by Caroline McCracken-Flesher
In Provost Pawkie’s Gudetown readers hear the town clock tick just once. The city fathers gather at the council chamber. “[The] town was lying in the defencelessness of sleep,” Pawkie remembers, “and nothing was heard but the clicking of the town-clock in the steeple over our heads.” But it is the height of the Napoleonic wars, and the press-gang is imminent. Time, that is, in The Provost never succumbs to the determinations of the clock. Rather it stretches, squeezes, recurs and skips in ways that make John Galt’s hometown novel a tale for our times and any place.
This discovery proved one of the great pleasures in developing this edition of John Galt’s novel for EUP. Provost Pawkie lives in turbulent times. Those times, with his responses, are a lot like ours.
Fast Times in Nineteenth-Century Scotland
In 1822, the year of The Provost’s publication, time seemed to shoot remorselessly forward. Gauged by an upsurge in innovation, which then—as now—was presumed to be “progress,” time was proceeding at a rattling rate. James Watt, name-checked in the novel along with his steam engine, in 1776 had translated Newcomen’s invention, with its power in place, toward movement in space. Watt’s displacement of heat by condensation and of motion by rotation by Pawkie’s later life would collapse distance in time—the first “loco-motive” ran as early as 1802. Assisted by eighteenth-century inventions like John Harrison’s chronometer, capable of articulating time precisely enough to map longitude, both time and space were efficiently harnessed in service of commerce. Thus as the nineteenth century dawned, the physical and temporal distance between Gudetown and anywhere else, whether by land or sea, stood on the brink of profitable compression. And profit is dear to Mr. Pawkie’s heart. Yet this acceleration seems too much for the good burgess who, he claims, in 1816 sensed “a change coming in among us.” Throughout his memoirs, Pawkie presents himself as the man of the moment—capable of playing a waiting game, always anticipating, reliably on time. Now, the Gudetown’s new baillies proceed upon “the reforming spirit abroad among men” into a world that is “gradually growing better.” Will Pawkie be left behind?
The Slow/Fast Times of Our Towns
Small town life seems slow … but it is often fast. As Galt shows, the ordinariness that is daily life stands against shocking moments that then become oft-told local stories. As editor, I found myself asking across the intensities and vacancies of small town life that Pawkie describes: what kind of time is this?
While in the 2020s we might regard a novel of eighteenth and nineteenth-century small town life as locked in its own time, and our day as escaping the limited temporalities of the past, readers of this volume may find themselves challenged by Provost Pawkie’s travels in time. Is Gudetown, with its many people all living their fast/slow overlapping lives—a place surprisingly like Galt’s hometown of Irvine, on the west coast of Scotland—like our towns, today?
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About the book
A scholarly edition of one of the great character novels of the early nineteenth century
- Provides a scholarly edition of the text with explanatory notes
- Explores Galt’s Provost Pawkie as a self-interested, self-revealing and very human narrator
- Reveals the richness of Galt’s contemporary imagination and context through its introductory essay and notes
About the author
Caroline McCracken-Flesher is professor of English at the University of Wyoming. She has published widely on Scottish literature and culture, including the monographs Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow and The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders.
