James Hogg Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on James Hogg

Known today as the author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), an extraordinary portrayal of the psychology of antinomian Calvinism, James Hogg became famous in his time as the "Ettrick Shepherd" of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, a coarsely ingenuous rustic full of opinions sometimes nobly savage in their honesty, sometimes rollickingly satirical, but always more or less offensive to polite Edinburgh society. Although Hogg the young shepherd was largely illiterate, the question of how deliberately Hogg the struggling man of letters exploited his background has long been disputed. What seems clear is that Hogg, always ambitious and often barely solvent whatever the success of his latest book, adopted a variety of literary roles in the course of a writing career that generated scores of ballads and songs, numerous long verse narratives, dozens of short stories (many of them later rewritten and published under different titles), several novels, an autobiography, a controversial life of Sir Walter Scott, and a collaboration with other contributors to Blackwood's Magazine that produced the libelous "Chaldee Manuscript" (October 1817) and the sensational Noctes Ambrosianae (1822-1835), the latter primarily a forum for the "deevilry" of the Blackwood's circle of writers.

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