John Galt’s ‘Whole Art of Colonization’

The Scottish novelist John Galt provides the clearest example of a writer in whose works fiction, literary technique, and settler colonization overlap. Famous for his regional novels about communities on Scotland’s western seaboard, he also had careers as parliamentary lobbyist, entrepreneur, and colonist in Upper Canada. In the 1820s, he spent a period working for the Canada Land Company, a colonization company he helped to establish in London, and through which he travelled to Canada to participate in the development of colonial settlements, including the city of Guelph. This provided copious material for writings in the final years of his life. Although Galt, and subsequently critics and biographers, have tended to represent the two periods of his life separately, they both are part of a single colonial project, connected by the extensive print networks of which he was a part. The connections are evident principally in his preoccupation with voice and dialect, sound and hearing. In the Scottish works he emphasizes phonological aspects of Scottish regional voices, and ways in which literature trains the ear. Sound operates as a mode of organizing and producing space. In the Canadian works, he explores the themes of sound and acoustic management in the context of colonial space. Together his works present an archive of colonial sound management, and an exploration of the auditory elements of his colonial project.

‘Then went forth our Scots’

This chapter considers the story of emigration from Glasgow across the Atlantic. Looking back to the religious persecutions of the seventeenth-century that drove Scots overseas, as well as the Darien Scheme to set up a Scots colony, it is shown how opportunities in the ‘New World’ were exploited via the British Empire. The work of writer and colonist John Galt is used as a case study.

John Galt and Circum-Atlantic Memory

The last chapter is devoted to the transatlantic Scottish writer John Galt. An important contributor to Blackwood’s and a key figure in the early settlement of what is now Ontario, Galt’s writing underscores the complex and often conflicted elements of Scottish post-Enlightenment thinking on the relation between the past and present – and the future – in the modern world. On the one hand, much of Galt’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, partakes of an empirically based ‘statistical account’ mode of regional and national enquiry, adopting the assumptions and speculative stance of a Scottish political economy. On the other hand, Annals of the Parish and his Canadian emigrant novels Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet inscribe a complex, and ultimately profoundly unsettling, cultural memory of the circum-Atlantic world. In the ‘annalist’ fiction that recounts the proximate past of the parish of Dalmailing, the ‘theoretical biographies’ of Todd and Corbet, and in other writing, Galt charts the development of a melancholy world-view inspired by a circum-Atlantic memory of constant upheaval and psychic trauma.

Responses to Peterloo in Scotland, 1819–1822

This essay traces the rapid agitated reception of Peterloo in Scotland, especially in the lowland west among the skilled working class. It also looks at the responses of Scottish Tory writers, in the reactionary mindsets of Walter Scott and William Motherwell and in the more nuanced treatment by John Galt. The emotion and wider political issues surrounding the release of Henry Hunt from jail are particularly focused upon via the proceedings of a convivial meeting at the Saracen Head inn in Paisley in 1822. As part of the detail of the network of Scottish public response to Peterloo, other events including especially the so-called 'Radical War' in Scotland of 1820 and its subsequent commemoration are sketched.