[In the following essay, Griffith considers generic difficulties related to Galt's fiction and his role in the early formation of the realist short story.]

When Brander Matthews proclaimed the existence of the short story in 1884, he created a literary problem as much historical as generic, for in defining the genre he placed it in literary history and thus set off the search for literary precedents. The search has been particularly fruitful in Studies in Short Fiction, yielding virtually a complete history of English short fiction.¹ Yet it has been slightly evasive as well, many of the studies implicitly denying Matthews' assertion by subtly shifting from short story to short fiction, thus subsuming the generic problem in the historical. The search is then conducted along lines already laid down by the history of English narrative, until eventually the roots of the short story are located in medieval poetic narratives such as The Dream of the Rood. This not only subverts the generic concept, but also excludes from historical consideration any figure not in the mainstream of the history of English narrative.

I propose to set that history aside briefly to examine someone only peripherally connected to it. Such a figure is John Galt. He is an early and important figure in Scottish realistic fiction, yet a minor figure in English literary history. With a meager fictional tradition behind him, Galt came innocently to the writing of prose narrative. Yet he wrote a great deal of fiction, too much by common consent, and published in both volume and periodical form. The problems he faced and at times overcame are significant not only for the narrative art in general, but more specifically for the art of the short story. I do not propose to cite Galt as an early writer of short stories, but I do believe that by examining the way in which an unsophisticated writer outside the historical mainstream confronts such problems as plotting, length, unity, and chaptering, we can fuse the historical and the generic and make some sense of the twin problems Brander Matthews bequeathed us.

John Galt began his literary career with the publication of a book of travels in 1812, but it was not until he became an early member of the Blackwood's group in 1819 that his career as a writer of fiction blossomed.² He first submitted articles to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine about August of 1819. His work once accepted by Blackwood, Galt capitalized on the connection and set off on what was to become a prolific period in an even more prolific career. Between 1820 and 1823 he published seven works, including two three-volume novels. From this productive period comes Galt's best known work—Annals of the Parish (1821), the one Galt work still read today. But also from this period come The Ayrshire Legatees (1821), The Steam-boat (1822), The Provost (1822) and other fictions which are important for the light they cast on problems of genre in narrative.

From the point of view of the generic and historical problems of the short story, the most interesting feature of the work of John Galt in the period 1820-1823 is that it is not easily classified by genre. Annals of the Parish, a diary of the Rev. Micah Balwhidder, records the affairs of the fictional parish of Dalmailing between 1760 and 1810 in a series of chronologically ordered “chapters” whose unity derives from a single narrator and a more or less consistent group of central characters. Essentially the same thing is done in The Provost. The Ayrshire Legatees, published periodically in Blackwood's between June 1820 and February 1821 before being issued in volume form, is an epistolary fiction resembling Humphrey Clinker. The Steam-boat was also first published periodically, its first installment running concurrently with the last segment of The Ayrshire Legatees. It is a framed voyage narrative in which the voyages are important only insofar as they provide an opportunity for the telling of a number of inset tales. Only Sir Andrew Wylie, which was published in three-volume form in 1822, falls easily into the novel category. If we speak of the others as novels, we use the term loosely, much as Northrup Frye reminds us in noting that the word “novel,” “which up to about 1900 was still the name of a more or less recognizable form, has since expanded into a catchall term which can be applied to practically any prose book that is not ‘on’ something.”³

If there is some confusion as to the generic character of Galt's work today, there was more among his contemporaries. Galt's more renowned contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, wrote to Joanna Baillie on June 11, 1821, recommending Annals of the Parish, the new Edinburgh publication by Mr. Galt, “who wrote the worst tragedies ever seen and has now written a most excellent novel if it can be called so.”⁴ Contemporary reviews, although for the most part laudatory, fail to use the word “novel,” relying instead on such terms as “tale” and “sketch.”⁵ One reviewer begins by citing the recent success of Scotch novels and their imitators, but then says of the Annals that “though it undoubtedly must be considered as the literary offspring of the Scotch Novels, it has some peculiar features which distinguish it from the servile herd of imitators”; he concludes by contrasting the “quiet kind of merit” of its “matter and manner” to the “glare, brilliancy, and hurry of a modern novel.”⁶

