John Galt had written four Scottish regional stories for William Blackwood’s Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine before he published his fifth, The Provost, in that journal. The series boosted Galt’s reputation beyond that of a writer of biographies, articles, travel books, and academic texts; he had become a novelist of note.

In March of 1822, the journal announced that The Provost would appear in early May. As Blackwood read the sections forwarded to him by Galt, he was said to have been so delighted that he refrained from his usual editing. The novel’s 2,000 copies sold in a fortnight that May, as reported in the June edition of Blackwood’s, with a second edition printing already selling out. The poet Samuel Coleridge had a copy, as did many other notables. Coleridge wrote that he knew of “no equal in Literature” to Galt’s depiction in the egoistic narrator Mr. Pawkie of the “Irony of Self-delusion.”

Pawkie opens by explaining his plan to win election. He became “jocund,” even with the beggars, in order to ingratiate himself with others and gain their support, as he “had a part to play in the public world.” He modestly admits, “I became, both by habit and repute, a man of popularity in the town, in so much that it was a shrewd saying of old James Alpha, the bookseller, that ‘mair gude jokes were cracked ilka day in James Pawkie’s shop, than in Thomas Curl, the barber’s, on a Saturday night.’”

In another example fraught with the irony noted by Coleridge, Pawkie describes how he managed to soothe an agitated acquaintance who was jealous over the choice of another to lead a volunteer brigade. The pompous self-assurance is laced with a curious sympathy that enriched Galt’s ironic tone: “Mr. Dinton, who was a proud man, and an offset from one of the county families, I could see, was not overly pleased at the preferment over him given to Mr. Pipe, so that I was in a manner constrained to loot a sort a-jee [‘bend a bit sideways’], and to wile him into good-humour with all the ability in my power . . . and I winkit to Mr. Pipe, as I said this, and he could with difficulty keep his countenance at hearing how I so beguiled Mr. Dinton into a spirit of loyalty.”

Critics later compared Galt’s style to that of Daniel Defoe, with its sharpness of detail rendering scenes as clear as a series of photographs. Laced with rich humor and an obvious grasp of the Scots vernacular, the novel focused on Mr. Pawkie’s three rounds of service in the office of provost, or mayor, of his town. Pawkie allows insight into Scotland and its people as he relates how he entered and progressed through a political life, contrasting his provincial experiences with the sophistication of the outside world. His setting of Gudetown reflected precisely many details of Galt’s hometown of Irvine. Critics later hailed the novel as a perfect meld of the pre–Industrial Revolution local Scottish scene with the political sphere. Manipulative of a forgiving political system, Mr. Pawkie stands as the ultimate self-aggrandizer, pleasant and kind, but thorough in serving his own needs before those of others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashley, A. J. “Coleridge on Galt.” Times Literary Supplement (September 25, 1930): 757.
Scott, P. H. John Galt. Scottish Academic Press, 1985.