Annals of the Parish Is the First Novel of the Industrial Revolution

Home , Agnes Mure Mackenzie, Andrew Picken, Weaver (Baxter novel)

The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert P. Irvine The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt Edited by John Galt

General Editor: Angela Esterhammer John Galt’s Annals of the Parish is the first novel of the Industrial Revolution. Narrated by the minister of a rural Scottish parish, it chronicles John Galt (1779–1839) was among the most with humour and pathos the fifty years popular and prolific Scottish writers of the 1760–1810 from the perspective of ordinary nineteenth century. He wrote in a panoply of people swept up in social and economic forms and genres about a great variety of topics transformation.

and settings, drawing on his experiences of the Parish Annals of living, working, and travelling in Scotland and John the Works Galt of Edinburgh Edition of This volume includes extensive explanatory England, in Europe and the Mediterranean, notes that identify Galt’s biblical allusions, and in North America. While he is best known Annals of references to historical events, and social and for his humorous tales and serious sagas about cultural practices of the period in which the Scottish life, his fiction spans many other genres novel is set. The appendices identify Galt’s including historical novels, gothic tales, political real-life sources for some of his incidents, and satire, travel narratives, and short stories. the Parish explain the history and institutions of the Church of Scotland as relevant to the story. The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt is A comprehensive introduction tells the story the first-ever scholarly edition of Galt’s fiction; of this novel’s production and reception, and it presents a wide range of Galt’s works, some outlines its literary and historical contexts. of which have never been reprinted. The Maps are included to help the reader series contains authoritative texts together with understand the geography on which the novel is materials that add to an appreciation of Galt’s acted out: south-west Scotland and its relation historical context, his cultural heritage, and his to the British Isles. overall importance within literary history. Robert P. Irvine is Reader in Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Edited by

Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Robert P. Irvine Back cover image: Sketch of John Galt by Daniel Maclise, Fraser’s Magazine, December 1830. Courtesy of University of Toronto Libraries and Victoria University Library (Toronto).

2372 eup galt_JKT.indd 1 26/02/2020 22:09 Annals of the Parish

The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt General Editor: Angela Esterhammer The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt

General Editor: Angela Esterhammer (University of Toronto)

Editorial Board: Gerard Carruthers (University of Glasgow) Ian Duncan (University of California, Berkeley) Penny Fielding (University of Edinburgh) Suzanne Gilbert (University of Stirling) Regina Hewitt (University of South Florida) Alison Lumsden (University of Aberdeen) Katie Trumpener (Yale University)

Published so far: Annals of the Parish, edited by Robert P. Irvine Three Short Novels: Glenfell; Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore; The Omen, edited by Angela Esterhammer

In preparation: Sir Andrew Wylie, of that Ilk, edited by Sharon Alker The Provost, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher The Entail, edited by Mark Schoenfield and Clare Simmons The Ayrshire Legatees and The Steam-Boat, edited by Mark Parker Lawrie Todd, edited by Regina Hewitt Bogle Corbet, edited by Katie Trumpener JOHN GALT

Annals of the Parish

Edited by Robert P. Irvine

edinburgh university press 2020 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in Arno Pro at the University of Toronto and printed and bound in Great Britain

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 4233 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4242 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4243 5 (epub)

The right of Robert P. Irvine to be identified as author of the editorial matter has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). CONTENTS

Preface to The Works of John Galt...... vii Acknowledgements. ix Chronology of John Galt. x Introduction. xv Origins...... xv Contemporary Reception ...... xx Later Reception. xxvii Literary Context...... xxxi Historical Context . xxxviii Conclusion. . xlv

Annals of the Parish . 1

Appendices. 169 1: Sources for Incidents...... 169 2: History of the Church of Scotland. . 175 3: Maps of Signficant Locations. . 182

Essay on the Text...... 185 The Genesis of the Text...... 185 Variation between First and Second Editions 189 The Present Text...... 193 Emendations . 194 End-of-line Hyphens . 197 Explanatory Notes. 199 Glossary. 259

PREFACE TO THE EDINBURGH EDITION OF THE WORKS OF JOHN GALT

John Galt was among the most popular and prolific Scottish writers of the nineteenth century. He wrote in a panoply of forms and genres about a great variety of topics and settings, drawing on his experiences of living, working, and travelling in Scotland and England, in Europe and the Mediterranean, and in North America. Yet only a fraction of his many works have been reprinted since their original publication. In 1841–43 Galt’s most important publisher, Blackwood, reprinted seven of his novels in volumes 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the Blackwood’s Standard Novels series. In 1895, the Blackwood firm republished these novels, with one change to the selection, as the eight-volume Works of John Galt; this collection was reissued in 1936, again with one additional novel. Modern annotated editions of some individual works have appeared since then. However, the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt presents for the first time a much fuller range of Galt’s fiction in authoritative texts, together with materials that add to an appreciation of his historical surroundings and his cultural heritage. Each volume includes an introduction that places Galt’s work in the context of history, genre, and the print culture of the period; annotations that explain specialized vocabulary as well as historical, geographical, literary, cultural, and philosophical allusions; and other features such as a glossary of Scots words and expressions, maps, and excerpts that illuminate Galt’s sources and his contemporary reception. Galt wrote and published his work quickly, sending portions of manuscript to the printer to be set in type as soon as he finished them; he and his publisher would frequently correct proofs of part of a text while he continued writing the remainder. Although he was usually busy with several projects at once, his correspondence documents his involvement in all stages of the publication process and shows that he undertook proof-corrections himself, except in cases where he developed especially close working relationships with a publisher or fellow writer and allowed that person editorial control. However, with few exceptions, no manuscripts or proofs of Galt’s published fiction have survived. For many of his works, only a single edition appeared during viii preface

his lifetime. Sometimes there were one or more further editions, lightly revised and corrected; in other cases, the text was originally published in a periodical and then revised for publication in book form. As a general editorial principle, subject to adaptation based on research by the editors and the particular publishing history of each text, the present edition adopts as the copy-text the latest version in which Galt is known to have had a hand. In the case of texts first published in periodicals and later revised by Galt to appear as a book, the book publication is preferred as the copy-text. Each volume of the present edition includes the editor’s account of the composition and publication history of Galt’s text, with reference to extant versions in the form of periodical publications, multiple book editions, and manuscript materials. All editorial emendations to the copy-text are recorded in a list of emendations at the end of the volume. The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt presents Galt’s fiction accurately as it appeared during his lifetime, reflecting his intentions to the extent that they can be ascertained. Galt’s work was thoroughly interwoven with the publishing practices and reading habits of his age. He wrote for currently popular publication venues such as monthly magazines and literary annuals; he acquiesced to the expected format of the three-volume novel, but also attempted to popularize alternative forms such as single-volume novels and shorter fiction. His works therefore present a revealing picture of the literary marketplace during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt highlights these insights through the editors’ contextu- alizing notes on early-nineteenth-century print culture and through the presentation of Galt’s texts on the page. With respect to page layout, font, punctuation, and many other details, this edition seeks to replicate the look of Galt’s original editions while providing an enjoyable reading experience for modern readers. The editors hope that the results will make Galt’s clever, insightful, multifaceted, often innovative fiction accessible to a wide range of readers and researchers, and reaffirm Galt’s importance within literary history. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are principally due to the General Editor of the series for her patience and good advice, and to her research assistants at the Uni- versity of Toronto for their work on various stages of this edition: Delaney Anderson, Justine Hamilton-Arvisais, David Johnstone, Anastasia Lachine, Ronan Mallovy, Sana Mohtadi, Tatiana Poluch, Zoe Sebastien, and Meg Zhang. Kaylee Baxter and Jovana Pajovic provided extensive assistance in preparing and setting the final text. Financial support of this edition by the University of Toronto is sincerely appreciated. I am very grateful to Gillian Hughes and Peter Garside for their advice on matters of publishing practice and periodical culture in the period; to Jon Mee for guidance on the history of the idea of industrial revolution; to Julian Goodare, Alistair Mutch, and Alasdair Raffe for their invaluable comments on the first draft of Appendix 2; toAlison Lumsden and Penny Fielding for guidance on textual emendation; to John McGavin, Eila Williamson, Aileen Douglas, Jane Carroll, Dermot Cavanagh, and Rebecca Tierney-Hynes for help with specific notes; and to Ian McGhee, Clare Simmons, and Mark Schoenfield for con- sultation on the glossary and annotations. Thanks also to Francesca Smith for making the maps, and to University of Toronto Libraries for providing the image of the original title page of Annals of the Parish.

Robert P. Irvine University of Edinburgh CHRONOLOGY OF JOHN GALT

1779 John Galt is born (2 May) at Irvine, Scotland, as the oldest child of John Galt (1750–1817), a ship’s captain involved in West Indian trade, and Jean Thomson (1746–1826).

1787–88 Attends the Old Grammar School in Irvine.

1789 Father becomes a ship-owner and moves the family to Greenock. Attends school in the Royal Close.

1795–1804 Clerk in Greenock Customs House, then in the mercantile office of James Miller & Co.

1797 Founds a literary and debating society with two former schoolfellows, William Spence and James Park.

1798 Death of brother James at Montego Bay (17 July).

1803 Publishes a memoir of Greenock poet John Wilson in John Leyden’s Scotish Descriptive Poems. Extracts from “Battle of Largs, a Gothic Poem” appear in the Scots Magazine (April 1803 and January 1804).

1804 Invites James Hogg to a public dinner in Greenock and meets him there. Moves to London (May). Publishes The Battle of Largs in book form, then suppresses it.

1805 “Essay on Commercial Policy” in the Philosophical Magazine, edited by Alexander Tilloch (November). Enters into business with Hugh McLachlan, factor and broker. chronology xi

1807 “Statistical Account of Upper Canada” in the Philosophical Magazine (October).

1808 Bankruptcy of the McLachlan-Galt business (April). Enters into business with brother Tom, who soon departs for Honduras.

1809 Admitted to Lincoln’s Inn to study law (18 May), but after four months embarks on travels in the Mediterranean and Near East, at times in the company of Lord Byron. Visits Gibraltar, Sardinia, Malta, Sicily, Albania, Greece, and Turkey; journeys overland between Constantinople and Vidin for the sake of a mercantile scheme that proves unsuccessful.

1811 Returns to London (October); abandons the study of law.

1812 Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811; The Tragedies of Maddalen, Agamemnon, Lady Macbeth, Antonia, and Clytemnestra; The Life and Admini stration of Cardinal Wolsey, about which Galt receives a complimentary letter from Walter Scott. Briefly editsRedhead Yorke’s Weekly Political Review. Travels to Gibraltar to open a branch office for Kirkman Finlay & Co. (June), but the business falls through.

1813 Returns to London to seek medical treatment. Marries Elizabeth Tilloch (20 April). Death of brother Tom in Honduras (2 August). Letters from the Levant; contributions to Lives of the Admirals. Last encounters with Byron.

