Confessions of a Justified Sinner Read Online Free Page B

through his body twice,’ but examination reveals only one fatal wound; Wringhim sees his mother’s body being carried to the house, but in the traditional account she is lost without trace.’
    John Wain’s edition, for Penguin Classics (1983), contains no bibliography, but there is instead a glossary of Scottish words and phrases, gleaned from the
Scottish National Dictionary.
In his notes, Professor Wain discusses many of the biblical terms to be found in Hogg: Belial, Canaanitish, Moabite, Melchizedek, etc.; and in his preface he concentrates on the political background to Hogg’s novel, giving the work a profound historical context. The mob violence, for example, relates closely to contemporary fears of revolution. During the parliamentary session of 1703, there was a dangerous division between the Jacobites, supporters of the Stuart Crown (and descendants of executed Charles I) and the Government Party, which wanted to introduce the English Act of Occasional Conformity, i.e. allegiance to the Protestant Hanoverian succession. Interestingly, the man framed for George’s murder, Thomas Drummond, really was the second son of the Duke of Melfort — a nobleman who’d gone into exile with James II to St Germain-en-Laye.
    Other complete works of Hogg’s are long out of print and the largest gathering,
The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd
, edited by T. Thomson in 1865, follows the corrupt 1837 text for the
Confessions.
We must thus currently rely on Judy Steel’s collection,
A Shepherd’s Delight: A James Hogg Anthology
(1985), for a flavour of the author’s poems, stories and plays. (‘The Poachers’ and ‘The Witches of Traquair’ are reprinted here.) Some of his letters are printed in
James Hogg at Home
by Norah Parr (1980) and his autobiographical writings have been edited by D. S. Mack, President of the James Hogg Society, as
Memoir of the Author’s Life
(1972).
    Regarding critical studies, there is E. C. Bathos’s
The Ettrick Shepherd
(1927), D. Craig’s
Scottish Literature and the Scottish People
(1961), L. Simpson’s
James Hogg: A Critical Study
(1962) and
James Hogg
by D. Gifford (1976). There is a concise account of the novel in Walter Allen’s
The English Novel
(1954), where it is described as ‘an astonishing self-exposure of religious aberration and delusion … a psychological document compared with which Stevenson’s
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
is a crude morality’.
    As to additional, concomitant surveys: the best account of witchcraft and its many ramifications is Sir Keith Thomas’s
Religion and the Decline of Magic
(1971); the atmospherics of Romanticism are to be found in
The Portable Coleridge
, edited by I. A. Richards (1950, copyright renewed 1978), and in entries by Addison, Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Leigh Hunt in
A Book of English Essays
, edited by W. E. Williams (1942); the points raised in the foregoing preface of Hamlet’s relationship with Robert Wringhim Colwan may be checked against essays and remarks on Shakespeare’s play by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers collected in
Hamlet: A Casebook
, edited by John Jump (1968). Ideas about Edmund Kean and profiles of similar personalities may be found in
On Actors and the Art of Acting
by George Henry Lewes (1875, reprinted in recent times by the Grove Press, New York). A discussion of the overlaps between acting and madness is also to be located in the present editor’s
Stage People
(1989). Alexander Mackendrick and Ealing films are dealt with extensively by Philip Kemp in his
Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick
(1991). Anthony Burgess’s autobiography comprises two volumes,
Little Wilson and Big God
(1987) and
You’ve Had Your Time
(1990).

CHRONOLOGY
             
    Please note: Text is repeated below at a larger size.

DATE
AUTHOR’S LIFE
1770  
James Hogg born at Ettrickhall Farm, near Selkirk, and baptised on 9 December.
1777  
Hogg’s only few months of schooling.
1794  
First