James Hogg and the Literary Persona

Question 1

When was James Hogg’s ‘Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ published?

Answer 1

1824

Question 2

What does Meike O’Halloran say about Hogg’s works and the marketplace?

Answer 2

‘Each of his works can be thought of as presenting readers with a microcosm of the literary marketplace – a kind of bookshop within a single book’

Question 3

What does Angela Esterhammer say about eighteenth-century celebrity?

Answer 3

‘the Romantic celebrity was a product of material culture, the circulation of print, and an ever-expanding reading public’

Question 4

What does Hogg say in an essay ‘On the Changes in the Habits, Amusements and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry’ (1832) about the effect of literature on rural culture?

Answer 4

The publication of Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ in 1802 was ‘a deadening blow… inflicted on our rural culture’, which had ‘floated down on the stream of oral tradition, from generation to generation’

Question 5

What does Leigh Hunt say on ‘On Periodical Essays’ (1808) about the identity of the essayist compared to the book author?

Answer 5

The essayist’s ‘acquaintance is likely to be longer lasting, because it is more gradual’, whereas ‘the author of a book is fixed upon you forever’

Question 6

How does Leigh Hunt refer to his literary voice in ‘I and We’ (1824)?

Answer 6

‘I am very much hampered with this ‘I’ of mine’

Question 7

What does the editor say after Wringhim’s narrative ends in ‘Private Memoirs’?

Answer 7

‘What can this work be? Sure, you will say, it must be an allegory; or, as the writer calls it, a religious PARABLE’

Question 8

What is a quote about the Protean identity of Gil-Martin in ‘Private Memoirs’, applicable to that of Hogg’s narrator??

Answer 8

‘by setting his features to the mould of other people’s, he at once entered into their conceptions and feelings’

Question 9

When did ‘A Scots Mummy’ appear in Blackwood’s magazine?

Answer 9

August 1823

Question 10

What does Leigh Hunt say about the demands of form on his literary voice in ‘I and We’?

Answer 10

‘It is the biographical gossip into which I have been led in this paper, which first made me adopt the first person singular’

Question 11

When was ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ first published?

Answer 11

1821

Question 12

Which publication was ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ published in?

Answer 12

The London Magazine

Question 13

When was ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ published?

Answer 13

1845

Question 14

What does De Quincey say in the preliminary confessions, which shows a fluid approach to genre?

Answer 14

‘the reader will find that the opium-eater boasteth himself a philosopher’

Question 15

What tongue-in-cheek role does Leigh Hunt speak of in ‘A Day by the Fire’ (1811)?

Answer 15

‘The Firesider’

Question 16

What title was the ‘Private Memoirs’ given in the 1828 edition, which may show Hogg’s attempt to focus on his literary identity?

Answer 16

‘The Suicide’s Grace’

Question 17

What did John Clare note in an unpublished autobiographical fragment about visiting London for the first time c.1828?

Answer 17

‘I coud almost fancy that my identity as well as my occupations had changd that I was not the same John Clare but that some stranger soul had jumpd into my skin’

Question 18

What does Mark Schoenfield note about the periodical in terms of voice?

Answer 18

It engenders a ‘collective voice’ that is also that of a ‘corporate identity’

Question 19

What does Hogg say in his ‘Memoirs of the Author’s Life’ (1834)?

Answer 19

‘I like to write about myself’

Question 20

When were the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ first published?

Answer 20

1822

Question 21

When did Hogg publish his ‘Noctes Benegerianae’ and where?

Answer 21

1828, the Edinburgh Literary Journal

Question 22

What does Lord Archbald say to Hogg in the first ‘Noctes Benegerianae’ that reeks of class consciousness?

Answer 22

‘I am ten times a greater man than you, for I too am an author, and grandson to a lord’

Question 23

What does the editor say in ‘Private Memoirs’ that testifies to the legitimising power of print?

Answer 23

‘the following extract from an authentic letter, published in Blackwoods’ Magazine for August, 1823’

Question 24

What does Hogg complain of in his ‘Memoirs’?

Answer 24

Editors ‘never read the works themselves, but give them to their minions’

Question 25

What anachronistic term does Jacqueline George apply to the Ettrick Shepherd?

Answer 25

textual ‘avatar’

Question 26

When were Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ published in English?

Answer 26

1790

Question 27

Who proposes a reading of ‘Private Memoirs’ as an allegory for Hogg’s relationship with Blackwoods?

Answer 27

Cates Baldridge

Question 28

What does Christopher North (John Wilson) say about John Clare’s celebrity in his review of ‘The Rural Muse’?

Answer 28

‘he earned that title [of the Northamptonshire Peasant] which, to our ears, has almost as pleasant a sound as that of the Ettrick Shepherd.’