KEVIN HALLIWELL
John Galt and the paratext: the discourse of authentication in North
American emigration literature
In the early nineteenth century, despite the history of settlement and transatlantic relations, much
of the experience of the North American continent remained to a large extent an unknown in
Britain. This was particularly true of Upper Canada, becoming, as it was, the focus of settlement
in the early years of the century. Despite the centuries of transatlantic contact a visitor to Upper
Canada could publish an account of their travels with a good expectation of finding an interested
public, and many did. Indeed, magazines such as Blackwood’s are replete with reports from North
America that mirror a kind of fevered interest in the continent. The difference between those
accounts of the United States and those dealing with Upper Canada, however, is that the United
States had by the early nineteenth century reached a stage of maturity such that American
character and society could be discussed at length, whereas Upper Canada represented a much
earlier stage of development.
Many accounts of visitors to Upper Canada display an almost anthropological zeal in the
enterprise they are undertaking. The concern with Upper Canada as a destination for emigration
led these visitors to append to their personal accounts some advice to intending emigrants and
more straightforward factual information, and the emigrant’s guide appears to have developed
from these early appendages and accounts.1 The tradition of personal testimony was one that
continued as the emigrant’s guide itself developed. Such was the novelty of North America and
Upper Canada in particular, however, that authenticated accounts of visits were necessary, even
in guide books. Descriptions and instructions were routinely augmented by the publication of
emigrants’ correspondence. It was not long before the mass of factual material, descriptions,
figures and tables came to dominate, and a guide became a more official amalgam of information,
but it was a long time before the authentic personal testimony disappeared from what were
essentially intended to be works of reference.
Guides to Upper Canada hardly existed in any form until the 1820s, when the number began to
rise, and the first use of the word ‘guide’ as applied to North America hardly predates this.2
Another prototype that was in existence, however, which offered some detailed descriptions of a
country, its inhabitants, their livelihoods and possibilities of improvement, was the ‘Statistical
Account’, which first appeared in Scotland in the 1790s.3 The 1791—99 Statistical Account of
Scotland was an ambitious project that collected descriptions of the whole country provided by
local parish ministers, but the word ‘statistical’ did not have its present meaning. It had been
coined by Sir John Sinclair, editor of the accounts, from the German, and it meant for him: ‘an
inquiry into the state of a country, for the purpose of ascertaining the quantum of happiness
enjoyed by its inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement.’4
I have mentioned these prototypes of factual or instructional works because I believe they
have a bearing on the works of John Galt dealing with North America. Writing against a
background of personal testimony and the need for information and instruction, Galt, with his
professional involvement in emigration through the Canada Company,5 his personal experience of
Upper Canada and his expressed concerns over the wellbeing of emigrants, might well be
expected to have produced a detailed emigrant’s guide. Galt was a novelist, however, with the
result that although he had apparently collected material for an emigrant’s guide, his major works
on North America were both novels, Lawrie Todd, or The Settlers in the Woods (1830)6 and
Bogle Corbet, or,The Emigrants (1831).7 The material he had collected was furnished to his
acquaintance Andrew Picken, who produced with it in 1832: The Canadas, as they at present
commend themselves to the enterprize of emigrants, colonists... compiled and condensed from
original documents furnished by John Galt Esq..8
Galt regarded his two novels as somehow different from, and more instructional than, his
others. In his Introduction for the 1832 edition of Lawrie Todd9 he wrote that he had ‘turned to
account the result of enquiries and observations made for another purpose’ (vi). His intention is
spelled out in a note to the Appendix of Bogle Corbet: ‘Having abandoned an intention which I
had at one time formed of publishing, for the benefit of Emigrants, a Statistical Account of Upper
Canada, for which I collected materials...’(III, [303]). Bogle Corbet he considered in his
Autobiography as ‘an attempt to embody facts and observations, collected and made on actual
occurrences. Canada, indeed, must have altered rapidly, if Bogle Corbet be not a true guide to
settlers of his rank.’10 And in the Literary Life and Miscellanies of 1834 he noted: ‘Lawrie
Todd... may be considered as the beginning of that new series of publications in which the
disposition to be didactic was more indulged than I had previously thought could be rendered
consistent with a regular story.’11
A different type of ‘didactic’ novel, therefore, a novel offering ‘instruction’, and using the
material gathered for a factual guide or a statistical account. This professed intention has been
tacitly, and perhaps surprisingly, accepted by critics. Frank Hallam Lyell characterised Lawrie
Todd and Bogle Corbet, for example, as ‘the works designed primarily as guide-books for settlers
in North America’.12 But how is this possible? Is it really possible that a novel can act as a guide
or even approach one, especially considering that when the form of emigrant’s guide was finally
established it usually consisted, being essentially a work of reference, of an amalgamation of
different textual types, descriptions, tables, lists, instructions and so on, often, apparently, with no
main body of text? This is easily seen in the guide published by Picken using Galt’s material.