1814 “On the Art of Rising in the World” and “On the Principles of the Fine Arts” in the New Monthly Magazine. Edits and contributes dramas to The New British Theatre (4 vols, 1814–15). Visits France, Belgium, and Holland on a potential business venture (May). Birth of son John (13 August).

1815 The Majolo (vol. 1). Birth of son Thomas (12 August). Becomes Secretary of the Royal Caledonian Asylum, a children’s charity established by the Highland Society in London. Death of friend William Spence.

1816 The Life and Studies of Benjamin West, Esq. (vol. 1); The Majolo (2 vols). xii chronology

1817 Death of father (6 August). Birth of son Alexander (6 September). Death of friend James Park. Begins writing for Richard Phillips’ Monthly Magazine.

1818 The Appeal: A Tragedy, in Three Acts performed at Edinburgh with prologue by J. G. Lockhart, epilogue by Walter Scott. Moves to Finnart near Greenock to work for Reid, Irving & Co., but the business venture is aborted.

1819 “The Late Mr. William Spence” in theMonthly Magazine (May). Returns to London to lobby Parliament as agent for the Edinburgh & Glasgow Union Canal Company. Begins writing school textbooks under pseudonyms for publishers Phillips and Souter, as well as children’s books including The History of Gog and Magog. Publishes occasional articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.

1820 Glenfell; Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore; Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West (2 vols); The Wandering Jew; All the Voyages round the World; A Tour of Europe; A Tour of Asia; The Earthquake; “The Atheniad, or The Rape of the Parthenon: An Epic Poem” in the Monthly Magazine (February); “The Ayrshire Legatees” in instalments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (June 1820–February 1821). The Union Canal bill is successfully passed by Parliament. Appointed agent for claimants in Upper Canada (now Ontario) seeking compensation from the British government for losses sustained in the War of 1812.

1821 Annals of the Parish; Pictures, Historical and Biographical; The Ayrshire Legatees (in book form); “The Steam-Boat” in instalments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (February–December). Resides in Edinburgh during the latter part of the year while writing for Blackwood.

1822 Sir Andrew Wylie, of that Ilk; The Provost; The Steam-Boat (in book form); “The Gathering of the West” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (September); The Entail. Visits Scotland during the summer; in Edinburgh during the visit of George IV (August), then in Greenock; returns to London in December.

1823 Ringan Gilhaize; The Spaewife.Moves his family from London to Musselburgh near Edinburgh. chronology xiii

1824 The Bachelor’s Wife; Rothelan. Forms the Canada Company to broker the sale of Crown lands and promote settlement in Upper Canada; appointed as its Secretary.

1825 Travels to York (now Toronto) via New York as one of five commissioners sent to Upper Canada on a fact-finding mission (January to June). Presented with the Freedom of the Burgh of Irvine. Death of father-in-law Alexander Tilloch. Travels to Scotland after his mother suffers a stroke (December).

1826 The Omen; The Last of the Lairds; “Bandana on Colonial Undertakings” and “Bandana on Emigration” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August– September). Death of mother (18 July). Appointed Superintendent of the Canada Company, which is granted a royal charter (19 August). Embarks for New York (October); reaches York in Upper Canada (12 December). Studies the operations of land companies in upper New York State.

1827 Visits Quebec for a month (February). Founds Guelph (23 April) and Goderich in Upper Canada. Visits the settlement of Galt (now part of Cambridge, Ontario) which William Dickson named in his honour.

1828 Sustains a lasting injury from a severe fall. His wife and sons join him in Canada; sons attend school in Lower Canada.

1829 Recalled from management of the Canada Company (2 January). Arrives in Liverpool (20 May) and proceeds to London. Committed to King’s Bench Prison for debt (15 July–10 November). Recurring spells of illness begin. “My Landlady and Her Lodgers” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August).

1830 Lawrie Todd; Southennan; The Life of Lord Byron. Wife and sons return from Canada (June). Briefly edits The Courier, a London evening newspaper. Begins contributing regularly to Fraser’s Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, and literary annuals.

1831 Bogle Corbet; Lives of the Players; short stories (including “The Fatal Whisper,” “The Unguarded Hour,” and “The Book of Life”) inThe Club-book, edited by xiv chronology

Andrew Picken. Forms and becomes Secretary of the British American Land Company for settlement of the Eastern Townships in Lower Canada.

1832 Stanley Buxton; The Member; The Radical; “Our Borough” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October). Begins writing for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (e.g., “The Howdie,” September–October 1832). Suffers a stroke (October); illness becomes more crippling.

1833 Eben Erskine; Poems; The Stolen Child; The Ouranologos, a joint venture with painter John Martin; Stories of the Study (containing “The Dean of Guild,” “The Jaunt,” and “The Seamstress,” among others); The Autobiography of John Galt. Resigns from the British American Land Company due to illness. Sons John and Thomas emigrate to Canada.

1834 The Literary Life, and Miscellanies, of John Galt; “The Mem, or Schoolmistress” in Fraser’s Magazine (August). Son Alexander leaves for Canada to work for the British American Land Company. Moves to Greenock and settles with his wife at the home of his sister, Agnes Macfie. Death of William Blackwood.

1835 Efforts of an Invalid (poetry). Continues to write and publish short fiction, chiefly in Fraser’s Magazine and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (e.g., “Tribulations of the Rev. Cowal Kilmun,” November 1835–January 1836).

1836 “A Rich Man” in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (June–August).

1838–39 Edits Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth.

1839 Dies at Greenock (11 April). The Demon of Destiny and Other Poemspublished posthumously. Elizabeth Tilloch Galt joins her sons in Canada. INTRODUCTION

Origins

Annals of the Parish has always been John Galt’s most widely known work of fiction, and is often identified as his best. It was first published in May 1821, when Galt was forty-two. All his adult life, writing had been a vocation pursued in parallel with a career in business, but his published work had mostly been non-fiction (periodical essays on political and economic subjects, biography, travel writing, educational books) and, after his settlement in London in 1813, drama. Galt’s first published novels were spun out of some of the same material: The Majolo (1816), Andrew of Padua (1820), and The Earthquake(1820) drew on his Mediterranean travels, while the Edinburgh-set Glenfell; or, Macdonalds and Campbells (also 1820) was developed from an unpub- lished play. None of these made any sort of mark with either reviewers or the novel-reading public. Success as a writer of fiction only came in a new genre, the tale of Scottish provincial life, encouraged by a new type of print venue, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Although Annals of the Parish was not itself published in his monthly miscellany, William Blackwood’s acceptance of The Ayrshire Legateesfor serialisa- tion there made the later volume possible, as Galt acknowledged in his Autobiography:

Although the Annals of the Parish is much older than the Ayrshire Legatees, it is due to Mr. Blackwood, of Edinburgh, to ascribe to him the peculiarities of that production, for, though unacquainted with the Annals of the Parish, his reception of my first contribution to his magazine of the Ayrshire Legatees, encouraged me to proceed with the manner in which it is composed, and thus, if there be any originality in my Scottish class of compositions, he is entitled to be considered as the first person who discovered it.1

1 The Autobiography of John Galt, 2 vols (London: Cochrane and McCrone, 1833), II, p. 235. xvi introduction

The boost whichThe Ayrshire Legateesgave to the magazine’s sales provided reassurance that further work in this original vein was likely to be a profitable undertaking. Our earliest documentary evidence for the story that would become Annals of the Parish was written in the context ofThe Ayrshire Legatees’ success: a letter from Galt to Blackwood of 30 September 1820 in which he describes “The Pastor” Annals( ’ original title) as “a work that I began some years ago.”2 The following January, Galt confirmed to Blackwood that “although the Legatees is apparently my firstScottish work, the fact is that the Pastor was begun many years ago, and before Waverly appeared I wrote to Constable proposing to execute a Scottish story”3 (Walter Scott’s first novel,Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, was published by Archibald Constable in 1814). Much later, in 1833, Galt claimed to have “nearly finished”Annals of the Parish in 1813, only to be told by Constable that “Scottish novels ... would not do, for at that time Waverley was not published, nor, if it had, was there any resemblance between my work and that celebrated production. In consequence … the unfinished manuscript was thrown into a drawer and forgotten.”4 But the specifics of this later story invite scepticism. In the letter to Blackwood in January 1821 Galt recallstwo Scottish works that he had conceived prior toThe Ayrshire Legatees: “ThePastor,” which he had begun writing “many years ago,” and a story, never more than a proposal, which was rejected by Constable prior to the publication of Waverley. In the Autobiography of 1833 these are remembered as the same item; and the motif which it introduces of a manuscript abandoned and forgotten and then found by chance years later, completed and published to acclaim, sounds suspiciously like the story Scott had told of Waverley’s origins in the “General Introduc- tion to the Waverley Novels” published in 1829.5 There is no reason to doubt that in the autumn of 1820, encouraged by the reception of The Ayrshire Legatees, Galt returned to an uncompleted story called “The Pastor,” begun “many years” earlier; but its rejection by Constable before the appearance of Waverley looks like a later elaboration, and so the “many years” when it was laid aside may not take the origins of

2 Galt to Blackwood, 30 September 1820, MS 4005, National Library of Scot- land (NLS). 3 Galt to Blackwood, 30 January 1821, MS 4006, NLS. 4 Autobiography, II, pp. 227–8. 5 This point is made in Erik Frykman, John Galt’s Scottish Stories 1820–1823 (Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1959), pp. 31–2. introduction xvii

“The Pastor” back as far as 1813. Whatever state of development “The Pastor” had reached when Galt first mentioned it to Blackwood, it is clear from their correspondence that the novel published as Annals of the Parish is substantially the product of collaboration between the two men in late 1820 and early 1821 (see “Essay on the Text”). Blackwood’s significant editorial contribution included dissuading Galt at an early stage from identifying his narrator with the Rev. Dr. Zachariah Pringle of The Ayrshire Legatees. In his letter of 30 November 1820 Galt accepted that his novel should be “as I originally projected it” and that its hero should be “Hoseah Belwhidder D.D.”6 “Belwhidder” sounds a bit like Balquhidder (pronounced “-whidder”), a place name, but also like bell-wether, a castrated male sheep wearing a bell to lead the flock (the Scots equiv- alent of “wether” is “wedder”). The latter suggestion makes this a comically appropriate name for a clergyman, and Galt had already used it in Glenfell, published anonymously with the London firm of Richard Phillips the previous January. The Rev. Mr. Belwhidder or Bellwhidder of Glenfell, an off-stage character, lives in contemporary Edinburgh, reads The Edinburgh Review, and is still available for wed- dings, and so cannot be identified with the narrator of Annals of the Parish. It is possible that in “The Pastor” as Galt “originally projected it,” that is, in a version extant before 1820, the protagonist was called Bel- whidder, and Galt then borrowed the name for Glenfell; but it seems more likely that Galt invented this name for Glenfell and then thought to reuse it in the new version of “The Pastor” (he seems to assume that Blackwood had either never heard of the earlier novel, or did not know that he was its author, when he describes The Ayrshire Legatees as “apparently my first Scottish work”). Galt liked comically appropriate names: Blackwood’s influence probably naturalised this one into the “Balwhidder” of the published Annals, as he was probably responsible for changing the name of the schoolteacher, “Loremore” in the first edition, into “Lorimore” in the second (approximating more closely to the Scottish surname Lorimer). The new title emerged in discussion between the two men in February 1821: Galt refers to the novel in a letter of 20 February as “the Parish Annals,” and a week later as “The Annals,” adding that “I think the simplicity of the altered title better than mine.”7 Blackwood’s editorial interventions leftAnnals of the Parish “a little

