GILLIAN HUGHES HAS MORE than earned the right to sum up Hogg's life in one measured, densely researched book, though in calling it "a life" she perhaps undersells the number of lives her subject lived. Shepherd, autodidact, collector, poet, satiris
t, essayist, reviewer, writer of fiction of the quality of the Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) – Hogg lived many professional lives in addition to the hectic social round wonderfully charted in the three volumes of the Collected Letters, a single-handed editing feat now completed.
Much of the work of the Stirling/South Carolina editions of Hogg's work could be seen as a rescue operation, for he was too long dismissed by early readers and editors as an eccentric rustic, a literary clown, a shepherd with ridiculous aspirations to poetry. The absurdity of this is patent now we have so much of the prose works, the poetry and the collected song, all crammed into the intervals of farming and sociable life.
Money is the theme that runs through the biography and letters: we find Scott and Blackwood proposed a deluxe edition of The Queen's Wake to "add emolument to his barren laurels". Hogg was growing slowly in prestige in the first two volumes of the Letters (which run from 1800 to 1831), though by this final one he is an established figure with some reputation in both Edinburgh (where his ties slowly loosened) and London.
As he wrote to his wife from London in 1832, "I never get home before three in the morning, and have been very much in the same sort of society. I have been with Lockhart, Jerdan, Captain Burns, Pringle, Cochrane, Murray, and last night I was with Martin ... and the list of great literary names and those of artists would of itself fill up this whole letter."
While autograph hunters pestered him (and cost him dearly in postage), publishers were less forthcoming, and both the Letters and the Life reveal a litany of projects limping along, disappointing in their outcomes, niggardly in their return during his lifetime. Feted at Burns dinners, "shifted from national poet to Tory icon of an appropriately naïve if gifted peasantry", Hogg was courted by Tory and Whig in the literary magazine circles. Now we have the manuscripts, and these volumes, we can see how various and hardworking his life was.
The preface to the third volume of Letters is an object lesson to other editors of correspondence, a testament to the hunting down of originals; while the Life gains its authority by an inconspicuous but thorough supply of evidence in the footnotes. Editing the Letters gives as thorough a knowledge of a writer like Hogg as could be hoped for: and Hughes and her colleagues display scrupulous scholarship in an exemplary way, for the reader to consult without losing the thread.
So – just how naïve a writer was he? As these volumes make clear, he wasn't in the slightest. He was ambitious, hard-working, sensitive to insult and keen to cement his place in the literary pantheon. He valued his friendship with Scott but allowed himself to contradict the great man when he felt it right.
He had to curb his temper with publishers and reviewers, for he had a living to make, a growing family, and a taste for conviviality. Like Burns, to whom he was often compared in his lifetime, he attracted attention, praise, and memorials after he died, while he could have done with rather more solid success in his lifetime.
Like Burns, too, he achieved an astonishing sophistication of language, narrative and poetic construction. These volumes are part of a re-evaluation which is making us realise just how much of his real worth that shorthand description "Ettrick Shepherd" conceals.
The full article contains 663 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
