Annals of the Parish

Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt

by John Galt (Editor), Robert P. Irvine (Editor)

Offers Galt’s most successful novel, a microcosm of fifty years of Scottish history 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 with humour and pathos the fifty years 1760–1810 from the perspective of ordinary people swept up in social and economic transformation.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2020

About the author

John Galt was a Scottish novelist, entrepreneur, and political and social commentator. He was the first novelist to deal with issues of the Industrial Revolution and he has been called the first political novelist in the English language.

In 1820 Galt began to write for Blackwoods Magazine which published Annals of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees in 1821, The Provost and Sir Andrew Wylie in 1822, and The Entail in 1823. His novel Ringan Gilhaize (1823) offers a very different perspective on Scotland's Covenanting period to Walter Scott's The Tale of Old Mortality (1816).

Galt was instrumental in establishing the Canada Company, which was granted a charter in 1826 and bought almost 2.5 million acres of land from the British Government with a view to selling it on in individual plots to settlers. He founded the cities of Guelph and Goderich in Ontario. His novels Lawrie Tod (1830) and Bogle Corbet (1831) are concerned with the settlement of North America.

Reviews

[L. M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Ripe with the flavour of a revolutionary age, sometimes unexpectedly moving. An unsettling novel about change.