What kind of guidance did Galt have in mind when publishing his novels? In their main texts,
the novels seem to me to be most successful as parochial or domestic works, which was perhaps
Galt’s forte. They both contain descriptions of settlement and various tasks and adventures
connected, but they do not seem to make use of a heavy didacticism. We might expect this kind
of didacticism or factual address to be carried out more in the footnotes or other appendages, a
classic example being Catherine Parr Traill’s lengthy footnotes to The Backwoods of Canada on
maple sugar, soft soap etc. (she also intended her work to be a ‘faithful guide’ 13). On the surface,
Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet, for all their differences (and in Bogle Corbet only the last third of
the novel deals with emigration, indeed Galt described it before publication as ‘a Glasgow
story’)14 do make use of appendages to the main text. Where Galt had used notes and appendices
before, these had often been explanations of Scotticisms and Scottish customs mentioned in the
main text.15 We might then expect there to be some factual or explanatory content in the
extraneous matter in his emigration novels. Here I would like to introduce the notion of paratext,
because what we are looking at is the matter that surrounds the main body of text that has been
identified and described by Gérard Genette as ‘paratext’.16 It would be illuminating to examine
this matter to see what effect it might have on reading the novel and whether it may be a key to
Galt’s real intention. We must also look at other related texts, for Genette shows the paratext as
including ‘those liminal devices and conventions, both within the book (peritext) and outside it
(epitext), that mediate the book to the reader... . Also elements in the public or private history of
the book.’ (xviii)
Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet can best be seen as embedded in an ensemble of interrelated
texts. Some are immediate commentaries, as in the Autobiography and the Literary Life, and there
is a wealth of other critical commentary. But there are a number of related texts, some types
covered by Genette and some not, which refer to the works. Firstly we have the works of Galt on
similar themes. Galt’s writings on North America and on emigration actually span a period of 28
years, and cover novels, pieces relating to the Canada Company proposals and short stories. They
begin, curiously, with a ‘Statistical Account of Upper Canada’ published in the Philosophical
Magazine in 1807, and written by Galt many years before he had ever been there.17 ‘The object of
this paper’, says Galt, ‘is chiefly to give an arranged view of a few statistical recollections which
were lately obtained from Mr Gilkison, of Amherstburgh, in Upper Canada.’ (3) A second-hand
piece, it follows the format of the Statistical Account in the grouping of its information, but it
seems to betray a certain sense of wonder that shows how at that time Upper Canada was still
seen as remote and exotic.18 Instead of the usual prosaic headings we have, for example, ‘Winds’,
‘Diseases’, ‘Curiosities’, ‘Hemp’ and ‘Miscellaneous’ and we are assured by Galt that in Upper
Canada ‘petrifactions are very common’ (4), the country is crossed by ‘the ruins of antient
fortresses’ (5) and that ‘although Lower Canada is greatly infested with rats, none have ever been
seen above the falls of Niagara’ (5). Contrast this to Galt’s final piece dealing with the experience
of emigration, a short story, ‘The Metropolitan Emigrant’, published in Fraser’s Magazine in
1835, a humorous catalogue of personal disaster and misfortune.19
In the introduction to the 1832 edition of Lawrie Todd Galt, as we have noted, says he ‘turned
to account the result of enquiries and observations made for another purpose’ – but he goes on:
‘The story is a fiction, but the incidents may be true; they are the result of hearsay and
investigation.’ (v) His main concern here is then somehow to authenticate the narrative, and he
goes on to outline the circumstances of his meeting with the model for the character of Lawrie
Todd, a Mr Thornton. This is in fact Grant Thorburn, a Scottish nailmaker who emigrated to New
York and became the first seedsman there. Galt had obtained some autobiographical writings
from Thorburn, which he followed closely in the first part of his narrative. Not only that, but
Thorburn himself, an eccentric and opinionated character, published his autobiography on the
strength of his celebrity as the model for Lawrie Todd, as Forty Years Residence in America, or,
The Doctrine of a Particular Providence Exemplified in the Life of Grant Thorburn (the Original
Lawrie Todd), Seedsman of New York, Written by Himself, with an Introduction by John Galt,
Esq. in 1834.20 Capitalising further on the association, Thorburn also published Sketches from the
Note Book of Laurie [sic] Todd, or, Hints to Young Merchants and their Clerks (New York:
Printed by D. Fanshaw, 1847), and a further autobiographical work, Life and Writings (New
York: E. Walker, 1852). We can already see how these texts, which find their place in the
paratextual ensemble, present us with a background of the complex interrelatedness of fiction,
biography, and authenticity.
