James Hogg (ca. 1770–1835)

During Hoggʼs visit to London, the circle of Scottish literati who were established in the city had already grown alarmed over the probable state of Cochraneʼs solvency, so Hoggʼs friends attempted to raise funds for the writer. Hogg refused charity, but he consented to a scheme for publication by subscription of a new deluxe edition of The Queenʼs Wake (1813–19), the poem that had first established his reputation. To this effort, John James Ruskin subscribed generously with a donation of £20, asking Hogg in a letter of 8 February 1832 for the honor of being the first subscriber (Hughes, James Hogg, 251–52, 266; Hughes, ed., The Collected Letters: Volume 3, 1832–1835, 32 n.).

Surely the symbolism was not lost on John James that he dated his donation on his sonʼs thirteenth birthday. Likely he not only saw himself as making an investment in modern Caledonian poetry on Johnʼs behalf; he probably fondly hoped he was investing in Johnʼs own future as a poet. Moreover, the projected form of the book, a deluxe edition of an established modern classic, reflected the success of another illustrated edition of modern poetry, which Ruskin is believed to have received on that same thirteenth birthday—the 1830 edition of Italy by Samuel Rogersʼs (1763–1855), which was illustrated by J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Stothard, and others. With his assertively generous donation, John James was taking as direct a part as he could in a distinctly contemporary mode of book production aimed at politely learned middle‐class consumers like himself. Ultimately, the hapless venture of the deluxe Queenʼs Wake gift book proved a stark contrast with the best‐seller status of Rogersʼs illustrated Italy and his 1834 collected Poems, also illustrated by Turner. The setback of Hoggʼs fortunes did not dampen John Jamesʼs ambitions, however, for he bided his time to follow up on his claim on Hoggʼs gratitude. (For a definition of the Victorian gift book see Annuals and Other Illustrated Books: Gift Books; and for the question of when Ruskin was presented with a copy of Italy, see Samuel Rogers (1763–1855): Ruskinʼs Introduction to Rogers.)

Meantime, Hogg replied to John James that he felt “queer” accepting such a generous donation but admitted to his pressing financial need. The gift emboldened Hogg to write to John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), the influential editor and the son‐in‐law of Walter Scott, nudging him with ideas for the gift book. (The impetus for the deluxe Queenʼs Wake was formally led by the prestigious publishing firm headed by another Scot, John Murray, for whom Lockhart worked as the editor of the Quarterly Review.) Cannily, Hogg insinuated terms for the book, which, he wrote, “should be a work something like The Keepsake with fewer ornaments yet so as to make it a drawing‐room book” (Hughes, ed., The Collected Letters: Volume 3, 1832–1835, 32, 33). Hoggʼs description shows that he wanted to take advantage of the fashion for literary annuals, but by specifying “fewer ornaments” he perhaps meant that the publication would appear less feminine, as annuals were perceived to be intended for the ladyʼs boudoir, rather than for the “drawing‐room”. Hoggʼs citing the Keepsake as an example may refer to its distinctively feminine ornament of a silk cover for the boards, which set a fashion for other annualsʼ covers; he may also have been strategically hinting at the Keepsakeʼs reputation as the costliest and most elegant of the many annuals crowding the market, and as the most lucrative for authors, having paid Walter Scott £500 for only two slight contributions (see Hunnisett, Steel‐Engraved Book Illustration in England, 142–43; Harris, “Feminizing the Textual Body”, 604, 575–76; and Annuals and Other Illustrated Books: The Gift Book).

As a potential illustrator for the deluxe edition, Hogg dropped the name of the popular artist, John Martin (1789–1854), whom Hogg met personally during his London visit, having encountered and admired the artistʼs work in the annuals and in the mezzotints that disseminated Martinʼs apocalyptic fantasies. Hogg may have admired the plate that Martin was commissioned to design and engrave to illustrate a poem by his friend and editor, Thomas Pringle, for the 1829 Friendshipʼs Offering, a volume to which Hogg himself contributed. Hogg also mentioned to Lockhart “some others who would do [an illustration] for me con amore” (Hughes, ed., The Collected Letters: Volume 3, 1832–1835, 33, 7; and see Friendshipʼs Offering: Illustration in the Smith, Elder Annual). Hogg appreciated the visual arts, and througout his London visit, he sought opportunities to view exhibitions and converse with artists (Hughes, “Hogg, Art, and the Annuals”, xliv).

