Four Tales [antikvár]

FOUR TALESJAMES HOGGJames Hogg (1770-1835), was born on his father's farm in the Ettrick Forest near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders. He left school for farm work at the age of seven and became a shepherd in his teens. Steeped in the oral tradition and encouraged by one of his employers, he determined to be a poet like Burns. He became friends with Walter Scott when the latter's interest in collecting old ballads led him to Hogg's mother. Hogg's various ventures into farming did not succeed. In 1810 he went to Edinburgh to seek a literary career. Success finally came in 1813 with The Queen's Wake. In his Poetic Mirror (1816), Hogg satirised Wordsworth, Byron, Scott and other contemporary poets.Hogg's first novels The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818) and The Three Perils of Man (1822), drew on the folk tradition, but they also have a unique imaginative energy which was never fully appreciated or understood by the more genteel arbiters of taste in Edinburgh. The Three Perils of Woman (1823) was not well received and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner made equally little impact when it first appeared (anonymously) in 1824.