The Collected Works of James Hogg
5 primary works • 30 total works
After Scott's death in 1832 James Hogg wrote an affectionate but frank account of their long friendship. Scott's son-in-law and official biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, declared himself to be filled with 'utter disgust and loathing' at the 'beastly and abominable things' he found it to contain. This edition includes both the original version, written as a contribution to a Scott biography planned by a young London friend of Hogg's, and a revised version created subsequently for an American market. Those with an interest in Romantic biography and autobiography will be particularly fascinated by these lively, readable, idiosyncratic and disconcerting texts. A wealth of information is provided in the paperback edition of this volume, which also includes a useful Hogg chronology and reading list.
Winter Evening Tales (1820; second edition 1821) was James Hogg's most successful work of prose fiction in his lifetime. Its experimental medley of novellas, tales, poems and sketches posed a lively alternative to the dominant form of the historical novel established by Walter Scott. The collection includes terse masterpieces of mystery and the uncanny, virtuoso improvisations on folktale themes, and two brilliant autobiographical novellas, The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee and Love Adventures of Mr George Cochrane. This paperback edition takes account of newly-discovered information about An Old Soldier's Tale and The Long Pack. A critical introduction, explanatory notes, reading list and Hogg chronology are provided to assist the reader in appreciating Hogg's entertaining and challenging tale collection to the full.
Originally published in 1810, The Forest Minstrel represents the first full collection of songs by Hogg. The items contained include some of his first compositions as a shepherd in Ettrick, while others originate from early contact with the literary culture of Edinburgh. This edition for the first time supplies musical settings for the majority of items, whereas in 1810 Hogg only nominated tunes by title. These settings are based on extensive research in relevant pre-1810 Scottish music books. As a result, the modern reader is given access to the tunes which originally formed an integral part of the songs. An Introduction describes Hogg's development as a song-writer and the musical context in 1810; while full annotation is provided on both the texts of the songs and the related tunes. Includes a CD The volume also includes a CD containing audio recordings of the seventy-two tunes which are provided by means of the notations.
The Bush aboon Traquair, like Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd, is a pastoral drama with songs, and in this play Hogg celebrates the life of the people of his native community in Ettrick Forest. At times earthy and at times hilarious, The Bush focuses on rural courtship, and it derives part of its energy from its presentation of a contrast between the old ways and an emerging (but not always admirable) modernity. Here, as elsewhere in Hogg's writings, the shepherds and ewe-milkers of Ettrick Forest operate in a pastoral world that is noticeably realistic and convincing. They pursue their love adventures as ardently as if they were inhabitants of the more literary pastoral world of the Forest of Arden, but as they do so they also have to cope with some very unpoetical and very troublesome sheep. It appears that The Bush was first drafted around 1813, but the first publication of Hogg's play came when a bowdlerised version was included in his posthumous Tales and Sketches (1837). Douglas Mack's edition includes the first-ever publication of the unbowdlerised version of The Bush aboon Traquair.
Written on the occasion of George IV's famous royal visit to Edinburgh in 1822, The Royal Jubilee is another pastoral drama with songs. In this 'Scottish Mask', Hogg brings a group of representative Scottish spirits to a 'romantic dell' on Arthur's Seat. The spirits (including an Ossianic Highlander who has suffered dispossession, and the ghost of an old Covenanter) give expression to past Scottish grievances against royalty, while indicating their hope that the King's visit will bring renewal and a fresh start. This potentially ambiguous expression of loyalty is further complicated by various Jacobite references and echoes as the spirits prepare to welcome a Hanoverian king, returning to the ancient kingdom of his Stuart ancestors.
Written on the occasion of George IV's famous royal visit to Edinburgh in 1822, The Royal Jubilee is another pastoral drama with songs. In this 'Scottish Mask', Hogg brings a group of representative Scottish spirits to a 'romantic dell' on Arthur's Seat. The spirits (including an Ossianic Highlander who has suffered dispossession, and the ghost of an old Covenanter) give expression to past Scottish grievances against royalty, while indicating their hope that the King's visit will bring renewal and a fresh start. This potentially ambiguous expression of loyalty is further complicated by various Jacobite references and echoes as the spirits prepare to welcome a Hanoverian king, returning to the ancient kingdom of his Stuart ancestors.
Heroic, radical and at times hilarious, Queen Hynde is Ossian with jokes; but Hogg's epic has serious purposes in mind. Its picture of the ancient Scottish past has much in common with stories of King Arthur and Camelot; and Queen Hynde aspires to emulate Paradise Lost as a Christian epic.
Written in 1832 but published only in 1836, after Hogg's death, Memoir of Burns was the culmination of Hogg's lifelong interest in Burns's poetry and life. Among the most neglected of his writings, this volume has never before been republished separately from the multi-volume edition of Burns for which it was written, Volumes 1-4 of the Hogg-Motherwell Works of Robert Burns. This is the first modern editorial treatment of the work. * The only scholarly edition that documents Hogg's use of his sources * Contains the comments Hogg made on individual Burns poems and songs in the annotations to the Works volumes * Draws on hitherto-unused manuscript material to clarify the relation between Hogg and Motherwell in the editing of the Works.
