SOURCE: Gordon, Ian A. “Galt's The Ayrshire Legatees: Genesis and Development.” Scottish Literary Journal 16, no. 1 (May 1989): 35-42.

[In the following essay, Gordon comments on Galt's popular novel The Ayrshire Legatees and the revisions it underwent in the transition from periodical publication to novel form.]

1

John Galt's first published Scottish novel made its initial appearance in monthly instalments from June 1820 to February 1821 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The editor, ‘Christopher North’, announced in the magazine the following year that the series (‘the very best that ever had been in any periodical work’) had ‘increased our sale prodigiously’. For both publisher and author the appearance of The Ayrshire Legatees was a turning point. It consolidated the position of Blackwood's Magazine as the leading Scottish literary journal; and it launched John Galt on his career as a novelist.

Galt had to wait for years before he attained such popular esteem. He had left Scotland as a young man, to establish himself in London. By 1819, when he had reached the age of forty, he was known on the London scene as a busy (if not always successful) entrepreneur who had found his way into polite society and as an indefatigable writer who had learned from sheer necessity to turn his hand to almost anything: biographies, travel-books, unproduceable plays (one did run for four nights), swiftly written and anonymously published tales, periodical articles by the dozen, pamphlets on current affairs, entries to encyclopedias, and a vast output (totalling some 3000 pages) of books under various pseudonyms designed for reading in elementary schools. He was later to describe his role during much of this period as that of a ‘publisher's hack’. It sounds an unlikely background for a popular novelist, some of whose books were to become near-classics. But the long apprenticeship taught Galt to write rapidly with accuracy and control—and to write (and always to write well) to a publisher's deadline.

Galt made his first approach to Blackwood's Magazine in 1819. He was continually on the hunt for new outlets and the now two-year-old magazine offered an attractive target. He gathered together a batch of general articles on topics ranging from the history of art to a report on the London scene. William Blackwood, bookseller and the proprietor of the magazine, wrote to say that the editor ‘likes them very much’. They duly appeared—under a variety of pen-names—and were promptly paid for.

This led Galt to think again. He had long harboured the notion of writing a book based on his early days in Scotland. He had the secret hope that one day he would do in print (‘in the colloquial manner’) what David Wilkie was already so successfully doing on canvas, the genre-painting of Scottish small-town and rural life. Some years earlier, in 1813, he had completed his first attempt, a sketch of village life in rural Ayrshire written in the persona of a parish minister. He had sent it to the Edinburgh publisher Constable (who was later to publish the Waverley Novels). Constable rejected it out of hand—‘Scottish novels would not succeed’. The manuscript was laid aside. It would keep.

The 1819 acceptance by Blackwood's Magazine of his general articles suggested a new approach. In view of Constable's reaction, it was probably too soon to try the rejected novel manuscript on Blackwood. In the meantime, why not try to combine something of the small-town/rural background of his manuscript with the sort of general article and report on the rural scene that William Blackwood (and his ‘editor’) obviously found acceptable? Galt could see a way, technically, through this problem but he needed some reassurance before he got down to the actual writing. He drafted a project and sent it to Blackwood.

The response (of 28 May 1820) was enthusiastic. ‘Our friend, Mr North’, wrote Blackwood, ‘thinks the plan you propose an exceedingly good one’. Let Galt provide ‘four or five pages in each number regularly’—and if Galt should later ‘think of publishing the whole separately I shall be happy to make arrangements’. The Ayrshire Legatees—unwritten and planned only in tentative outline—was off to a flying start.

2

Galt's solution to the problem of combining what he described to Blackwood as ‘my London sketches’ with small-town life in rural Ayrshire is on the surface simple. From Richardson and Smollett onwards, the epistolary form of the novel had been available for later imitators. Galt decided to adopt it. He would invent a situation—the collection of a legacy—that would bring a family group from a small Ayrshire village for some months to London. Their experiences and impressions would be recorded in a series of letters (so providing an up-to-date London commentary for the readers of the magazine). But the letters would also be read aloud to an assembled group of neighbours in the family's home village of ‘Garnock’ (in all but name Galt's native town of Irvine). Every letter-reading would be followed by a session of commentary and the exchange of local gossip.

The simplicity of the plan is deceptive. Galt in The Ayrshire Legatees was quietly expanding the frontiers of the epistolary novel. In Pamela, the prototype, the heroine's experiences are narrated in letters to her parents. They play no part in her story; Richardson after giving a few of their letters in the early pages of the novel lets them drop out of sight and concentrates thereafter on what is a continuous first-person narrative by the heroine.

Galt altered all that. In The Ayrshire Legatees recipients are as important as letter-writers. They form a chorus of village voices commenting on the events recorded in the letters; and they both represent and enact a varied village life that is quite independent of the events taking place on the private and the public scene in London.