The immediate paratextual appendages in Lawrie Todd are more extensive, consisting as they
do, besides the introduction, of three lengthy appendices, freehand notes to each of the novel’s
nine parts, and a glossary of Scotticisms with a few ‘Yankeyisms’. A cursory glance at these
shows that none of them contains any particular factual material of any use to a prospective
emigrant. The first three are in fact writings of Grant Thorburn, which were later also published
by him in his autobiographical work and which document his experience of the yellow fever
epidemic in New York. The author is not here acknowledged, but Galt is not at pains to hide his
sources—quite the opposite. His Preface to the first edition (reprinted in the 1832 edition) reveals
that the tale is based on that of a ‘singular, but worthy man’, that the settlement described is ‘a
shadowy and subdued outline of the history and localities of Rochester’, and that he is aiming to
provide ‘a description, which may be considered authentic, of the rise and progress of a
successful American settlement’, which ‘cannot but be useful to the emigrant’ (viii). Here is the
crux of the matter, because it is in its very faithfulness that the book is meant to be of
instructional value, and Galt goes on to elaborate on his sources in some detail throughout the
notes to each of the nine parts, for example, in the notes to Part II: ‘The character of Mr. Hoskins
is entirely new, but it is not altogether an invention, as the model existed in the person of my
friend Philemon Whright [sic] of the township of Hull in Lower Canada.’ (449) This is similar to
a certain extent to what Scott was persuaded to do for the ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of his works,
although the Waverley novels were originally published without notes,21 and it has the effect of
presenting the work as a ‘historical’ novel. Introduction, preface, appendices, notes, glossary: all
are at great pains to authenticate the material. Galt’s aesthetic seems to presume that faithful
depiction automatically becomes instructional.
In Bogle Corbet we are in fact offered some kind of appended gazetteer. This is a small
appendix which describes in very few words the different soil conditions and situations of various
townships in Upper Canada (The same information is given in Picken’s guide, where it is
introduced as ‘the description given of [the Huron Tract’s] surveyed townships by the
Corporation Inspectors’ (192).) The appendix is minimally informative and it hardly affects the
novel, but it so unnerved critic Ian A. Gordon that he said of Bogle Corbet: ‘There is little attempt
at “fiction”... the third volume... offered an unashamed appendix in the form of a gazetteer.’22 The
work is of course fiction, but the appendix creates a kind of effect of authenticity that infects the
novel, signalled in the Preface. Again, Galt felt he was providing instruction; he says:
‘Information given as incidents of personal experience is more instructive than opinion.’23
But if Galt considered these novels as useful guides for the emigrant, and their immediate
paratextual apparatus provides a veneer of authentication, they are still not strongly differentiated
from his other novels. Throughout his writings, especially in his autobiographical works, Galt
was anxious to defend the authenticity of his fiction. As R. K. Gordon noted: ‘Galt looked on
literature more as a record of things done... and belittled invention.’24 It is a subject Galt returned
to again and again and the compulsion to stress the accuracy of his portrayals seems to reach a
state of some anxiety. This is an anxiety betrayed most in his Autobiography and Literary Life.
