Galt, as here, often describes himself as a Tory, but this is difficult to reconcile with the attitudes which appear throughout his writings. He is no respecter of inherited privilege from the monarch downwards and he is particularly contemptuous of landowners. His sympathies lie with the poor and oppressed and it is not only in The Member that he describes the Tories as corrupt. In the Last of the Lairds, for example, a character says of ducks in the rain that they are ‘as garrulous with enjoyment, as Tories in the pools of corruption’. A man of Galt’s sharp intelligence was unlikely to be unaware of this paradox; but I do not know of any attempt that he made to explain it.
The William Holmes MP, to whom the book was dedicated, was a real person, described in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘the adroit and dexterous whip of the tory party … a most skilful dispenser of patronage’. Galt tells us that the dedication was written by J.G. Lockhart, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott, who, like Galt, was associated with the Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood. Galt says of the dedication that it was a clever jeu d’esprit, and so admirably in keeping with the character of Jobbry that he was proud to have it ascribed to him.
The Member was described on the title page as ‘By the author of The Ayrshire Legatees etc. etc.’. Even without this, it is clearly from the same pen as the best of Galt, shrewd, ironic, humane and enriched by Scots vocabulary and turn of phrase. This time, the irony is directed more against the institution than the individual. The Radical, in contrast, is so different in atmosphere and style that it would be impossible on internal evidence to conclude that it had been written by the same man. Once again the style is appropriate to the narrator; but, unlike any of the others, it is dry and abstract with a strong flavour of self-obsessed fanaticism. This time Galt presumably had no model, for the book is not in his usual style of social realism. It is not so much a novel with satirical overtones as a satire disguised as a novel. It is entirely in English, although a schoolmaster is given the name Mr Skelper.
The narrator, Nathan Butt (which has a significance to an ear tuned to Scots) is more of an anarchist than a radical. From his schooldays onwards he is opposed to all authority. His goal is ‘nothing less than [naethin but] the emancipation of the human race from the trammels and bondage of the social law’. He wants to abolish property, religion, law, marriage and all ‘coercive expedients in the management of mankind’; but he still marries and expects absolute obedience from his wife. Like Mr Jobbry, he is no democrat because ‘the wise are few, and the foolish numerous’. He is prepared to pose as a Whig and support parliamentary reform as a means to his own ‘high and great purposes’. Although elected as a Whig, his election is declared invalid. He will not be in the House to vote for the Reform Bill, which was in fact passed in June 1832, only a few weeks after the publication of the book.
Although the approach of these two books to parliamentary reform is apparently so different, there is perhaps a common idea behind them, which may also be a clue to Galt’s idiosyncratic Toryism. It was a commonplace of Scottish Enlightenment thought, expressed for instance by Adam Ferguson, that society was so complex a mechanism that any attempt to change it was liable to have unforeseen and possibly disastrous consequences. Change should therefore be undertaken only when clearly necessary and after very careful consideration. Galt in his youth had steeped himself in the Greenock Subscription Library in the works of Robertson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson and the rest. Like Walter Scott, he accepted the doctrine of the need for political caution. What he is probably saying in The Member is: ‘All right. The House of Commons is unrepresentative and corrupt, but it does not do much harm. It is probably better to leave it alone.’ The Radical makes the point that an apparently moderate and desirable reform may open the way to extremists bent on the destruction of all law and social order.
In his Autobiography Galt said that The Radical was more philosophical in its satire than The Member. His object was ‘to show that many of these institutes, which are regarded as essentials in society, owe their origin to the sacrifice required to be made by man, to partake of its securities’. He did not think that he had failed in writing it, but he had to admit that it had not sold well. He thought that this might be because it had dealt in truths that were unpalatable at the time. In his Literary Life Galt said that the sales of both books had been unsatisfactory; ‘although on the Continent, they have attracted more attention than any other product of my pen, they have almost been still-born here’.
The Member was published in January 1832 and The Radical in May. The unsold sheets of both were issued as a single volume, The Reform, in November. While Blackwood’s held the copyright of Galt’s best-known novels and kept most of them almost continuously in print for more than 100 years, they were not involved with the two political novels. The Member was not reprinted until Ian A. Gordon edited an edition for the Scottish Academic Press in 1973, which was reissued as a paperback in 1985. This text of The Member and its notes is used with the kind permission of Professor Gordon. The Radical is reprinted here for the first time since its original appearance.
Paul H. Scott
JOHN GALT
An Autobiography
EDITED WITH NOTES BY
IAN A . GORDON
DEDICATION
To
WILLIAM HOLMES, Esq. M.P.
The Girlands, Jan. 1, 1832.
MY DEAR SIR,
I beg leave to inscribe to you this brief Memoir of my parliamentary services, and I do so on the same principle that our acquaintance, Colonel Napier, refers to as his motive in dedicating that interesting work, the History of the Peninsular War, to the Duke of Wellington. It was chiefly under your kind superintendence that I had the satisfaction of exerting myself as an independent member, really and cordially devoted to the public good, during many anxious campaigns; and now, retired for ever from the busy scene, it is natural that I should feel a certain satisfaction in associating your respected name with this humble record.
If the Reform Bill passes, which an offended Providence seems, I fear, but too likely to permit, your own far more brilliant and distinguished career as a patriotic senator is, probably, also drawing to a conclusion; and withdrawn, like me, to a rural retreat, in the calm repose of an evening hour, no longer liable to sudden interruption, it may serve to amuse your leisure to cast an eye over the unpretending narrative of scenes and events so intimately connected in my mind with the recollection of your talents, zeal, and genius, in what, though not generally so considered by the unthinking mass, I have long esteemed nearly the most important situation which any British subject can fill; but which, alas! is perhaps destined to pass away and be forgotten, amidst this general convulsion so fatal to the established institutions of a once happy and contented country. If, indeed, my dear and worthy friend, the present horrid measure be carried into full effect, it is but too plain that the axe will have been laid to the root of the British Oak. The upsetting, short-sighted conceit of new-fangled theorems will not long endure either the aristocratic or the monarchic branches; and your old office, so useful and necessary even, under a well-regulated social system, will fall with the rest; for the sharp, dogged persons likely to be returned under the schedules, will need no remembrancer to call them to their congenial daily and nightly task of retrenchment and demolition.
A melancholy vista discloses itself to all rational understandings; – a church in tatters; a peerage humbled and degraded – no doubt, soon to be entirely got rid of; that poor, deluded man, the well-meaning William IV, probably packed off to Hanover; the three per cents down to two, at the very best of it; a graduated property tax sapping the vitals of order in all quarters; and, no question, parliamentary grants and pensions of every description no longer held sacred!
May