The characterisation of the villagers who remain behind in Garnock is as strong as that of the London visitors, and Galt deploys all his considerable writing skills to achieve his intended range of effects in both locales. At the London end, the visitors from the country are the Garnock parish minister, Dr Pringle, with his wife, daughter and son. The doctor of divinity writes in educated Anglo-Scots, his unlettered wife in Ayrshire dialect in phonetic spelling. Rachel Pringle, much given to the ‘sensibility’ that Jane Austen had satirised only a few years earlier, writes the flowery English of the romantic novel of the period. Andrew Pringle, Edinburgh lawyer, who takes to London life with growing sophistication, uses the business-like English style he had learned from his favourite reading, The Edinburgh Review. All four are made to write ‘in character’ and their letters show the first appearance of that ironical unconscious self-revelation that was to become one of Galt's hallmarks in all his best fiction.

For his Garnock scenes Galt used the more regular novel technique, direct narration combined with dialogue, most of it in the Ayrshire vernacular. The villagers, among them the once flighty but now godly Mrs Glibbans, her backbiting daughter, the industrious spinsters Nanny Eydent and Mally Glencairn, Mr Craig, the upright and censorious kirk elder (whose Holy Willie private life is dramatically uncovered when his maid has to send for Nanse Swaddle the midwife)—they are cameos; but the effect is life-size. Even a minor walk-on character like Sanders Dickie the Irvine postman (his only function to deliver the London letters) springs from his few entries into full life. The Garnock characters, however many or however few lines of print they may occupy in the novel, are always seen by Galt in the round.

They continued to occupy his imagination for years afterwards. Dr and Mrs Pringle make a notable re-entry, on their way to Rachel's lying-in and George IV's coronation, in The Steam-boat, published in 1821 in Blackwood's Magazine. The Leddy in The Entail (1822) has high praise for the preaching in the Wynd Kirk of ‘that delightful man, Dr Pringle o' Garnock’. Galt's two spinster ladies lived on, one (her name altered) in a short story “The Seamstress” in his 1833 collection Stories of the Study, and (under her own name, Nanny Eydent) in The Gathering of the West, 1822, when she goes to Edinburgh for the visit of George IV and, with some help from advocate Andrew Pringle, contrives to view the fashions at the Levee. The other is the central figure in the unfinished The Spinster or the Autobiography of Miss Mally Glencairn, which is still in manuscript. The Garnock voices continue to echo throughout all of Galt's Tales of the West. They had their beginnings in his first published Scottish novel.

3

Christopher North's testimony shows how well the regular instalments of The Ayrshire Legatees went down with the readers. The monthly episodes were equally popular, as his letters to Galt demonstrate, with William Blackwood. Late in 1820, while The Ayrshire Legatees was running its course in the magazine, Galt was emboldened to look out his old 1813 manuscript and send Blackwood a few sample pages. The response was enthusiastic—and it appeared in volume form in May of the following year as Annals of the Parish. It was an instant success. It has remained an abiding one. Galt for a few more years could do nothing wrong; Blackwood would publish anything he provided.

His first thought was to revise the monthly instalments of The Ayrshire Legatees for publication in book form. While he was still working, late in 1820, on the final tidying-up of Annals of the Parish he promised Blackwood that he ‘would revise the numbers with that view’. By April of the following year he was able to report to his publisher ‘I have arranged the Legatees so as to make a regular book’. It was published in volume form in June 1821, a month after appearance of Annals of the Parish.

4

When Galt came to revise the magazine version of the novel he had before him an accurate text. Galt expected what he wrote to appear in print (punctuation apart) exactly as he had written it. On sending Blackwood the very first instalment of The Ayrshire Legatees he added the significant warning ‘Tell our friend Mr North not to touch one of the Scotticisms’.

Blackwood on his part ensured that all was well by sending Galt a steady stream of proofs, slips and revises, knowing that his author was a careful and long-experienced corrector of proofs. It can be taken for granted that any Blackwood publication of this period in which Galt's oversight can be documented—as it can from their regular correspondence—represents the author's final intentions. The 1821 edition of The Ayrshire Legatees falls into this category. It was a revised but accurately printed version produced by the author carefully working over the original magazine text.

5

In preparing his revision Galt made three main changes. Like all his novels of this period (his self-styled ‘Tales of the West’), The Ayrshire Legatees was published anonymously. Behind this mask of anonymity Galt tried to give the illusion that his fiction was not fiction. He insisted that what he was offering was a real set of letters written to real recipients.

Some of his magazine readers particularly in the west of Scotland took to making enquiries—one obstinate correspondent from Irvine complained that he could find no Miss Mally Glencairn living in the Kirkgate! Galt had to fend him off with further denials. These exchanges between writer and reader begin to appear as prefaces to the later magazine instalments as ‘Responsive Notices to Correspondents’. Galt at first thought of including them in the forthcoming book version but decided to eliminate them. They were easily separated from the main narrative.

His second exclusion from the magazine version was not so easy and it called for some re-writing. A built-in difficulty of the epistolary novel—particularly if the story is passed off as ‘reality’ and not fiction—is to explain how an ‘editor’ has gained access to an entire file of correspondence. Even Richardson had been reduced to some unlikely explanations. Galt solved the problem by inventing a ‘Kilwinning correspondent’ Mr McGruel, who attended all the letter-readings and who was allowed by general consent to forward copies. It was, at best, a clumsy device. It might not meet much objection from those who read each instalment at monthly intervals, but would show up to anyone reading the novel as a book. Galt had no compunction in removing Mr McGruel from the book version. It was perhaps just as well. Galt's minor characters have a way of coming alive and Mr McGruel was beginning to develop a brisk life of his own that had no relevance to the rest of the narrative.