The author himself was eventually to express some dismay at the generic difficulties his works posed. “I send you the first part of The Ayrshire Legatees which I have called my London sketches,” he wrote to William Blackwood on May 1, 1820.⁷ In his response Blackwood referred to Galt's “admirable article ‘The Pringle Family’” and expressed his desire that Galt would “continue the series for such a length of time as will enable you to embrace all the subjects which would interest such visitors of London, and will of course interest every one.”⁸ Galt's “sketches” and Blackwood's “article” became the public's “novel.” In looking back thirteen years later Galt confronted the problem squarely:

It may be necessary to explain here, that I do not think the character of my own productions has been altogether rightly regarded. Merely because the works are supposed to be fictitious, they have been all considered as novels, and yet, as such, the best of them are certainly deficient in the peculiarity of a novel. They would be more properly characterized, in several instances, as theoretical histories, than either as novels or romances.⁹

None of this is to suggest that Galt's work was entirely without precedent. Certainly the epistolary character of The Ayrshire Legatees is a popular eighteenth-century device, and The Steam-boat's framed tales are an even older narrative format. Yet in treatment if not in design Galt's early work was original. As one Galt critic notes, “If we except Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton's Cottagers of Glenburnie, which was published in 1808, we may say that the Annals of the Parish was a type of literature entirely new to Galt's contemporaries in England and Scotland.”¹⁰ In part this was because Scotland had no long tradition of prose fiction; it was also the result of the fortunate coming together of Galt and Blackwood. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, in making the writing of original fiction lucrative, attracted a new class of professional writer and initiated a new era of popular magazines and magazine fiction.¹¹ Moreover, in encouraging a new talent such as Galt, who was new to any narrative format, Blackwood's helped pioneer the short fiction series, at once a method of publication and a genre which must be examined in any consideration of the ancestry of the short story.

The short fiction series is a periodically published “story” whose installments are so loosely connected as often to take on the autonomy of discrete short fictions. With its roots in such eighteenth-century publications as the Tatler and the Spectator, its flourishing at the beginning of the nineteenth century was doubtless encouraged as well by the previous century's picaresque novel tradition, a tradition in which Galt's own countryman, Smollett, was a central figure. One needs to look back, then, not forward so as not to confuse the series with its Victorian offspring, the serially published novel. The difference between series and serial is simple but nevertheless important. In the former the part is always greater than the whole. The serial is an extended narrative which moves in a clearly plotted sequence from beginning to middle to end. It differs from the volume novel for the most part only in that readers experience it in parts before they experience it as a whole. The parts are therefore significant as they move the narrative toward its conclusion. Those which fail to do so are customarily considered digressions or interpolations. Indeed, the serial is always writing toward an end; the series is never conscious of an end. In the serial, then, the whole is greater than the part. In the series, on the other hand, although the parts may share locale, characters, narrator, may be unified tonally or even thematically, they will not be bound together by the plotted sequence of an extended narrative. Unlike the parts of a serial, therefore, those in a series will not be shaped by publication in parts. There will be none of that striving for effect, that dramatic curtain closing at the end of each part which Victorian readers of serials came to expect and which a reviewer of Vanity Fair pointed to as a characteristic feature of serial publication.¹² Furthermore, freed from the temporal rigidity of a plot, the sequence of parts in a series is unimportant and the parts may often be rearranged with a casual freedom. Accordingly, the parts of a series tend to be more repetitive than sequential, the later parts of a series simply repeating the successful formula of the earlier segments.