6 Galt to Blackwood, 30 November 1820, MS 4005, NLS. 7 Galt to Blackwood, 20 and 27 February 1821, MS 4006, NLS. xviii introduction

shortened”: they included the “gentle pruning” which he thought necessary “else very serious people would be all up in arms against us.” 8 He later credited his “omissions and a good many little alter- ations” with making Galt’s novel “a much more perfect and simply natural work than when it was past into my hands.”9 On 27 February, while this process was underway, Galt informed Blackwood that he intended “to write a dedicating epistle to the King in the character of the Session clerk”; on 18 April he suggested instead a dedication “To Henry MacKenzie Esqr author of the man of feeling—A small acknowledgment for the pleasure derived in early life from the perusal of his simple and beautiful tales”10 (Scott had dedicatedWaverley to Mackenzie). Blackwood seems to have rejected both proposals, for the first edition of Annals appeared without any dedication; the second edition carries a dedication to John Wilson, an editor at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In February, the last instalment of The Ayrshire Legatees and the first of The Steam-Boathaving appeared in the magazine, Galt suggested to Blackwood that book versions of both could be published with the forthcoming Annals as a series called “Tales of the West” (that is, the west of Scotland).11 This suggestion was presumably made with an eye to Scott’s series “Tales of my Landlord” in which five of his novels of Scottish history had so far appeared (the first two published by Blackwood), but in Blackwood’s judgment “[t]his general title was rather a disadvantage to these books. Now if you were to take a general title it would smell something of imitation which has always a bad effect.” He left open the possibility of republishing them as a series after their launch as independent volumes.12 On 17 February 1821 Blackwood informed Galt that he would pay him 60 guineas (£63) for Annals of the Parish; Galt had been “in hopes that you would have given me £100 however I shall be contented with 60 Gs.” 13 But by the end of the year Galt had to thank Blackwood “for twenty guineas in addition to your former allowance for the ‘Annals of

8 Galt to Blackwood, 18 April 1821, MS 4006, NLS; Blackwood to Galt, 23 January 1821, MS 30304, NLS. 9 Blackwood to John Wilson Croker, 23 June 1821, MS 30305, NLS. 10 Galt to Blackwood, 27 February 1821 and 18 April 1821, MS 4006, NLS. 11 Galt to Blackwood, 20 February 1821, MS 4006, NLS. 12 Blackwood to Galt, 20 May 1821, MS 30305, NLS. 13 Blackwood’s note to a letter from Galt of 14 February 1821, and Galt to Blackwood, 27 February 1821, MS 4006, NLS. introduction xix

the Parish’.”14 Blackwood’s generosity was prompted by the remarkable critical and commercial success of their book. It was advertised in April and went on sale in May, a single volume in duodecimo format (the usual one for commercial fiction) priced at 8 shillings in plain boards. In a letter to the poet James Hogg Blackwood claimed to have sold nearly 400 copies in Edinburgh by 18 May, and reported that his London partner Thomas Cadell had sold nearly 500 copies “in three or four days”: “in short I have seldom published a more popular and sale- able book.”15 Seeing how well it was reviewed in the press, Blackwood sent Cadell another 300 copies on 23 May.16 Blackwood “never had a moment’s doubt myself of its success,” but the popularity of Annals took Cadell by surprise:

It gratifies me much to find that the orders received from the Trade for ‘Annals of the Parish’ are so different in their extent to what I at first apprehended; Had I been able to read the Book previous to my writing on the 30th Ult: such a fear would not have been expressed, as I should have felt confident that, notwithstanding the prejudice entertained against the Author, the intrinsic merit which the Work possesses must eventually ensure its success. It is a book calculated for a large class of readers, and the sale of it, I trust, will prove commensurate to your wishes.17

This suggests that Blackwood had risked a larger print run than Cadell had initially thought wise; since Cadell had at least 437 copies remain- ing at the time of his annual sale the following February, at least 1,700 copies of the first edition must have been produced, and probably 2,000 (twice the number of their previous Galt title, The Earthquake), divided between the two booksellers.18 The approach of Cadell’s sale turned the thoughts of all three men to a second edition, which gave Blackwood the opportunity to correct most of the typesetting errors

14 Galt to Blackwood, 29 December 1821, MS 4006, NLS. 15 Blackwood to Hogg, 18 May 1821, MS 30301, NLS. 16 Blackwood to Thomas Cadell, 23 May 1821, MS 30002, NLS. 17 Cadell to Blackwood, 31 May 1821, MS 4006, NLS; reproduced in Theo- dore Besterman, The Publishing Firm of Cadell & Davies: Select Correspondence and Accounts, 1793–1836 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 64. 18 The print run forThe Earthquake is mentioned in Blackwood to Galt, 26 July 1820, MS 30002, NLS. xx introduction

in the first edition (though some new ones crept in as well) and to refine some of its spelling (see “Essay on the Text” for details). The second edition was printed in Edinburgh in time for Blackwood to dispatch Cadell’s share of the run to London on 5 March 1822.19

Contemporary Reception

On its publication and in the following years Annals of the Parish was reviewed by the periodical press in warmly appreciative terms. On 20 May 1821 Blackwood wrote to Galt congratulating him on the good reviews in the London weeklies The Guardian and John Bull; from Scotland he reported that Henry Mackenzie had sent him “a critique upon it” for that month’s Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and that his friend John Johnstone, editor of the weekly Inverness Courier, had written a “very admirable critique” after Blackwood had “merely sent him a present of the book.”20 Galt replied from London on 28 May con- firming that “[s]everal papers, I think five or six, have noticed the book here all in a very laudable manner”: in addition to those mentioned by Blackwood these included another weekly, the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, and the prestigious Tory Quarterly Review.21 As in Scotland, some of the London coverage may have been the result of Blackwood’s hints to friendly contacts: he later wrote to John Wilson Croker, editor of the Quarterly and author of its Annals review, to thank him for the “high opinion” he had expressed of the book; Charles Knight, editor of the Guardian, was a friend of Croker’s.22 The reviews in the Guardian (by Knight) and the Inverness Courier (almost certainly by Christian Isobel Johnstone, John’s wife, co-editor

19 Blackwood to Galt, 5 March 1822, MS 30305, NLS. 20 Blackwood to Galt, 20 May 1821, MS 30305, NLS. The ultra-conservative John Bull, which rarely noticed literary works, merely observes that Annals “bears strong marks of genius and talent” and recommends it to the paper’s readers (22 [14 May 1821], p. 173). In his letter Blackwood also anticipates a review in John Bull’s newly launched sister-paper, The Journal of Literature, but I have been unable to trace this publication. 21 Galt to Blackwood, 28 May 1821, MS 4006, NLS. 22 Blackwood to Croker, 23 June 1821, MS 30305, NLS. Galt knew about the Quarterly review in advance: in an undated letter, he wrote to John Murray, its publisher, requesting that his name not be mentioned, “as a particular favour if not too late” (MS 10998, NLS). introduction xxi

of the Courier, herself a published novelist and the literary brains of their partnership) agree in finding the master-plot ofAnnals of the Parish in its account of, in Knight’s words, “the changes which take place in the social relations of a country advancing rapidly to the summit of refinement.” Knight observes that even the English reader, ignorant of the Scottish manners it represents, can nevertheless “enjoy its simplicity, and its keeping—(if we may use a Painter’s phrase). The author never peeps out. We regard the Rev. Micah Balwhidder as a real being,” to be loved for “the singleness of heart which he so uncon- sciously displays” and which guarantees the truth of his observations.23 Johnstone suggests that the character of the narrator himself “is but a subordinate part of the design of this volume, which is to present a lively record of that change in manners and national character, which has within the last sixty years wrought such miracles around us.”24 The Literary Chronicle, on the other hand, while borrowing the Guardian’s point about the novel’s successful effacement of its author behind a completely convincing fictional narrator, makes no reference to its representation of historical change. But it welcomes the author’s return to the style of the Ayrshire Legatees, in contrast to that of “more than one recent instance” from the same hand. The instances referred to certainly include The Earthquake, Galt’s three-volume novel published the previous December with the same title-page attribution to “the Author of The Ayrshire Legatees,” which had been poorly received (accounting at least in part for the “prejudice entertained against the Author” which had worried Cadell). In contrast, even without a “story of deep and intricate contrivance,” Annals of the Parish displays the “talent of making ordinary life interesting” that is also on show in The Ayrshire Legatees and its model, Tobias Smollett’sExpedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).25 It is striking that none of the reviews in the London weeklies com- pares Annals of the Parish to the novels of Walter Scott, for we have already seen some evidence of Galt’s consciousness of “the Author of Waverley” as the dominant presence in the market for which he was writing. In the Quarterly Review, Croker made a point of dismissing any question of creative influence: althoughAnnals of the Parish “must

23 The Guardian, or Historical and Literary Recorder2.75 (13 May 1821), p. 3. 24 Inverness Courier 180 (10 May 1821), p. 4. 25 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 3.103 (19 May 1821), pp. 313–14. A review in the June issue of the Ladies’ Monthly Museum reproduces parts of the Literary Chronicle review. xxii introduction

be considered the literary offspring of theScotch Novels” (meaning Scott’s), it also “so far resembles other and earlier productions, that it is the period of its appearance, rather than its intrinsic quality, that determines its filiation.” These “earlier productions” include Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield(1766), a precedent identified by most reviewers (and later acknowledged by Galt: see Appendix 1); but also “Memoirs of P. P. Clerk of this Parish,” ascribed to Alexander Pope on its publication in 1742, the mock-heroic autobiography of a lowly church functionary satirising the self-importance of A History of his Own Time (1724, 1734) by Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. The main interest of Croker’s review lies in his perception of an ambiva- lence in Galt’s portrayal of what we now call the industrial revolution:

We suspect that the chief design of the author was to exhibit the progress of modern improvement in a distant village; and although he has certainly marked some of the benefits and disadvantages which the manufacturing system pro- duces, we do not look upon these as the happiest parts of his work: they are not unamusing, and they are natural, but they are not conceived with any great originality, told with any great force, nor contrasted with any great degree of variety. The author seems to us to have been a little afraid of his subject:—he appears, as Mr. Balwhidder ought in all consistency to be, well inclined to lament the diffusion of knowledge; but the editor is evidently alarmed lest he should be represented as an enemy to the ‘progress of light,’ and he has therefore left this, the most promising point, we think, in his story in a very unsatisfactory state.

