The Invisible Hand of the Literary Market: Authorial Self-Fashioning in Grant Thorburn and John Galt

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jennifer Scott writes and researches from Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, located on the unceded, shared traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), Tsleil-Waututh, and x^wməθk^wəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations. She is the Member Services Officer for the Faculty Association of Simon Fraser University where she is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of English.

Notes

1. In 1825, British Parliament repealed the Bubble act of 1770. After the South Seas Bubble, incorporation could only occur through Royal Charter or by an Act of Parliament. Both processes were costly, and as such, incorporation was a significant marker of economic stability and cultural status between 1770 and 1825. After the reinstatement of corporations, British society saw both an increase in corporations as well as a significant shift in the economic landscape that would now include stock investment.

2. The Canada Company was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1825. It was a land distribution company tasked with the sale of a tract of land in Upper Canada named the Huron Tract. Galt started as the Company Secretary and later became its Superintendent before being recalled to London in 1830.

3. The second book commissioned by Colburn and Bentley was Bogle Corbet, a much darker emigration story published in 1831. In Bogle Corbet, the eponymous character emigrates to North America, but after a circuitous journey beginning in Jamaica with a return to Britain before landing in Upper Canada. Unlike Lawrie Todd, emigration is a failed experience for Bogle Corbet, who is bankrupt and full of dismay at the end of the novel.

4. Galt uses a similar tactic in deploying the periodical press and his books about North American life to promote and respond to the machinations of the Canada Company, which I have written about in “The Canada Company Coterie: Authorial Collaboration and Fraser's Town and Country Magazine in Upper Canada."

5. The absence of the slave trade as a narrative feature in either Galt or Thorburn is glaring. In Notes on Virginia, Thorburn is explicit in this exclusion: he decides to “leave those subjects for wiser and sounder heads to debate upon, and abler scribblers to write about” (7). In Lawrie Todd, slavery is completely absent. In Bogle Corbet, the companion novel to Lawrie Todd, there is one description of a Jamaican woman where Bogle Corbet “hesitated to believe she was really human” (1:299). The last chapter of the first volume, “A Dialogue” offers a brief discussion on slavery, but any sustained or developed discussion of the slave trade (in spite of the fact that Bogle Corbet is a plantation owner) is conspicuously absent. Beginning with Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, the link between the slave trade and economics in relation to transatlantic study has been a key--if not the founding--feature of the research area. In “Annals of Ice: Formations of Empire, Place, and History in Galt and Munro” Katie Trumpener argues that Galt attempts to make links between industrial capitalism and slavery much like Nova Scotian writers Thomas McCullough and Thomas Haliburton made those links between Nova Scotia and the Caribbean slave trade (48–49). There is an important and fulsome discussion of the relationship between Lawrie Todd's speculative capitalism, Bogle Corbet's colonial circum-Atlantic trade, and slavery to be had that is outside the scope of this paper.

6. See Regina Hewitt's “John Galt, Harriet Martineau, and the Role of the Social Theorist” for a more fulsome discussion of Galt's understanding of and representations of Providence in Lawrie Todd, and Eben Erskine.

7. (excluding the yearly seed catalogues issued by his business beginning in 1812).

8. Given that Thorburn's Forty Years’ was first published in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country in article form and the first book edition was published by Fraser, we might hazard that Fraser also published the 2^nd London edition.

9. There is much room to develop a larger argument about reading Lawrie Todd and Thorburn's re-iterations thereof through a Physiocratic economic lens. Indeed, Galt's own theories of taxation and tariff, as published in A Literary Life, Fraser's and Blackwood's would suggest he has taken the basic premises of physiocracy (a singular tax model, the role of government in nation-building, the importance of free trade, and the importance of agriculture as the cornerstone of any national economy) and developed his business policies regarding the Canada Company and his North American ventures to align with a Physiocratic economic model. However, this article does not have Galt's economic theory as its primary focus. For further reading on Physiocratic Economics, see Norman J. Ware, “The Physiocrats: A Study in Economic Rationalization” (1931), Robert F. Haggard, “The Politics of Friendship: DuPont, Jefferson, Madison, and the Physiocratic Dream for the New World” (2009), and Eleanor Courtemanche ‘The Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism (2011).

10. Today, $80,000 USD would be worth approximately $2,000,000 USD. (Sahr, np).

11. As Richard Sylla, Jack Wilson, and Charles Jones suggest, “the 1815 to 1850 period … demonstrated the least variability in stock returns in the 200 year period covered. It was noted, the longest and strongest bull market ever experienced in the United States” (qtd in Bodenhorn 10). Indeed, Sylla et al go on to convincingly argue that “the financial watershed that is evident around 1815 is consistent with other evidence that the pace of economic development quickened around that time” (“U.S. Financial Markets” 40 qtd. in Bodenhorn 10).

12. In John Tebbel's foundational study of early American publishing, all that is mentioned of Fanshaw is his role in the publication of religious tracts and his relationship to the Quakers specifically (73).

13. Though Blackwood declined the opportunity, he would later publish many articles based on Galt's own experiences in North America, including Scotch and Yankees: A Caricature”. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. 33 (January–June 1833): 91–105, 188–98 and The Literary Life and Miscellany of John Galt (1834).