SOURCE: Costain, Keith M. “The Spirit of the Age and the Scottish Fiction of John Galt.” Wordsworth Circle 11, no. 2 (spring 1980): 98-106.

[In the following essay, Costain describes Galt's positive representation of industrial progress in his prose fiction.]

Unlike most novelists in the early nineteenth century, John Galt was concerned with contemporary social problems. As an essayist, a novelist, and a Scot, he was fully aware of the implications of the industrialism that had transformed at least the lowlands of Scotland from “an utterly impoverished country to a prosperous land.”¹ In an interconnected series of novels that he wrote in the 1820s and early 1830s, he examines the full range of contemporary phenomena, affirming in 1824 that “all the past has become, in some degree, obsolete, or is only drawn on to furnish illustrations to characters, possessing something in common with that high state of excitement into which we have ourselves been raised by the vast and wonderful events of the age” (The Bachelor's Wife [1824], p. 351). In his fiction and nonfiction alike, Galt defends the present against the past and defines it by contrast with the past. More specifically, all his novels of modern life explore the differences and dramatize the conflicts between feudalism and urban capitalism, especially in relation to the rise of factory industry. Galt emphasizes the dynamism of early industrial society, its manifestation of an ideal “improvement” to come to perfection in the future. Thus he depicts as distinguishing features of British society in the early nineteenth century: agriculture improved by new technology and scientific method; the new industrial economy; more evenly diffused prosperity; alterations in class structure and relationships; the prominence of “public opinion” as a political force; and the growing urban influence on the national life. Such developments Galt considered to be harbingers of a general progress unknown to former ages. This view from the center, the outlook upon social change from an urban and essentially middle-class vantage point, informs much of Galt's fiction.

Galt's positive representation of his times stems not from Godwinian idealism, but from the ideal of progress expounded by the Scottish Realist philosophers who dominated the Scottish universities during Galt's youth. Their ideas, which Galt found persuasive,² combined with his own astute understanding of the forces that underlie historical development, led him to think that in industrialism lay the progressive power that would help eradicate the poverty that had fettered Scotland for so long. Galt's attitude toward the changes of his day was shaped by Scottish historical conditions and by Scottish thought that, in unison with his particular temperament, caused him in his fiction to be more cautious in expressing his conviction that the spirit of the age demanded a reformation of British society and a realignment of British social thinking. The optimism behind Galt's view of his times is qualified—he took neither so gloomy a view as Southey nor so sanguine a view as Macaulay. He would have been less optimistic than he was had he not written during a period that afterwards came to be regarded as “the golden times of manufactures,”³ before the great crisis in the industrial system that occurred in the late 1830s.

Galt's focus on the present and his celebration of its unique qualities is evident in his earliest nonfictional works. His Life of Wolsey (1812) interprets its subject as the herald of “a system in which power shall be possessed by right of intellectual attainment.” Galt saw such a system taking shape at the time he wrote the book. With his “forward spirit,” his “intrepid disregard of precedents,” Wolsey is portrayed as a forerunner of the “new men” of Galt's own day who, as Galt asserted of Wolsey and his type, “agitated and altered the regular frame of society by their influence.”⁴ In 1812 Galt also published Cursory Reflections on Political and Commercial Topics, a pamphlet written in the belief that “the discussions of the times are not favourable to the preservation of things as they are. The spirit of innovation is abroad. …”⁵ Corollary to Galt's interest in the innovative present is his disrespect for antiquity expressed in his travel books. In Voyages and Travels (1812) he remarks that “Antiquity is a wrinkled and aged dame; and it is only by her tales that she interests us.”⁶ In Letters from the Levant (1813) he declares to a correspondent: “Although I am very willing to allow the antients to have been very extraordinary persons, yet you know that I have always thought but little of their great affairs, and particularly of their most famous characters, compared to the great affairs and famous characters of the moderns.”⁷

It was in the year Letters from the Levant was published that Galt submitted to Constable an early draft of Annals of the Parish, the first-written, though not the first-published, of his novels of modern Scottish life.⁸ The work expresses the state of mind and deals with the topics of Galt's nonfictional works mentioned above. It is a tribute to the “forward spirit” of men who, after the manner of Wolsey, though in a humble sphere, alter society by their “intrepid disregard of precedents.” It dramatizes that “spirit of innovation” observed in Cursory Reflections and, in the fashion of the travel books, exalts the “great affairs” of the present in contrast to what the narrator of the Annals calls “the taciturn regularity of ancient affairs.”⁹ Offered to Constable not long after the Luddite Riots had occurred, Annals of the Parish may be read as at least an implicitly anti-Luddite novel to the extent that it condemns violent action of any sort and takes a generally constructive position concerning the value of industrialism. Like the other novels of contemporary or near-contemporary life that were to follow, Annals of the Parish, in the words of its narrator, was written to “testify to posterity anent the great changes that have happened in my day and generation—a period which all the best-informed writers say, has not had its match in the history of the world, since the beginning of time” (201).

