Ebook: Bogle Corbet: or The Emigrants

The first scholarly edition of Bogle Corbet

• Includes explanatory notes and a glossary of Scots vocabulary
• Three maps locate the novel’s key transits and locales
• A detailed introduction lays out much of the historical background to the novel’s four key locations (Glasgow; London; Jamaica; Upper Canada)
• Includes detailed overview of the novel’s original 1831 reception; its rediscovery in the 1950s-70s, and current scholarly debates about the novel
• Includes an appendix excerpting key 1831 reviews and documents from the novel’s belated Canadian revival

Through the life-story of its eloquent but depressive narrator, Bogle Corbet links the industrial revolution in Scotland to the French Revolution, Jamaica’s plantation economy to the settlement of English Canada. A pioneering industrial novel, colonial novel, and world systems novel, Bogle Corbet also offers an early psychological portrait of emigrant experience. Galt’s vivid vignettes show Britain and key British colonies at moments of political unrest and transition, and explore the ambivalences of a world newly governed by industrialism, capitalism, globalisation, and mass displacement. Galt’s novel thus remains a work for our own times, even as it offers important transcontinental insights into a key historical juncture. It has inspired eloquent champions (both nineteenth- and twentieth-century) and continues to spark critical debate.