The Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg

James Hogg’s contributions to Scottish periodicals from 1810 onwards as they appeared in their original form

• Includes carefully edited texts of 82 contributions to 15 periodicals (with the exception of contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Spy, which appear in other volumes)
• Provides detailed textual and explanatory notes and glossary
• Includes a scholarly, comprehensive introduction covering the full range of Hogg’s contributions to Scottish periodicals over his whole literary life

This volume contains the original versions of James Hogg’s contributions to Scottish periodicals, including newspapers, literary journals and specialist agricultural journals, which were an important outlet for Hogg’s work throughout his literary life and his contributions cover many of his favourite themes and styles including the supernatural, rural life, current events, books, human relationships and Scottish history appearing in short stories, songs, poems, newspaper reports, letters to the editor, travel writing and articles on Scottish life, culture and country. The volume provides examples of the range and diversity of themes, genres and styles found in Hogg’s work from the time when he first came to live in Edinburgh to try and establish himself as an author in 1810 till the time of his death.

Gathers together Hogg's writing for magazines beyond Scotland Beginning with the short story 'The Long Pack', first published in a London miscellany in 1809, and concluding with 'The Rose of Plora', a poem printed posthumously in a New York eclectic magazine in 1841, the collection spans the full period of Hogg's life as a professional writer. Several pieces are reprinted in this book for the first time. A detailed introduction explores Hogg's complex relationship to the periodicals market in Scotland and overseas, while an extensive Appendix records the many hundreds of reprints of his work in newspapers and magazines around the world. Each text is introduced and fully annotated, and its publication history accounted for. A glossary aids readers unfamiliar with the Scots language.

Provides a broader literary and musical context to Hogg's reception as a songwriter

When James Hogg published what was to be his final collection of songs, Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd (1831), he set out to present his public with ‘a pocket volume’ of his best and most popular songs. It contained 113 songs spanning the whole of Hogg’s career as shepherd and professional writer, from his ‘first’ song, ‘Donald MacDonald’, created around 1803, to songs which had only just appeared in print.

Hogg chose to write his own little ‘notices’ or headnotes to each of the songs providing information about the creation, and several humorous anecdotes about performances, of these songs. He also used these introductory notes to advertise the whereabouts of his songs within larger musical collections and in printed song-sheets which had appeared the length and breadth of the British Isles. In so doing Hogg was able to stake his claim as Scotland’s most important songwriter since Robert Burns.

For the first time since their initial publication in the early decades of the nineteeth century, Hogg’s Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs presents Hogg’s songs in facsimile. Designed to be used in collaboration with the new edition of Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd, this volume will open up the world of Hogg’s songs for readers, providing, for the very first time the full textual and musical contexts of these songs as Hogg’s public would have known and enjoyed them. Information about Hogg’s involvement with a wide range of composers and music publishers, in addition to the affiliation of his songs with several leading singers of his day are given in the accompanying introductory and editorial notes.

James Hogg’s Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd appeared in 1831 and presented his public with ‘a pocket volume’ of his best and most popular songs. It contains 113 songs spanning the whole of Hogg’s career as shepherd and professional writer, from his ‘first’ song, ‘Donald MacDonald’, created around 1803, to songs that had only just appeared in print.

This volume is the first scholarly edition of the collection since its original appearance. It includes an Introduction, giving an account of the importance to Hogg of songs and singing across his creative life and detailed notes to each of the songs Hogg presents. The volume is intended to be used alongside James Hogg’s Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs which contains musical copies of the songs, taken directly from the collections to which Hogg refers in Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd. As such it provides the full textual and musical contexts of these songs as Hogg’s public would have known and enjoyed them.

This is one of Hogg's longest and also one of his most original and daring works. Gillian Hughes's uncovering of the original manuscript in the Fales Library of New York University in August 2001 allows the editors to produce here a text that reflects Hogg's original intentions.

