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The Invisible Hand of the Literary Market: Authorial Self-Fashioning in Grant Thorburn and John Galt

The January 1833 issue of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, features a detailed portrait of John Galt, standing in profile in front of a map of Canada and next to a bust of Byron, homages to his work as a land speculator in Upper Canada and as Byron’s biographer, respectively. He is relaxed, his hands in his pockets. His signature, a feature of all of Daniel Maclise’s Fraserian portraits, is subtly included in the bottom left corner. In December of that same year, Maclise’s portrait of Grant Thorburn was included in the magazine. Unlike Galt, whose portrait is full of allusions to his professional life, Thorburn’s portrait is simple. He is standing facing the reader, his right hand placed awkwardly in his vest. In contrast to Galt’s compact signature, Thorburn’s is large and dominant, centered at the bottom of the page with a large decorative flourish emphasizing the words above. Beneath his signature reads “The Original Lawrie Todd” (original emphasis). Whereas Maclise’s portrait of Galt shows an author at ease amongst references to his other works, at ease in the literary milieu of Fraser’s, and confident in his recognizability so much that his signature is almost forgotten, Thorburn’s portrait is absent of any context, and the dominance of his signature suggests perhaps that the most important aspect of this portrait is, in fact, his name and its relationship to Galt’s character Lawrie Todd, which was based on Thorburn’s own life story. The differences in how Maclise rendered these two authors for representation in the same literary magazine speaks to the relationship between these two author-businessmen. One at home in the literary world, trying desperately to succeed in transatlantic business; the other at home in the world of business and yet uncomfortably situated in the literary one thanks to his relationship with Galt, in spite of having achieved his own status as a Fraserian. This article concerns itself with these two Scottish authors whose North American experiences informed their own and each other’s published versions of Thorburn’s life. Galt, a well-known Scottish author, most famous for publishing Annals of the Parish with Blackwood in 1821, had established himself as a fixture in the Edinburgh literary scene when he arrived in North America for the second time in 1826 to pursue a secondary career: that of a land-broker and transatlantic investment manager for a publicly-traded corporation named the Canada Company. Later that year, Galt traveled from Upper Canada to New York City, where he met fellow Scotsman, Thorburn, who had originally emigrated to North America to escape political tensions in Scotland, and had planned on working as a nail-maker. Instead, Thorburn found his trade obsolete thanks to industrial