He says he ‘considered the novel as a vehicle for instruction, or philosophy teaching’
(Autobiography, II, 210), and he thought also that his novels would be more properly
characterised as ‘theoretical histories’ rather than as novels or romances (II, 220). He expressed
his disappointment that Lawrie Todd was merely read as a novel, and that the review in Fraser’s
Magazine valued it for its characterisation and not for its practical detail.25
The mass of paratext, therefore, from the immediate peritextual apparatus (the title-page
epigraph to Bogle Corbet, for instance, a quote from Thomas Gray: ‘truth severe by fairy fiction
dressed’) through the introductions and prefaces, which prepare the reader for the authenticity of
the account, and the appendices and footnotes, which lend a veneer of authenticity to the main
text, right through to Galt’s commentaries on his novels and the associated ensemble of texts, all
this points to a discourse of authentication that envelops the main text of the novels. There are
also ways in which this is supported or enhanced by the main body of text itself. Lawrie Todd is
heavily overlaid with a paratextual discourse of authentication, its sources revealed. Bogle Corbet
is not presented as the iteration of a real personal narrative, but in both novels Galt is at pains to
present the narrative as a personal record of events.
Characteristic of this support for the discourse of authentication are instances of what I would
call ‘negative narrative space’, that is, points where the narrator tells us that nothing happened.
This occurs in Lawrie Todd to a certain extent, for example the statement: ‘Between that accident
and the period of my departure for Scotland... nothing of particular note occurred either to me or
to the town...’ (298), but it is much more commonplace in Bogle Corbet. This kind of statement
has the effect of focussing on the act of recording. It is the kind of statement commonly found in
a private journal and it distances this type of work from the adventure novel or the action-filled
historical novel. This focus on the act of recording is made more explicit in Bogle Corbet when
the narrative shifts into the present tense as the family embark for the voyage to Canada at the end
of volume II, introduced with the following remarks: ‘Hitherto I have written these reminiscences
of accident and feeling retrospectively, and... I have now only detached notes to make, merely to
keep up a connexion in the narrative...’ (II, 246) There follows a passage of present-tense notation
of activities which reads like a hastily scribbled journal entry.
These embedded layers of discourse and lacunae in the narrative universe are much more
apparent in Bogle Corbet, where Galt seems less at pains to keep faithful to his biographical
sources, less serious in his undertaking and less serious in his intent (the work was written in
response to a request from his publishers) but, more importantly, very much in control of the
narrative. Indeed, the embedded layers of fictionality lend the work at times an almost ludic
quality. At one point in the narrative, for example, a short story told to Corbet en route to
Montreal is typographically distinguished in the text (II, 276--292). Lawrie Todd himself (already
publicly authenticated as based on Grant Thorburn) is introduced as a character to advise on
emigration matters, and there are numerous references to Bogle Corbet’s recording his own
experience for posterity. This last allows the forthright no-nonsense Mrs Corbet to comment that
Corbet is busy writing his life story, but it will not be worth reading, consisting as it does of
‘whey and water’ (III, 283). She goes on: ‘He never met with a right novel-like adventure in all
his days – what he has read to me of it, is as common as old newspaper.’ (III, 284) She also
comments on the negativity of the portrayal of her own character.
For Galt, of course, negative portrayal was in itself a token of honesty. The negativity of his
portrayal of emigration has received a fair amount of comment from critics. He seems to reserve
some of his gloomiest remarks for the Canadian landscape, particularly the forests,26 and his
bathetic treatment of Niagara Falls in Bogle Corbet, although taken from an incident in his own
life, tempts one to think of him as anti-Romantic.27 Although the account in Lawrie Todd is on the
whole successful, the portrayal of Bogle Corbet is ambivalent, and Corbet is used as a
mouthpiece for Galt’s views on the problems of emigration and their amelioration. The book
concludes with Corbet’s meditation: ‘Perhaps I am too apt to give way to peevish complaints of
the unalleviated sameness of the settler’s pursuits... but the tale of it may not be unprofitable to
those who may glance at these pages for amusement, and find them in many respects as much
devoted to information.’ (III, 301) Negative space, negative portrayals – further overlays of
authenticity.
