The Ayrshire Legatees, The Steam-Boat, The Gathering of the West
John Galt
Edited by Mark Parker
- Provides scholarly edition of the texts with explanatory notes
- Appendices supply material that appeared in the serial publication and was excised in subsequent book editions
- Introduction situates these works in the context of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, where they first appeared
The Ayrshire Legatees, The Steam-Boat and The Gathering of the West first appeared as serials in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine during the magazine’s most innovative phase. Introducing a colourful cast of narrators and characters who present idiosyncratic perspectives on current events as they travel between London, Edinburgh, and the rural west of Scotland, Galt’s texts experiment with observation, dialogue, storytelling, and genre.Bringing these three interrelated texts together in one volume for the first time, this edition includes extensive explanatory notes that identify Galt’s allusions, references to historical events and social and cultural practices of the period in which they are set. An appendix details the textual changes between the Blackwood’s serials and the book versions. The editor’s introduction explores the origins of Galt’s texts in the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine and their reliance on the magazine’s unique dialogism, cross-talk among contributions and inside jokes, along with the influential context of the historical novel.
The reciprocal "relation between serial and magazine" has rarely been so well understood or editorially marked as it is in Parker’s splendid edition of these pivotal works in the career of John Galt. Long focused on serialisation’s effect on the forms of fiction, scholars have slighted the reciprocal effect that fiction – and it should be added, poetry – forced upon topical and eclectic discursive forms of the nineteenth-century and beyond. Calling attention to how "the dynamism and experimentational force of [Galt’s] serial versions" exploit magazinist bibliography, Parker’s edition, modest in its address, has serious implications for literary history and critical method.