The most obvious of the “great changes” occurring in Galt's day was displacement by the new industrial and commercial system of a repressive, country-based, oligarchical system in which power derived from landownership and land was owned by a few. Galt's satisfaction at this displacement is voiced in his novel The Member (1832) by a bright young schoolmaster in tune with the times. He nonplusses the protagonist, Archibald Jobbry, a thoroughly corrupt Scottish Tory member of Parliament, by proclaiming the demise of the feudal system from which Jobbry has profited politically. The young man informs Jobbry that “the great properties have had their day: they are the relics of the feudal system, when the land bore all the public burdens. That system is in principle overthrown, and is hastening to be so in fact. The system that it will be succeeded by is one that will give employment to the people—is one that will gradually bring on an equalisation of condition” (264-65). This passage from a novel published in the year of the first Reform Act enunciates the gradualist position, acceptance of which, Galt thought, would enable Britain to avoid violent revolution. He had argued in various periodical essays published in the 1820s that the condition of the common people could be improved through timely economic, political, and social reforms without their having to resort to violence to improve it for themselves. Galt found the reactionary “country gentlemen” standing in the way of such reforms—men whom Galt considered unfit for the continued exercise of power. At the time he wrote his best and most characteristic fictions Galt was also writing articles for Blackwood's Magazine attacking the gentry for their inhumanity and recalcitrant opposition to change.¹⁰ In the novels the gentry are depicted as absurd anachronisms whose removal from power is long overdue.

The most ridiculous example of the type is Malachi Mailings, the pathetic subject of The Last of the Lairds (1826), whose family “from unrecorded epochs, flourished in the barony of Killochen, a fertile and pleasant tract of Renfrewshire.”¹¹ The family withers when Malachi becomes the laird. He has little wit, no sense of purpose or direction, and merely hopes (vainly as events turn out) to hang on to the tumbledown “mansion house of Auldbiggings” and what little is left of its estate. Malachi's situation is figured in the “gnomonless dial” (IX, [The Collected Works of John Galt, Vol. IX, hereafter referred to as IX], 4) in his overgrown garden. Because he lacks any understanding of the process of change visibly at work in society at large during the later years of his life, he attributes alterations in class relationships, for example, to some nebulous “conspiracy that's working the downfall and overthrow of sae mony birthrights o' our national gentry” (IX, 46). He blames his various failures—especially what he refers to as the “mouldering awa” of “the lands o' my forefathers”—upon this supposed “conspiracy” (IX, 183). In Malachi's primitive mind this “conspiracy” is mysteriously linked with the introduction of turnip farming, for this progressive agricultural measure seems to him responsible for social disorder. The laird earnestly informs the narrator of his story that “with the ingrowth o' turnip-farming, there has aye been a corresponding smasherie amang the looms and sugar hoggits. Last year, I was in terror for what was to happen when I saw sae mony braw parks that used to be ploughed for vittle to man sawn for fodder to beasts” (IX, 252).

Although the pathos of Malachi's situation is sympathetically rendered, Galt's ironies leave no doubt that the author is highly critical of what Malachi represents. Because in his heyday the laird had exercised a whimsical tyranny over his dependents, it is ironic that he should be turned off his land at last by the son of one of his cottars who had gone out to India in poverty and returned a wealthy nabob. It is more ironic still that Malachi should be driven in his distress to seek help (and, worse, find himself obliged to accept it) from the parish minister, the son of another former dependent and one whom the laird had persecuted with particular malignancy. Such ironies suggest that Malachi's removal from his debt-ridden estate is as inevitable and necessary as the removal from political influence of the irresponsible class he represents.

Galt, then, thought that the dead hand of the past must be made to relax its grip since progress depended upon the activities of able, intelligent men with an attitude of mind very different from the laird of Killochen's. He had made this point in the novels preceding The Last of the Lairds, though less centrally. In Sir Andrew Wylie (1822), the conclusion of which prefigures The Last of the Lairds, the unwillingness of most of the west country Scottish lairds to engage in the new farming, or in either commercial or industrial enterprises, is criticized. The laird of Craiglands, an obvious precursor of Mr. Mailings, condemns himself and those who think as he does when with unconscious irony he complains about the activities of his more forward-looking (and thus exceptional) neighbor, Monkgreen, “wha was aye ettling to improve and improve his lands like a common farmer, and wha cut down the fine auld trees o' his grandfather's planting, and set up his sons as Glasgow merchants” (IV [The Collected Works of John Galt, Vol. IV, hereafter referred to as IV], 300). Further, the feelings Galt was later to express in his articles on the “country gentlemen” enter into the contemptuous account given of the gentry of his parish by the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, narrator of Annals of the Parish (1821). The minister, who eventually establishes his own son as a Glasgow merchant, indicts the gentry for not taking an active part in developing the new economic order. He points out that they were “in general straitened in their circumstances, partly with upsetting, and partly by the eating rust of family pride, which hurt the edge of many a clever fellow among them, that would have done well in the way of trade, but sunk into divors for the sake of their genteelity” (130).

While Galt attacks the feudal outlook, he endorses the viewpoint of the agricultural improvers who were busily revitalizing the country. These men were more closely linked, both economically and in attitude, with the “new men” of the expanding cities than with their aristocratic rural predecessors. They applied “manufacturing” methods to farming like their counterparts on the North American continent,¹² and displayed none of the primitive, superstitious aversion to new technology and to new methods of production that was evident among the reactionary lairds.