If it is obvious that one key to the difference between series and serial is plot, then it will also be plain why all of Galt's early works are either short fiction series or failed attempts at another format which retain the character of the series. Annals of the Parish, The Ayrshire Legatees, The Steam-boat, The Provost—not one is tightly plotted. Both the Annals and The Provost have the fragmentary character of a diary; what story there is in the other two serves only as a framework on which to hang a series of tales. In The Ayrshire Legatees, for example, the Pringle family goes off to London after Dr. Pringle receives a letter from India informing him of his having been named a residuary legatee of a recently dead cousin. The family goes to London, collects the money—but only after a delay sufficient to have all four family members write home—and returns. The resemblances to Humphrey Clinker are enough to suggest the picaresque parentage of the short fiction series. Yet Galt felt forced into even this much plotting. He remarked to Blackwood how the trip was necessary “in order to prepare the reader for the tone of the observations which I mean to ascribe to the several characters.” Although forced “to frame somewhat more of a story than … at first intended,” he was certain that it would not “diminish the interest of the work.” Obviously glad to have finished with the earlier beginning he was compelled to write, he concluded: “but having got the parties in London, and engaged in the objects of their journey, we shall proceed with a freer rein” (Letters [The Letters of John Galt from the Blackwood Papers in the National Library of Scotland], pp. 29-30). Such was the relative insignificance of the legacy plot that the family's actually receiving the money is mentioned only casually in a letter of Mrs. Pingle's.¹³ At that point in the story the correspondents are too busy describing the incidents which make up the individual parts of the series—Queen Caroline's trial and the Pringle girl's impending marriage. The legacy itself accounts for few changes in the Pringle family on their return, and is again barely alluded to, this despite its size—over £ 120,000. Galt also apparently cut the series short, for he wrote to Blackwood on August 12, 1820, of plans to have the family make an excursion to Paris, returning by way of Holland to Leith, all because he wished to use a journal which he had once kept on a similar journey. He must have abandoned the notion, however, as casually as he took it up, since he concludes: “But as I allow myself to write these sketches in a sort of clishmaclavian manner it is impossible to say yet what turn the story will take” (Letters, pp. 36-37).

There is less indifference to plotting in Sir Andrew Wylie, which is more clearly a novel; yet Sir Andrew Wylie still makes plain Galt's weakness in plot construction and emphasizes what generic hybrids are the earlier works. Galt originally intended to write an autobiographical “progress” story of a Scotchman in London. Like The Ayrshire Legatees and Annals of the Parish, it was to consist of a series of sketches or episodes. But Blackwood, in responding to Galt's indication of his progress in writing, urged him in the direction of the three-volume novel: “I am glad you are getting on with the other work. I am quite certain that if you take time, and put your whole strength upon it, you will make a most amusing and interesting book. A great matter is to construct a good and striking story with which to interweave your graphic sketches of actual life and manners” (Oliphant, I, 451). Galt acquiesced and wrote at length an awkwardly constructed novel with a romantic plot. In his review Jeffrey wrote that Galt's error was in “resolving to have three volumes instead of one.”¹⁴ The novelist later agreed, and, although no theorist, nevertheless came close to recognizing the generic character of the problem. After indicating Blackwood's interference, Galt wrote of Sir Andrew Wylie: “As it now stands it is more like an ordinary novel, than that which I first projected, inasmuch as, instead of giving, as intended, a view of the rise and progress of a Scotchman in London, it exhibits a beginning, a middle, and an end, according to the most approved fashion for works of that description” (Autobiography, II, 239). A similar awareness of genre led him to question the labeling of his earlier works as novels:

A consistent fable is as essential to a novel as a plot is to a drama, and yet those, which are deemed my best productions, are deficient in this essential ingredient. For example, in the Annals of the Parish, there is nothing that properly deserves to be regarded as a story; for the only link of cohesion, which joins the incidents together, is the mere remembrance of the supposed author, and nothing makes the work complete within itself, but the biographical recurrence upon the scene, of the same individuals. It is, in consequence, as widely different from a novel, as a novel can be from any other species of narrative.

