The Story of John Galt’s Scottish Novels

Abstract

This chapter unearths a sweeping account of the Age of Improvement in John Galt’s brand of non-fictional fiction (‘theoretical history’). It finds Galt exploring the capacity of a modernising society to cope with localised, historically rooted and distinctive cultural forms. His narrative of improvement draws on the first Statistical Account of Scotland in both formal and thematic terms. In Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Entail (1823), local and national cultures can function as cohesive agents that remedy the destabilising effects of rapid change, yet they can also be perverted into a dark influence working to misdirect the effect of global market forces. Galt presents history as a contest over the volatile substance of ‘story’, which his novels rhetorically disavow. His analysis of the law of unintended consequences is permeated by a dry sense of humour. Yet by The Entail, Scottish history has become a catalogue of tragic failures, as the changes wrought by improvement fracture the nation into incompatible alternatives.