The improvers Kibbock and Coulter of Annals of the Parish are favorably presented. Their self-confidence and technical ingenuity, which matches the urban industrialist's, elicit the narrator's and, one may assume, the author's respect. Coulter, Mr. Balwhidder reports, “was from beyond Edinburgh, and had got his insight among the Lothian farmers, so that he knew what crop should follow another, and nothing could surpass the regularity of his rigs and furrows” (37). Coulter's interest in increased productivity rather than in display impresses the minister, who claims that advanced farming methods “tended to do more for the benefit of my people than if the young laird had rebuilded the Breadland House in a fashionable style, as was at one time spoken of” (37).

If the concentration of agricultural improvers on productivity had a revitalizing effect on the country, the revival created by the focus of industry on the same goal was both stronger and more widespread. Galt depicts industrialism as awakening Scotland from the long sleep (or, perhaps, stupor) induced by economic stagnation under a tenacious but declining feudal social order. The state of many of the common people under that social order had been graphically represented by Scott in the eighth chapter of Waverley, in the account he gives of life in the preindustrial village of Tully-Veolan where “it seemed, upon the whole, as if poverty, and indolence, its too frequent companion, were combining to depress the natural genius and acquired information of a hardy, intelligent, and reflecting peasantry.” This commentary upon the scene he depicts suggests that Scott thought the depressed condition of the preindustrial Scottish peasantry to have been socially induced, and therefore to be remediable. But he was unwilling to present industrialism as the remedy, whereas in Galt's fiction the rise of industry is interpreted in precisely this way.

In Galt's fictional world industry is shown to work an almost magical change in the lives of a poverty-stricken people who, when employed, were obliged to endure the traditional rural drudgery that is deplored in Sir Andrew Wylie. Self-made and rich, Wylie returns to the village of Stoneyholm only to be shocked at the appearance of some of his former schoolfriends who remained in the village controlled by the laird of Craiglands. He finds them “chained by fortune to rustic drudgery” (IV, 243), their faces “depressed, it might almost be said depraved, with premature age, the effects of heavy toil and constant labour” (IV, 250). Nothing in Wylie's London experience seems to have prepared him for such a sad spectacle. The villagers of Stoneyholm resemble the inhabitants of Scott's Tully-Veolan, but the workers in cities, or in areas in which new cotton towns had been built present a different appearance. When Mr. Balwhidder records his awe at the “spacious fabric” of the cotton mill (“nothing like it had been seen before in our day and generation”) he notes how it proved to be an “enlivening rod” (128). Soon after the mill is built the people are stimulated to such unprecedented productive activity that “the whole countryside was stirring with new life” (127).

Annals of the Parish, it is true, deals with the early phase of industrialization when water supplied the power for the mills. But when he later touches on the era of steam power Galt continues to emphasize the “new life” that industry stimulates in the mass of the people. When Archibald Plack, the central figure in Galt's novella A Rich Man, visits Scotland, he is so impressed with the purposeful bustle he witnesses in Glasgow that his enthusiasm at the sight of a lively, working populace outweighs his tentative criticism of the industrial environment. He writes that “Glasgow was mair to my liking than Edinburgh, for the people there are all in a stir, which gladdens me to see. Only, they are greatly given to coomy work and have an overplush of foul lums and steam-engines. Still, they are braw, hearty, and ettling.”¹³

Galt reminds the readers of his novel The Entail (1822) that society may be observed either from above or below, and that the view differs according to the angle of vision. Like the Rev. Mr. Eadie in this novel, Galt felt some compunction “to contemplate the movements of society from below.”¹⁴ From this point of view he interpreted the Industrial Revolution as having liberating effects, tangible and intangible, upon the common people. Mr. Balwhidder recollects in Annals of the Parish that with the coming of the cotton mill “there was a visible increase among us of worldly prosperity” (129). This increase, and the care taken by at least the more enlightened employers over such matters as housing, gave the factory worker a degree of independence the feudal gentry resented. In recounting the building of the factory town in his own parish the minister observes that the gentry “were not pleased with this innovation, especially when they saw the handsome dwellings that were built for the weavers of the mills, and the unstinted hand that supplied the wealth required for the carrying on of the business. It sank their pride into insignificance, and many of them would almost rather have wanted the rise that took place in the value of their lands, than have seen this incoming of what they called o'er sea speculation” (128).

The indignation of the gentry at the greater freedom of the common people under the new economic order is amusingly depicted in Sir Andrew Wylie. The laird of Craiglands, who observes society from above, protests that “it was a black day when poor Scotland saw the incoming pestilence of the cotton-jennies” (IV, 272) and declares indignantly that “the vera weavers in Glasgow and Paisley hae houses … that the Craiglands here wouldna be a byre to” (IV, 272). The newly rich Andrew Wylie, to whom these remonstrances against the signs of the times are addressed, can hardly be expected to sympathize, especially since the laird associates him with the owners of the cotton-jennies. In fact, Wylie agrees with his grandmother, whose life-long poverty has obliged her to observe social change from below and who, citing individual case histories to support her contention, retorts to the laird that “the cotton-warks hae made that, whilk in my day would hae been a sore burden, a stock in trade o' mony hands, whom the Lord has blessed with thriftiness and prosperity” (IV, 274).