Croker takes more serious exception to some other specific aspects of Galt’s novel, especially the occasional “brutal and shocking impiety” of Mr. Cayenne, and in particular his “horrid exclamation” against the “democratic weaver lads” in chapter 34; Croker’s horror might suggest that it was passages such as this that aroused Blackwood’s concerns about the reaction of “very serious people” in his letter to Galt of 23 January 1821. But despite these reservations, Croker ends by recom- mending the “excellent morality, sober pleasantry, and unassuming simplicity, both of matter and manner” of Annals of the Parish “to such readers as may prefer this quiet kind of merit to the glare, brilliancy, introduction xxiii

and hurry of the modern novel.”26 Galt was delighted to hear that Henry Mackenzie had written a review for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: “I thought he was the most likely man living to comprehend the spirit of the Annals & I wish you could somehow contrive to let him know that it was at one time proposed to inscribe it to him.”27 Presumably due to his distaste for the aggressively partisan ethos of Blackwood’s, Mackenzie insisted that his review of Galt’s novel appear there anonymously, and Blackwood warned Galt not to tell anyone of his authorship. Born in 1745, Mack- enzie belonged to Balwhidder’s generation, and so it is not surprising that, like Johnstone, he is most impressed by the novel’s account of the changes in “manners and national character,” changes that he had himself witnessed, traced in “a Scots inland village, from its comparatively unimproved state, in the year 1760, down to the modern period, the modern manners, the modern way of living, in the year 1809”; Mackenzie also praises the pathos of scenes such as the “melancholy spectacle of a thousand poor people, suddenly thrown out of employ- ment and deprived of subsistence” by the closure of the cotton mill. Balwhidder represents an ideal of moderation:

He never forgets … his benevolence or his virtue; and his charity for the failings of others, and for those relaxations of moral discipline, which are perhaps inseparable from a progressive state of society, continues unabated by the prejudices of ancient recollection, by the zeal of a warmly religious clergyman, or an adherence to the rigid principles of Calvinism.

In this regard Mackenzie notes Balwhidder’s distress at “the party spirit which the political madness of the years immediately following the French Revolution produced in the parish,” “his patience with political dissenters,” and his role in maintaining the social order by promoting “a friendly and cordial communication between different ranks of the community” conducive to “the general advantage.” On Mackenzie’s account, Annals of the Parish also invites readers to think of their contemporary society as itself the outcome of historical change: “We are very apt to forget the origin of practices which universal cus- tom has now made us consider as of established adoption, though

26 Quarterly Review 25.49 (April 1821), pp. 147–53. 27 Galt to Blackwood, 28 May 1821, MS 4006, NLS. xxiv introduction

some of them have no merit but what prescription confers, and others are subject to censure which habit only induces us to withhold.”28 Mackenzie’s review is followed in the magazine by the first section of Johnstone’s, extracted from the Inverness Courier. Praise for Annals of the Parish is also unstinting in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ’s rival Scottish monthly, the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, which included three long extracts as a separate item in its June issue as well as a review. This journal was a continuation of theScots Maga- zine which had begun publishing in 1739, and had been mocked in the pages of Blackwood’s for its senescence: that Balwhidder is a committed reader of the Scots Magazine reflects this association with a bygone era, and its review of Annals does nothing to dispel it. It recognises the “glimpses of the progress of improvement and manners” included in the novel, but is most impressed by its nostalgia: its “unobtrusive and common-life” incidents are “such things as we almost fancy that we ourselves recollect to have met with in our boyhood”; “a great part of the merit and interest of the book consists in this revival of reminiscences, this incorporation of itself with our own early minds.” After reproducing the last two chapters ofAnnals the review takes their valedictory turn when the reviewer announces his own retirement as editor of the Edinburgh Magazine. Comparing himself to Balwhidder in his last years in the pulpit, he regrets his own “canaille schism,” meaning the founding of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817, and longs for the return of a “more chaste and temperate” tone of writing than that which the writers of Blackwood’s “hobbleshow” have introduced – the chastity and temperance, in fact, of Henry Mackenzie’s journal The Mirrorfrom forty years before (1779–80).29 The long-established LondonMonthly Review, discussing Annals of the Parish alongside The Ayrshire Legateesin November, mostly recycles points made by Croker in the Quarterly, adding its own spec- ulation that their author was related by marriage to Scott (apparently assuming him to be John Gibson Lockhart, an editor of Blackwood’s, who had married Scott’s daughter Sophia in April 1820). But it omits any reference to Galt’s representation of the “manufacturing system” in his novel, and by closing with a quote from Thomas Gray’sElegy Writ- ten in a Country Churchyard (1751) gives the impression of Annals as a

28 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 9.50 (May 1821), pp. 203–10. 29 Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, being a new series of The Scots Magazine 8 (June 1821), pp. 511–12, 555–6. introduction xxv

prose pastoral.30 By the same omission, the same effect is produced by Francis Jeffrey’s account of Galt’s novel in the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly’s Whig antagonist. This appeared a full two years after the novel’s first publication, as part of a portmanteau review of what its running head calls “Secondary Scottish Novels,” meaning those not written by the Author of Waverley, but published by William Black- wood: it includes novels written by Galt, Lockhart, and John Wilson. Jeffrey describes a collective project in fiction by “not unworthy followers of him by whose example they were roused,” each emulating different elements of Scott’s novels; in the case of “The author of the Parish Annals” these are “the humorous and less dignified parts of his original … all harmonized by the same truth to nature and fine sense of national particularity.” Jeffrey judges Annals of the Parish to be “perhaps the best and most interesting” of the books under review.31 But when he turns to the representation of history, his praise is on very particular grounds: Balwhidder’s narration includes “public events” to show that they only have “slight and transient effects … on the tranquil lives and peaceful occupations of his remote parishioners,” in order to help “dissipate the illusion, by which private persons are led to suppose, that they have a personal interest in the wisdom of cabinets, or the madness of princes.”32 Jeffrey, like the Monthly Review, reads Annals of the Parish as pastoral: history happens elsewhere, and rural life continues more or less untouched by its convulsions. Jeffrey includes six long extracts, but none is from later in the novel than the death of Charles Malcolm in chapter 23, completely excluding the arrival of the cotton mill and its consequences from his account of the novel. The possibility must be acknowledged that Jeffrey, setting out to review twelve novels, some of them very long, just did not read any further in this one. We find traces of the contemporary reception of Annals of the Parish in places other than the reviews: Blackwood fostered word-of- mouth publicity too, boasting to Galt that he had given away around a

30 Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal 96 (November 1821), pp. 300–12. The misattribution of Annals and The Ayrshire Legateesto Lockhart seems to have persisted for several years: Scott had to correct the Marchioness of Aber- corn on this point in 1824 (H. J. C. Grierson, The Letters of Walter Scott, 12 vols [London: Constable, 1932–37], VIII, p. 293). 31 Edinburgh Review 39.77 (May 1823), pp. 158–96; pp. 162–70 are on Annals. 32 Jeffrey had previously articulated this idea with respect to Scott’sOld Mortality in Edinburgh Review 28.55 (March 1817), pp. 216–18. xxvi introduction

hundred copies, “[s]o anxious have I been to make the book known.”33 Defending the novel against a sceptical James Hogg, who thought it would not sell as a book but should have been serialised instead, Blackwood could cite the high opinion not only of Blackwood’s writers (Wilson, Lockhart, William Howison) and Mackenzie but also Scott and his friends “& fifty others who are all loud in its praises.”34 Scott recommended Annals to the playwright Joanna Baillie, like Galt long based in London, in a letter of 11 June 1821; another Edinburgh writer, the memoirist and poet Anne Grant, recommended it to a Dublin correspondent in a letter of 23 October.35 Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, recalled Byron praising the novel very highly.36 Galt’s ambition, expressed to Blackwood during the novel’s development, “to give that degree of reality to the story that may induce some to think there has actually been an original chronicle,” was rewarded with anecdotes of readers assuming precisely this.37 He reported that someone identified only as “Bonaparte’s agent” had thought thatAnnals was “a veritable history,” in a letter to which Blackwood replied on 25 June 1821 with a story of his own: “Among the rest my worthy old mother read the book with great delight and thought Micah an honest and upright minister of the gospel, but unfortunately one of my little boys hap- pened to tell her it was a novel, and then it lost all its charms, and she was very angry at us for having deceived her.”38 Galt was still recording such comments the following year: “I heard last night a good anecdote of the Annals—a lady remarked to a gentleman who had lent her the book that it was very amusing but she thought the old clergyman very silly to publish it.”39 In the year of its first publication in Edinburgh Annals of the Parish

33 Blackwood to Galt, 20 May 1821, MS 30305, NLS. 34 Hogg to Blackwood, 16 May 1821, MS 4007, NLS; reproduced (but mis- dated) in Alan Lang Strout, The Life and Letters of James Hogg(Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1946), p. 206; Blackwood to Hogg, 18 May 1821, MS 30301, NLS. 35 Scott calledAnnals “a most excellent novel if it can be calld so” (Grierson, Letters, VI, p. 468; Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan, ed. J. P. Grant, 3 vols [London: Longman, 1844], II, pp. 304–5). 36 Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 51. 37 Galt to Blackwood, 27 February 1821, MS 4006, NLS. 38 Blackwood to Galt, 25 June 1821, MS 30305, NLS. 39 Galt to Blackwood, 18 May 1822, MS 4008, NLS. introduction xxvii was reproduced in Philadelphia by Mathew Carey and Sons, who also published Scott’s novels for the American market. In 1824 Scott’s French translator, A. J. P. Defauconpret, published French versions of Annals and The Provost: this appears to have been the only trans- lation of Annals of the Parish into another language in the nineteenth century.40 In Britain, it was next republished in 1841 in the Blackwood’s Standard Novels series (1841–43). In this form it remained in print until the 1880s; a few other publishers brought out their own editions after the British copyright lapsed in 1863.

