John Galt's America

Abstract

MODERN readers know John Galt for his novels of the Scottish west country, especially Annals of the Parish, The Ayrshire Legatees and The Entail. In histories of the English novel Galt occupies a modest place behind and slightly to the left of Sir Walter Scott, to whom from the beginning he has been inappropriately compared. But among American readers Galt has not received the credit due him as an energetic friend of the United States during a period in the nineteenth century when American democracy and the American people seemed to have only querulous critics among the best-known British writers. None of Galt's biographers and none of the recent investigators of British-American cultural relations in the nineteenth century have noticed that Galt was the first well-known British novelist to write an American novel, a novel successful enough to have influenced the way a large group of British readers understood and felt about America. The novel, Lawrie Todd, is more interesting now as social history than as fiction, but it deserves to be better known. In its own right the story has an interesting genesis and purpose and it provides a climax to Galt's colorful American career. A review of Lawrie Todd and some of Galt's other contributions to transatlantic literary relations may serve to correct the general impression that Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans and Martin Chuzzlewit tell the whole story of a British generation's disaffection with the age of Jackson in America. Galt's American fiction is unlike any other written in Britain in the nineteenth century. It is utilitarian, to use the word Galt seems to have invented in Annals of the Parish and which John Stuart Mill borrowed from him to put to more famous uses. All of his transatlantic novels and stories were meant as practical guides to emigration and settling in the United States