Rediscovering One of the First Global Political Novels

FAS Professor Katie Trumpener’s new edition of John Galt’s Bogle Corbet: Or the Emigrants is the first unabridged, critical edition of this remarkable novel.

Katie Trumpener’s interest in nineteenth-century Scottish novelist John Galt began, surprisingly, in Berlin. The city “was still a Cold War place” when Trumpener was there working on her PhD in 1988. The culture shock she experienced prompted her to read a wide range of nineteenth-century literature, including the work of John Galt, whose prose – both sharp and astute – delighted Trumpener. Later, as she was writing her first book, she discovered a severely abridged version of Galt’s novel Bogle Corbet: Or the Emigrants that, oddly enough, focused solely on Canada.

Galt’s triple-decker novel, originally published in 1831, opens in Jamaica, moves to Glasgow and London (with discussion of Anglo-Indian affairs and another trip back to Jamaica) before moving, in the book’s final third, to Canada.

When the novel was republished in 1977 by a self-consciously nationalist press (McClelland & Stewart: The Canadian Publishers) during the first wave of Anglo Canadian nationalism, it consisted only of the final volume of the three-volume novel — and began in media res, with scant explanation of what had come before.  Trumpener, who grew up in Canada, explained that:

“Canadian nationalists – and the New Canadian Library series – were looking to establish a canon of Canadian literature and history. But Galt’s novel only gets to Canada in volume three. Money was tight in Canadian publishing in those days. And the non-Canadian parts of this historic novel were less obviously relevant to students and general readers, so they just cut everything else out.”

When Trumpener finally found a copy of the complete novel, she was fascinated. She believed a new edition was necessary, but it was twenty years before she had the opportunity to produce an unabridged, critical edition of Bogle Corbet: Or the Emigrants in the John Galt Edition from the University of Edinburgh Press.

“This novel,” she explained, “deserved to be republished in a better form.”

Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, spoke with Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud of the FAS Dean’s Office about editing the first unabridged, critical edition of Bogle Corbet: Or the Emigrants (Edinburgh University Press), a complex psychological novel that explores British colonialism, racial and global politics, and early perspectives on the Industrial Revolution.

How would you describe John Galt’s Bogle Corbet: Or the Emigrants?

Trumpener: Bogle Corbet is probably not as streamlined as most 19th century novels that are popular now. Galt’s writing style is anecdotal and sharp, and there are all these funny vignettes (which would lend themselves to reading aloud or excerpting in a newspaper).

This is a really ambitious novel that ought to be more known. It’s very far flung, and then it just stays in Upper Canada in this tiny radius after having gone all over the globe. My son helped me to develop the computerized maps I appended because I wanted to show visually how wide-ranging the novel actually is.

The novel is [also] linguistically interesting. Like many nineteenth-century Scottish novels, it has a lot of passages in Scots English, but it may be the only one that also has passages in Jamaican Patois.

Galt’s a very interesting novelist. Most of his Scottish novels are quite short, but his new publisher insisted that he write this “triple decker” novel. There’s every sense that he resented that. Critics have argued the Canadian statistics appended at the end are padding for the novel, and maybe the episodic nature of the novel is too, but I don’t really think that myself. In some of his shorter Scottish novels, Galt is such an economical, detailed, and careful reader of things. I think of him as a very shrewd political and historical novelist who thinks about all kinds of social processes very interestingly. So you can see why I thought this novel should not be forgotten. Now [that] it’s back in print, it could be taught.

Why is this an important novel about the industrial revolution?

Trumpener: It’s one of the first novels about the Industrial Revolution.

