38 Facts About James Hogg

James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English.

James Hogg was a friend of many of the great writers of his day, including Sir Walter Scott, of whom he later wrote an unauthorised biography.

James Hogg became widely known as the "Ettrick Shepherd", a nickname under which some of his works were published, and the character name he was given in the widely read series Noctes Ambrosianae, published in Blackwood's Magazine.

James Hogg is best known today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

James Hogg's father, Robert Hogg, was a tenant farmer while his mother, Margaret Hogg, was noted for collecting native Scottish ballads.

James Hogg attended a parish school for a few months before his education was stopped due to his father's bankruptcy as a stock-farmer and sheep-dealer.

Robert James Hogg was then given the position of shepherd at Ettrickhouse farm by one of his neighbours.

James Hogg worked as a farm servant throughout his childhood, tending cows, doing general farm work, and acting as a shepherd's assistant.

James Hogg stayed here for two years, learning to read while tending sheep, and being given newspapers and theological works by his employer's wife.

James Hogg later said that Laidlaw was more like a father to him than an employer.

James Hogg began composing songs to be sung by local girls.

James Hogg became a lifelong friend of his master's son, William Laidlaw, himself a minor writer and later the amanuensis of Walter Scott.

James Hogg first became familiar with the work of the recently deceased Robert Burns in 1797, after having the poem Tam o' Shanter read to him.

In 1801 James Hogg was recruited to collect ballads for Walter Scott's collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

James Hogg met Scott himself the following year and began working for the Edinburgh Magazine.

James Hogg eventually found a farm on Harris but due to trouble with his finances and a legal issue he was unable to secure a lease by 1804.

In 1810 James Hogg moved to Edinburgh to start a literary career.

In 1814 James Hogg completed a visionary poetic narrative The Pilgrims of the Sun in three weeks, and in the same year he met William Wordsworth and made a visit to the Lake District to see Wordsworth and other poets.

James Hogg continued to write songs and poems, including "The Field of Waterloo" and "To the Ancient Banner of Buccleuch".

James Hogg first met the publisher William Blackwood in the aftermath of his own publisher John Goldie's 1814 bankruptcy, and in 1817 he helped with the start of Blackwood's Edinburgh Monthly Magazine.

James Hogg published his two volume collection Dramatic Tales in May In 1818 his collection The Brownie of Bodsbeck; and Other Tales was published by Blackwood.

The second volume of Jacobite Relics was published in February 1821, and his son James Robert Hogg was born in March 1821.

James Hogg found his ideal contributors in John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart.

The Noctes continued until 1834, and were written after 1825 mostly by Wilson, although other writers, including James Hogg himself, had a hand in them.

James Hogg became one of the best-known figures in topical literary affairs, famous throughout Britain and its colonies.

Quite what the real James Hogg made of this is mostly unknown, although some of his letters to Blackwood and others express outrage and anguish.

In 1823, in debt to Blackwood, James Hogg began publishing his work The Shepherd's Calendar in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

In 1825 James Hogg's daughter Maggie was born, and he began writing a new prose work, later titled Tales of the Wars of Montrose.

In 1826 James Hogg was in serious trouble with his debts, while the firm of Constable collapsed, involving Walter Scott and James Hogg's friend John Aiken.

The death of his father-in-law, whose family James Hogg had been supporting, gave him relief.

James Hogg's third daughter Harriet was born at the end of the year.

In 1832 his Altrive Tales was published in London, while Blackwood finally published A Queer Book in April or May James Hogg was offered a large sum to edit a collection of the works of Robert Burns, but the bankruptcy of his London publisher stopped the publication of his Altrive Tales after the first of the twelve projected volumes.

In 1833 James Hogg had an accident while curling, falling through the ice, causing a serious illness.

James Hogg published Tales of the Wars of Montrose in March 1835.

James Hogg died on 21 November 1835 and was buried in Ettrick Churchyard, close to his childhood home in the Scottish Borders.

James Hogg was considered a man of great natural genius whose uncouth style and subject-matter, so natural for the clownish figure depicted in the Noctes Ambrosianae, should not be held against him.

Victorian readers of these emasculated texts naturally came to the conclusion that James Hogg had been overrated, and that he was notable mainly as an example of triumph over adverse circumstances.

James Hogg is a direct ancestor of Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro.