First edition - published December 1822
After three single-volume publications by John Galt (The Provost, The Steam-Boat, The Gathering in the West) we have only his second three-decker (after Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk). He must have felt it merited the Dedication he made to King George IV and, by and large, his critics thought he was right. Essentially, the tale is that of a single-minded Scotsman, Claud Walkinshaw, who was determined to regain an inheritance lost by his grandfather. He does not command affection. His behaviour towards his devoted bairnswoman, Maudge Dobbie, is disgraceful. She brings up the pennyless orphan Claud in a garret-room in the Saltmarket, Glasgow but is thanked for her pains by being cast-off as he gained adulthood. Claud not only dominates the story until well into the second volume but, even after his death, his perverse behaviour towards his eldest son and his wife - in fact, towards anyone and anything which gets in the way of his dream - comes back to bite him. He resolved to marry, and beget children, and entail the property, that none of his descendants might ever have it in their power to commit the imprudence which had brought his grandfather to a morsel, and thrown himself on the world.
He married Miss Girzy Hypel, the only daughter of Malachi Hypel, the Laird of Plealands, of legendary litigiousness. Claud actually dislikes her but she is the heiress to the neighbouring Hypel estate. Heaven may forgive the aversion I had to her, but my own nature never can. Claud can never be content, his mania gives him no peace: I sold my soul to the Evil One in my childhood, that I might recover the inheritance of my forbears...I stifled the very sense o' loving-kindness within me. In fact, he is constantly fighting against his own conscience, enduring the gnawings of remorse and not lacking the leaven of original virtue. As he confesses to his lawyer, Frae the very dawn o' life I hae done nothing but big and build an idolatrous image; and when it was finished, ye saw how I laid my first-born on its burning and brazen altar.
It is Girzy who, after Claud's death, dominates the second half of the story as Leddy Grippy. Her father introduced her to Claud: Is na she a coothy and kind creature? She'll make you a capital wife. -...Man, it would do your heart gude to hear how she rants among the servan' lasses, lazy sluts...I trow Girzy gars them keep a trig house and a birring wheel. I liked the cross-reference to Galt's The Gathering in the West - the name of Mrs Walkinshaw on a brass plate, not quite so large as the one that the Lord Provost of the royal city sported on the occasion of His Majesty's most gracious visit... The Leddy is a fascinating amalgam of selfishness and generosity, egotistical but affectionate - Claud had to put up with the speat of her clatter. The problem for an English reader, both in 1823 and now, is that whenever Claud or Girzy speaks, it is in West Country Scots and, unless one is forever looking up words in one's Scottish Dictionary, it is best to skim over a portion of what they say. One of Galt's London friends called the use of Scots its heathenish fault. All the younger members of the family and most other characters speak the King's English. The other problem, as the tale wears on, is keeping track of just who is who. Looking back, it would have been wise to construct a Family Tree as one went along.
There are some lovely touches of typical Galt humour. The funeral of Malachi Hypel is a case in point - the failure to realise the body had not accompanied them to the churchyard, the lurching of the coffin onto the ground the second tine around, and two carriers falling into the grave, head foremost, with the coffin itself. In fact, the whole plot revolves round a series of deaths: Charlie, Claud's eldest disinherited son; Claud himself; one of Claud's third son's twins; Betty Bodle, the wife of Walter, Claud's second son; Walter's only child, also called Betty Bodel. All within a year. One chapter commences, Death, it is said, rarely enters a house without making himself familiar to the inmates. It certainly was a regular visitor in The Entail. Fortuitously for James Walkinshaw, the 'rightful' heir of Claud - being the eldest/only son of the eldest disinherited Charlie, survives to claim his inheritance, due to a further series of fortuitous deaths - that of Walter and then George (in a well-written chapter on a shipwreck off Cape Wrath - is Galt copying Scott's The Pirate for his scene?). His sister Mary, a mild and unobtrusive girl, also marries happily. One also warms to the fact that, at last, Mrs Charles, Bell Fatherlans, (Charles' long-suffering and poverty-stricken widow, lives to see her children deservedly well settled.) As Mrs Eadie remarks, Death has performed his task... It is Mrs Eadie who is the most unsatisfactory character in the tale. Is her improbability (second-sight etc.) another imitation of Scott's The Pirate - the equally unlikely Norma?
Inevitably, due to the novel's plot being based on a legal device, lawyers and the law are regularly involved. I found it interesting that the benevolent lawyer, who tried to stop Claud from ruining his eldest son's future, was named Mr Keelevin. This surname was the used as the pseudonym of Andrew Picken for his Tales and Sketches of the West of Scotland (1824) The other two, roguish, lawyers Threeper and Pitwinnoch are well drawn.
I noted the reference to Dr. Pringle - of The Ayrshire Legatees - preaching at the Wynd Kirk. The fact that Mary and Ellen just happen to be on the cliffside at the time of the shipwreck leading to George Walkinshaw's drowning just has to be put down to coincidental poetic licence,
Leddy Grippy's departure from this mortal coil is wonderfully commented upon, with Galt taking good-humoured aim at his critics:
Her doleful exit from the tents of Time, Law, and Physic, it is now our melancholy duty to relate, which we will endeavour to do with all that good-humoured pathos for which we are so greatly and so deservedly celebrated. If nobody says we are so distinguished, we must modestly do it ourselves, never having been able to understand why a candidate for parliament or popularity should be allowed to boast of his virtues more than any other dealer in tales and fictions.
The Entail was praised by Walter Scott, Lord Byron and Coleridge (the former two claiming they had read the work three times). Keith Costain (in John Galt 1779-1979) calls the work Galt's masterpiece, arguing that the fusion of tragic with comic elements is the secret of its power. Few characters come out of the tale well - a contemporary reviewer (in the Literary Gazette) spoke of the moral ugliness of the Walkinshaws, a most unamiable and sordid race. However, the story of tragic falls and comic redemption is a rattlingly compelling one. James Walkinshaw, seemingly due a tragic fate like his father Charles, actually wins through to live in well-off contentment.
