| Project Summary/Extract | The major aim of this project is to produce a critical edition of selected early work by the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835). A contemporary of Sir Walter Scott, Hogg is now earning new appreciation as his work is being systematically recovered and republished. The son of a sheep-farming family in Ettrick Valley, he suffered great poverty in his childhood. Almost completely self-educated, he grew up to be a prolific writer of poetry, songs, novels, stories, essays, and plays, and to move between the oral culture of his Borders home and the sophisticated literary culture of early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh. Early focus on his roots in the labouring classes, contentious relations with the publishing world during his life, and subsequent bowdlerising of his works for their perceived 'indelicacy' resulted, over time, in his disappearance from the canon until a recovery of his reputation began in the mid-twentieth century.
The Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg (hereafter S/SC Edition) is playing a major role in that recovery by providing a rigorously researched modern collected edition in 39 volumes. To date 24 hardback S/SC volumes have been published by Edinburgh University Press to general acclaim, 9 of which have so far been reprinted in paperback. This proposal seeks to complete the preparation of a forthcoming S/SC volume. The poems and prose pieces to be included in this volume are long out of print, many of them since Hogg's lifetime at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The proposed volume will include Hogg's first collection of poems, Scottish Pastorals (1801), which was published in pamphlet form when he was thirty years old and running the sheep-farm of Ettrickhouse in the Ettrick valley. The poems of Scottish Pastorals offer a striking picture of rural Scottish life in the early nineteenth century and contain a good deal of raw energy. This collection also shows Hogg exploring potential models for his later poetic ventures. In particular, like other labouring-class poets such as Robert Burns, this shepherd-poet from Ettrick approached works such as Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd from a different direction than had poets from more privileged backgrounds, and in so doing he rewrote many conventions of eighteenth-century pastoral.
The volume will also include other early poems not published elsewhere within the S/SC Edition, thus completing the edition's coverage of this aspect of Hogg's career. One of the poems to be included is 'The Mistakes of a Night' (1794), an energetically rumbustious tale of rural courtship. In addition, the volume will include Hogg's 'Letters on Poetry', which appeared in The Scots Magazine for May 1805 and January 1806: they have never been reprinted. These interesting early documents demonstrate his confident grasp of Shakespeare and eighteenth-century writers including Pope, Swift, Sterne, Goldsmith, Thomson, and Burns, as well as his passion for theatre. The 'Letters' also reveal Hogg's acute, and very Romantic, awareness of his own processes of reading and composition.
Work on the project will also involve a search for other early Hogg poems and songs, as well as research into the ballads that Hogg contributed to Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03).
Edinburgh University Press has accepted the volume for publication, and a contract has been signed. |