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Considering his vast and diversified literary output, as well as his colorful career as a businessman and promoter of various enterprises, it is ironic that John Galt, a Scots novelist contemporaneous with Sir Walter Scott, should be so little known today. According to George Saintsbury's History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896), Galt's writings are "totally uncritical; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly worthless, his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his historical novels are given up by all but devotees." Yet a recent biographer, Ian A. Gordon, calls Galt "a novelist of considerable power, with an assured niche in literary history." Other scholars have agreed, pointing out that novels such as Annals of the Parish (1821), The Ayrshire Legatees (1821), The Provost (1822), and The Entail (1822) are valuable reflections of English and Scottish society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Galt's novels generally involve the important concerns of his times, and they are important as contributions to the development of the realistic Scottish novel, enhanced by local color derived from minute details of village life day-to-day and a generous use of vernacular speech.
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