Later Reception

The next important era in the reception ofAnnals of the Parish came at the end of the century. In 1895 Blackwood and Sons brought out a selected Works of John Galt in the context of the commercial success of a new generation of stories of Scottish village life, thick with humour and pathos, initiated by J. M. Barrie (Auld Licht Idylls, 1888; A Window in Thrums, 1889) and continued by two Presbyterian ministers, S. R. Crockett The( Stickit Minister, 1893) and John Watson (writing as “Ian Maclaren”: Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, 1894). In 1895 the Edinburgh lawyer-critic John Hepburn Millar published a critique of this type of writing under the title “The Literature of the Kailyard” (that is, cabbage-patch), and the label stuck.41 The Works of John Galt of that year was suggested to Blackwood and Sons by Crockett;42 its editor, David Storrar Meldrum, had himself contributed to the genre in Black- wood’s Edinburgh Magazine (The Story of Margrédel, being a fireside history of a Fifeshire family, 1893–94), and Crockett provided introduc- tions for each two-volume set, the first of which comprisedAnnals of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees. Crockett assimilates these stories to pastoral (“there are no books in our national literature which con- vey so melodious and continuous an impression of peace”), and then

40 Les Chroniques Écossaises, contenant Les Annales de la Paroisse et Le Prévot, Par M. Galt, auteur de Sir André Wylie, Des Lairds de Grippy, etc. etc. Traduit de l’anglais par le traducteur des romans de Sir Walter Scott (Paris: Lecointe et Durey, 1824). 41 J. H. Millar, “The Literature of the Kailyard,”New Review 12.71 (April 1895), pp. 384–94. 42 [J. H. Millar], “The Novels of John Galt,”Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 159.968 (June 1896), pp. 871–82; here, p. 871. xxviii introduction

identifies Galt as the pioneer of Crockett’s own type of fiction: “We have now much of the writing which glorifies the little quaintnesses of the towns and villages of Scotland. Galt deserves much of the credit for that full-eared crop, which in the fulness of time has come after him.”43 In the same year as Blackwood’s new edition, Macmillan published its own combination of Annals of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees in a single, stand-alone volume, with an introduction by the Anglican clergyman and literary critic Alfred Ainger. Ainger acknowledges that this reprint follows the “marked revival of interest in Scottish character and manners” initiated by Barrie. But Ainger also takes Galt seriously as a novelist in his own right, putting him alongside the Victorian realists Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell: “the method and the art of the village annals of Cranford bear no small resemblance to those of Dalmailing.” Rev. Ainger judges “the whole episode of Mr. Cayenne” to be “masterly,” without Croker’s worries about blasphemy: “Had Galt always been up to this level he would have ranked with the greatest names in English fiction.”44 Two reviews of the 1895 editions, by Millar in Blackwood’s and by the Glasgow scholar-journalist William Wallace in The Bookman, set out to rescue Galt from association with the Kailyard school. Wallace draws his readers’ attention to the “absolute contrast” between the Scotland of which Barrie writes, which is still in this respect the Scot- land of the present day, and the Scotland of which and in which Galt wrote: between “Scotland of the old Moderate days, and Scotland as it has been spiritualised and morally revolutionised by the Evangelical party, which secured its purely ecclesiastical triumph in the formation of the Free Church in 1843.”45 Barrie may share his humour and pathos with Galt, but in Barrie they are allied with the “intense though mysti- cal religious faith” of the following age: from the perspective of a late Victorian reader, the Scotland of Annals of the Parish looked less devout than the modern nation, not more. In this way Wallace puts Galt back into his historical context, at a safe distance from the Kailyarders. Millar puts history back into Galt: “He was more than the chronicler of

43 S. R. Crockett, “Introduction” to John Galt,Annals of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees, 2 vols, in Works of John Galt, ed. D. Storrar Meldrum (Edin- burgh: Blackwood, 1895), I, pp. xvii and xxxvii. 44 Alfred Ainger, “Introduction” to John Galt, Annals of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees (London and New York: Macmillan, 1895), p. xvi. 45 William Wallace, “Galt Redivivus,” The Bookman8.45 (June 1895), pp. 78–9. introduction xxix

the various humours, civil and parochial, of the Scots Renaissance in the second half of the eighteenth century. He was its historian also.” By “the Scots Renaissance” Millar means what we now call the agricultural and early industrial revolutions, understood as unleashing Scotland’s social and mental energies as well as its material and economic ones. Like Wallace, Millar draws the contrast with the “spiritually idealising” perspective of the “present-day writers,” but in doing so places Galt in a long tradition of “vernacular literature” going back to the late medi- eval poet William Dunbar, a tradition which included “the common or unclean” in its “rounded and complete picture” of human life. Galt does not idealise, because he writes from personal observation – and “an observation that amounts to philosophic insight” – to note “the developmental forces beneath contemporary events.” Millar, in fact, seems to have been the first commentator onAnnals of the Parish and The Provost to pay attention to what Galt himself said about his ambi- tions for them in his autobiographical writing, where he terms them “theoretical histories of society” or “philosophical sketches” rather than novels; Millar quotes Galt’s description of Annals in his Literary Life as “a kind of treatise on the history of society in the West of Scot- land during the reign of King George the Third.”46 This shows, says Millar, “that the author of the ‘Annals’ and the ‘Provost’ was a deliber- ate student of sociology” (although, as Millar certainly knew, the term “sociology” was not yet coined in Galt’s day): in these novels, “local and parochial annals are informed with the dignity of philosophic history.”47 Millar’s point is perhaps borne out by those twentieth- century historians of the industrial revolution who cite Annals of the Parish as a source.48

46 Autobiography, II, pp. 220–1; The Literary Life, and Miscellanies, of John Galt, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood and London: Cadell, 1834), I, p. 155: reproduced in Appendix 1 of the present volume. 47 Millar, “Novels of John Galt,” p. 875. 48 G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Victoria (New York: Longmans, 1942), p. 456, referring to Galt’s portrayal of the “social consequences” of the arrival of cotton mills in the west of Scotland; Eric Hobsbawm includes Annals among those works he found “particularly useful or stimulating” (Industry and Empire [London: Weiden- feld and Nicolson, 1968], p. 319). See also Christopher A. Whatley, “The Insider’s Eye in the Age of Improvement, Urbanisation, and Revolution,” in The International Companion to John Galt, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2017), pp. 82–97. xxx introduction

This recontextualization of Galt as at once chronicler and product of a particular phase in Scotland’s history is continued in twentieth- century commentary, increasingly shaped as it is by the rise of English literary studies in the universities, and the gradual construction of a canon of Scottish Literature by academic critics. A 1933 collection entitled Edinburgh Essays on Scots Literature, edited by Herbert Grierson, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, was based on lectures by his colleagues and included an essay on Galt by George Kitchen; while this essay says little specifically about Annals of the Parish other than to declare it a “masterpiece,” it opens up the question of Galt’s politics in relation to the strongly partisan periodicals of his time such as Blackwood’s and the Quarterly Review. A front-page appreciation in the Times Literary Supplement in 1936 by Agnes Mure Mackenzie was prompted by the publication of the first book-length biography of Galt by Jennie Aberdein: both women were graduates in English Literature from the University of Aberdeen.49 Mackenzie puts Galt in the context of a Golden Age of Scottish culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “an age more sure of itself,” more confident in its values, than her own inter-war age of anxiety. The attention ofAnnals of the Parish to the “interior” action of character, contrasted with the priority given by Scott to “exterior” action, allows Mackenzie to credit Galt with being the “father of the modern novel of analysis”: not only the historian of the modernisation of society, but also a precursor of the Modern in literature. Mackenzie also notes that Galt’s use of Scots “has some topical interest at the moment, when the revival of Scots, and its widening of range, as a literary vehicle, are so much debated.” In these ways, Mackenzie expands on Millar’s brief reference to a “vernacular tradition” going back to Dunbar to locate Galt in literary history, but a literary history now realigned to reflect the developments and concerns of the twentieth century. New editions of Annals of the Parish continued to appear: a volume (also including The Ayrshire Legatees) in J. M. Dent’s budget Every- man’s Library (1910) and, in the year of Mackenzie’s essay, a reissue of the Blackwood Works of John Galt, revised by William Roughhead, in an expanded ten-volume set under the imprint of John Grant of Edinburgh. But the most important event in the twentieth-century publication history of Annals was the novel’s first scholarly edition,

49 [Agnes Mure Mackenzie], “Dominion and Parish: John Galt’s Conquest of Two Worlds,” Times Literary Supplement 1813 (31 October 1936), pp. 1–2; Jennie W. Aberdein, John Galt (London: Humphrey Milford, 1936). introduction xxxi

edited by James Kinsley and published by Oxford University Press in their Oxford English Novels series in 1967. This in effect confirmed its place in the canon of English literary fiction: its republication as a World’s Classics paperback in 1986 made available for student use a properly edited and annotated text with a helpful introduction, and allowed Annals of the Parish to be included in undergraduate courses on Scottish fiction of the Romantic period for two decades before it went out of print. In addition to academic criticism, Annals has continued to gain admirers outside the academy, from a thoughtful discussion by V. S. Pritchett in The Living Novel in 1946 to a lively and observant blogpost by the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin in 2017.50

Literary Context

Contemporary reviewers of Annals of the Parish typically looked to eighteenth-century fiction to find clergymen comparable to Micah Balwhidder, namely Abraham Adams in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Dr Primrose in Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. Those who suggested a similarity between Galt’s novel and the “por- traitures of humble life” of George Crabbe51 may have had a particular poem in mind: “The Parish Register” (fromPoems , 1807), in which a rural vicar (like Crabbe himself) narrates a series of anecdotes and life stories of his parishioners, suggested by a single year’s record of baptisms, marriages, and burials. These stories indeed often resem- ble some of the episodes narrated by Balwhidder, but the poem has no interest in social and economic change, and Crabbe’s narrator is a much more detached and judgmental figure. The economics of the parish are understood in moral terms: “Toil, care, and patience bless the abstemious few, / Fear, shame and want the thoughtless herd pursue” (lines 29–30).52 Balwhidder’s sermon in the “Introduction” to

50 V. S. Pritchett, “A Scottish Documentary,” inThe Living Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), pp. 37–42; Ursula K. Le Guin, “B-sides: John Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-john-galts- annals-parish/. 51 Monthly Review 96 (November 1821), p. 312. In the Inverness Courier review, Johnstone notes that Annals represents the last sixty years “with the minute fidelity and lively colouring of Crabbe” (180 [10 May 1821], p. 4). 52 George Crabbe, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Norma Dalrymple- xxxii introduction

