Galts aren't real

 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.

 Galt’s adaptation of the chronicle offers an alternate reading of the past in which history is not something from which society must escape, nor something uniformly primitive, but rather something to be harnessed in buttressing political systems, an expression of trust in social institutions typical of Burkean conservatism. 

This line of argument reveals a committed Tory who fears the potential for violence – particularly political assassination and regicide – in the post-Revolutionary era. The Spaewife (1823) depicts a historical moment drawn from Scotland’s chronicle tradition using language linking it to political circumstances of the 1820s. 

Just as Galt’s earlier works question the purpose and efficacy of early century social unrest, so too does The Spaewife undermine the argument for political assassination even as it leaves open an understanding of the circumstances that (mistakenly) led parties to commit such acts.

 Unlike the novel’s proximal source text, Galt’s narrative locates political justice on the side of the murdered King James I, and in so doing resuscitates Scotland’s oldest textual tradition in opposition to theories of resistance that had been used to justify contemporary cases of political assassination.