(Autobiography, II, 219-220)

Lacking the control encouraged by a plot, Galt's short fiction series are characterized by a certain discursiveness. Balwhidder and Provost Pawkie have the freedom to comment on any affair in their parish and community. They use it liberally. The letter writers of The Ayrshire Legatees abuse a similar license. There is also in all these works no reason why they should end where they do, since the format is repetitive rather than sequential. The Steam-boat's twenty inset tales are the consequence of that many encounters on three voyages, although the number of meetings and voyages might have been multiplied ad infinitum. Likewise the diary format of Annals of the Parish and The Provost provides an ending in an arbitrarily chosen year. In short, the series fiction lacks a sense of an ending because the parts are always more important than the whole.

Yet this is true of only some of the parts in Galt's work, since at times he seems equally indifferent to the part as to the whole. One looks for the most part in vain for the sort of unity of effect in the individual segment which Matthews pointed to as characteristic of the short story. Galt's failure to capitalize on the potential inherent in the series for an integrity of parts is clear if one examines the revision of The Ayrshire Legatees and The Steam-boat for volume publication. The eight numbers of the periodical publication of the former in Blackwood's became nine chapters and a conclusion in volume form, since the first periodical number was divided into three chapters. Why this was done is not clear. It makes for neither more nor less unity in the individual part. Length could not have been a factor, since the second number was longer than the first but was not divided. Galt also added chapter titles, but these are often an obviously failed attempt to achieve unity in the part. Chapter 8, for example, is titled “The Queen's Trial,” yet contains a long letter from Andrew Pringle which says nothing about the Queen. Andrew's letter about the Queen appears in the next chapter, “The Marriage.” If there is some inconsistency in the chaptering of The Ayrshire Legatees, there is chaos in the same process in The Steam-boat. Some periodical numbers containing many stories become equivalent chapters; others are broken up. In all the ten numbers become seventeen chapters with no apparent plan. Only those few chapters containing a single story may be said to have integrity as parts. In the magazine version the narrator, Thomas Duffle, writes of his plan “to tell seriatim … the different things worthy of being placed on record in my various aqueous undertakings”; in the volume publication Galt omitted the phrase “to tell seriatim.”¹⁵ The deletion and the awkward chaptering failed to disguise either the weaknesses of the periodically published series format or Galt's failure to benefit from its obvious potential as well.

Both Annals of the Parish and The Provost were published first in volume form and are not, therefore, technically short fiction series. Yet Galt's narrative tendencies—discursiveness, inability to plot, inadequate sense of chaptering—shape these volume publications so that they have many of the characteristics of the short fiction series. Both works are autobiographical reminiscences, the first of a Scottish presbyter, the second of a town magistrate. Set in essentially the same late eighteenth-century period, they are also linked tonally and thematically in the wistful attitude they take toward the many changes the towns experience in that period. As diaries or chronicles, however, they lack a plot and thus depend for their unity on a consistency of tone. The individual chapters, determined either by the arbitrary limit of a calendar or by what the narrator's memory deems the important events of that year, have much of the integrity of discrete short fictions. What linking devices Galt uses are often clumsy and often ignored. He links one chapter with an earlier one with the phrase “as I have recorded” or he looks ahead in such a phrase as “as I shall have to record by and by.” But he sometimes forgets to record what he anticipates, leaving the chapters unlinked. At his most incisive, however, his memory focuses on a single event in a year and the result is a unified short fiction detachable from the whole. This is the case of “The Execution,” the story of the public execution of a young woman accused of murdering her illegitimate child.¹⁶ Equally powerful is the chapter covering the year 1782 in the Annals (I, 154-157). Here Galt handles with a restraint often absent in later novels the death of a sympathetic character. Because of the brevity of the piece, it is suggestive rather than exhaustive and thus avoids the sentimentalizing so common to the nineteenth-century death-bed scene. These and other unified and detachable chapters more than make up for the weaknesses of Galt's early work.