Annals of the Parish suggests this theme, saying of the older generation that “Their land was tilled with industry … and, verily, they had the reward of well-doing even in this world,” but it is not developed in the chapters that follow. Among contemporary reviewers only Christian Isobel Johnstone noted the precedent in non-fictional prose for the minister as chronicler of social and economic change in his parish when she suggested that Annals should be added as an appendix to future editions of the Statistical Account of Scotland. This referred to the remarkable research project carried out by Sir John Sinclair, agricultural improver and Member of Parliament for Caithness: a list of 171 questions sent to the minister of every one of Scotland’s 938 parishes inquiring into population, housing, the state of agriculture, fisheries, and manufactures, land ownership, and natural history. The responses were published in the 1790s in a series of twenty-one volumes now known as the “Old Statistical Account” (the exercise was repeated in the 1830s). Galt was certainly familiar with this work: a copy was available in Greenock Library, to which he subscribed as a young man. In his Literary Life Galt gives the impression that the local history included in Annals was simply remembered from his own early life in Irvine and Greenock.53 But as well as the idea of the parish minister as narrator of social change, the Statistical Account also provided mod- els for some of the developments in Dalmailing that lay outside his personal experience, such as the opening of the cotton mill. At some points one can also hear thematic echoes (identified in the “Explan- atory Notes” to the present volume) from the Ayrshire volumes of the county-by-county surveys commissioned by the government’s Board of Agriculture: William Fullarton’s General View of the Agri- culture of the County of Ayr from 1793 and, especially, the more recent and wide-ranging volume of the same title by William Aiton (1811). If, as he claimed in his autobiographical writing, Galt had in mind the parish of Dreghorn when creating the fictional Dalmailing, this may have been suggested by Aiton’s description of Dreghorn village as particularly “contemptible” in its present state but one for which the Earl of Eglinton, its proprietor, had commissioned an ambitious, though unrealised, scheme of improvement.54

Champneys and Arthur Pollard, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), I, p. 213. 53 Galt, Literary Life, I, p. 229. 54 William Aiton, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Ayr, with Observations on the Means of its Improvement (London: Longman et al., 1811), pp. 131–2. introduction xxxiii

The Statistical Account was not the only non-fiction work from Greenock Library with a demonstrable influence onAnnals of the Parish. As Erik Frykman first pointed out in 1954, the library also made available to Galt the classic texts of what we now refer to as the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume’s Essays, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, William Robertson’s histories, and the Essay on Civil Society by Adam Ferguson.55 In these thinkers Galt found a philosophy of history which traced the causes of social progress to incremental technological and economic improvement driven by the self-interest of ordinary people in their everyday transactions, not to the grand schemes of political or religious law- givers or reformers. In his 1896 essay in Blackwood’s Millar recognised in Annals of the Parish “the dignity of philosophical history,” crediting this achievement to Galt’s extraordinary powers of observation of the world around him;56 but it also reflects Galt’s familiarity with the principle he discovered in philosophical historians like Hume, that “the domestic and the gradual revolutions of a state must be a more proper subject of reasoning and observation than the foreign and the violent, which are commonly produced by single persons, and are more influenced by whim, folly, or caprice, than by general passions and interests.”57 Because those passions and interests are “general,” that is, common to all human beings, the history which they explain is a universal history: all societies everywhere can be understood to be at some point or other on a common trajectory of development. The cumulative effects of those passions and interests are consequences unintended by any particular human agent, individual or collective: in Adam Ferguson’s formulation, “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon estab- lishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”58 That history is the execution of a

55 Erik Frykman, John Galt and Eighteenth Century Scottish Philosophy. Some notes on the intellectual background of Galt’s Scottish Stories, being the John Galt Lecture for 1953, delivered before the society on 11th December 1953 (Greenock: Greenock Philosophical Society, 1954). 56 Millar, “Novels of John Galt,” p. 875. 57 David Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742), in Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 57. 58 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Duncan xxxiv introduction

divine design, of “Providence,” is often assumed by the Scottish phi- losophers even when it is not explicitly stated. Hence Keith Costain can argue that Annals of the Parish, alone among Galt’s stories, fully “dramatizes in fictive terms the theory of progress held by the ‘Scottish School’”; for, since the laws of human nature that propel “progress” are universal, “it makes as much sense to look for the workings of Providence in a small community as in a large.”59 Any comparison of the fiction of Galt and Walter Scott, who dominated the market for which Galt was writing, must begin with the intellectual inheritance of the Scottish Enlightenment that they shared. On the face of it, Scott’s novels are typically “historical” to the extent that they take as their setting some political event of, in Hume’s terms, the “violent” variety, usually dynastic or religious civil war. But they do so in order to expose the agents of these events as motivated, if not by “folly, or caprice,” then by vanity, ambition, prejudice, or fanaticism. Other characters in Scott’s novels, including the hero and heroine, represent instead our common human nature, the “general passions and interests” which, unlike civil war, produce lasting social benefits through their peaceful, “domestic and gradual” operation in the manner described by the Scottish philosophical historians. What Scott never attempted was a novel in which the domestic and gradual operation of general passions and interests was all that his tale had to tell. His second novel, Guy Mannering (1815) overlaps with the first half of Annals of the Parish in its setting (the south-west of Scotland), economic concerns (the improvement of a gentleman’s estate), personnel (smugglers, customs officers, returnees from empire) and temporal sweep (from the early 1760s to the early 1780s). But in the absence of any revolutions or rebellions to drive a plot, Scott deploys the age- old conventions of romance (a prophecy fulfilled, a kidnapped child, a lost heir restored to his birthright) to make a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In Annals of the Parish Galt dispenses with any such conventional structure, while also leaving the “foreign and ... violent” wars and revolutions which affect his characters beyond the horizon of the narrator’s personal experience. What is left is a narrative which might appear to have no plot at all (as Galt observed in his Literary Life), beyond its record of the local realisation of the universal providential plot of incremental technological and social progress.

Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 122. 59 Keith M. Costain, “Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fiction of John Galt,” ELH 43 (1976), pp. 342–65; here, p. 354. introduction xxxv

In his book Scott’s Shadow (2007), Ian Duncan usefully names this narrative mode “exemplarity”: events in the parish are “representative of larger historical processes such as the expansion of overseas empire, the development of trade and industry, the diffusion of commodities and information, the appearance of new social and ideological forma- tions.”60 Yet, as Duncan goes on to argue, there are points in the novel where something like a plot is visible, when the meaning of events lies not, or not only, in their exemplification of larger historical processes, but also in their grouping or layering into metaphors for those processes. Duncan’s example is the death of Mr and Mrs Dwining in chapter 49, which functions as a symbol, as well as a consequence, of the disaster of the closure of the mill.61 Another example might be the sequence of deaths in the middle of the novel that allegorise the passing of the old, pre-industrial social structure. Lord Eglesham’s murder in chapter 22 is followed in quick succession by the deaths of Charles Malcolm (chapter 23) and Jenny Gaffaw (chapter 24). The deaths of these representatives of the top, middle, and bottom of the local social hierarchy do not themselves leave that hierarchy in any way changed: Mrs Malcolm’s other children continue their social ascent, and Jenny’s daughter Meg continues in her place as the local “natural”; there is, presumably, a new Lord Eglesham, though he is never mentioned. But both Charles and Jenny were beneficiaries, through Balwhidder’s intervention, of Lord Eglesham’s beneficence (chapters 9 and 14); and after this point, Balwhidder never again facilitates what Henry Mackenzie calls in his review “a friendly and cordial communication between different ranks of the community” in this way.62 In chapter 26, at the mid-point of the novel, Mr Cayenne arrives in the parish: he is soon a much more active presence than Lord Eglesham ever was, but he never dispenses patronage to individuals in the manner of the nobleman. Each of these events, apart from Jenny’s death (caused by a bad cold, and poverty), refers to a specific historical circumstance: a real-life murder, a famous naval battle, the flight of loyalists at the end of the American revolutionary war. But as a sequence they allegorise a process that did not happen in any one year, or over a few years: the dissolution, with the coming of the industrial revolution, of a society structured by local, hierarchical bonds of personal generosity and

60 Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 224. 61 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, p. 229. 62 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 9.50 (May 1821), p. 209. xxxvi introduction

dependence. Balwhidder is practised in allegory by vocation: it is the typical mode of his sermons, whether in the conventional typology that applies biblical stories to present circumstances, or in figures of his own contriving (the parish represented as a virtuous widow-woman and her children in chapter 17, for example). It is also the mode of the dream in chapter 34 (117–18),63 in which the “the great men, and the kings of the earth” are overthrown by an unnamed “army with banners” representing the new French Republic (Balwhidder’s dream occurs just before he hears of the execution of Louis XVI in 1793). The native “multitude” are only onlookers in this struggle, but the downfall of the victors begins with a burning city labelled “Public Opinion,” proleptic of his people’s rejection of radical politics that Balwhidder will narrate in the following chapters. And that burning city, from which the con- querors must flee, only to be swept away by God with a broom “made of the hail and the storm,” is also Moscow in 1812. Galt’s readers can recognise here an allegory of Napoleon’s catastrophic retreat through the Russian winter in that year, the beginning of the end of the wars with France which Britain entered in the year of Balwhidder’s dream: that is, an event still two years in the future at the time of Balwhidder’s writing his chronicle. Here is allegory used not to condense the incremental change of social and economic history into a symbolic series of events, but to figure Hume’s violent “folly” and “caprice” of political history, its full meaning available to the reader in 1821 though not to Balwhidder in 1810. That Annals takes the form of a retrospective chronicle, not a diary, gives Balwhidder himself the opportunity to interpret events in any given year in the light of what came later, revealing a significance that was not apparent at the time. But Galt does not in fact grant the older Balwhidder any great superiority of interpretative power compared to his younger self, such as, for example, religious conversion provides the narrators of autobiographical narrative in the English puritan tradition of John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 1666) and Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, 1719; Moll Flanders, 1722). Rather, the narrative point of view in each chapter usually remains very close to Balwhidder’s perspective at the time narrated, relatively uninformed by what Balwhidder has learned since then. Here we have the greatest contrast with Scott’s historical novels, whose third-person

63 When no further specification is given, numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the present volume. introduction xxxvii

narrators, usually writing at a considerable distance in time from the events narrated, bring to those events a perspective unavailable to any of the characters caught up in them. Waverley (1814), like Annals of the Parish, is supposed to be narrated from a point in time other than its year of publication: 1805, allowing this novel of the 1745 rebellion the subtitle “’Tis Sixty Years Since.” When Galt resumed work on Annals in late 1820, he could have adopted this as the title for his first chapter. But Scott’s sixty years provides his narrator with the authority of a historian on an episode whose long-term consequences are now known and which can therefore be safely consigned to the past. Balwhidder’s half-century provides him with his subject matter: Annals of the Parish describes how Scotland got from then to now, without granting the present moment of narration a privileged perspective from outside the historical processes that it describes, precluding the reassuring sense of closure provided by Scott. In this as in many other respects we find the closest formal prece dent for Annals of the Parish not in any novel by Scott or Fielding or Goldsmith, but in Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, published in 1800, in which the tenures of four successive proprietors of an Irish estate are narrated by an old family servant, Thady Quirk, in his own distinctive dialect. Edgeworth, like Galt, was deeply read in the Scot- tish Enlightenment, and the underlying story of Castle Rackrent, like that of Annals of the Parish, is of the local, rural manifestation of universal economic forces: a story of the social change brought by commerce, albeit not incremental change as in Galt, but change repeatedly postponed in a series of dodges by an extravagant and irresponsible gentry. That Thady, at least ostensibly, sings the praises of his masters while telling a story that disgraces them creates the sort of narrative irony that some critics have found in Balwhidder too.64 In one respect, Edgeworth’s story is a very eighteenth-century one: as early as 1711, The Spectatorhad warned that the landed gentleman must adopt the practices of the merchant, “unless by scorning to be the Steward, he

