Natural genius who gave form to Scotland's roots

Published on Friday 21 April 2006 13:32

A GENTLEMANLY young friend of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, watching him one day on the far side of St Mary's Loch in Selkirkshire's Yarrow Valley, was seized with a dreadful anxiety.

Hogg back in the fold

The works of James Hogg, described by novelist James Robertson as "one of our best-known but least-read authors", have gradually come back into print with the appearance of the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of his Collected Works, published by Edinburgh University Press.

As a real-life Borders shepherd turned professional author, Hogg had learned to negotiate cannily between the rural peasant Scotland in which he had been born and educated and the polite culture of early 19th century Edinburgh and London. The European-wide vogue for the ancient Celtic world of the Ossian poems and for the Waverley novels meant that the primitive and the parochial were seen as embodying universal values. Hogg had the edge on Sir Walter Scott and James Macpherson, though, in being as well as writing about the primitive native of Scotland.

Widely known by his pen-name of the Ettrick Shepherd and as the Shepherd of the Noctes Ambrosianae of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Hogg's letters reveal that his engagement with his own prescribed role of the Scottish aboriginal was in fact extremely sophisticated. While describing himself repeatedly in his letters as an "old shepherd", Hogg's packaging of aboriginal Scottishness provides some real surprises. He thinks, for instance, of becoming a scriptwriter for the popular English stage comedian and ventriloquist Charles Mathews, one of whose most successful stage impersonations was Mrs M'Night, the elderly and gently garrulous widow of a Scottish minister.

In his dealings with London publishers and periodical editors Hogg anticipated the later development of professional literary agents. Audaciously, he managed to use one publisher, Edinburgh's William Blackwood, to act as his agent in placing his Border Romance The Three Perils of Man, with another publisher in London. Subsequently, he referred London editors wanting his stories or poems to his fellow-writer and old friend Allan Cunningham who held a stockpile of suitable articles in the English metropolis for him. Hogg became an active promoter of Robert Burns, organising and appearing at public Burns Night dinners in Edinburgh and tracking down and publicly verifying surviving traces of the poet among his friends and acquaintances. When he visited London for the first and only time in his life in 1832, Hogg entered the streets and drawing rooms of the West End draped in his shepherd's plaid and was portrayed wearing it in Fraser's Magazine.

At home in the Yarrow Valley, Hogg's letters show him similarly packaging peasant Scotland for a genteel audience and promoting early tourism in the Borders. Swarms of literary tourists from as far afield as Denmark and North America in the 1820s and 1830s descended on his country home, and he helped to make the reputation of St Mary's Loch and Tibby Shiel's Inn as an angling station. Hogg was also active in the creation of Innerleithen in the nearby Tweed Valley as a fashionable Victorian holiday resort.

From the archive

The St Ronan Border Games

The Scotsman

13 August 1834

While keeping the local and traditional inter-parish football match and games between Ettrick and Yarrow alive, he also reshaped such traditional events for a wider audience, shown most clearly in his creation and promotion of the St Ronan's Border Club. The club employed a piper and held angling and archery contests for a membership drawn from local tradesmen and gentry and Edinburgh visitors. Its annual programme culminated in a two-day games before an audience of hundreds and on occasion several thousands, anticipating the Victorian Highland Gatherings patronised by royalty at places like Braemar. Hogg organised the games, appeared as one of the judges on the field, sang his songs at the public dinner that followed and wrote commemorative accounts of the event and the Shepherd's role in it for the Edinburgh newspapers.

Hogg's literary and sporting activities were not always so joyfully united. At the end of his ruinous lease of the large farm of Mount Benger, he declared sadly, "I am thinking of giving up shooting and fishing and every thing of the sort as unsuitable to my years and circumstances". Fortunately, he changed his mind and continued to revel in the pleasures to be reaped "on the waste among the blooming heath, by the silver spring, or swathed in the delicious breeze of the wilderness" as well as in the writing which had made the Ettrick Shepherd a household name.

Dr Gillian Hughes is James Hogg Arts and Humanities Research Board Research Fellow of the University of Stirling, and a General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of James Hogg. She is a founder member of the James Hogg Society and editor of the journal Studies in Hogg and His World. The second of three volumes of The Collected Letters of James Hogg - co-edited by Hughes, Douglas S Mack, Robin MacLachlan and Elaine Petrie - will be released this month. The first-ever systematic collection and editing of Hogg's letters is an important part of this accumulating tribute to one of the most significant figures of a golden age of Scottish culture.

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