Bruce Gilkison, Walking with James Hogg: The Ettrick Shepherd's Journeys through Scotland

Duncan Hotchkiss

doi:10.3366/nor.2019.0177

James Hogg, ‘the beginner, and almost sole instigator' of Blackwood's – Not Once, but Twice

Romanticism ◽

10.3366/rom.2017.0335 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 23 (3) ◽

pp. 205-214

Author(s):

Thomas C. Richardson

Keyword(s):

James Hogg ◽

The Social ◽

Magazine Publishing

James Hogg claims to have been instrumental in initiating both versions of William Blackwood's venture into magazine publishing in 1817. This essay examines Hogg's role in beginning the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and its successor, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and discusses the significance of his contributions to the Edinburgh Monthly and the early numbers of Blackwood's in terms of his influence on the direction of the magazine and the magazine's impact on him. Attention is given to key works in both versions, especially ‘Tales and Anecdotes of the Pastoral Life’ and ‘Shakspeare Club of Alloa’ in the Edinburgh Monthly and the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ and ‘Elegy’ in Blackwood's. Also important for Hogg's relationship with Blackwood's were Hogg's submissions that Blackwood did not publish. This essay looks particularly at Hogg's failed effort to enter the attacks on the Cockney School and how he also became a victim of the social and intellectual disdain leveled against the Cockneys.

Download Full-text

Black Books and Brownies

10.1093/oso/9780198824466.003.0009 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Alison Milbank

Keyword(s):

Historical Change ◽

Religious Change ◽

The Novel ◽

Black Book ◽

James Hogg ◽

The Bible ◽

The Reformation ◽

The Future

Scottish fiction about the Reformation is concerned with the mechanics of historical change, which are rendered through a series of enchanted books and people discussed in Chapter 8. In the novel, The Monastery, describing the Dissolution and Reformation, Scott gothicizes the Bible as a magic book and the White Lady as its guardian to dramatize the mysterious nature of religious change, the dependence of the future on a Gothic past, and the need for interpretation. In Old Mortality, Scott’s protagonist escapes the frozen dualities of Covenanter and Claverhouse, revealing historical change itself as problematic in Humean terms and requiring a leap of faith. James Hogg contests this presentation of the Covenanters by re-enchanting them as supposed brownies, as mediators of history and nature, and in his Three Perils of Man reprises Scott’s wizard Michael Scott pitted against Roger Bacon and his ‘black book’ the Bible to present the Reformation as an eternal reality.

Download Full-text