The Entail : or The Lairds of Grippy

Galt’s tragi-comic novel of conflicted desires presented in historical, legal, and local contexts.

Memorable for characters eccentric yet socially and economically representative, and for scenes alternately comic and tragic, John Galt’s 1823 novel The Entail is a compelling story of greed, anxiety, and tradition against a background of social upheaval. In addition to making this remarkable novel available in a scholarly edition with annotations suitable both for the general reader and for research, the editors provide an introduction that makes its complex legal issues—of property, marriage law, trial procedures—accessible in the context of Scottish Romanticism and modernisation. Situating Galt’s aesthetic choices in dialogue with the Romantic-era Scottish novel the volume discusses the text, Galt’s letters, early periodical reviews, and recent scholarship. Through annotations that clarify Scots language and dialect as well as legal parlance, the editors highlight the novel’s comic collisions of language and personalities, and the attention to social transformation that Galt painstakingly, although sometimes obliquely, details.