SOURCE: Costain, Keith M. “The Spirit of the Age and the Scottish Fiction of John Galt.” Wordsworth Circle 11, no. 2 (spring 1980): 98-106.

In the following essay, Costain describes Galt's positive representation of industrial progress in his prose fiction.

Unlike most novelists in the early nineteenth century, John Galt was concerned with contemporary social problems. As an essayist, a novelist, and a Scot, he was fully aware of the implications of the industrialism that had transformed at least the lowlands of Scotland from “an utterly impoverished country to a prosperous land.”¹ In an interconnected series of novels that he wrote in the 1820s and early 1830s, he examines the full range of contemporary phenomena, affirming in 1824 that “all the past has become, in some degree, obsolete, or is only drawn on to furnish illustrations to characters, possessing something in common with that high state of excitement into which we have...