Additional subscription funds were collected and eventually sent to Hogg, while Martin did create and exhibit a watercolor drawing based on the tale of Kilmeny, which forms part of the bardsʼ competition in The Queenʼs Wake; however, the planned book ultimately went the way of Hoggʼs other disappointments resulting from his London venture, and the deluxe edition was never published (OʼHalloran, “Illustrations to The Queenʼs Wake”, c–civ). Meanwhile, months later in 1832, John James Ruskin would add his name to another list for publication by subscription—this time for the Facsimiles of Sketches in Flanders and Germany (1833) by Samuel Prout (1783–1852) (Lockett, Samuel Prout, 74). This publication did come to fruition, and John James was doubtless flattered to be listed among subscribers who included members of the aristocracy, well‐known artists, and other successful professional men. Earlier in the year, he must have been equally proud to lead the way among prosperous Scottish London merchants in supporting Hoggʼs book, an elegant expression of modern Caledonian poetry. Nonetheless, while Proutʼs book proved auspicious in helping Ruskin to envision his own place in the British print production of art and poetry in the 1830s (see Account of a Tour on the Continent), the example of Hoggʼs ill‐fated Queenʼs Wake subscription edition must have worked in part as a cautionary tale. The fading away of the deluxe Queenʼs Wake, along with the compromised plans for the Altrive Tales edition, posed an inverse complement to Thomas Macaulayʼs encomium to the 1830 illustrated Italy, which, were it “dug up in some Pompeii or Herculaneum two thousand years hence”, Macaulay enthused, “would give to posterity a higher idea of the state of the arts amongst us than anything else which lay in an equally small compass” (quoted in Rogers, The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, 111).

One year lapsed before John James followed up on this remembrance with a letter of 22 January 1834, in which the father evasively explains to Hogg that Alexander Elder had “long since . . . favoured” him “with a sight of part” of the January 1833 letter commending his son, but that meanwhile “sundry hints from our wife, and niece, and son” had been urging reply, since “all indulge in periodical remembrances of the delight your only too short visit offered them” (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 273–74). What John James suggests only indirectly is that he was now prompted to confide in Hogg concerning Johnʼs “precocity of talent”, which Hogg held in high regard despite his reservations about precocity as such.

In his letter, John James says that he has ventured to write because Hogg is a man “of talent and of heart”, whereas “the world at large”, lacks “comprehen[sion] . . . patience . . . feeling . . . delicacy”, and John James dares not entrust others with his “weaknesses, because” he is “not yet willing to be laughed out of them”. Namely, John James declares, “the youth you were kind enough to notice”, his son John, “gives promise of very considerable talent. His faculty of composition is unbounded”. The composition that has finally persuaded John James to bring Johnʼs talent to Hoggʼs attention is Account of a Tour on the Continent. “Last summer”, John James explains, “we spent four months in Switzerland and Italy, of which tour every scene is sketched in verse or prose, or picture” in the “Account”. While he demures over a lack of “any very strong indication of originality” in the writing, John James marvels at his sonʼs “rapidity of composition” and prolific production of “thosands of lines”. John James included as a sample Johnʼs latest “80 or 100 lines” (unidentified), which the boy “produced in one hour, while he waited for me in the city” (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 274).

Perhaps abashed by Hoggʼs expression of distaste for precocity, John James hastens to assure Hogg that he and Margaret are not “fostering a poetical plant or genius” in order to be able “to say we keep a poet. It is impossible for any parents to make less of a gift than we do of this, firstly, from its small intrinsic value, as yet unsuspected in him; and next, because we dread the sacrifice of our offspring by making him a victim to the pangs of despised verse, a sacrifice to a thankless world, who read, admire, and trample on the greatest and the best” (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 274–75). Here John James appears to evoke the mythology surrounding Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), the perished boy poet. While suggestive more of rhetorical flourish than of credible anxiety, the allusion links John Ruskin as an emerging poet to James Hogg as an established poet “of talent and of heart”, who has nonetheless reaped misfortune and abuse along with his fame. At the end of his letter, John James commiserates with the poet for having to retreat from the glare of London with his health compromised, his lifeʼs work having fallen victim to an insecure publishing scheme. “I should like to see your works coming forward in better hands”, John James concludes, referring to the debacle of Cochraneʼs bankruptcy. “You began your memoir so well” (i.e., the first volume of the Altrive Tales, containing Hoggʼs “Memoir of the Authorʼs Life”), “that I feel quite enraged at the stupid bookseller for breaking at such a crisis” (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 275).