Galt thus finds in industrialism an enlivening, energizing force that gave the common people greater material independence than they had enjoyed in an agrarian system dominated by the landed gentry. He also shows that industry had a liberating influence upon the mind and character of the ordinary people. Some of the cultural implications of this contention will be discussed later; here it will suffice to establish that in Galt's fiction greater mental and moral freedom are regarded as beneficial consequences of the rise of industry.

The narrator of Sir Andrew Wylie insists upon the beneficial immaterial effects of industrialization when he writes that his story begins at a time when “neither the commerce nor the manufactures of Scotland had risen to that height which has since not only wrought such changes in the appearance of the country, but affected the very depths and principles of the national character” (III [The Collected Works of John Galt, Vol. III, hereafter referred to as III], 35). Something of the manner in which Galt conceived the advent of factory industry to have affected the “depths” and “principles” of the Scottish national character is suggested by what, in Annals of the Parish, Mr. Balwhidder has to say about the reaction to the new cotton factory displayed by the laboring people who live in his area—a reaction sharply divergent from that of the gentry. With the building of the mill, the minister recalls, “the minds of men were excited to new enterprizes; a new genius, as it were, had descended upon the earth, and there was an erect and out-looking spirit abroad that was not to be satisfied with the taciturn regularity of ancient affairs” (128). The minister's “new genius” would seem to be identical with the “natural genius” discerned by Scott among the peasantry, now revitalized and given new opportunities for its expression by industry.

The “erect and out-looking spirit” which Mr. Balwhidder testifies that industry inspired found its best opportunities for expression either in towns and cities expanding in consequence of increased industrial productivity and increased trade or in new towns specifically built to satisfy the demands of the factory system for the consolidation of material resources and the concentration of the work-force. Where his contemporaries tended to think of cities in general, and of industrial cities in particular, as unresponsive to the higher human aspirations (thus setting their novels largely in the country), Galt celebrates the freedom of the urban environment from traditional constraints.

Galt appreciated that urban centers, along a scale ranging from metropolitan London to small but steadily growing factory towns like the Cayenneville of Annals of the Parish, encouraged a state of mind advantageous to material and cultural improvement. He found that such centers accepted variety and change. He regarded them as offering appropriate and varied conditions for self-development, while in rural villages or on landed estates custom kept the individual “in his place.” The contrast between city and village in this respect is felt by the many visitors to London whom Galt portrays. They are as impressed as Andrew Pringle in The Ayrshire Legatees (1820-21) that “the universe of this vast city contains a plurality of systems” (II [The Collected Works of John Galt, Vol. II, hereafter referred to as II], 169). They are often as awe-stricken by the city's ceaseless movement as the visitor in Galt's story “My Landlady and Her Lodgers.”¹⁵

The view that variety and change are natural and desirable features of social life is not, however, illustrated only by London experience. If the Rev. Dr. Pringle's mental horizons are widened by his sojourn in London, those of Mr. Balwhidder are similarly extended by what he observes during a visit to industrial Glasgow. He is astonished at the “great improvements” visible there, “surpassing far [he acknowledges] all that was done in our part of the country, which I thought was not to be paralleled” (136). Yet the difference, after all, is merely one of degree. Such improvements as have been made in the minister's parish are the consequence of attitudes identical to those that prevail in Glasgow. Mr. Cayenne, who initiated them, is the same kind of man as the mill-owners of Glasgow and, indeed, is backed with capital by a group of them in setting up the factory and town of Cayenneville.

Cayenne comes to live in Dalmailing (the village the evolution of which Annals of the Parish records) as a refugee after the American War of Independence. He is a man of talent and restless energy who seeks an outlet for his abilities by taking a hand in running village affairs. But the villagers regard him as an interloper; they reject his suggested improvements and cling to their customary ways of doing business. Mr. Balwhidder expresses the irritation of his community when, in his chronicle entry for 1785, he writes complainingly that “the worst thing about Mr. Cayenne was his meddling with matters in which he had no concern, for he had a most irksome nature, and could not be at rest, so that he was truly a thorn in our side” (116-17). In his chronicle entry for 1788, however, the minister finds that Mr. Cayenne is no longer a “serpent plague sent upon the parish” but “one of our greatest benefactors” (127). Mr. Balwhidder's view has altered radically in three years because, unable to participate in the life of a traditional community on his own terms, Cayenne builds Cayenneville and its factory on previously unsettled land. In doing so he provides a large number of people with work. Further, by forming an urban community the growth of which is unhindered by such customary attitudes and legal restrictions as shape the more static patterns of village life, he brings into being a dynamic force that spurs the process of change in the entire region. It is by bringing industrialism to bear on Dalmailing from without that Cayenne becomes a greater benefactor to the parish than any of its “ancient families, in their turreted houses” (128).

