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<!-- you can have any number of categories here --> [[Category:Gil Stelter]] [[Category:Libertarian And Objectivism Are Both Stolen Terms]] [[Category:John Galt]] <!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.--> {{URL | url = http://www.guelphmercury.com/news-story/2755443-who-was-the-real-john-galt-/}} <!-- {{Other URL | url = }} --> <!-- {{Old URL | url = }} --> {{End URL}} {{DES | des = Ayn Rand stole this name, as well as [[Objectivism]]. "In the literary world he is known as a Scottish novelist who specialized in irony and sarcasm. To those of us who live in Guelph, he was a colonizer and the founder of our city who ran into difficulties with the company he had organized." | show=}} <!-- insert wiki page text here --> <!-- DPL has problems with categories that have a single quote in them. Use these explicit workarounds. --> <!-- otherwise, we would use {{Links}} and {{Quotes}} --> {{List|title=Who was (the real) John Galt?|links=true}} {{Quotations|title=Who was (the real) John Galt?|quotes=true}} {{Text | What kind of person was John Galt? In the literary world he is known as a Scottish novelist who specialized in irony and sarcasm. To those of us who live in Guelph, he was a colonizer and the founder of our city who ran into difficulties with the company he had organized. Existing biographies of him don’t do much to bridge the gap between these two Galts, although a younger generation of literary scholars realized Galt wrote a great deal more than fiction: biographies, travel accounts, dramas, poetry, art and architectural criticism and political and economic journalism. I’ve been working on Galt, off and on, for a number of years, mostly on his Canadian activities, and only recently am I trying to do a biography that includes all aspects of his varied career. He is turning out to be a great deal more complex and interesting than I expected. I’ll give examples here of two aspects of his life that may not be known or appreciated by those of us who only know him as Guelph’s founder. The first is the young Galt as an adventurer. We usually picture him as a tall, somewhat corpulent figure more suited to the literary salons and boardrooms of London than to the exploration of distant frontiers. Yet at age 30, Galt left London for an extended, two-and-a-half-year tour of the Mediterranean and the Turkish Ottoman Empire that involved a series of physically difficult and sometimes extremely dangerous travel through lawless territory and a war zone. What began as a trip for health and education developed into what he termed his ‘Levant scheme,’ an effort to bypass Napoleon’s prohibition of British trade with Europe. Galt actually purchased a 35-camel caravan of goods near Constantinople and preceded it through Turkish territory in what is now Bulgaria, on a route to Hungary. This involved crossing a mountain chain in the middle of winter, avoiding Turkish and Russian troops trying to control the area and convincing local authorities that he was not a British spy. The goods eventually reached their destination, but a larger-scale operation did not materialize because a Scottish partner in Vienna felt the project was too dangerous. The point here is that Galt was willing to take risks and think big. As he put it: “I never in my life have been able to lay my heart to any business whatever in which the imagination had not a place.” A second aspect of Galt’s life before his Canadian colonization scheme that is worth further study is the extent to which he managed to move in the highest circles of the elite in what was then the greatest city in the world, London. What can we learn about a person based on the people he associated with? Despite a relatively poor formal education and without a family fortune to support him, Galt convinced the leading politicians, government officials and businessmen of London to invest in his brainchild, the Canada Company. And Galt was particularly drawn to the aristocracy who dominated the social and artistic side of Regency London. By the moral standards of the day, Galt seems to have been a prude, yet he associated with several of the sons of George III, who epitomized the scandalous excesses of the period. Beautiful and strong-willed women fascinated Galt and the king’s sons had them in abundance as mistresses. Galt was acquainted with Mary Ann Thompson, the notorious Mrs. Clarke, who had been the mistress of Frederick, the Duke of York, George’s second son. She exposed the corruption in the army system of promotions when Frederick stopped supporting her financially. Mrs. Clarke came to Galt for help in writing another exposé but he declined, probably in deference to the Duke, to whom he felt obligated. George’s fourth son, Edward, the Duke of Kent, regularly asked Galt’s advice on matters such as getting parliamentary help in paying off his large debts. Yet Galt never mentioned Edward’s longtime mistress, Julie de St Laurent, who oversaw his household, nor Edward’s late marriage to a German princess that resulted in the child who became Queen Victoria. Galt’s longest associate in the king’s family probably was the liberal rebel, Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex, who became a major figure in London’s artistic and charity societies. Aristocratic connections were also the basis for some of Galt’s most significant literary friendships. He met George Gordon, Lord Byron, the poet superstar of his day, during his Mediterranean voyage. After Galt’s return from Canada, he published a controversial but popular biography of Byron. Both had frequented the literary salon of the beautiful Irish socialite, Marguerite, Lady Blessington, who later scandalized London society by living with Count D’Orsay, the husband of her stepdaughter. Lady Blessington and some of Galt’s other aristocratic friends remained loyal to him when he returned sick and financially embarrassed from his Canadian adventure. }}
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