Origins

The appearance of The Ayrshire Legatees in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was Galt's breakthrough after years of unremarkable literary labour. It inaugurated his richest period of literary work, prompting new work like Annals of the Parish, The Provost, and The Entail. The success of The Ayrshire Legatees gave Galt access to the power of the Blackwood publishing network: a burgeoning house, an energetic and open-handed editor, and a lively magazine in which to appear and be promoted.

Such éclat was unexpected. In the four years before The Ayrshire Legatees, Galt had tried several kinds of writing. He published three novels: the 1816 Majolo, which Galt admitted to be “sketchily written” in his 1833 Autobiography; the 1820 Earthquake, a digressive and poorly structured tale; and, also in 1820, the shorter Glenfell. He wrote a handful of travel books, published pseudonymously. Galt finished the far more estimable Life and Studies of Benjamin West in 1820, working closely with the painter himself, who provided the materials for the biography and happily corrected the text in manuscript and proof. This “fat work,” as William Hazlitt was to call such routine literary activity, afforded Galt neither fame nor fortune. Perhaps the best indication of Galt's status during this period was Sir Richard Phillips’s offer of twelve guineas a sheet for material provided to his Monthly Magazine, the standard rate for magazine work. When Galt submitted the first instalment of The Ayrshire Legatees to William Blackwood in May 1820, it would have been as a reliable and efficient journalist.

By the spring of the following year, however, Galt appeared anonymously on the title page of the first edition of Annals of the Parish as the commercially viable and critically respected “Author of ‘The Ayrshire Legatees.’” As ever, he tried to seize the moment. In an undated letter to Blackwood less than a year after the first instalment of The Ayrshire Legatees, Galt sketched an ambitious plan for a series of books to rival Walter Scott's “Tales of My Landlord.” The republication of Galt’s successful magazine series in book form prompted him to project “a general work” to be called “Tales of the West,” which would include The Ayrshire Legatees, The Steam-Boat, and Annals of the Parish.