Cayenne is but one example of the “new men”¹⁶ whom many novelists of the nineteenth century eyed with considerable misgiving. Galt's “new men” take a variety of routes to social and political prominence. Some, it has already been indicated, are agricultural improvers; others are nabobs returned from India, as Mary Cunningham in Sir Andrew Wylie phrases it, “with a heavy purse and a broken constitution” (IV, 129); others still are professional men or, like Andrew Wylie, successful entrepreneurs. Most, however, are forerunners of the Victorian “captains of industry.” They are merchants and manufacturers some of whom, like Mr. Cayenne, enjoy the initial advantage of capital while others struggle out of the ranks of the populace. The latter are typified by Peter Gauze, a workman who appears in The Gathering of the West (1823) as spokesman for Galt on matters pertaining to class relationships. He is among those “who by the exercise of their natural sagacity, rise from the loom to the warehouse, and ultimately animate the vast machinery of the cotton mills.”¹⁷ Whatever their avenues to position may have been, however, Galt's new men all are urban capitalists and individualists. They have all refused to accept ready-made social roles. Early in life they realized, like Archibald Jobbry in The Member, that “talent, which nature does not seem to give out to rank, like physical peculiarity—will as it has ever been, be distributed among the community at large” (144). Conscious of their talent, ambitious to put it to profitable use, the new men find their chance in the growing cities and towns, in North America, or in India, to which Jobbry like many others went out “a bare lad, with scarcely shoon upon my cloots” (10).

Galt admired the individualism of the new men he introduced into his fictions—even the individualism of men such as Jobbry, James Pawkie of The Provost (1822) or Claud Walkinshaw of The Entail to all of whom, as his irony indicates, he took strong exception on moral grounds. Galt's admiration is evident in the manner in which he enters into their exploits, in the comic vigor with which he recounts their schemes and intrigues, in his identification with their success. Most of all his admiration of their individualism is evident in his idealization of it by means of what might be called the myth of the urban pioneer. The myth indicates that when he observed its operation and effects from the center Galt interpreted the individualism of his new men as a positive manifestation of the spirit of the age.

This social myth is partly expressed in the Whittington story, the pattern of which is implicit in the careers of most of the men in Galt's fiction who make room for themselves at the top. Occasionally the pattern is made explicit. Archibald Plack of A Rich Man rises from the gutter to become Lord Mayor of London. Claud Walkinshaw of The Entail prefers “the history of Whittington and his cat to the achievements of Sir William Wallace” (4), and in Sir Andrew Wylie the Laird of Craiglands' sister is said to have predicted that Wylie “would be ordained Lord Mayor of London, for he was in a far more likely road to the post than Whittington when ‘greeting wi' his cat in his arms’” (III, 349). The story manifested in the careers of these and other men values individual initiative and individual ability. It thus sets a high value on the city where such qualities are permitted freer play than in a rural setting. This is true also of Galt's extension of the implications of the Whittington story in the story of the “adventurer.”

The word “adventurer” has an admittedly equivocal significance, but when Galt evaluates the changes of his time from the center he gives the word something of the positive import it carries in a term such as “merchant adventurer.” Galt's new men are frequently called “adventurers” because they are pioneers or explorers seeking their fortune by exciting and daring enterprises, relying for success on such personal qualities as courage and native wit. Their “territory” or “frontier” is the complex modern city or newly established factory town, either of which will be made to serve their purposes much in the way that virgin forest or newly-opened prairie serves the purposes of more conventional but similarly motivated pioneers. Mr. Cayenne (who made his capital as a Virginia planter) building a factory town in a once entirely rural area of southwestern Scotland is no less a pioneer than Lawrie Todd (the hero of Galt's best Canadian novel) carving fields out of the woods of Upper Canada.

Andrew Wylie is the classical “adventurer” as Galt conceived the type, and also is his most sustained analogue to Whittington. Like other adventurers in Galt's fictional world, he feels stifled by the way of life followed in his oppressive birthplace, the village of Stoneyholm in Ayrshire. He feels himself to be “daily in quest of something he could not find, either on the moorlands or along the hedge-rows and belts of planting that skirted the hills and farms of the Craiglands” (III, 21). He is one of those who, “having few means of advancement, and but a narrow field of enterprise at home, sought their fortunes abroad,” taking with him only the schooling that is “the common patrimony of the Scottish adventurer” (III, 35).

Wylie's quest for advancement and for a wider field of endeavor brings him to London where he quickly familiarizes himself with his new environment, the better to make it serve his ends. In the city he discovers that he has entrepreneurial talents—talents that eventually ensure him commercial success, a membership in parliament, and a baronetcy. London permits Wylie to arrive at what the narrator of his career unequivocally declares to be “his natural level in society” (IV, 155). He then returns to his birthplace “to enjoy that superiority over his early companions which … is really the only reward of an adventurous spirit” (IV, 241). He must also confront “that jealousy of adventurous talent which … began to enter into competition with the entailed gentility of those feudal relics, the west country lairds” (IV, 130).