Thus, John James implies, his apprehensions of Johnʼs writing being insulted by a “thankless world” at the outset of his sonʼs career are justified by his witness of Hoggʼs crowning achievement being thwarted at the end of a successful career. As Robert Patten remarks about Charles Dickens in the 1830s, who was starting to formulate his persona of “Boz”, considerable entrepreneurial resources were required in order for an author to “both fuel and stand up to capitalist material and cultural production during the heyday of British industrialism” (Patten, Charles Dickens and “Boz”, 19). Ruskinʼs achievement in Account of a Tour on the Continent, which he was presently composing, and to which his father referred as evidence of serious poetic ability, would shortly lead to Ruskinʼs first significant commission for publication, using the persona of J.R.—the poem “Saltzburg”, composed to accompany an engraving of that title in the annual, Friendshipʼs Offering . . . for MDCCCXXXV, published in November 1834. By the time John James wrote to Hogg in January 1834, the Ruskins may already have been approached by Thomas Pringle, as editor of Friendshipʼs Offering, with the commission for this poem, and John James may have looked to Hogg for guidance as a previous contributor to this annual—and yet as one whose deluxe Queenʼs Wake, planned on the splendid pattern of the annuals, with the expenses partly underwritten by John James himself, had proved a nonstarter.

It may have been at about this time, too, that Pringle introduced the young Ruskin as a prodigy to another great man, Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), who by comparison with Hogg presented an almost opposite example of urbanity and success in the new illustrated literary publishing of the 1830s. Yet this exemplar of literary and worldly success must have seemed forbidding in his own way, a “man of taste” in his London “palace of art”, with the power to make or break careers. In John Jamesʼs appeal to Hogg as a writer “of talent and of heart”, the father may have sought a refuge not only from “the world at large”, which lacks “comprehen[sion] . . . patience . . . feeling . . . delicacy”, but specifically from the notoriously acid wit of the poet of 22 St. James Place.

In a striking contrast with Rogers, who received Ruskin for a stately visit of a few hours to his temple of taste, with its view of the fashionable metropolitan Green Park, Hogg invited the boy for an extended stay at his Altrive farm in Yarrow. The invitation was not unique, Hogg having made such an offer also to the young daughter of his publisher, James Cochrane. Hogg loved children and wielded great charm over them, and he appears to have thought of such visits as invigorating holidays for country‐starved city children in the company of his own “noisy romping healthy brats but good learners” (Hughes, James Hogg, 244, 264). On 13 February 1834, John wrote to decline Hoggʼs invitation, explaining that he could not “make up [his] mind to leave [his] parents even for a short time” until he went to university, and that his parents were “equally tenacious” of him. Writing of what might have been, however, Ruskin summons an idyllic myth that frames the nurturing of the emergent writer in a georgic or pastoral setting, like the landscape surrounding Hoggʼs “Minstrel Boy”. Such mythology probably underwrote John Jamesʼs motives in appealing to the Ettrick Shepherd as a man of “heart” as well as talent.

As Ruskin wrote nostalgically to Hogg about “the blue hills” of Scotland, among which he had “passed some of the happiest days of [his] short life”, he was doubtless thinking of visits to his fatherʼs family in Perth during the Tours of 1822–25 and Tours of 1826–27, prior to the death of his aunt, Janet (“Jessie”) Richardson (1783–1828), which interrupted the Tour of 1828. These times in the “North Countrie” were “exceedingly pleasant”, but “can never more return” to him, Ruskin explains to Hogg as if already well traveled in the paths of sentiment; and having framed this ballad‐like yearning, he goes on to imagine sojourning in the Border country, “the braes of Yarrow, and the banks of Tweed”, in the company of Hoggʼs bairns somewhat in the fantastic manner of one of Hoggʼs supernatural tales, in which a youth wakes among the fairies, as in Kilmeny: it would “be more than [he] can well tell of pleasure” to be able to to wander among the holmes and hills of lovely Ettrick with” the Ettrick Shepherd, “to whom they and Scotland owe much, very much of their celebrity, and to find brothers in his children (for if the children have the loving‐kindness of the father they would be sisters and brothers to me)” (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 276–77).

Ruskin closes by replying to Hoggʼs critique of his verse (apparently lost, along with Hoggʼs invitation to Ruskin to stay at Altrive, which was probably contained in the same letter). Hoggʼs “examination of [his] very worthless rhymes”, as Ruskin puts it, must have been based on the “80 or 100 lines” that John James had sent as a sample—lines therefore written in January 1834 or somewhat earlier, it appears, and possibly intended for Account of a Tour on the Continent. Hogg remarks on Ruskinʼs imitativeness of verse by Walter Scott (1771–1832) and George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). This opinion was shared, Hogg must have said, by a “Mr. Marshall”, who is unidentified, but who was probably Charles Marshall, Hoggʼs amanuensis and tutor for his children, a young man who had taken up residence at Altrive toward the end of 1833 (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 277, and see 296–307 for Marshallʼs recollections of Hogg; see also Hughes, introduction to Hogg, Letters, 1832–1835, 224, 263).