John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society. Edited by Regina Hewitt.

Abstract

Regina Hewitt, ed., John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society (Bucknell University Press, 2012) viii + 382 $85.00 Before I discuss Regina Hewitt's excellent new edited collection, Johri Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society, a disclosure is necessary: I was born and raised in the town Galt founded in 1827, in what was then Upper Canada. When my parents moved to Guelph, Ontario in the early 1970s, it was still a relatively small city of no more than 50,000 souls. An indoor shopping mall was planned, but not yet built, on former farmland; the University of Guelph, originally the Ontario Agricultural College, was the biggest employer; and the Catholic Church of our Lady, at the top of Norfolk Street, was the most recognizable landmark. The latter statement still holds true, but on my most recent visit, almost two decades after I first moved away, the changes were at least as palpable as the continuities. The Guelph population has swelled to over 120,000; manufacturing, including biotechnology and agri-business, is now the biggest employment sector; what used to be the south edge of town, where I grew up, is now closer to the middle as commuter developments serving Toronto (fifty minutes to the east when the traffic is passable), stretch for several miles. The misnamed Speed River still flows through the limestone downtown, but sleek government buildings and high-tech research centers are almost as prominent as the increasingly anachronistic church on the hill. The newly renovated and expanded City Hall is still watched over, however, by a statue of john Galt, the founding father. I have vague memories of learning about Galt sporadically in elementary school: I seem to recall being told he chopped down a tree in what is now St. George's Square in downtown Guelph, put his hand on the stump, and declared a road would stretch in each of his fingers' directions. As it turns out, Galt himself encouraged such myth-making, recording in his autobiography that when he and two other men in his Canada Company felled the first tree (a maple, of course) in the area, it fell with a crash of accumulating thunder, as if ancient nature were alarmed at the entrance of social man into her innocent solitudes. Although the echoes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the above quotation immediately suggest Galt's high degree of educated self-consciousness, it was not until graduate school that I learned he was something other than a Canadian Paul Bunyan: that he was, in fact, a Scottish novelist of real significance as well as past popularity. As Regina Hewitt notes in her introduction to this capacious new collection of essays on Galt's writings, the causes of his long posthumous dwelling in literary obscurity can be traced at least in part to his own penchant for self-effacement. Like many ambitious Scotsmen of his generation, Galt seems to have been reluctant to be known primarily as an author; in fact, his initial, two-volume Autobiography (1833) so slighted his literary accomplishments that he was pressured to write a three-volume supplement to account for them more fully. Gerard Carruthers develops this line of biographical inquiry further in his opening essay, observing that even in his hometown of Greenock, Galt's iconic status lags far behind that of either the inventor James Watt, or Highland Mary Campbell, one of Robert Burns' most famous lovers (33). Could this relative paucity of hometown memorialization reflect the fact that Galt frequently, albeit quietly, appeared to satirize the inhabitants of the towns and villages of Western Scotland in his best-known novels and stories? Or--as Ken McNeil suggests in his essay on Galt's late fiction, Bogle Corbet; or, The Emigrants (1831)--is it because his Ontario adventuring and subsequent turn toward early colonial/ imperial Fiction continues effectively to bar Galt from being firmly claimed by either side of the Atlantic? …