The particular “feudal relic” Wylie must confront is the laird of Craiglands whose daughter, Mary, Wylie wishes to marry. In dramatizing this confrontation Galt likens Wylie to those other “adventurers,” the merchants and manufacturers of the southwestern Scottish lowlands as, earlier in the narrative, he had drawn comparisons between Wylie and the nabobs. Owing to these connections Wylie comes to represent the emergent industrial, imperialist society as surely as the laird represents the supplanted agrarian order. Thus Galt's defense of his hero in the face of aristocratic feudal prejudice amounts to an apologia for a new socioeconomic order. Significantly, in the narrative Galt entrusts Wylie's defense to Mary Cunningham, the laird's daughter, whose progressive education in Edinburgh has endowed her with a more liberal view than that of her father on the question of social change. She expresses surprise that her father should “entertain such prejudices against those who rise in the world by their talents and merits.” She reminds him that “the founders of all families must have sprung originally from the people,” a proposition the validity of which the laird does not directly deny, though he avers that “there's some difference between a family come of the sword, and ane o' the shuttle” (IV, 301). Despite his prejudices he lives long enough to see Mary pledged to marry Wylie, ironically linking a family whose burial-place is ornamented with “a tablet, on which the arms of the Craiglands Cunninghams had been emblazoned in the rude carving of the sixteenth century” (IV, 378) with a class of men the laird dismisses in disgust as “weavers in coaches, wi' flunkeys ahint them” (IV, 273). Wylie's marriage to Mary Cunningham enables him, at the laird's death, to take his place as the foremost man of the district much as, in Annals of the Parish, Mr. Cayenne replaces the Earl of Eaglesham.

The talents and efforts of the new men, combined with the labor of a revitalized work force, created new wealth that enabled the city to extend its traditional educative, civilizing influence to the whole society. The newly rich were able to acquire “polish” by visiting and living in cities such as Edinburgh or London. In London Andrew Pringle of The Ayrshire Legatees is made painfully aware of his provincialism, remarking ruefully in a letter to a friend in his native village of Garnock that “a raw Scotchman, contrasted with a sharp Londoner, is very inadroit and awkward, be his talents what they may” (II, 219). Mary Cunningham reveals “something of the taste [she] acquired during her residence in Edinburgh” in her landscape gardening projects, which are said to bear “testimony to the improved spirit of the age” (IV, 267). Perhaps conscious of some inconsistency between his evident approval of Mary's activities and his equally evident approbation of Mr. Balwhidder's preference for productivity over ornamentation, Galt has the narrator of Sir Andrew Wylie justify the “improvements” at the Craiglands on utilitarian and humanitarian as well as upon aesthetic grounds. Mary's industriousness sets a beneficial example for others to emulate; she also provides work for the poor and lightens the burdens of the aged, “for the old men found easier occupation in trimming the walks and lawns than in hedging and ditching and the statute labour of the highways” (IV, 189-90).

The poor, however, gained more from the new society of the industrial era than secondary benefits stemming from the increased income and conspicuous consumption of their social superiors. The civilizing influence of the city touched them more directly. Earlier in this essay it was noted that an important psychological effect of the development of commerce and factory industry, as Galt observed it in its Scottish context particularly, was the mental awakening of the common people. This awakening had important cultural consequences because it led working people to demand and get—even if they had to form their own organizations to get it for themselves—the education that many were formerly too poor or (before the process of urban centralization afforded them the necessary conditions) too disorganized to obtain. Commenting upon this social improvement in his essay “The Spirit of the Age” (1831), John Stuart Mill pointed out that until recently “none but the wealthy, and even, I might say, the hereditarily wealthy” had it in their power to qualify themselves to comprehend and manage public affairs. This is no longer the case, he asserts, because of a number of factors, significant among which is “the increase of the town-population, which brings masses of men together, and accustoms them to examine and discuss important subjects with one another.”¹⁸

Galt dramatizes this process in Annals of the Parish. One of the most notable cultural differences between the factory town of Cayenneville and the parallel rural village of Dalmailing is the concern displayed in the former for mutual improvement and for “the diffusion of elementary education”—another of the factors mentioned by Mill as helping to explain the new enlightenment of the populace (24). Mr. Balwhidder records that the factory workers (many of whom have come from such larger centers as Glasgow and Manchester) make sure that they have a bookshop “such as the like of was only to be seen in cities and borough towns” (133). The minister is impressed that the keeper of the shop “had a correspondence with London and could get me down any book published there within the same month in which it came out” (133). The bookseller also obtains a London newspaper for the spinners and weavers “who paid him a penny a week apiece for the same” (133). Twelve years later the shop is so well-established that it stocks “not only a London newspaper daily, but magazines, and reviews, and other new publications” (178). Thus, in its small way, the Cayenneville bookshop furthers the process of national cultural centralization. It also promotes a general cultural trend to which Mr. Balwhidder refers approvingly when, in his chronicle entry for the year 1802, he remarks that “mankind read more, and the spirit of reflection and reasoning was more awake than at any time within my remembrance” (178).

Annals of the Parish ends praising the wider diffusion of education, formal and informal, that industrialism and urbanization together made possible. Not only do the adult workers of Cayenneville educate one another by discussing the pressing topics of the day (as one might anticipate of people described as “lads by-common in capacity” [128]), but they also enjoy the services of “a broken manufacturer's wife, an excellent teacher, and a genteel and modernized woman” (170) who ensures that the children have an adequate formal education. The minister is surprised and pleased at his retirement to be presented with an inscription written, not by a farm laborer from Dalmailing, but “by a weaver lad that works for his daily bread” (204). This evidence of the advancement effected by the “broken manufacturer's wife” causes Balwhidder to reflect that “the progress of book-learning and education has been wonderful since [the beginning of my ministry] and with it has come a spirit of greater liberality than the world knew before; bringing men of adverse principles and doctrines into a more humane communion with each other” (204).