Scotland, which seems to us now like a somewhat peripheral economy, was the epicenter of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Bogle was born in Jamaica into a plantation family, but his parents died, and so he was sent to Scotland to live with his relatives. They decided to apprentice him to a Glasgow weaver. He’s working in a small factory, with weavers working on industrial looms. The book includes these very interesting descriptions of what their culture is like on the floor: they’re all reading and debating the latest news about the French Revolution. They end up becoming revolutionaries, and eventually, after a downturn in trade, these radical weavers become unemployed and were seen as dangerous. In real life, too, Glasgow became Britain’s most turbulent city. So to calm the political situation, the British government ended up shipping hundreds of weavers in assisted immigration to Upper Canada. Galt himself also ended up in Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) to administer to a vast new settlement, opening this big tract of land and settling it. In the novel, Bogle Corbet is asked by his former associates, these old Jacobin weavers, if they can accompany him to Upper Canada because he’s going to emigrate. But when they arrive it turns out that he wants to establish a hierarchical settlement with himself at the top, and they want a Jacobin society, so there’s a huge clash. The whole thing almost falls apart.

What can Bogle Corbet tell us about 19^th century British colonialism?

Trumpener: I initially saw it as a book about colonialism. I just think that’s kind of incredible that the novel features three different locales and cases rubbing up against each other: you have the Industrial Revolution, the social unrest that follows, and then this very volatile situation on the salve plantations of Jamaica. And then you also have the whole debate about what’s happening in Upper Canada. In my first book (which discusses Bogle Corbet in its closing chapter), I saw this as a reflection on the Empire. It’s falling apart.

How does Bogle Corbet’s Jamaican origins shape his global journey?

Trumpener: The Jamaican chapters are interesting, odd, and complicated by their racial politics.

One of the reasons why Bogle Corbet is depressed his whole life is that he is separated from the enslaved nurse whom he loved. She takes him to England to hand him over to distant relatives, and then she vanishes; decades later, he’s still counting how many days they’ve been apart. This is like a wound that will never heal. That sounds sentimental—but it is partly a psychological novel, overtly about depression and melancholia. In general, the racial politics of the novel are strange: sometimes alienating but often powerful.

And a few years after this, Galt wrote a series of political and economic essays about Jamaica’s planation economy and the abolition of slavery.

What was the relationship between Bogle Corbet and Canadian nationalism?

Trumpener: Galt’s contemporaries saw it as a how-to book: how to be a settler in Upper Canada. It has an appendix, which has factual information, in case you were emigrating to Canada and wanted to know where to buy land.

There are some very interesting essays from the 1960s saying that Bogle Corbet should have been the great Canadian novel. But then sales of the abridged 1977 Canadian edition were extremely low. There wasn’t much reception; people couldn’t really make head or tail of this truncated thing, and I’m not surprised—since it started in volume three.

When I was writing my initial book, I was just scandalized by this truncation. I thought, that is so typical, having grown up in Canada. Canadian nationalism could be empowering but also very myopic, and this garbled reprint seemed like Exhibit A.

Why is there renewed interest in John Galt’s work – and especially Bogle Corbet – today?

Trumpener: Galt is a pioneering political novelist, and Bogle Corbet is a global novel. It has a big vision, but it’s a bit dispersed because it’s taking place simultaneously in three places that are only loosely connected up to one another. One of the things I feel – from having read, really thought about, and occasionally taught his Scottish novels – is that Galt’s very interested in colonialism. He’s clear-eyed about the problems of empire and the moral blowback on Scotland itself.

I did a pretty deep dive into who reviewed the original novel. One article mentioned it as part a group of novels they recommended to be bought by a regional public library system in India. That suggests this book could potentially have circulated around in the Empire. Excerpts from it were published in a lot of American newspapers, in a lot of Canadian newspapers, and in a lot of British newspapers, so it had a pretty full reception in that part of the Anglophone world.

Today there’s a lot more focus and literary studies on immigration and migration. Galt’s depictions of Jamaica and Canada are very interesting. People are also interested in Galt’s focus on the differences between Canada and the United States. Bogle Corbet doesn’t really have a home; he leaves Jamaica before he fully remembers it, so he’s an outsider wherever he goes.

This is a book for our times, our moment of massive displacement and emigration.

Katie Trumpener is Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English in the FAS. Her critical edition, Bogle Corbet: Or the Emigrants, is available from Edinburgh University Press.

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