Provost

Just out of earshot, in countless nineteenth-century novels, runs the hum of daily labour by house servants, the upward striving of local worthies. The background of many a Jane Austen novel roils with war; Walter Scott writes in the time of radical weavers. It was John Galt, living between the prosperous Royal Borough of Ivrine, the intensity of technological Greenock, and the politics of London who brought this background into the foreground. Provost Pawkie's memoir of his life loops through the personal and political frustrations of small town life lived in an increasingly global context. Full of incident, and leavened with a large dose of self-interest, the provost's memoirs offer a clear eyed, and often funny context for our own time. Through his self-revealing narrator, Galt accomplishes a trenchant critique of the intrigue that is a global politics, when lived personally and locally.

John Galt was a Scottish novelist, entrepreneur, and political and social commentator. Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Global Studies at the University of Wyoming. Her monographs include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (2005) and The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (2012). She edited the anthologies Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (2005) and Scotland as Science Fiction (2007) and co-edited volumes such as Walter Scott at 250: Looking Forward (2021) and The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature (2022). She published an edition of Mary Paterson (2015) and is currently editing Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and John Gibson Lockhart's Reginald Dalton for EUP. With Alan Riach, she is developing the Edinburgh Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Writers.