My journey through nineteenth-century British Victorian ecclesiastical satirical fiction (very niche) continues, with the glorious and moving Annals of the Parish by John Galt (1779-1839). It’s a novel first published in 1821 (four years after Jane Austen died), told in annual diary entries by the Reverend Micah Balwhidder, a gentle Presbyterian minister from the parish of Dalmailing near the town of Irville, both invented but certainly intended to be in Ayrshire, south-west of Glasgow in Scotland.

Let’s get the language out of the way: there is Scots dialect in this novel but it is not an impediment to your understanding if you’re not familiar with the vocabulary. My edition (OUP World’s Classics, 1986) has excellent notes at the end, and its word lists for the more archaic terms are very instructive. Page 18 has, for instance:

yett: gate

hirpling: limping

bachle: old shoe

freats: omens

howdies: midwives

set: leased

narrow: parsimonious

scrimpetest: stingiest

kent: knew

I particularly enjoyed discovering that etter-cap was an abusive name for a spider. Suddenly Tolkien’s ‘Atter-cop’ sprang into my memory from The Hobbit which Bilbo yells to lure the spiders away from the trussed-up dwarves.

The cadences of Galt’s prose in Mr Balwhidder’s voice roll along until the rhythm of the words becomes beguiling:

‘[a returning midshipman] brought a Muscovy duck to Lady Macadam, who had, as I related, in a manner educated his sister Kate. That duck was the first of the kind we had ever seen, and many thought it was of the goose species, only with short bowly legs. It was, however, a tractable and homely beast, and after some confabulation, as my lady herself told Mrs Balwhidder, it was received into fellowship by her other ducks and poultry.’

Annals of the Parish is the story of very small doings in a small country parish, where boys go off to join the Scots Greys and the Navy, a former gentleman’s valet opens a dancing school, the eldest daughter of a widow is taken as a companion by the eccentric Lady Macadam, who is appalled when her son and her protege fall in love, the smugglers increase their activities, the laird falls off his horse into a midden as the road is so bad and builds a new road at his own expense which brings increased traffic and trade to the parish. Tea-drinking becomes fashionable among the ladies, and though the minister is at first very suspicious of this new excuse for women to sit and gossip together instead of keeping their houses clean, he is won over by his own enjoyment of the drink, even when his wife buys a silver teapot for the house, and realises that tea-drinking among the ladies does not send them home drunk, as they had done when in the habit of drinking possets in their gossip sessions hitherto.

All of life is in these Annals: birth, marriage, death, tragedy, comedy, justice and injustice, and the lives of the parishioners become deeply interesting as we work through the years from 1760 to 1810. Mr Balwhidder decided to write these Annals as occupation in his retirement as the parish minister, and his narrative pulls out the memorable bits that chart the progress of the parish from a scattered group of cottages amongst a few big houses, to becoming a thriving small town. The American wars and the Napoleonic Wars are viewed with concern and exceitement from afar, as their village boys depart for war, and by the 1780s Mr Balwhidder has decided to club together with his father-in-law to actually order a newspaper three times a week, as there is so much news to keep up with and to discuss.

Mr Balwhidder’s job is keeping the parish godly and Christian, and being the voice of moderation and kindness to his people as well as upholding a firm moral position. Reading how men and women found guilty of fornication and brought before the Session are made to do penance on Sundays is a medieval practice held over from before the Reformation; yet Mr Balwhidder’s journey with his (second) wife to Edinburgh, where he has been appointed to preach at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, feels very modern: hiring a chaise, then taking the coach, then finding their booked accommodation, and going to visit friends in the city.

I love this novel. I’ve reread it many times since I discovered it in my twenties. The characters feel like old friends, and reading it seels as if I am dropping in to see how they’re all getting on in Dalmailing, looking out for favourite bits, and noticing things that I had forgotten (like Mr Cayenne’s turtle). This time I was noticing how Galt portrayed the impoverished Jenny Gaffaw and her daughter Meg, who clearly has learning difficulties. The scene of Jenny’s funeral, and Meg’s solemn presentation of a dram of water and a piece of bread on a slate to the minister at her mother’s wake brought me to tears.

Is it satirical? Galt is very kind to Mr Balwhidder, who is humble and honest, able to see a joke, and even capable of roaring out a slightly scandalous rebuke to a backslider in the church, such is his outrage at the man’s cheekiness in a house of worship. But while the Kirk is depicted as ponderous, powerful and with fingers in everyone’s business, it’s a kind Kirk, an institution that cares about its people, and is not punitive for punishment’s sake, as it had been two centuries before: the Covenanting times were a much tougher period of history to live through. The eighteenth century was softer to the poor and the needy, and the Kirk is presented throughout as a helping hand rather than corrupt or negligent or pernicious.

I discovered that I last wrote about Annals of the Parish ten years ago, so this is a nice anniversary. Read that post (katemacdonald.net/2015/…) for more on the novel.