Alongside the two main plots (the supernatural located at Aikwood Castle and the chivalric located at Roxburgh Castle) a series of embedded narratives provides the reader with, amongst other things, pictures of the traditional and timeless world of rural life in which Hogg had grown up and of early Scottish history. The name Sir Walter Scott (used through most of the manuscript) is restored and passages excised from the manuscript or omitted when the printed edition was prepared are included in the editorial apparatus. In several cases Hogg's more daringly explicit language has been brought back where the printed edition has bowdlerised or subdued the expression. The restoration of the name in particular makes explicit how much this novel represents a challenge to Scott's dominance in the portrayal of chivalry and the Middle Ages in general.

Any attempt to assess Hogg as a major novelist, and in particular as a major historical novelist, must consider this edition of The Three Perils of Man.

Hogg played a significant role in the success and notoriety of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which was founded in 1817 by the Edinburgh publisher and bookseller, William Blackwood. Hogg's relationships with Blackwood, the magazine, and the major contributors were central to both his literary and personal life. From 1817 until his death in 1835 he published more than one hundred works in 'Maga', as the magazine came to be known among the contributors, and wrote perhaps another forty for the magazine that were not published there. His contributions showcase the diversity of his talent and his achievement as a writer; his published works include a great variety of songs and lyric poetry, narrative and dramatic poetry, sketches of rural and farming life, review essays, ballads, short stories, satirical pieces, and even a 'screed' on politics.

This edition for the first time collects Hogg's 'Maga' publications, as well as provides a comprehensive introduction to Hogg's connection with Blackwood's and full explanatory and textual notes to the works. The volume also includes works Hogg intended for Blackwood's and which have now been edited from extant manuscripts.

Although portrayed as the 'boozing buffoon' of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Hogg (both as the celebrated Ettrick Shepherd and anonymously) was a key contributor of songs, narrative poems, tales and reviews to the liveliest of all early nineteenth-century periodicals. The present volume includes several items hitherto published only in Blackwood's, and ranges from the infamous 'Chaldee Manuscript' to newly-identified items such as a Scottish commemoration of the coronation of George IV. The volume also includes works Hogg intended for Blackwood's but which are now published for the first time.

Hogg's work for his favourite periodical is provided in this volume in full cultural context, including detailed annotation and a convenient and complete editorial apparatus. Also included is music for several of the Shepherd's songs.

Hogg grew up in rural Ettrick Forest in a notable family of tradition-bearers, and in his first major poetry collection The Mountain Bard of 1807 he claims his rightful position at the centre of that culture. Whereas Scott collected the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Hogg was the sole author of The Mountain Bard. He learned to negotiate the erudite print culture of Edinburgh with the literary ballad, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by his powerful friend, shifting the shape of his earlier manuscript and periodical poems accordingly. Then in 1821, when he was an established literary man, he published a revised edition in keeping with his new professional status as Author of The Queen's Wake. The present edition prints together, for the first time, the surviving pre-1807 versions of poems included in The Mountain Bard, the full 1807 collection, and the complete 1821 version. The Introduction (besides giving a full history of this complex, changing work) places it firmly within the eighteenth-century antiquarian projects of ballad-collecting and the intellectual currents of Romanticism, in particular the literary vogue for the ballad shown in works such as Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Available in Paperback:

• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
• The Shepherd's Calendar
• Tales of the Wars of Montrose
• The Three Perils of Woman
• Winter Evening Tales
• Anecdotes of Scott
• The Queen's Wake
• Altrive Tales

Also Available in Hardback:

A Queer Book
• The Shepherd's Calendar
• The Three Perils of Woman
• Tales of the Wars of Montrose
• Lay Sermons
• Queen Hynde
• Anecdotes of Scott
• The Spy
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
• The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (First Series)
• The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (Second Series)
• Winter Evening Tales
• The Queen's Wake
• Altrive Tales
• The Collected Letters of James Hogg, Volume 1, 1800-1819

With an Essay on Hogg's Literary Friendships by Janette Currie and an Appendix on the Popular Context by Suzanne Gilbert

Scottish popular tradition includes a group of stories about a King who has adventures - amorous and otherwise - as he wanders in disguise among his people. Many of these stories focus on James V and in Walter Scott's long narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) the King encounters a mysterious lady while he is wandering alone and unrecognised in the Highlands. At first sight Scott's heroine seems to be a simple country girl, but she turns out to be a daughter of the great aristocratic house of Douglas, living for the time being in a rural exile.