Scottish Pastorals: Together with Other Early Poems and 'Letters on Poetry'
by James Hogg
Published 31 December 2030
This volume is designed to present Hogg's first (very short) collection of poetry, Scottish Pastorals (1801), together with other early poems, and the 'Letters on Poetry' that he contributed to The Scots Magazine in 1805-06. Hogg's first collection of poems, Scottish Pastorals, was published in pamphlet form in 1801, when he was thirty years old. This volume also contains his first published poem 'The Mistakes of a Night' (1794), an energetically rumbustious tale of rural courtship and his 'Letters on Poetry' that appeared in the numbers of The Scots Magazine for May 1805 and January 1806; these have never been reprinted before now. These interesting early documents demonstrate his confident grasp of Shakespeare and eighteenth-century writers including Pope, Swift, Sterne, Goldsmith, Thomson, and Burns, as well as his passion for theatre.
This volume complements The Mountain Bard (first edition 1807) and The Forest Minstrel (first edition 1810) and, when taken together and read alongside the first volume of Hogg's Collected Letters, these volumes in the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg allow readers to gain a comprehensive overview of Hogg's career as a poet up until 1810, the year in which (aged 39) he moved to Edinburgh to begin a career as a professional writer.
This volume complements The Mountain Bard (first edition 1807) and The Forest Minstrel (first edition 1810) and, when taken together and read alongside the first volume of Hogg's Collected Letters, these volumes in the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg allow readers to gain a comprehensive overview of Hogg's career as a poet up until 1810, the year in which (aged 39) he moved to Edinburgh to begin a career as a professional writer.
Hogg left a written record of three of his many journeys to the Highlands,
those of 1802, 1803 and 1804, and in Highland Journeys he offers a
thoughtful and deeply-felt response to the Highland Clearances. He gives
vivid pictures of his experiences, including a narrow escape from a Navy
press-gang, and a Sacrament day with one minister preaching in English
and another in Gaelic. Highland Journeys makes a refreshing contribution to our understanding of early nineteenth-century travel writing.
those of 1802, 1803 and 1804, and in Highland Journeys he offers a
thoughtful and deeply-felt response to the Highland Clearances. He gives
vivid pictures of his experiences, including a narrow escape from a Navy
press-gang, and a Sacrament day with one minister preaching in English
and another in Gaelic. Highland Journeys makes a refreshing contribution to our understanding of early nineteenth-century travel writing.
In 1822 Rudolph Ackermann's Forget Me Not [...] for 1823 established a fashion for handsomely produced and copiously illustrated annual anthologies of short literary works. Books of this kind were designed as Christmas and New Year's presents, and in the 1820s and 1830s they became a significant publishing phenomenon. Like other well-known writers of the time (including Wordsworth, Scott, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Hogg was a contributor to the annuals, and Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books brings together all the Hogg texts that were either written for, or first published in, annuals and gift-books. 'Invocation to the Queen of the Fairies' in the Literary Souvenir for 1825 was Hogg's first known contribution to an annual, and thereafter writing for the annuals became 'a kind of business' for him during the economic slump of the late 1820s. Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books contains some of Hogg's finest short stories (for example 'The Cameronian Preacher's Tale' and 'Scottish Haymakers'), as well as some of his best-known poems (for example 'A Boy's Song' and 'The Sky Lark').
This volume highlights a coherent part of Hogg's total literary output, and in doing so provides new insights into an area of nineteenth-century publishing history that is attracting increasing interest and attention. Hogg was a professional writer with an acute awareness of the shifting trends of the literary marketplace during the 1820s and 1830s, when annuals were at their peak of popularity. However, his literary objectives did not always match the needs of the annuals, and as a result some of his contributions were returned as unsuitable for a family-oriented audience. Hogg's sometimes complex negotiations with the editors and publishers of the annuals are meticulously documented in Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books. In this context, the volume (for example) reprints both Hogg's manuscript version of 'What is Sin?', and the version actually published in Ackermann's Juvenile Forget Me Not. The engravings for which Hogg wrote are included in the present volume.
This volume highlights a coherent part of Hogg's total literary output, and in doing so provides new insights into an area of nineteenth-century publishing history that is attracting increasing interest and attention. Hogg was a professional writer with an acute awareness of the shifting trends of the literary marketplace during the 1820s and 1830s, when annuals were at their peak of popularity. However, his literary objectives did not always match the needs of the annuals, and as a result some of his contributions were returned as unsuitable for a family-oriented audience. Hogg's sometimes complex negotiations with the editors and publishers of the annuals are meticulously documented in Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books. In this context, the volume (for example) reprints both Hogg's manuscript version of 'What is Sin?', and the version actually published in Ackermann's Juvenile Forget Me Not. The engravings for which Hogg wrote are included in the present volume.
The proposed Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs volume provides access to the relevant material in the various musical collections to which Hogg refers in his 1831 head notes, thus allowing the new readers of the 21st century to see in facsimile what Hogg himself saw. This procedure provides a broader context - in literary and musical terms - in which to enhance our understanding of the reception of Hogg's songs during his lifetime.