The International Companion to John Galt ed. by Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (review)

Like other John Galt admirers, I cannot understand why he is not read by everyone. Galt is often as slyly witty as Austen, as moving as Dickens, as subtle a social observer and theorist as George Eliot, a prescient, frequently brilliant commentator of all the underlying processes and contradictions of modernity– and a wonderful conjurer of character and psychology, with a special predilection for delineating depression, loss, fanaticism, unease, and other modes of half-knowing. He has Defoe's dash, documentary impulses, flare for detail, and for the vicissitudes of the confessional voice. His masterworks are many, including Annals of the Parish (1821), The Provost (1822), The Entail (1823), and Ringhan Gilhaize (1823). He is fully the intellectual and literary equal of his now more famous Scottish contemporaries, Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg, and a lasting influence on other nineteenth-century Scottish novelists.

The essays here by literary critics, social historians and men-of-letters find further ways to measure his virtues. Andrew O'Hagan's opening essay (as so often with O'Hagan, autobiographically tinged and compulsively readable), lauds him as a Proustian conjurer of lost place, of experience lived in constant anticipation of loss, of complex, melancholy social worlds, as of the powerful psychic bonds between character formation and place, 'bringing the psychology of loss to our understanding of social pattern'. O'Hagan grew up in Irvine, Galt's childhood home, so is particularly lyrical in evoking that world, including the way particular dialect words serve as Galt's madeleines. For O'Hagan, Galt's fiction anticipates Joyce's 'The Dead', with its sense of dead and living composing a continuous community: Galt is a 'wizard of time', whose 'Hogarthian parade' of characters 'tumble through pages like the broken furze of time itself, landing year after year in these annals before blowing out again into a vast and unknowable universe of the dead'.

Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd praise Galt's mastery of scale: if Scott lauded (and in the process, implicitly diminished) Austen, with her little square of ivory, her delicate touch, Galt too largely eschews macro-history in favour of 'the intimate spaces of national life'. Kidd links the peculiarities of Galtian narrative voice, and Galt's recurrent interest in hypocrisy, self-suppression and providential registers of explanation, to regional schisms within the eighteenth-century Presbyterian church, intensely attentive to the increasingly vexed relationship between ministers' personal beliefs and official doctrinal teachings. Galt, indeed, demonstrates 'an eye for the blurry conjuncture where providential happenings and deeper sociological trends appear to coincide'.

For Craig Lamont, Galt's fascination with providence is less Calvinist theology than a preoccupation with the secular theology of Adam Smith's invisible hand. His suggestive essay contextualises Galt's work in relationship to Glasgow, with its distinctive tradition within the Scottish Enlightenment, pioneering role as manufacturing centre (one of the world's first cities to 'beget a poetry of industrial pollution') and imperial nodal point. Galt's family background, and occupational immersion in business, manufacturing, trade and government enabled him to write with unprecedented authority and subtlety about the workings of empire and the emerging modern world order.

Angela Esterhammer explores the complexity of Galt's relationship to speculation as an economic activity, a force for social upheaval but also for the creation of self-made men; highlights include a particularly layered, nuanced rereading of the ideological complexities and narrative layering of The Entail. Ian McGhee contextualises Galt's activities in Upper Canada, clearing bush and founding settlements, as a mode of land speculation (sufficiently unsuccessful in the short run to have Galt cashiered and land in debtor's prison, but lucrative enough to make profits for the Canada Company for the next hundred years). Alison Lumsden reads Ringhan Gilhaize as Covenanter commemoration in light of Pierre Nora's notion of 'lieux de memoire'. Historian Christopher Whatley celebrates Galt's brilliance as a chronicler of 'improvement' in Britain...