Hogg, James, also called the Ettrick Shepherd 1770-1835
Scottish poet and novelist

He was born on Ettrickhall Farm in the Ettrick Forest, Selkirkshire. He inherited a rich store of oral ballads from his mother, and in 1790 became shepherd to William Laidlaw, who encouraged him to write. He published The Mountain Bard in 1803, and on the proceeds of it dabbled unsuccessfully in farming then eventually settled in Edinburgh. A volume of poems, The Queen's Wake (1813), gained him cordial recognition, and a bequest of a farm at Altrive Lake (now Edinhope) enabled him to marry in 1820 and turn his attention to writing. A regular contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, and the 'Ettrick Shepherd' of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae, he described himself as 'the King of the Mountain and Fairy School'. His poems of the supernatural are at their best when he avoids Gothic elaboration and relies on the suggestive understatement of the ballad style, as in 'Kilmeny'. 'The Aged Widow's Lament' shows the influence of the Scottish vernacular tradition, and his debt to Robert Burns is apparent in the riotous 'Village of Balmaquhapple'. Of Hogg's prose works, the most remarkable is Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), a macabre novel which anticipates Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In 1834 he published his Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott, against the wishes of Scott's family.

Bibliography: A Strout, James Hogg: a biography (1946)