The Member And The Radical. John Galt

       Contents

       Acknowledgements

       Introduction

      THE MEMBER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

      Notes by Ian A. Gordon

      THE RADICAL: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

      Notes by Paul H. Scott

      Glossary

       Introduction

      One of the first reviewers of The Member, when it was published in 1832, said that he wished that ‘Mr. Galt would do nothing but write imaginary autobiographies’. He was thinking not only of The Member itself, described on its title page as ‘An Autobiography’, but also of Galt’s earlier works, Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Provost (1822). As a novelist Galt was innovative and diverse in subject matter and technique and this particular kind of fictional autobiography was one of his happiest inventions.

      There was, of course, nothing new in novels which told the life story, or part of it, of an imaginary character in the first person. Daniel Defoe did that in Robinson Crusoe and Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random and there are innumerable other examples. Galt’s originality lay in some special characteristics of his own, apart from his concentration and brevity. One of these qualities was noticed by Samuel Coleridge in The Provost, but it applies to the others as well. He called it an ‘irony of self-delusion’. The imaginary autobiographer gives away his weaknesses at every turn, evidently without the slightest suspicion that he is doing so. He continues, Coleridge says, in ‘a happy state of self-applause’. Galt gives each of his subjects a personality entirely appropriate to his circumstances, with a style and habit of speech to match, sustained throughout without a single false note.

      Another of Galt’s strengths is the smeddum and force of the Scots of Irvine and Greenock where he spent the first twenty-five years and the last five of his life. In a prefatory note to one of his last short stories Galt spoke of ‘the fortunate circumstances of the Scotch possessing the whole range of the English language, as well as their own, by which they enjoy an unusually rich vocabulary’. This richness is less apparent in The Member than in the earlier novels, but again this is appropriate. The imaginary writer, Archibald Jobbry, has spent most of his life in India and can be expected to have lost much of his Scots.

      In his Autobiography Galt said that he was convinced ‘that not in character only, but in all things, an author should have natural models before him’. The Member was no exception. Galt says of it:

      The gentleman I had in view as the model, was immediately discovered in the House of Commons, and I suspect he is possessed of too much shrewd humour to be offended with the liberty I have taken. I have represented him as neither saying or doing aught, that, I think, as the world wags, he may not unblushingly have done, nor which, in my heart, I do not approve.

      Parliament and Whitehall were familiar territory to Galt. He had acted for years as a lobbyist on behalf of the Union Canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1820 he was appointed to act as the agent for a group of claimants who had suffered loss when the United States invaded Canada in 1812. This involved him both in taking charge of the settlement of part of Ontario and in protracted negotiations with the government.

      Galt insisted that his books like the Annals were not novels, but something quite different. They had no plot, and, he wrote, ‘the only link of cohesion, which joins the incidents together, is the mere remembrance of the supposed author. It is, in consequence, as widely different from a novel, as a novel can be from any other species of narration’. He used various phrases to describe them: ‘a kind of treatise on the history of society’, ‘theoretical histories’, or ‘philosophical sketches’. He even went so far as to deny that he hoped to entertain the reader:

      I only desire it to be remembered by my readers that, I had an object in view beyond what was apparent. I considered the novel as a vehicle of instruction, or philosophy teaching by examples, parables, in which the moral was more valuable than the incidents were impressive. Indeed it is not in this age that a man of ordinary common sense would enter into competition in recreative stories, with a great genius who possessed the attention of all. I mean Sir Walter Scott.

      In his irony, humour and richness of character Galt is one of the most entertaining of novelists. His denial that he had any such intention is therefore curious. Perhaps he was betraying a twinge of Presbyterian conscience over the frivolity of writing novels intended only to entertain. His sympathies with Presbyterianism, indeed with the spirit of the Covenanters, are clear from his great historical novel, Ringan Gilhaize.

      At all events. The Member and The Radical are the most obviously ‘philosophical’, or at least political, of his novels. They were both published in 1832 shortly before the passage of the Reform Act which began the process of extending the right to vote in British parliamentary elections to a larger part of the population. Controversy over this measure, which was promoted by the Whigs and opposed by the Tories, was then at its height. The two novels were clearly intended as contributions to the debate. This was another of Galt’s innovations. The Provost was a novel of political satire on the local level. Sir Andrew Wylie (1822) had introduced episodes of political intrigue. The Member and The Radical were the first novels in our literature centered on parliamentary politics.

      Archibald Jobbry, the narrator of The Member, is that familiar figure in nineteenth-century literature, the Scot who has made a fortune in India and returns to buy an estate in his own country. He finds that the peaceful enjoyment of his retirement is disturbed by the demands of his kith and kin, ‘all gaping like voracious larks for a pick’. His solution is to buy himself a seat in Parliament, under the old corrupt system before the Reform Act, to get his hands on some government patronage to satisfy them. Having twice survived what he calls ironically his ‘popular election’, he settles down to draw what advantage he can from his support of the government. He finds this easy for ‘a conscientious man’, because he sees little distinction between Whig and Tory. He begins to take a ‘sort of attachment to the House’ (still a not unusual phenomenon) and develops some quite enlightened ideas. Mr Jobbry is no die-hard Tory, but he is inevitably opposed to parliamentary reform, or in his words, ‘giving the unenlightened many, an increase of dominion over the enlightened few’. He sees that his day is over as the Reform Act looms and his seat loses all marketable value. So he retires to his Scottish estate.

      The obvious reading of The Member is that it is a satire aimed at the corruption of the pre-Reform parliament, a contribution to the case for reform, and therefore support for the Whigs and an attack on the Tories. If we can believe what he says himself in his Autobiography, this was not Galt’s intention:

      In the Member, I tried to embody all that could, in my opinion, be urged against the tories of my own way of thinking, and I was not aware that it could be deemed very bad, till I saw my friend, Dr. Bowring’s account of it, in the Westminster Review, in which he considered it as a reluctant concession to the spirit of the times. I am sure, however, that Mr. Jobbry is not made to make any acknowledgement