Galt thought popular education a good in itself but he also saw it as a practical political necessity. During his lifetime public opinion had become, in Andrew Wylie's words, “the god of the political world” (IV, 196). Galt regarded this phenomenon as an expression of the progressive spirit of the age, but he recognized that public opinion was volatile and could easily be misled by such a demagogue as he portrays in James Pawkie, whose career is the subject of The Provost.

Pawkie, like Andrew Wylie, observes clearly enough “the rising of that sharp-sighted spirit that is now abroad among the affairs of men.”¹⁹ But as chief magistrate of Gudetown, instead of being guided by public opinion or seeking to educate it, he manipulates it for personal advantage. In order to do so he opposes any educative influence that might make public opinion more enlightened. Thus he complains how in 1809 there was “a great sough throughout the country on the subject of education” (124), and protests the establishment of “such an ettering sore and king's evil as a newspaper, in our heretofore and hitherto royal and loyal borough; especially as it was given out that the calamity, for I can call it no less, was to be conducted on liberal principles, meaning, of course, in the most afflicting and vexatious manner towards his Majesty's ministers” (121). Pawkie condemns himself out of his own mouth for he is just as obviously self-interested as men like the laird of Craiglands, and his protests against those changes he dislikes are just as futile. Such self-interest, Galt realized, would preclude the formation of that educated public opinion which he thought necessary for the implementation of overdue social and political reforms. Without an enlightened public opinion the “humane communion” envisioned by the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder would remain an unattainable ideal.

When he observed social change from the center, Galt was very much what Mill called in the “Spirit of the Age,” a man “of the present day” (6), extolling the zeitgeist as an energizing force, a “spirit of improvement” that was “sharp-sighted,” “erect and out-looking,” and that would liberate the individual and society from bondage to the past. Searching the present for clues to the possible shape of the future Galt could say, with Mr. Balwhidder, that he had been “all my days a close observer of the signs of the times; so that what was lightly called prophecy and prediction, were but a probability that experience had taught me to discern” (170). In view, then, of Galt's enthusiasm for the present, of his celebration of its spirit manifesting “greater liberality than the world knew before,” how is it that he often turns his irony upon the “new men” as well as upon the “feudal relics?” How is it that he has at least as much respect for the pastoral values²⁰ and conduct of his numerous parish ministers as for the notable achievements and sociopolitical success of his nabobs, merchants, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs?

The answer to such questions necessitates a qualification of the argument of this paper, though it is a qualification that does not invalidate its basic case, namely that Galt is unusual among the novelists of his day for the extent of his positive appreciation of radical social change at an early stage in the unfolding of the industrial era. Galt did not regard the superiority of the present over the past as absolute. There were certain moral imperatives inherited from the past the dictates of which, he felt, could not be ignored by humanity without a loss of social purpose and stability. Thus the notion, held by some, that the very phrase “the spirit of the age” implied the relativity of all values was one that Galt rejected. His opposition to such a notion lies behind his ironic exposure of James Pawkie as a sophist when the Provost of Gudetown tries to argue away his own corruption and that of his political predecessors by asserting that “the spirit of their own age was upon them, as that of ours is upon us, and their ways of working the wherry entered more or less into all their trafficking, whether for the commonality, or for their own particular behoof and advantage” (74).

Galt's fictional world, in effect, conveys the ambiguity of feeling and attitude that was characteristic of the zeitgeist itself. Mill acknowledges this ambiguity when, in his essay, he says that “men of the present age” may rejoice at their liberation from old doctrines and old institutions, but they find no new certainties toward which to turn. “We have not yet advanced [he continues] beyond the unsettled state, in which the mind is, when it has recently found itself out in a grievous error, and has not yet satisfied itself of the truth. The men of the present day rather incline to an opinion than embrace it; few, except the very penetrating, or the very presumptuous, have full confidence in their own convictions” (6). Galt attacks the “grievous errors” of feudalism but not because he took comfort in every aspect of industrialism and urbanization. In his depiction of the present he is critical as well as celebratory. He recognized that there was a shadow-side to the industrial era just as he saw some good in feudalism (though rarely in the feudal gentry). If an expanded commerce and the new factory industry improved social conditions for the majority, the greater and more widely diffused wealth produced by the new economic order might lead to a stultifying “mammon-worship”—a prospect that he examines especially in The Entail. Further, if the current individualism had exciting implications for a man of Galt's creative temperament, he knew that were it to remain unchecked by important moral considerations it would become the narrow, unrestrained self-interest he deplored. In all his novels he advocates, often by implication, the pressing necessity of a new worldview in which the values of a competitive, capitalistic society would be synthesized with the moral imperatives of the communal ideal which he associated with society's feudal stage. In Galt's novels that ideal is guarded and furthered by his pastors who, like the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder of Annals of the Parish, believe that Christian charity has the power to transform basically selfish human nature so that man, “when actuated by this divine impulse … rose out of himself and became as a god, zealous to abate the sufferings of all things that live” (147). Although he would not have expressed himself in the minister's pulpit manner, Galt held such a view as a necessary article of faith in changing and uncertain times.

