Annals of the Parish (1821) was the Scottish novel that established John Galt as a major proponent of regional realism; along with books such as Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village (1824), Annals offered a model for early Canadian sketch writers such as Susanna Moodie. John Galt contributed more directly to early Canadian literature with Bogle Corbet (1831); the third volume of this novel, set in southwestern Ontario, combines the ironic perspective of the Annals with details drawn from Galt's experience as colonizer in the 1820s. Galt's Autobiography (1833) is another essential source for students of politics, landscape, and the daily management of life in the Canadas.
John Galt was born on 2 May 1779 at Irvine, in west-coast Scotland, the son of John and Jean Thomson Galt. His father was a sea captain, and young John was early apprenticed to business in Greenock, in spite of a childhood flair for writing blank-verse tragedies. He left for London at the age of twenty-five. Among his first publications was "Statistical Account of Upper Canada" in the Philosophical Magazine (October 1807), owned by Dr. Alexander Tilloch, whose daughter Elizabeth he married on 20 April 1813. Galt's early experiences included business bank-ruptcy, legal studies, travels in Europe during the Napoleonic embargo--he became involved with George Gordon, Lord Byron in some smuggling enterprises--and prodigious writing of travel books, plays, biographies, and poems. In 1818 he returned to Glasgow to work as political lobbyist for the Glasgow-Edinburgh canal; this led in 1820 to another lobbying assignment, as agent for United Empire Loyalists hoping for government reimbursement for losses sustained during the War of 1812.
Galt's era of fame as a novelist also began in 1820. Ten novels about West Scotland life poured out in the next five years. Meantime, however, Galt continued his business life, pressing the claims of the Loyalists. His brief for them incorporated the suggestion that funds could be found by selling Canadian crown and church lands, a position offensive to Canadian clerics such as John Strachan. The Canadian Company was nevertheless formed, with Galt as one of its commissioners, and he made his first transatlantic visit in 1825 to arrange the takeover of vast tracts of land, to be sold by the company to immigrants. After visits to New York State to study methods of land settlement and town planning he returned to London in June 1825.
Galt came to Canada again in 1826 as superintendent of the Canada Company. Descriptions of his travels with William "Tiger" Dunlop from Quebec to York, Guelph, Penetanguishene, and Goderich make Galt's Autobiography an excellent source of information on roads, shipping, social life, and climate. Reports of his tussles with Lieutenant-Governor Peregrine Maitland and secretary Wilmot Horton (distorted by a misconception of Galt's connections with William Lyon Mackenzie) add a rich sense of politics in the mid 1820s. His production of novels momentarily ceased, although The Last of the Lairds (1826), arguably his best work, was published in London during his absence overseas.
Galt brought his wife and three sons to Canada in 1828 with the intention of permanent establishment there, but his dealings with the Canada Company became strained, and he was recalled. April 1829, accused of mismanagement. Debts for his sons' schooling had piled up, and he was incarcerated in London debtors' prison from July to November, 1829. Here he wrote the following to clear his debts: Lawrie Todd (1830), a novel about settlement life in the United States; a biography of Byron (1830); Southennan (1830), a romance set in the time of Mary Queen of Scots; and articles for Fraser's Magazine including "The Hurons, a Canadian Tale," "Canadian Sketches," "American Traditions," and "Guelph in Upper Canada."
The popularity of Lawrie Todd brought financial relief, and the rise in value of Canada Company stock restored faith in Galt's management abilities. In 1831 he became secretary for the British-American Land Company. Settling his family in cheap lodgings in London, he continued to produce work on his Canadian experiences: Bogle Corbet and further articles on Canada published in Fraser's, Tait's, and Blackwood's.
His always precarious health deteriorated. A first stroke in 1832 was followed by another in 1834 and a third in 1836. Galt, now settled in Scotland, his debts paid off by Herculean efforts to publish, lived until 11 April 1839, writing and dictating until his last hours. Canada was still among his topics in late poetry and prose; important ethnographic articles in Fraser's included "Shaa-naan-Lillet, Last of the Boeothics," and "Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnees" (both 1835).
The Autobiography and The Literary Life and Miscellanies (1834), partly dictated to his son when Galt was incapacitated, are sometimes rambling and inconsistent, but they are rewarding resources for students interested in early life in the Canadas or in the artistic strategies devised by a perceptive observer straining for ways to reveal and assess that life. Lawrie Todd and especially Bogle Corbet, however, constitute Galt's main claim for Canadian attention. The New World section of Lawrie Todd is set in upstate New York, but contains many details of settlement life drawn directly from Galt's Canadian experiences. Lively in tone and incisive in characterization, Lawrie Todd deserved its contemporary popularity; it also deserves a modern reprinting. The third volume of Bogle Corbet has been reissued in a New Canadian Library Edition. This part of the pseudoautobiography of a generally unsuccessful entrepreneur is set in a new Upper-Canadian community, sixty miles from York. Details of the founding and organization of this village replicate facts about Guelph, Ontario. In middle age, Bogle brings his unwilling wife, Urseline, and his family into the bush in order to set out a town designed to satisfy modern economic and aesthetic principles. Like a bundle of sticks, the settlers will be tied by common ownership and cooperative work on roads, mills, and public buildings. Like the "New Town" in Edinburgh, the village will be laid out with vistas and green spaces, attention being paid to the picturesque aspects of cityscape as well as to practical needs for public gathering places, markets, schools, churches, and business facilities.
One recurring theme is the difference between life in such a planned colony and life in the United States, where the will-o'-the-wisp of freedom attracts radical members of the pioneer group away from the settlement of "Nox." Other points about life in a new country are slyly made by the portraiture of religious charlatans, such as Mr. Faggotter, the Methodist preacher who pursues the less respectable wives in the town, and the feckless farmer who stands helplessly by in the face of disaster. As for Bogle himself, like the narrators of Galt's Scottish novels, he is untrustworthy, a persona whose oddities beckon the reader into rectifying his unbalanced account. In Bogle Corbet Galt inaugurates a new genre, a narrative form of loosely linked sequential sketches pointing the way not only to Susanna Moodie, but also to later writers such as Duncan Campbell Scott, Stephen Leacock, and Alice Munro.
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