Galt's 'Annals of the Parish' revisited

 

First edition - 1821

My first Blog on this John Galt novel - possibly his most well-known - was on 7th June 2020. I remember being quite taken with both the style and content and this re-reading - exactly 200 years to the month since it was first published - has done nothing to change my mind. I think the best tribute I can pay Galt is to to say that I began to believe Balwhidder was a real parson engaged in genuine work over fifty years. I am not alone: William Blackwood, the publisher of the book, told Galt that his mother had read the book, thinking Balwhidder was an upright minister of the Word. She became angry when one of her grandsons told her it was actually a novel! Balwhidder is not a cipher of the author; he appears as a real personality. The revered essayist/critic, V. S. Pritchett, entitles the Chapter on Galt and the Annals in his The Living Novel, A Scottish Documentary.

Rev. Micah Balwhidder with his wife (1st? 2nd? 3rd?!)

A strength of the Annals is that national - even international events - are seamlessly interwoven with local affairs. There is movement and progression throughout: the establishment of Cayenneville mirrors what was really happening at Robert Owen's New Lanark (a great place to visit); the improvement in farming by Balwhidder's second father-in-law, Mr. Kibbock, with his plantation of fir-trees on the bleak and barren tops of the hills of his farm. The effects of improved conditions in his parish, leads Balwhidder to exclaim: The minds of men were excited to new enterprises; a new genius, as it were, had descended upon the earth, and there was an erect and outlying spirit abroad that was not to be satisfied with the taciturn regularity of ancient affairs. Content for so long with just the Scots Magazine for his written news, Balwhidder soon realises the immediacy of the newspapers that arrive, eventually to be had from the new bookshop in Cayenne. 

The tea-drinker

The tea!  At first the pastor disperses a group of women secretly engaged in the new vice of tea drinking. Then, in the very next chapter, tea appears in the Manse. Much later on we find Mrs Balwhidder has bought a silver teapot. Change is all around. Moreover, the availability of sugar from the West Indies leads to the fashion of making jam and jelly, which hitherto had  been only known in the kitchens and confectionaries of the gentry.  The new turn-pike road not only leads to additional house building but to a stage-coach timetable to Glasgow.

The murderer returns

Not all is rosy. There is the murder committed by Patrick O'Neil, a catholic Irish corporal, on Jean Glaikit; a gamekeeper seduces the pastor's parlour maid; the awful death by burning of Miss Grizy/Girzie; the demise of Nanse Birrel, found upside down in a well; the wilful shooting of Lord Eglesham by the exciseman Mungo Argyle.

I commented in some detail in my June 2020 Blog on Galt's wonderful cast of characters, so there is no need to repeat; but I found myself warming even more to the pastor and understood more deeply the powerful Cayenne, with all his faults and virtues, One critic has argued Galt establishes a conspiracy  between himself and the reader. We quickly catch on that Balwhidder is not over-bright and rarely has a sense of proportion. It is a sustained exercise in the "irony of self-delusion" and unconscious self-revelation. There is the marvellous account by the pastor of his preaching to the General Assembly in Edinburgh, where the sure and steadfast earth itself was grown coggly beneath my feet, as I mounted the pulpit and where there was a sough in the kirk over some of his words!

I also made much of the humour in the Annals. I still chuckle at the thought of the first Mrs Balwhidder's headstone settling the wrong way when the second Mrs Balwhidder was laid by her side! V. S. Pritchett writes that Balwhidder belongs to the best dry vintage of Scottish humour, with its strange conflicting tangs of primness and animal  spirits. The courtship of the third Mrs Balwhidder is a masterpiece of comic writing. Of course, one important aspect of the humour is that we feel Balwhidder is probably unconscious as to how comical he is. His sense of self-importance as both a pastor and an annalist is clear. Naive, backward-looking, often self-indulgent, prudent, superstitious, sometimes depressed and lonely, the pastor can still elicit sympathy, even warmth, from the reader.

As P. H. Scott has remarked: Annals of the Parish is a book which can be read in at least three ways: as an evocation of a period, as an illustration of a theory of social change, or quite simply as a highly entertaining comedy. I like to think I read it throughout in 'triplicate'.