Galt was not, then, totally dissimilar from other novelists of his age (what novelist ever is?). He stood out from the rest, however, because although he could see the possibility of mass exploitation in the changes of his day, he also emphasized that in them also lay the possibility of material and cultural betterment for the majority of people previously condemned to hard physical labor. In his portrait of his age he expresses with conviction a point made later by Victorian writers, and stated somewhat tentatively by Matthew Arnold:

Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalizing influence of our passionate and material progress, it seems … indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after he has made himself perfectly comfortable, and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure.²¹

Those novelists of Galt's day who thought, with Mrs. Elton, “One has not great hopes of Birmingham … there is something direful in the sound,” and thus kept urban centers (other than spas) and the urban viewpoint out of their fiction, refused to recognize this possibility. They thus presented only partial portraits of a society that by 1851 would be more urban than rural.

Notes

1. Henry Grey Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1928), X. Graham's evaluation of Scottish industrialism is much like Galt's.

2. For a discussion of the influence upon Galt of Scottish Realist ideas concerning history see my article “Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fiction of John Galt,” ELH [Journal of English Literary History], 43 (1976), 342-65.

3. The phrase is that of Peter Gaskell who uses it in Artisans and Machinery: The Moral and Physical Condition of the Manufacturing Population Considered with Reference to Mechanical Substitutes for Human Labour (1836). This work has been reprinted as No. 8 in The Cass Library of Industrial Classics series (1968). The phrase is used on p. 12 of this edition. Gaskell's account of the decline of the working class is largely mythological.

4. Life of Cardinal Wolsey, 3rd ed. (1846), pp. 130, 6, 200.

5. Cursory Reflections on Political and Commercial Topics As Connected With the Regent's Accession To The Royal Authority (1812), p. 23.

6. Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811; Containing Statistical, Commercial, and Miscellaneous Observations on Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Serigo, and Turkey (1812), p. 175.

7. Letters from the Levant; Containing Views of the State of Society, Manners, Opinions and Commerce in Greece and Several of the Principal Islands of the Archipelago (1813), p. 130.

8. The publication of Annals of the Parish had to wait until 1821. By that time, after Galt had convinced Blackwood by means of The Ayrshire Legatees (1820-21) that he had found a profitable new author, the publisher was only too eager to print the earlier novel (though in a much revised form).

9. Annals of the Parish, ed. James Kinsley (1967), p. 128. Further references to this novel will be to this edition and will be given in the text of the article, by page number.

10. See “Hints to the Country Gentlemen, In a Letter to C. North, Esq.,” and “Hints to the Country Gentlemen, Letter II” in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 12 (1822), 482-91; 12 (1822), 624-32.

11. The Last of the Lairds, p. 1. The text used is that of The Collected Works of John Galt, ed. D. S. Meldrum and William Roughead, 10 vols. (1936). This is volume IX of the Collected Works. Further references to it, and references to The Ayrshire Legatees and to Sir Andrew Wylie will be given in the text of the article by volume and page number.

12. Galt was impressed that in North America “land was bought as a raw material, and being improved in value by certain preparations for settlers, was afterwards sold as a manufactured article.” See “Bandana on Colonial Undertakings,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 20 (1826), 305.

13. A Rich Man and Other Stories, ed. William Roughead (1925), p. 71. The title story first appeared in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, June-August, 1836. Plack may object to smoke and dirt but John Galt thought highly of the steam engine that so appalled Peter Gaskell and Friedrich Engels. One of his personae in his book The Bachelor's Wife declares that “the steam engine … is the greatest invention, next to that of letters, which the powers of the human mind have yet achieved” (p. 194).

14. The Entail, ed. Ian A. Gordon (1970), p. 209. Further references to this novel will be given in the text of the article, by page number.

15. See “My Landlady and Her Lodgers” in A Rich Man and Other Stories, p. 234. The story was first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, August-November, 1829.

16. Galt uses the term in his novel The Radical (1832), p. 175.

17. The Gathering of the West (1823), 297. The text referred to is that of the second edition published by Blackwood together with a later edition of The Ayrshire Legatees. The story first appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (September, 1822).

18. Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (1963), p. 24. Subsequent references to “The Spirit of the Age” will be given in the text.

19. The Provost, ed. Ian A. Gordon, (1973), p. 112. Further references to this novel are given in the text, by page number.

20. The pastoral element in Galt's fictional world is discussed in my article “Early Remembrances: Pastoral in the Fictional World of John Galt,” UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], 47 (1978), 283-303.

21. “The Function of Criticism At The Present Time,” The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (1962), III, 269. Hardy makes a similar point in The Return of the Native (Book 3, Chapter 2) where he indicates the mistaken assumption behind Clym Yeobright's idealism: “He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather than affluence.” But he fails to realize that: “In passing from the bucolic to the intellectual life the intermediary stages are usually two at least, frequently many more; and one of these stages is almost sure to be worldly advance. We can hardly imagine bucolic placidity quickening to intellectual aims without imagining social aims as the transitional phase.” For Galt the Industrial Revolution was ultimately justified (when he viewed the world from the center) by the fact that it provided the means whereby “bucolic placidity” might begin “quickening to intellectual aims.”