Galt proposed in a letter to Blackwood to join together in a “general work” The Ayrshire Legatees, Annals of the Parish, and The Steam-boat under a general title such as Tales of the West (Letters, pp. 68-69). He probably had in mind Scott's series Tales of a Landlord. Although the idea never came to fruition, the series character of John Galt's fiction in the period 1820-1823 remains clear.¹⁷ Perhaps because it insistently encouraged formulaic repetition, the series form accounted for the production of no great fiction, but it did briefly discourage a novice at the narrative art from trying his hand at the novel. In so doing, it forced Galt to confront the essential difference between the two species of narrative—short fiction series and novel. Such a distinction was not made by later more renowned novelists, who, under the influence of what Lionel Stevenson aptly named “the agglomerative impulse,”¹⁸ often wrote short fictions which were novels in miniature always threatening to become novels in full. So although Galt lacked the narrative skills necessary to exploit the potential of the series and thereby to become an early writer of short stories, he nevertheless grappled with the generic problem more than a half century before Brander Matthews fused the generic and the historical dimensions of the short story in 1884.

Notes

1. See the following, arranged chronologically according to period covered: Edgar Hill Duncan, “Short Fiction in Medieval English: A Survey,” 9(1972), 1-28 and “Short Fiction in Medieval English II: The Middle English Period,” 11(1974), 227-241; Margaret Schlauch, “English Short Fiction in the 15th and 16th Centuries,” 3(1966), 393-434; Charles C. Mish, “English Short Fiction in the Seventeenth Century,” 6(1969), 223-330; Benjamin Boyce, “English Short Fiction in the Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary View,” 5(1968), 95-112; E. W. Pitcher, “On the Conventions of Eighteenth-century British Short Fiction: Part I: 1700-60,” 12(1975), 199-212 and “Part II,” 12(1975), 327-342; E. W. Pitcher, “Changes in Short Fiction in Britain 1785-1810: Philosophic Tales, Gothic Tales, and Fragments and Visions,” 13(1976), 331-354; Wendell V. Harris, “English Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century,” 6(1968), 1-93.

2. The standard biography is that of Jennie W. Aberdein, John Galt (London: Oxford University Press, 1936). See also Ian A. Gordon, John Galt, the Life of a Writer (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1972), which includes the most comprehensive bibliography.

3. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 304.

4. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable & Co., 1932), VI, 468.

5. See Monthly Review, 94 (Sept. 1821), 300-312; Blackwood's, 9 (May 1821), 203-210; Blackwood's, 11 (June 1822), 741-745; Edinburgh Review, 39 (Oct. 1823), 158-196; Quarterly Review, 25 (April 1821), 147-153.

6. Quarterly Review, 25 (April 1821), 147-149.

7. George Spencer Beasley, The Letters of John Galt from the Blackwood Papers in the National Library of Scotland, Lubbock, Texas, 1951 (Kentucky Microcards, Series A, no. 16), pp. 29-30. Hereafter referred to as Letters.

8. Mrs. Oliphant, William Blackwood and his Sons (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Son, 1897), I, 450.

9. The Autobiography of John Galt (London: Cochrane & McCrone, 1833), II, 219-220.

10. Frank Hallam Lyell, A Study of the Novels of John Galt, Princeton Studies in English, No. 28 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), p. 63.

11. Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 7.

12. Fraser's (Sept. 1848), 322.

13. The Ayrshire Legatees, II, 251 in The Works of John Galt, eds. D. S. Meldrum and William Roughead, 10 vols. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1936). Subsequent references will be to this edition.

14. Edinburgh Review, 39 (Oct. 1823), 177.

15. Blackwood's, 8 (Feb. 1821), 525.

16. The Provost, pp. 45-50.

17. Galt did write more conventional short fictions, all published periodically and not a part of any series. See The Howdie and Other Tales, ed. William Roughead (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, Ltd., 1923).

18. “The Short Story in Embryo,” English Literature in Transition, 15(1972), 261-268.