Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fiction of John Galt

Abstract

The history of the novel is characterized, among its other attributes, by a continuous quest for new or modified forms and structures adequate to convey new or modified perceptions of reality. Some novelists are content to appeal to the specifically tradition and, like Fielding with his comic epic in prose, adapt existing structures to express their perceptions while others search more radically beyond the boundaries of imaginative literature for new formal and structural models. In an attempt to recreate individual and modern experience Defoe and Richardson have recourse to the journal, the autobiography, or to private correspondence, while Sterne's yet more radical reliance on a structure suggested not by preceding literary models but by Locke's associationist psychology is well-known. In the early nineteenth century Scott demonstrated that reality had an immensely important historical dimension, though he preferred to express this insight by accommodating older structures to his purposes, as Fielding had done in a different context. It was Scott's less wellknown contemporary, John Galt, possessed of a historical consciousness only somewhat less remarkable than Scott's, who sought to develop a new form with its own characteristic structure to embody a vision of reality redefined to include its influential historical component. This essay is an attempt to give an account of the form which Galt developed. The account provides another example of that process of cross-fertilization between fiction and non-fiction manifested in the history of the novel generally. More particularly, it also provides what seems to me the proper context for serious critical discussion of an author whose works have always enjoyed a respectable readership yet one not as widespread as his talents deserve.