64 Kenneth G. Simpson, “Ironic Self-Revelation in Annals of the Parish,” in John Galt 1779–1979, ed. Christopher A. Whatley (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1979) pp. 64–91. On the comparison with Castle Rackrent, see Martha Bohrer, “John Galt’s Annals of the Parish and the Narrative Strategies of Tales of Locale,” in John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society, ed. Regina Hewitt (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), pp. 95–118. xxxviii introduction

resolves the Steward shall be the Gentleman,”65 which is exactly what happens at the end of Castle Rackrent when Thady’s son Jason (trained in the law, good with accounts) seizes the estate from the last of the Rackrents. Going on the little we are told about them, the local gentry in Annals seem set on the same course, but they are very much on the margins of Balwhidder’s narrative, appearing only when they refuse to hire a new schoolmaster, grudgingly pay for a new manse, or stop coming to church altogether. But Castle Rackrent shares with Annals a refusal of conventional plot and a sense of the open-endedness of the history it chronicles: an editorial postscript is uncertain whether the imminent parliamentary union with Great Britain “will hasten or retard the amelioration of this country,” a question Balwhidder asks himself about the industrial revolution.66 Castle Rackrent is included in the 1808 catalogue of Greenock Library, so it is highly likely that Galt read it as a young man.67

Historical Context

In the farewell sermon which introduces the novel, Balwhidder urges the younger part of the congregation to follow the example of their parents in “fearing God and honouring the King,” and in their grati- tude “for the quiet and protection of the government in their day and generation”:

I do not counsel passive obedience; that is a doctrine that the Church of Scotland can never abide; but the divine right of resistance, which, in the days of her trouble, she so bravely asserted against popish and prelatic usurpations, was never resorted to till the attempt was made to remove the ark of the tabernacle from her. I therefore counsel you, my young friends, no to lend your ears to those that trum- pet forth their hypothetical politics, but to believe that the laws of the land are administered with a good intent, till in your own homes and dwellings ye feel the presence of the

65 Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), II, p. 188. 66 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, ed. George Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 97. 67 Frykman, John Galt’s Scottish Stories, p. 226. introduction xxxix

oppressor—then, and not till then, are ye free to gird your loins for battle—and woe to him, and woe to the land where that is come to, if the sword be sheathed till the wrong be redressed. (4–5)

If we return to this passage after finishing the novel, it may strike us as slightly odd, and not only because this sermon as a whole – articulate, vigorous, concise – does not sound like the performance of the ram- bling and forgetful valetudinarian that Balwhidder has represented himself as in its final chapters. It is also that this specific warning, against resistance to the king and his government in the name of “hypothetical politics,” seems superfluous given the recent history of the parish that Balwhidder has narrated. “Hypothetical politics” had indeed caused him some worries in the early and middle years of the 1790s, when enthusiasm for the French Revolution was at its height among the workers of Cayenneville. But by 1800 “the crisis of their political distemperature was over” (138); the organisation of a local militia co-opts their skills “in the ways of committees and associating together” (145), previously so threatening to government, in the cause of national defence in 1803; and Balwhidder remembers both “a general resuscitation of religious sentiments” in 1804 (150), and his particular satisfaction at seeing “several lads, who had been both wild and free in their principles, marrying with sobriety, and taking their wives to the kirk, with the comely decorum of heads of families” in 1807 (158). So Balwhidder’s warning not to take the precedent of the seventeenth-century Covenanters as licence for revolt in the present day seems an unnecessary one to give his parishioners in 1810.68 It speaks directly, however, to the recent experience of Galt’s readers in 1821. The period following the defeat of Napoleon had been one of widespread unemployment all across Britain, but especially in manufacturing districts; this lent urgency to the demand for political reform, held in abeyance during the war but now finding full and popular expression. A deepening of economic distress in early 1819, and the imposition of new taxes on malt, spirits, tobacco, tea, and coffee that summer, reactivated working-class political associations: in Scot- land, this was especially marked in the hard-hit weaving communities of the western lowlands. In the aftermath of the massacre by mounted soldiers of eighteen people attending a peaceful mass rally in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819, local reform associations in these

68 On the Covenanters, see Appendix 2. xl introduction

areas, though still committed to constitutional protest and petition within the law, began to practise military-style drilling (many members were demobilized soldiers), both for self-defence and to forestall criticism of their rallies as undisciplined mobs. The government’s response was to ban such activity by Act of Parliament. Peaceful shows of strength having been effectively outlawed, some in the reform societies turned to plans for armed revolt. These werestymied, however, by the necessity, but great difficulty, of co-ordinating such plans at a national level without alerting the authorities. A placard announcing a general uprising that appeared across the west of Scotland on 2 April 1820 was dated from Glasgow the previous day, but addressed “The Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland”: the small groups of men from Glasgow and nearby towns who took up arms on 4 April and set off to seize strategic locations seem to have thought that they were taking part in a Britain-wide insurrection. One group got as far as a skirmish with cavalry, in which they were defeated and arrested; the others dispersed when their situation became clear. Ninety-eight warrants for arrest for high treason were issued against individuals from five counties; from twenty-four capital convictions, only three executions eventually followed, of James Wilson at Glasgow on 30 August 1820 and Andrew Hardie and John Baird at Stirling on 8 Sep- tember.69 Of the seventeen Ayrshire men wanted by the courts in 1820, seven were from Stewarton parish, which borders Dreghorn to the north; eight from Galston parish, nine miles up the River Irvine; and two from Mauchline further south.70 That these were small communities based on weaving and other work in textiles reflects a general fact about the “insurgent radicalism” of 1819–20, that it “appeared strongest in those small and medium-sized communities around large urban centres such as Paisley and Glasgow, rather than in the larger areas themselves”; radicalism had deep roots within such communities, “augmented by a sense of local history,” and one contemporary observed that “the most contaminated villages” had been “poisoned since the year 1794 and the evil has festered ever since.”71 Annals of the

69 Gordon Pentland, The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815–1820 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), pp. 110–11. The historical account in this paragraph is drawn from Pentland’s book. 70 C. J. Green, Trials for High Treason in Scotland, under a Special Commission, held at Stirling, Glasgow, Dumbarton, Paisley, and Ayr, in the Year 1820, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1825), III, p. 478. 71 Pentland, Spirit of the Union, p. 106. introduction xli

Parish narrates the local history of just the sort of community that had incubated the abortive uprising against the state of April 1820. The Church, on the other hand, found its social and moral authority most seriously threatened in those large urban centres themselves. In 1819, its most prominent Evangelical minister, Thomas Chalmers, set out to demonstrate that the Kirk’s inherited structures could rise to the unprecedented social challenges that these places presented, when he took on the charge of the newly-created parish of St John’s in the East End of Glasgow. Given sufficient commitment, Chalmers believed, the modes of social care and moral surveillance that connected minister, elders, and parishioners living side by side in a rural parish, what he called the “principle of locality,” could be replicated among the vast, rootless, and impoverished population of the industrial city.72 Chalmers drew the lessons of his experience in his three-volume The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns: this was published in the same year as Annals of the Parish, which raises similar questions about the adaptability of the traditional parish to industrial society. But the Presbyterian inheritance was also implicated in the political unrest of 1819–20. While Chalmers was invoking the “principle of locality” as an answer to the social and moral degradation of St John’s, radicals were invoking the church’s own seventeenth-century history as a precedent for taking up arms against the Crown. Many Scottish Presbyterians, especially in the denominations that had seceded from the established church, still revered as martyrs those Covenanters who had twice taken up arms against the government of Charles II. Those who sought to fully reconcile the Kirk to the eighteenth-century British polity had justified these revolts by arguing that the Stuart tyranny “had threatened not only the freedom of presbyterians, but also, in its abuses of due legal process, the whole civic fabric of liberty and property” which the eighteenth-century British polity was committed to protecting.73 That the Covenanters’ cause in the later seventeenth

72 “Every thing has been permitted to run at random; and, as a fruit of the utter disregard of the principle of locality, have the city clergyman and his people almost lost sight of each other. It is the intimacy of connection between these two parties which has impressed its best and most peculiar features on the Scottish nation” (Thomas Chalmers,The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, 3 vols [Glasgow: Chalmers and Collins, 1821], I, p. 127). 73 Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge xlii introduction

century was “civil and religious liberty” in the modern sense remained a widespread and popular version of Scottish history in the early nineteenth century, especially in the Covenanters’ heartland of southern and western Scotland, though its most informed articulations now came from ministers of the Seceder churches.74 This version of the past was “crucially … a politically usable one” in the present, and provided “a developed political theology which, most alarmingly for the authorities, delineated a theory of justified resistance” to both the state and national elites.75 And, even though all the Presbyterian churches “openly repudiated the connection … the Covenanting past clearly provided a measure of inspiration for Scottish popular protest during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”76 Galt, writing in the aftermath of the events of 1820, has his minister-protagonist repeat this open repudiation at the start of Annals of the Parish; of course, he cannot do so without at the same time evoking the possibility of the connection between modern political protest and the Covenanters that Balwhidder repudiates. This was not the first time that the fraught political legacy of the Covenanters had been addressed in a work of fiction. Scott’s A Tale of Old Mortality (1816) had provoked a long-running controversy with its portrayal of the uprising of 1679. Scott’s Covenanters are mostly ignorant fanatics, bent not on “civil and religious liberty,” but on their own theocratic tyranny. This provoked an angry rebuttal from Thomas McCrie, minister of one of the Seceder communions, in a review of Old Mortality spread over three issues of the Evangelical Edinburgh Christian Instructor in 1817, later collected and published as a book. McCrie finds the source of Scott’s animus in the present age of political reaction, “in the force with which the current of public opinion, impelled by recent events, has been directed into the old channel of hereditary rights and royal legitimacy, to the over-bearing and carry-

