John Galt's Mediterranean Experience

Abstract

John Galt--bestselling late-Romantic novelist, businessman, traveller, and widely networked contemporary of Lord Byron and Walter Scott--is enjoying something of a revival due the popularity of Scottish Romanticism. But while Galt's work is being react in the context of Scottish regional fiction, the historical novel, and transatlantic studies (thanks his involvement with Canadian settlement and Caribbean trade), the extent and significance of his Mediterranean travels remain unexplored. From 1809 1811, travelling as cultural tourist and mercantile entrepreneur, crossing paths with Byron whenever possible, Galt explored coasts and islands between Gibraltar and Turkey. His first publications in the genres of travel literature, drama, and fiction derive directly from this voyage, and the settings and worldviews he encountered in the Mediterranean reappear throughout his 'work, casting a different light even on his Scottish fiction. A peculiarity of Galt the traveller is the contrast between his self-proclaimed commitment direct and accurate observation of foreign settings and and the stereotyped versions of them that appear throughout his writing. subtitle of his 1812 book Voyages and Travels--Containing Statistical, Commercial, and Miscellaneous Observations on Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Serigo, and Turkey--stakes his claim be a meticulous first-hand observer of physical and social geography. Galt believed that this commitment accuracy also characterized his fictional repesentations of Mediterranean settings--and that it accounted for British readers' misunderstanding of his European fiction, even though Galt thought that his pictures of foreign and characters were at least as good as his Scottish ones (Literary Life 1: 188). Looking hack on the poor reception of his first novel Earthquake, which is set mainly in Sicily, he concludes that it struck readers as too foreign, they felt that its great detect ... is in not being English enough (Autobiography 2: 234). Galt goes on complain that even when English writers set their novels in foreign locations and give their foreign names, the behaviour of these remains typically English: The difference in seems very little understood, or, if understood, very little attended to (Autobiography 2: 234). Yet Galt's claim that his own fiction does represent the national difference in manners also signals his lifelong commitment the notion of (barmier that he derives From Enlightenment philosophy although Galt never theorizes this concept. Organizing his observations about the manners, beliefs, appearance, and productions of individuals and societies under the rubric Of character leads Galt away from direct observation and toward generalization and type-casting of foreign cultures. Galt's resulting partial encounter with Mediterranean cultures tin both senses of the word partial) is aptly symbolized by the situation of quarantine that appears repeatedly in his fiction as veil as his autobiography, functioning as a silt of personal crisis 1mi also as a site for storytelling. In his memoirs, Galt repeatedly recounts a kind of epiphany he experienced Iii the lazaretto or quarantine station of Messina, Sicily. Arriving by boat from Missolonghi in 1811, Galt was required spend eighteen class in a truly lugubrious room in the lazaretto. He hound escape from the desperate boredom of this situation by turning the life and works of the celebrated Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri: I cannot describe the delight the volumes afforded. he recalls: I devoured them: and they produced an immediate revolution in my taste (Autobiography 1:216-17). lazaretto of Messina reappears several times in Galt's fiction and sets the knit for an encounter with the foreign that is not quite an encounter: confined at the border of a country, the quarantined traveller has severely restricted access its culture--in Galt's own case through the volumes of Alfieri that are the only reading material he has been able obtain relieve his boredom (or his 'borderdom'). …