Synopsis
This is a major new biography based on extensive archival research. From ragged boy cowherd to famous author, James Hogg's life-story is one of extraordinary transitions both socially and professionally. Precariously balancing his Ettrick world and his Edinburgh world, he sometimes seemed at home in both and sometimes in neither. He was a man of apparent contradictions: a partisan Tory with Radical friends; an upholder of oral tradition who eagerly embraced every new development in early nineteenth-century print culture; a man who wrote against biographical intrusions yet in his own life writing, stories and poems emphasised his persona and origins as the Ettrick Shepherd. In his own lifetime, Hogg was best-known as a heaven-inspired and naive Scottish rustic who featured as the boozing buffoon of Blackwood's "Edinburgh Magazine". His formidable intelligence and drive were seldom acknowledged by his contemporaries, and his most challenging work was disliked rather than praised for disturbing conventional readerly preconceptions.
In his own fascinating Memoir, this notoriously open-hearted man was curiously reticent about certain passages in his life, thus providing a template for subsequent biographers.