University Press, 1993), p. 68. 74 Neil Forsyth, “Presbyterian Historians and the Scottish Invention of Brit- ish Liberty,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society 34 (2004), pp. 97, 94; referring to Archibald Bruce, Historico-Politico-Ecclesiastical Dissertation (1802) and Thomas McCrie,Life of Andrew Melville (1819). 75 Gordon Pentland, Radicalism, Reform and National Identity in Scotland, 1820–1833 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), p. 44. 76 Colin Kidd, “Conditional Britons: The Scots Covenanting Tradition and the Eighteenth-Century British State,” English Historical Review 117.474 (November 2002), p. 1168. introduction xliii

ing away of all well-grounded jealousies of arbitrary power, and slavish non-resistance.”77 This controversy is most often mentioned by literary historians as the occasion for counter-fictions of the Covenanters, by James Hogg (The Brownie of Bodsbeck, 1818) and later by Galt (Ringan Gilhaize, 1823), but it is also a context to which Christian Isobel John- stone alludes when she admits her “slight grudge” against Scott for his anti-Presbyterian stereotypes of the Scottish clergy (his “prelatic limnings, as Micah might say”) in her review for the Inverness Courier.78 Also published in 1821 was a book-length response to McCrie’s critique of Scott by William Aiton, Sherriff-Substitute of Hamilton, Lanark- shire. This book includes “Reflections on Political Subjects” in which Aiton attacks the “political whigs” of the present day (that is, politicians of the Whig party) for encouraging the “lower orders” into rebellion, by means including an appeal to the original Whigs (the Covenanters) of the seventeenth century.79 His book ends with a prayer very close to Balwhidder’s advice to his younger parishioners in his farewell sermon: “let all the labouring classes, who are, or may be happier in this island, than people of their rank can be in any other part of the world, learn to fear God; honour the King; and to avoid them that are given to change.”80 A pair of letters published inBlackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in December 1821 confirm that Aiton’s distinction between modern Whig politicians and the popular religious tradition that they exploit provided a context in which Galt’s novel was understood.81 One letter is addressed “To the Author of ‘Annals of the Parish of Dal- mailing’” from “an elder of the Established Church for nearly thirty years.” It denounces the self-interest of both the modern Whig and

77 [Thomas McCrie],A Vindication of the Scottish Covenanters: Consisting of a Review of the First Series of the “Tales of my Landlord,” extracted from the Chris- tian Instructor for 1817 (Glasgow: Maurice Ogle, 1824), p. 60. 78 Inverness Courier 180 (10 May 1821), p. 4. 79 William Aiton, A History of the Rencounter at Drumclog, and Battle of Both- well Bridge, in the Month of June, 1679, With an Account of what is correct, and what is fictitious in the “Tales of my Landlord” respecting these engagements, and Reflections on Political Subjects(Hamilton: Borthwick, 1821), p. 121. The same William Aiton was author of the 1811 survey of Ayrshire agriculture that Galt probably consulted in writing Annals of the Parish. 80 Aiton, History of the Rencounter, p. 131. 81 “Whigs of the Covenant. To Christopher North, Esq.” and “To the Author of ‘Annals of the Parish of Dalmailing,’ &c.,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 10.58 (December 1821), pp. 665–8. xliv introduction

modern Tory parties, and warns: “The native population of Scotland, with some trifling exceptions, consists wholly of the Whigs of the Cov- enant, differing as widely from the nominal and prominent Whigs of our day, as the apostle Peter differed from that smooth, cunning, and thievish priest, Doctor Judas Iscariot. … In drawing up further Parish Annals, keep this constantly in view.” Signed “A Whig of the Covenant,” the letter is prefaced inBlackwood’s by another, validating its account of “the politico-moral state of the Scottishpeople ” and distinguishing the “hallowed prejudices and affections which enter so deeply into the genuine Scottish character” of the “Presbyterian Whigs” from the purely “secular interests” of the “Political Whigs” who are very small in number. The reassuring conclusion is that political commotion such as the country suffered in 1819–20 is the work of only a “few political fanatics and theorists in the manufacturing districts.” This letter, which in the magazine follows the final instalment of Galt’sThe Steam-Boat, is signed “Author of ‘Annals of the Parish’.” It is not by Galt; it has been suggested that both letters are the work of Thomas Gillespie, a scholar and parish minister in Fife.82 These letters raise the question of how farAnnals of the Parish shares their urge to turn the Presbyterian legacy into national tradition, a set of what they call “old usages and institutions,” the objects of the common people’s “veneration,” stripped of any dangerous political valence; for Gillespie seems to be motivated by a perception that Galt’s novel does not quite do what this conservative agenda would require of it. Certainly, the immediate historical context of economic distress, political unrest, and the threat of violent insurrection hangs over the references in Annals to the revolutions of the previous century in America and France. But any reader such as Gillespie who expected to find in a minister of the established Church an unequivocal and con- sistent defender of the social and political status quo might well have been disappointed in Micah Balwhidder. In his entry for 1789, the year of the French Revolution, Balwhidder recalls a year “not remarkable for any extraordinary occurrence,” although “there was a hopefulness in the minds of men, and a planning of new undertakings, of which, whatever may be the upshot, the devising is ever rich in the cheerful anticipations of good” (109). Those inclined to find in Annals of the Parish irony at its narrator’s expense may see his omission of events

82 Alan Lang Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol- umes I through XVIII, 1817–1825 (Lubbock: Texas Technical College Library, 1959), p. 89. introduction xlv

in France at this point as exposing his comically limited perspective on the world. Read alongside the Scottish Enlightenment version of history, we may instead find here an instance of its valorisation of the material and gradual transformation of society by technological progress over the false promises of what Hume dismissed as “foreign and ... violent” revolution: the “new undertakings” which really bring improvement in the human condition are developments like the stage-coach which allows Mrs Balwhidder to sell her butter in the Glasgow markets, not events like the storming of the Bastille. But it also possible that, in remembering “a hopefulness in the minds of men, and a planning of new undertakings, of which, whatever may be the upshot, the devising is ever rich in the cheerful anticipations of good,” Balwhidder is remembering the French Revolution, or at least remembering how the French Revolution made him feel, while choosing not to remember why he felt that way, because of its “upshot” (the Terror, war) in the years that followed. Balwhidder’s difficulties in the 1790s, personal and parochial, reflect the challenge that this decade represented for his church as a whole, complicated as it was “by the embarrassment attaching to the presbyterian Kirk’s radical pedigree.”83 If the polarisation of British politics in that decade, and the terrible course of events in France itself, leave Balwhidder sharing in this embarrassment, then he is in very good company: “Even the aged retired leader of the Moderates, William Robertson, was wrongfooted by the sudden volte-face in political orthodoxy” at this time, requiring him to suppress a sermon from 1788 which had then seemed an inof - fensive celebration of British liberties and now seemed dangerously radical.84

Conclusion

There is another kind of revolution at stake in Annals of the Parish. For while Galt shares with the historians of the Scottish Enlightenment an understanding of technological and economic “improvement” as the motive force of historical change, recent experience had exploded their assumption that its effects would always be incremental and

83 Colin Kidd, “The Kirk, the French Revolution, and the Burden of Scottish Whiggery,” in Religious Change in Europe 1650–1914, ed. Nigel Aston (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 213. 84 Ibid., p. 225. xlvi introduction

necessarily beneficial. This novel is surely the first work of fiction to describe the industrial revolution as a revolution, as a sudden and unprecedented transformation of social relations by the technologies of mass production. It was only six years earlier that Robert Owen, philanthropic part-owner and manager of the New Lanark cotton mill, had first drawn attention to the difference in kind between the “essen- tially agricultural” Britain of “thirty or forty years ago” and the new society produced by “the mechanical inventions which introduced the cotton trade into this country”:

The manufacturing system has already so far extended its influence over the British empire, as to effect an essential change in the general character of the mass of the people. This alteration is still rapid in its progress; and ere long, the comparatively happy simplicity of the agricultural peasant will be wholly lost amongst us. It is even now scarcely to be found without a mixture of those habits which are the offspring of trade, manufactures, and commerce.85

Owen looked back to the “example of some landed proprietor,” in consequence of which the rural poor “became strongly attached to those on whom they depended,” and contrasted this with the alienation of the factory worker: “[t]oday he labours for one master, tomorrow for a second, then for a third, and a fourth, until all ties between employers and employed are frittered down to the consideration of what immediate gain each can derive from the other.”86 Annals of the Parish too marks the passing of a social order based on attachment and dependence with the death of Lord Eglesham. But the six years between Owen’s retrospective and Galt’s gave the latter a better sense of what was replacing it. “As long as the Great French Wars lasted, patriotism reinforced paternalism to hold overt class conflict in check,” writes a much later historian; but with peace, “one opposing pressure, patriotism, being removed, the other, dependency, failed to hold.” And so “it was in the first five years of peace, between Waterloo and the Queen’s Trial [of 1820], that the vertical antagonisms and horizontal solidarities of class came, for the first time, clearly, unmistakably,

85 Robert Owen, “Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (1815),” in A New View of Society and other Writings, ed. Gregory Claeys (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 93–4. 86 Owen, “Observations,” pp. 96–7. introduction xlvii

and irrevocably, to supplant the vertical connections and horizontal rivalries of dependency and interest.” As well as the old “vertical connections … of dependency,” Annals of the Parish also represents the emergence of the “horizontal solidarities of class,” as the workers of Cayenneville come to identify with “all members of one broad social level” across the country.87 Rather than the brutalised and atomised individuals foreseen by Owen, Galt’s workers associate, borrow books, and club together to subscribe to a London newspaper. On the other side of the class divide, Mr Cayenne is in touch with his partners in London and through them with a whole new national stratum of industrial entrepreneurs. Industrialisation fractures local society along the fault lines of class, but it also integrates the parish into the social and political networks of mainland Britain as never before. His early recognition of the social effects of industrialisation, com- bined with the events of 1819–20, forced Galt beyond the model of history provided by the Scottish Enlightenment. This is why Annals of the Parish is a fiction of Scottish history very different from Scott’s novels of the 1810s, even though the two authors shared the same intellectual inheritance. In this novel, Enlightenment optimism about “progress” is balanced by Robert Owen’s worry that the condition of an industrial working class “will sooner or later plunge the country into a formidable and perhaps inextricable state of danger” without legislative measures to ameliorate its condition.88 The raising of a volunteer regiment in chapter 44 occasions a spectacle of social unity, and suggests that a British popular patriotism might substitute for a vanished local paternalism and paper over the cracks of a class society. But Balwhidder’s account of his parish does not end on this note, but with the closure of the cotton mill in chapter 49, the deaths of the Dwinings, and mass unemployment which parochial resources for poor relief will clearly be unable to mitigate. Croker, reviewing Annals in the Quarterly, suggested that when Galt turned to the consequences of the new “manufacturing system” he appeared “a little afraid of his subject.”89 In historical hindsight Galt seems, on the contrary, cou- rageously clear-eyed in his assessment of the prospects for industrial society in Annals of the Parish, emboldened by his having found the perfect literary form in which to trace its origins.

87 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880(London: Routledge, 1969), p. 172. 88 Owen, “Observations,” p. 98. 89 Quarterly Review 25.49 (April 1821), p. 151.