort the government still evaded payment. He then produced another scheme, a proposal for a company to raise capital for the development and settlement of land in Ontario. This could earn revenue which could be used to meet the claims. The company was formed in 1824 with Galt as secretary. He sailed to Canada in 1826 to direct operations there, leaving with Blackwood another novel in his best manner, The Last of the Lairds.

For just over two years, from 1827 to 1829, Galt threw his energy into the development of 1 million acres of largely virgin land between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. He organized the clearing of forests, the building of roads, bridges and canals, the sale of land to settlers, and the foundation of the towns of Guelph and Goderich. Galt was clearly very happy in this work and, in his own view at least, successful. Part of his character was not satisfied with the ‘secondary pursuit’ of literature and longed for the satisfaction of involvement in practical affairs on a substantial scale. He said in his Autobiography that he felt that he was now ‘entering seriously the avenue of life’ (2.1). His family joined him in Canada and two of his sons afterwards had distinguished careers there. The youngest, Alexander Tilloch Galt (1817–1893), became finance minister of Canada, and his elder brother, Thomas, chief justice of the court of common pleas of Ontario. Both were knighted.

The Canadian career of John Galt himself, however, came to an abrupt and distressing end. For reasons which are obscure, the board of the company, which was Galt's own idea and creation, evidently lost confidence in him. There was talk of a whispering campaign. The board sent out an accountant with instructions to report directly to them. This became, Galt says, an ‘affliction’ (Galt, Autobiography, 2.124) and he decided to return to London to have the matter out with the directors. He sailed from New York but before he went on board he was informed that a new man had been appointed in his place. Afterwards he said in a letter to his friend D. M. Moir: ‘It has fallen to the lot of few to have done so much for any country and to be so used’ (Moir, xcvii).

This was not the end of Galt's misfortunes. He arrived in Liverpool on 20 May 1829. On 15 July he was arrested for a debt of £80 for school fees and spent several months in king's bench prison. In his Autobiography and Literary Life Galt plays down this episode; but R. P. Gillies in Memoirs of a Literary Veteran says that he was ‘irretrievably injured in mind, body and estate’ by his imprisonment (3.61). Certainly his health, which had never been robust, deteriorated badly at about this time. Moir attributes this to a fall in Canada which injured his spine (Moir, cix). Whatever the reason, Galt for the rest of his life suffered from attacks of paralysis which at times even deprived him of sight.

Later years

According to his own account Galt now largely withdrew from society, but he continued to write, producing in rapid succession a novel entitled Southennan (1830), set in the Scotland of Queen Mary, and two further novels, which were set in contemporary North America, Lawrie Todd (1830) and Bogle Corbet (1831), as well as his Life of Lord Byron (1830). In 1832 he wrote two political satires as contributions to the controversy over parliamentary reform, The Member and The Radical. Both are ‘imaginary autobiographies’, but are quite different in style. The Radical is entirely in English and is a somewhat abstract exercise on the theory that radical thought was liable to lead to anarchy. The Member returns to Galt's best manner in an account of a self-made man using the unreformed House of Commons for his own profit. In the Autobiography Galt professes surprise that it was resented by the tories as an attack, because he had always regarded himself as a tory. This is a paradox, because Galt's instincts and attitudes were anything but tory. He was no respecter of the established order and inherited privilege, and his novels give an unfavourable view of landowners. He says that most of his friends were whigs and that when he was for a time editor of a newspaper, The Courier, he set about alleviating its ‘ultra toryism’ (Galt, Autobiography, 2.196–8).

In January 1832 Thomas Carlyle met Galt and recorded his impressions in his notebook:

Galt looks old, is deafish; has the air of a sedate Greenock Burgher; mouth indicating sly humour, and self-satisfaction; the eyes old and without lashes, gave me a sort of wae interest for him. He wears spectacles, and is hard of hearing: a very large man; and eats and drinks with a certain west-country gusto and research. Said little; but that little peaceable, clear and gutmüthig. Wish to see him also again. (Two Notebooks, 249–51)

Towards the end of 1832 Galt had a stroke which left him for a time unable to hold a pen. In this state he dictated his Autobiography and shortly afterwards his Literary Life. In 1834 he retired to Greenock for, as Katherine Thomson said, he ‘was never in his element out of Scotland’ (Thomson, 2.97). He continued to write short stories with his usual zest and humour and perfect command of the Scots tongue. In one of them, ‘The Seamstress’, he made explicit his enthusiasm for the language. The Scots, he said, were fortunate in having their own language as well as English and therefore ‘an unusually rich vocabulary’. His own work was an ample demonstration of this richness. Galt died on 11 April 1839 in Greenock, survived by his wife, and was buried in the new burying-ground there.

Paul Henderson Scott

Sources J. Galt, The autobiography of John Galt, 2 vols. (1833) · J. Galt, Literary life, 3 vols. (1834) · D. M. Moir, ‘Biographical memoir’, in J. Galt, ‘The annals of the parish’, and, ‘The Ayrshire legatees’, new edn (1841) · J. Hogg, ‘Reminiscences of some of his contemporaries’, Poetical works, 5 (1840), cxiv–cxv · Two notebooks of Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. Norton (1898), 249–50 · M. Gardiner, countess of Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron (1834), 6, 74, 249–50 · R. P. Gillies, Memoirs of a literary veteran, 3 vols. (1851), vol. 3, pp. 57–61 · K. Thomson, Recollections of literary characters, 2 vols. (1854), vol. 2, pp. 99–107 · I. A. Gordon, John Galt: the life of a writer (1972) [incl. full bibliography] · C. A. Whatley, ed., John Galt, 1779–1979 (1979) · P. H. Scott, John Galt (1985) · E. Waterston, ed., John Galt, reappraisals (1985)

Archives NL Scot., corresp. and letters · NL Scot., MSS · Public Archives of Ontario, Toronto, corresp. :: Derbys. RO, letters to Sir R. J. Wilmot-Horton · NA Canada, corresp. and genealogical MSS · NL Scot., corresp. with Blackwoods · NL Scot., letters to Richard Bentley · NL Scot., corresp. with Archibald Constable · NL Scot., letters to D. M. Moir

Likenesses Count A. D'Orsay, pencil drawing, 1823, Scot. NPG · T. Woolnoth, stipple, 1824 (after E. Hastings), BM, NPG; repro. in Ladies' Monthly Museum (1824) · W. Brockedon, pencil and chalk, 1834, NPG · J. Fleming, oils, Greenock Art Gallery · R. Graves, line engraving (after J. Irvine), BM, NPG; repro. in Galt, Autobiography, frontispiece [see illus.] · C. Grey, oils, Scot. NPG · D. Maclise, lithograph (The Fraserians), BM; repro. in Fraser's Magazine (1830) · G. B. Shaw, engraving (after oil painting by W. J. Thomson), repro. in J. Galt, ‘The annals of the parish’, and, ‘The Ayrshire legatees’ (1841) · J. Smith, oils, Guelph, Canada

Wealth at death granted £50 in 1838 by Literary Fund; British Government granted 1200 acres in Canada in 1838: Gordon, John Galt, 140–41

Paul Henderson Scott, ‘Galt, John (1779–1839)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/10316, accessed 23 Oct 2015]