SOURCE: Waterston, Elizabeth. “John Galt's Canadian Experience: The Scottish Strain.” Studies in Scottish Literature 15 (1980): 257-62.

In the following essay, Waterston discusses Galt's unromantic, middle-class novel Bogle Corbet as it illustrates qualities of Canadian and Scottish life.

“Vertical Mosaic” is a phrase happily adopted by many critics and historians to explain the quality of Canadian life. “Mosaic” refers to the notion that the individual pieces, the ethnic groups and sub-groups, tend to hold their shape, keep their colour, rather than to melt and meld into “One Nation, Indivisible.” “Vertical” alludes to the fact that certain groups tend to move to high positions in every sort of scale—political, economic, artistic, social. Scottish “pieces” in the Canadian mosaic have always figured high in the vertical pattern.

The Scots came early to Canada, bound for the fur trade, exploring and exploiting the harsh northland: Mackenzie, Simon Fraser, MacTavish, Simpson and McGill...