His first wife, Betty, was his childhood sweetheart and his cousin, but she died after only a few years. He marries three times, and waits a dutiful year after the death each of his first two wives before snapping up the next one, because without a mistress in the house the servant girls lay everything to waste. It’s quietly funny because the narrator, the earnest and very innocent Reverend Micah Balwhidder, is terribly old-fashioned, rigid in his views, and a credit to the formidable Presbyterian training from which he rarely deviates. It’s a fictionalised diary, Scottish history told at a very small scale, in incidents happening to characters so real they may as well be real people. Back from my holidays, today’s letter in my A-Z of Really Like This Book podcasts is G, so I am delighted to go back 200 years, to return to the work of this Scottish novelist and friend of Lord Byron. His novel Annals of the Parish (1821) is a gentle and quietly funny diary of the changing life and times in a small Scottish village.
I adore John Galt’s early 19th-century Scottish fiction.
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