Highland Journeys

`Simple congratulations are in order at the outset, to the editors and publisher [...] of the projected Collected Works of James Hogg. It has taken a long time for Hogg to be recognised as one of the most notable Scottish writers, and it can fairly be said that the process of getting him into full and clear focus is still far from complete. That process is immeasurably helped by the provision of proper and unbowdlerised texts (in many cases for the first time), and in this the ongoing Collected Works with be a milestone [..] we have an author of unique interest, force, and originality.'Edwin Morgan, Scottish Literary Journal

`Edinburgh University Press are also to be praised for the elegant presentation of the books. It is wonderful that at last we are going to have a collected edition of this important author without bowdlerisation or linguistic interference [...]. These books of Hogg have been wonderfully presented and edited. Hogg's own idiosyncratic style has been left untouched.'Ian Crichton Smith, Studies in Scottish Literature

`It may take some time, but when the current Collected Works reaches its culmination, Hogg's great novel should seem a little less oddly unique, and some other astounding books [...] may receive their share of belated glory.'Liam Mcillvanney, London Review of Books

`[T]he Stirling/South Carolina edition of Hogg's works is proving one of the major scholarly publishing events of the decade.' Penny Fielding, Studies in Hogg and his World

`A quiet revolution in Scottish literary studies has been going on over the past 10 years. The Stirling/South Carolina research edition of the collected works of James Hogg has been steadily forcing a reassessment of one of our best-known but least-read authors.'James Robertson, The Herald

Hogg left a written record of three of his many journeys to the Highlands, those of 1802, 1803 and 1804. Here he vividly depicts his experiences, including a narrow escape from a Navy press-gang, and the scene during preparations for Sacrament Day with one minister preaching in English and another in Gaelic. Hogg also explains aspects of Gaelic culture such as the waulking songs, and he describes the trade in kelp, lucrative to the landowners but back-breaking and ill-paid for the workers. Hogg had hoped to become a sheep-farmer on the Isle of Harris. At the same time he was concerned about the depopulation of the Highlands and was critical of negligent or absentee landlords. Highland Journeys makes a refreshing contribution to our understanding of early nineteenth-century travel writing.

`Chastity, carnality, carnage and carnivorousness are among his favourite subjects, and dance together in his writings to the music of a divided life. [...] The later-eighteenth century was a time when [Scotland] had taken to producing writers and thinkers of world consequence. One of these - though long disregarded as such, long unimaginable as such - was Hogg.'Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement

`The Ettrick Shepherd [...] was much more comfortable to be with than James Hogg, the author of obsessive, experimental fictions which either satirised or ignored the decencies of polite letters. To some degree even these could be bowdlerised and domesticated, as many of them were in the Victorian collections of Hogg's fiction published after his death, and passed off as written by `the Ettrick Shepherd'. But one in particular, and for my money the best of them---TheThree Perils of Woman - was immediately recognised as irredeemable by its first reviewers, and until last year had never been reprinted. [...] [The new] collected edition [...] will eventually run to some thirty volumes. The first three came out last year [in 1995], and are magnificent: spaciously designed, scrupulously edited and thoughtfully introduced, with Antony Hasler's Introduction to The Three Perils of Woman especially illuminating. The two volumes published along with The Three Perils of Woman are much less disturbing than that book but immensely engaging. The Shepherd's Calendar is a volume of anecdotes and sketches or rural life in the Borders [...]. A Queer Book is a volume of poems. [...] There is a strangeness about some of these poems that recalls the self-consciousness of Hogg's best fiction.' John Barrell, The London Review of Books

`Everything about the Edinburgh-Scott is clear, and coherent; when one argues with its premises, one does so at least from a position of confident understanding of their rationale. The same can be said of the exemplary Stirling/South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg. The case is both similar and different, here, however: a major Scottish writer whose work has never been subject to serious editorial scrutiny is being put on the map internationally (it can be no surprise that both editions have received co-sponsorship and substantial funding from the United States); in complete contrast to the Edinburgh Waverley, in Hogg's case we have a collected edition containing works some of which have never previously been reprinted, and for which there is no complex textual evolution to be encountered and negotiated. Unlike other volumes in the Stirling/South Carolina Edition, the Lay Sermons are textually very simple [...]. This is a welcome addition to the series, essential to its completeness, but not one of the most exciting of the volumes. It is hard to see it arousing the same level of critical discussion as has followed the re-publication of The Three Perils of Woman under the joint editorship of David Groves, Antony Hasler, and Douglas Mack, for example, or Gillian Hughes's previous volume, Tales of the Wars of Montrose. Even here, some of Hogg's characteristic narrative complexities surface, however. [...] It is a little hard to know what to do with such apparently wanton and provocative narratorial disturbance, the more so as it does not seem to issue in corresponding equivocation in the body of the Sermons themselves. The editor, wisely it seems to me, refrains from attempting a resolution of the inconsistency at this point; it is a notable example of the restraint and good judgment which characterizes her work, a measuredness that keeps it well clear of the strain of over-ingenious interpretation which has accompanied Hogg's just re-positioning at the centre of nineteenth-century Scottish literary-critical scrutiny over the past few years.' Susan Manning, Eighteenth-Century Scotland

H. B. de Groot teaches at the University of Toronto. He has published a number of essays on Scottish literature in Studies in Hogg and his World and elsewhere.