This negative portrayal of emigration to North America reaches a culmination in Galt’s last
piece on the subject, the short story ‘The Metropolitan Emigrant’, published in Fraser’s
Magazine in 1835. This is a catalogue of hardship and suffering involving snake bites,
mosquitoes, bad roads, economic failure, back pain, bear attacks, doctor’s bills, crop failure and
litigation, culminating in the Englishman’s decision to return home ‘having experienced in
Canada the folly of emigration’ (299). But we have to be careful here not to take this as Galt’s
final word. A professional advocate for emigration, whose three sons had all emigrated to
Canada, Galt had a sophisticated knowledge of the experience. His constant anxieties about
authentication in his writing, and his advocacy of sponsored emigration under correct
circumstances, which he believed could only be achieved by the involvement of private
companies, never left him. His negativity, though it is intentional and a part of an authenticating
discourse, is in the end selective. It is mostly allied to individual attempts to settle the backwoods
by settlers acting alone, and that is what this final story is telling us. Along with his anxieties
about authentication and this continuous advocacy of sponsored emigration, which is supported
by other articles published in Blackwood’s and other periodicals throughout the years,28 Galt
gives the impression of being resolute if not obsessive.
Because of their span and variety Galt’s works on emigration to North America lend
themselves to these inter- and intratextual readings. It seems to me that rather than adding to the
instructional quality of the emigration novels, the accompanying paratext and the related textual
ensemble that also forms a part of it highlight Galt’s obsession with authenticating his writing. On
the one hand this is the culmination of Galt’s aesthetic and on the other a discourse that
underlines similar concerns of other writers on North America at the time and their compulsion to
record, testify and inform. Though they may at time approach the documentary, a sense that Galt
himself tried to convey, the novels never become guides in the fullest sense. In a way, Galt’s
obsession with documenting authenticated experience overrides the direct instructional impulse,
just as his obsessive argument against isolated individual emigration encourages a negativity and
imbalances the broader portrayal of the experience.
Yet in producing works embedded in a context of extraneous biographical and factual material
that speak to texts of complex factual and fictional interrelatedness, Galt is showing us,
ultimately, how in his case the fictional universe is grounded in lived experience. Even if he had
gone from wonder to negativity in the course of 28 years, Galt’s obsession with authentication
shows that whatever the portrayal, he had been to North America, and he knew people who had
been there, and he had witnessed emigration, especially that of pioneers on the land, and the
establishment of communities. This was, as he himself noted in the introduction to the 1832
edition of Lawrie Todd, an experience not available elsewhere: ‘Europe affords no such situation,
no such trial of ingenuity, no such test of the energy and resources of character.’ (v) The novelty
of this experience is a clue to the continuing public interest in it. Had Galt, as he said he intended,
written his guide or his full Statistical Account, he would have instructed more succinctly, but I
doubt he would have conveyed as much of the richness of the emotional and social experience of
settlement. In the end, however, the compulsion to inform and instruct is perhaps more than the
fictional form can sustain, and the concomitant need to universalize the experience is countered
by the authenticating specificity of the paratextual discourse.
National Library of Scotland
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
For example, John Howison, Sketches of Upper Canada, Domestic, Local, and Characteristic: To
Which Are Added Practical Details for the Information of Emigrants of Every Class; and Some
Recollections of the United States of America (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1821).
The OED has 1759 for the first use of ‘guide’ in a book title as meaning ‘a book of information on
places or objects of interest in a locality, city, building, etc.; a guidebook’. The earliest guide to North
America using this word in the title that I could find in the collections of the National Library of
Scotland is The Emigrant’s Guide, or, A Picture of America: Exhibiting a View of the United States
Divested of Democratic Colouring... ; also, A Sketch of the British Provinces... , By an Old Scene
Painter (London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1816).
The original Statistical Account of Scotland, ed. Sir John Sinclair, was published in 21 volumes
(Edinburgh: William Creech, 1791—99). The material was re-ordered and re-published, ed. Donald J.
Withrington and Ian R. Grant, in 20 volumes (East Ardley, Wakefield: EP Publishing Ltd, 1983).
References are to this later edition.
Statistical Account (1983), 26. Original italics.
A land and colonization company founded at Galt’s instigation in 1824. The company purchased
crown lands in Upper Canada and entered into contract to settle and improve them, thus increasing
their value. The money paid for crown lands was to be used in part to compensate for losses sustained
by settlers in the War of 1812. Galt visited Upper Canada in 1825 to purchase lands for the company
and returned in 1826 to supervise its settlement. He was relieved of his post as Superintendent and
recalled to Britain in 1829.