A third alteration illustrates Galt's agility in changing tack as his story developed. Dr Pringle's pulpit was occupied in his absence by the city-educated Rev. Charles Snodgrass, correspondent of advocate Andrew Pringle. He is portrayed as a tactful mediator among the Garnock factions but the parish for him was but a step in the direction of a fashionable city church. After one of his peace-making interventions, Galt has him hope (in the magazine version) that he will never ‘have to dree penance as the pastor for life of the parish of Garnock’.

Galt changed his mind about what he had in store for young Mr Snodgrass. For Rachel and Andrew Pringle he had planned good marriages in London. Why not round off the story with a third marriage? In the final magazine instalment Dr Pringle's newly inherited wealth enables him to yield up the parish stipend to his young successor, now fallen in love with Rachel Pringle's Garnock correspondent.

Only an alert reader of the magazine instalments would have remembered the young minister's earlier dissatisfaction with Garnock but in a book version (read perhaps at a single sitting) the discrepancy would have been obvious. Mr Snodgrass's plans for a flight from Garnock disappeared in Galt's skilled rewriting. There is no more talk of penance. At the close of the novel he is contentedly looking forward to acquiring a wife, a manse, a glebe—and a stipend worth three times the average for a parish minister of his time. The city church could wait.

6

For the reader of today The Ayrshire Legatees is now inevitably a period piece. It is a novel about the past, particularly in the ‘London Sketches’ of public events of the year 1820. It is noteworthy that these are confined to one segment of the novel, the letters of Andrew Pringle. He is—in the Galt ‘autobiographical’ manner—self-revealed as a prig and a bore. Galt intended to exhibit him as a prig. He also meant him to be seen as a bore. At the reading of one of his letters a Clyde skipper in the Garnock audience falls asleep and on waking announces that he had dreamt he was in a fog at sea—and ‘some of the company thought the observation not inappropriate to what they had been hearing’. Even Andrew's friend the Rev. Mr Snodgrass can say of one of his London reports only ‘This is a dry letter’.

Though The Ayrshire Legatees was widely popular, some of the real-life public figures, ‘acridly’ commented on in Andrew's prosy letters, were less well pleased with how they were portrayed. Galt had to make strenuous denials that the opinions of Andrew Pringle were the opinions of John Galt. In his Literary Life of 1834 he rejected the identification. ‘[Andrew Pringle] is too ultra for me.’ Yet he recognised that the accusation was an ‘indirect compliment’ to his ability to create a life-like fictional character. Galt's fiction, like Defoe's, is sometimes more real than the real thing.

7

The heart of the novel remains Garnock and its inhabitants, the closely textured life of a small town. Dr and Mrs Pringle are, in London, innocents abroad, and Galt extracts the maximum comedy from their adventures and misadventures. But they belong to Garnock—and Garnock belongs to them. They never lose touch. They finally arrive home, in a new carriage, richer, more fashionably dressed, the Doctor for the first time in his life in a clerical wig, his wife economically resplendent in a dyed fur that ‘looked quite as well as sable, without costing a third of the money’. They will remain as they have always been.

The Ayrshire Legatees is a splendidly comic novel. Like all good comedy it has something serious to say. Garnock covers a whole gamut of human behaviour. There is malice in the little town as well as kindness, skulduggery as well as forgiveness, bigotry as well as a large tolerance. Galt, an emancipated product of the Scottish Enlightenment (firmly based in the metropolis), notes it all and accepts it, setting it down ironically and without sentimentality. The Ayrshire Legatees, period piece, a small-town affair, filled with minor characters, their speech a minority rural dialect, has something in it of universality. People, Galt implies, are cast in different moulds; we have to accept their differences and learn to live with them. It is not without design that Galt made the compassion and tolerance of Dr Pringle the real centre of his novel.

8

One further edition of The Ayrshire Legatees appeared in Galt's lifetime. In February 1823 Blackwood reported to Galt that stock was running low. He was down to his last twelve copies and had ordered a reprint, to be bound up together with one of Galt's later stories The Gathering of the West which had already appeared in the magazine. ‘There will hardly be time’, he wrote, ‘to send you proofs.’ But a few weeks later Galt was in Leith and remained there for some weeks. He was within walking distance of Blackwood's shop in Edinburgh's Princes Street and, though he was now engaged in secret dealings with another publisher, he called at the shop regularly. There is ample evidence in the correspondence (now in the National Library of Scotland) that Blackwood sent material for proofing to the Leith address and no doubt that Galt exercised oversight of the new edition. Blackwood had a finished copy of the book delivered to him on the first of April. This second edition of 1823 represents what the author considered the final form of his novel. It must be the basis for any authoritative later edition.