Ettrick Valley

Ettick will be forever associated with the poetic gifts of the Ettrick Shepherd, who was a distinct oddity in the fashionable literary world of the early nineteenth century. A Border poet with a shepherd's plaid slung across his shoulders, his crudeness and outspokenness sent shockwaves through the salons and conventions of the literati. Initially, they were charmed and reverntial, but eventually they tired of him and often ridiculed him as te novelty of the artistic bumpkin wore thin. A similar recetion had greeted the 'Ploughman Poet', Robert Burns, a generation earlier. But Hogg was no transient performing seal for drawing rooms and dining clubs. He evolved into a major writer who was admired by Byron and André Gide, and has influenced Scottish writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Muriel Spark. In 1824 he wrote on of the masterpieces of Scottish literature: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

The Literary Traveller in Scotland

Allan Foster

Hogg was born the second of four sons in 1770 in the parish of Ettrick in the Scottish Borders. When he was six years old, his father, an impoverished farmer, became bankrupt, and he was forced to leave school. Most of his childhood was spent working on farms, and in his mid-teens he became a shepherd and taught himself to write and play the fiddle. From his mother he learned the oral tradition of ballads and folklore of the Borders. She in turn had learned them from her father, the legendary Will O'Phaup, reputed to have been the last man to converse with the fairies. Soon Hogg was composing his own songs and verses, publishing his first poem in the Scots Magazine in 1793, and in 1801 he published Scottish Pastorals, a small volume of poems. The locals dubbed him 'Jamie the Poeter'. In the summer of 1802 he first met Walter Scott while working as a shepherd for Scott's friend William Laidlaw. Scott, the newly appointed sherif-depute of Selkirk, was scouring the countryside for the disappearing ballads of the Borders. Hogg aided Scott in his search, and the two contemporaries began a lifelong, if sometimes traumatic, friendship.

In 1810, after his attempts at farming failed, Hogg moved to Edinburgh to try to earn his living as a writer. Scott's assistance to his friend was invaluable, but he eventually achieved fame with the publication of his poem The Queen's Wake, completed in Deanhaugh Street in 1813, and in 1815 The Pilgrims of the Sun was published. He edited the short-lived literary magazine The Spy, and many of his stories and poems were published in Blackwood's (Edinburgh) Magazine, in which he first used his now famous sobriquet, the Ettrick Shepherd. He was often caricatured by Blackwood's in John Wilson's (Christopher North) Noctes Ambrosianae as an unsophisticated 'boozing buffon', a portrayal often accentuated and exploited by Hogg, who played up to his celebrity image.

He is best remembered today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, originally published anonymously because, Hogg explained, 'it being a story replete with horrors, after I had written it durst not venture to put my name to it'. A more likely explanation may be that he didn't want to cause offence to Calvinist Edinburgh.

He lived for five years in Edinburgh at various addresses, including The Harrow Inn, Teviot Row and Ann Street, since demolished to make way for the Waverley Bridge. In 1815 the Duke of Buccleuch granted him a rent-free farm at Altrive (now Edinhope) in Yarrow, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1820 he married Margaret Phillips, a pious woman from a Nithsdale farming family, with whom he had five children. He died on 21 November 1835 from 'what the country folks call black jaundice' (probably liver failure) and is buried in Ettrick Kirkyard. At his funeral most of Edinburgh's literati were conspicuous by their absence, except for the towering figure of John Wilson, who wept for his departed friend.

SEE ALSO: Sir Walter Scott, Tibbie Shiel's Inn, Gordon Arms, Sir Walter Scott's Courtroom.

FURTHER INFORMATION: The cottage in which Hogg was born collapsed around 1830. His grave can be seen in Ettrick Kirkyard about ten yards from the south-west corner of the church. Relics connected to Hogg can be seen in Sir Walter Scott's Courtroom in Selkirk. Overlooking Tibbie Shiel's Inn (up the hill off the A708_ by St Mary's Loch is a statue of James Hogg. About four miles up the Ettrick valley from Selkirk on the B7009 stands Aikwood Tower, home of Lord and LAdy Steel, which now houses a permanent James Hogg exhibition. Open Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, May to September, 2pm - 5pm. Tel: 017550 52253. Email enquiries@aikwwoodscottishborders.com
The James Hogg Society, c/o Dr Robin MacLachlan, 8 Tybenham Road, London, SW19 3LA

FURTHER READING: Walter Elliot, The Hogg Traill; Karl Miller, Electric Shepherd; David Groves, James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer; Norah Parr, James Hogg at Home; Mary Garden (Hogg's Daughter), Memorials of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd.

Extract from The Literary Traveller in Scotland by Allan Foster used by kind permission of Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, and remains copyright Allan Foster and Mainstream Publishing.