Lawrie Todd, or, The Settlers in the Woods (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1830).
Bogle Corbet, or, the Emigrants (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831).
Andrew Picken, The Canadas, As They At Present Commend Themselves to the Enterprize of
Emigrants, Colonists, and Capitalists: Comprehending a Variety of Topographical Reports
Concerning the Quality of the Land, etc. in Different Districts; and the Fullest General Information,
Compiled and Condensed from Original Documents Furnished by John Galt, Esq.... and Other
Authentic Soruces (London: Effingham Wilson, 1832).
Lawrie Todd, or, The Settlers in the Woods: Revised, Corrected, and Illustrated with a New
Introduction, Notes, etc. by the Author (London: R. Bentley, 1832). All page references are to this
edition.
10. The Autobiography of John Galt (London: Cochrane and M’Crone,1833), 209.
11. The Literary Life and Miscellanies, of John Galt (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1834), 298.
12. Frank Hallam Lyell, A Study of the Novels of John Galt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942),
222.
13. Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer,
Illustrative of the Domestic Economy of British America (London: C. Knight, 1836). In her
introduction Traill wrote: ‘Among the numerous works on Canada that have been published within the
last ten years, with emigration for their leading theme, there are few, if any, that give information
regarding the domestic economy of a settler’s life, sufficiently minute to prove a faithful guide to the
person on whose responsibility the whole comfort of a family depends—the mistress, whose
department it is “to haud the house in order”.’ (The Backwoods of Canada, ed. Michael A. Peterman,
Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1997, 1.)
14. In a letter to D. M. Moir of 30 December 1830, quoted in D. M. Moir, Biographical Memoir of John
Galt (Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantine and Hughes, 1841), lxxxix.
15. Notably in The Provost (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1822), which contains notes and an extensive
glossary.
16. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thesholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge
Unniversity Press, 1997). Originally published as Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987). Page references are to the
English edition.
17. The Philosophical Magazine, Comprehending the Various Branches of Science, the Liberal and Fine
Arts, Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce. By Alexander Tilloch (London: John Murray;
Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co), vol. xxix, for October, November and December, 1807; and
January, 1808, 3—10.
18. I do not agree with Elizabeth Waterston’s description of this account as ‘a cool, business-like report on
a country he had not yet visited’. Elizabeth Waterston, ‘Bogle Corbet and the Annals of New World
Parishes’, John Galt : Reappraisals, ed. Elizabeth Waterston (Guelph: University of Guelph, 1985),
57—62 (58).
19. Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, September 1835, 291—99.
20. Published in Boston, MA, by Russell, Odiome & Metcalf and in London by J. Fraser.
21. See Jane Millgate, ‘The Interleaved Waverley Novels’, Scott’s Interleaved Waverley Novels: the
‘Magnum Opus’, National Library of Scotland MSS. 23001—41: An Introduction and Commentary,
ed. Iain Gordon Brown ([Oxford]: Co-published by Pergamon Books Ltd/Aberdeen University Press in
Association with the National Library of Scotland, 1987), 3—10.
22. Iain A. Gordon, John Galt: The Life of a Writer (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1922), 100.
23. Bogle Corbet, Preface, iii.
24. R. K. Gordon, John Galt (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1920), 39.
25. See Literary Life, I, 298, and Lyell, 179.
26. For example: ‘The landscape is... solitary, and, to say the truth, is to the emigrant a little saddening.’
(Bogle Corbet, II, 302).
27. The reaction of Mrs Corbet, who describes Niagara Falls as ‘neat’, as an ‘unaccountable and
extravagant waste of water’ and as ‘a foolish river tumbling headlong over a rock’ (Bogle Corbet, III,
224, 225), is a recounting of the reaction of Galt’s servant as presented in the Autobiography, I, 317.
28. For example a number of letters on emigration to Upper Canada signed ‘Bandana’ (1826), an ‘Outline
of a Plan of Emigration to Upper Canada’ dated Glasgow, 2 nd April 1824, other pieces on the Canada
Company, and an article ‘Scotch and Yankees’ (1833). He also published, in Fraser’s Magazine,
articles on American Traditions (1830; 1832) and a short story ‘The Hurons: A Canadian Tale’ (1830),
as well as numerous other periodical contributions relating to North America.