Scott's romantic and aristocratic version of the old 'wandering King' stories was hugely popular in its day, but Hogg subverts and questions this tale in Mador of the Moor (1816). The name 'Mador' suggests 'made o'er', 'made over', and Mador of the Moor is in effect a makeover of The Lady of the Lake. Hogg's poem, like Scott's, tells how a deer-hunt in the Highlands leads a disguised King of Scots into a love-adventure with a young woman. However Hogg's heroine, Ila Moore, is not a chaste aristocrat but a girl of low social standing who is made pregnant by the wandering King. Ila's inherent resourcefulness and strength of character suggest that a peasant girl pregnant out of wedlock can be a heroine fully worthy of respect, and Mador (rejected as shocking and ridiculous by its original readership), now re-emerges as a flowing and immensely readable narrative that eloquently challenges the deeply-ingrained class and gender prejudices of Hogg's society.

Hogg was a superb letter-writer, and this is the initial volume of the first collected edition of his letters (to be completed in three volumes). Many of the letters have never been published before, or published only in part. They vividly reflect Hogg's varied social experience and shed new light on his own writings and those of his contemporaries. Among his famous correspondents were writers such as Scott, Byron, and Southey, antiquarians such as Robert Surtees, politicians such as Sir Robert Peel, and editors and publishers such as John Murray, William Blackwood, and Robert Chambers. But there are also letters to shepherds, farmers, aristocrats, musicians, young ladies, and bluestockings. Hogg first appears in this volume in 1800 as a young shepherd with literary ambitions, and becomes the famous author of The Queen's Wake (1813) and a key supporter of the early Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1817). Among the final letters it contains are some tender if idiosyncratic love-letters to the Dumfriesshire girl he married in 1820 at the mature age of forty-nine. Hogg's entertaining and informative letters are supplemented by detailed annotation and a full editorial apparatus, including biographical notes on his chief correspondents and a concise overview of this phase of his life.

This edition of Hogg's Letters has its roots in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the four founder members of the James Hogg Society (Gillian Hughes, Douglas Mack, Robin MacLachlan, and Elaine Petrie) began work on tracing and transcribing Hogg's surviving letters. The major tasks of completing this work and preparing a full-scale edition of Hogg's Letters were subsequently passed to Gillian Hughes, who is now bringing this important research project to fruition.

Key Features

• The first ever edition of Hogg's letters to be published
• Includes many letters never previously published
• Features Hogg's correspondence with figures such as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and Sir Robert Peel

Winter Evening Tales (1820; second edition 1821) was James Hogg's most successful work of prose fiction in his lifetime. Exhibiting the most complex genesis of any of Hogg's works, it is the outstanding example of a 'national' genre pioneered by him - the miscellaneous collection of popular and traditional narratives. Hogg's 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 - the highlights of the edition - two brilliant autobiographical novellas, The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee and Love Adventures of Mr George Cochrane.

Reprinted in incomplete and unreliable texts in Victorian editions of Hogg's works, Winter Evening Tales fell into almost total obscurity after the author's death. The Stirling/ South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg is delighted to republish this key work in Hogg's career in its entirety for the first time since the early nineteenth century.

James Hogg knew Sir Walter Scott well, and after Scott's death in 1832 he wrote an affectionate but frank account of their long friendship. Hogg arranged for his manuscript to be sent to John Gibson Lockhart, Scott's son-in-law and official biographer; but when Lockhart read the manuscript he declared himself to be filled with 'utter disgust and loathing' at the 'beastly and abominable things' he found it to contain. As a result, Hogg withdrew the manuscript from publication, but later arranged for the US publication of an extensively revised version, Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott. Professor Rubenstein has produced a meticulous new edition which includes both the first version, Anecdotes of Sir W. Scott and the later version. She provides a wealth of new information about these lively, readable, idiosyncratic, and disconcerting texts.