P. M. Davies)

Burgess’s own books contain much on medicine and disease. The Doctor is Sick deals with the fantasy of a patient dying from a brain tumour. The infernal underworld where he believes he is heading is blended with the criminal underworld of a Dickensian London; or Honey for the Bears about losing one’s identity in the madhouse of Soviet Russia; or Nothing Like the Sun, where Shakespeare is in the tertiary phase of syphillis; or his many adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac, with its hero emotionally crippled by a huge nose … There are many more. The whole lot could be seen as prefigured in Hogg’s interests. Like the historical Hogg, Burgess’s fictional characters demonstrate the insecurities of men educated out of their social class — men who have too much brain, who are never satisfied or safe, and who have nothing to protect themselves with except language. It will have to be left to other commentators comprehensively to elucidate Burgess’s obsession with doubles — good and evil, creativity and poetasting — and to discuss the rift between his origins and what he has made of himself, as sketched in his volumes of memoirs, which he subtitles his Confessions. And who is going to examine the way the celebrity on the Côte d’Azur, with his villa on Malta and chalet in Switzerland, is related to the half-Scottish Manchester Catholic schoolmaster, born John Wilson, the very same name as James Hogg’s friend (1785-1854), the metaphysician and editor?

Roger Lewis

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was first published, anonymously, by Longmans in June 1824 and reissued in 1837 as The Private Memoirs of a Fanatic, heavily edited by D. O. Hill, who removed all the Calvinistic satire and references to the devil. An edition by Shiells & Co. in 1895, called The Suicide’s Grave, Being the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, returned to the 1824 original, but introduced many new misprints and slips. The 1824 text was also used for an edition of Hogg in the Campion Reprints Series (1924) and by the Cresset Press (1947), where the book was introduced by André Gide, who said Robert’s behaviour ‘is the exteriorized development of our own desires, of our pride, of our most secret thoughts’.

There are two other modern texts available, both following that of 1824. John Carey’s, for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics Series (1969), contains a detailed bibliography, pinpointing the discrepancies between editions, and exacting explanatory notes on such items as the Covenanters, the Scottish legal system and Episcopalian dress. He also informs us that a grey stone slab may be found at the top of Fell Law mountain, at the exact spot where Hogg places Robert’s desecrated tomb. In his preface, Professor Carey usefully investigates the so-called factual nature of the Editor’s Narrative — and discovers considerable indecisiveness: ‘the old laird marries after succeeding to Dalcastle in 1687, but his second son is seventeen on 25 March 1704; Colwans and Wringhims go to Edinburgh in 1704 to attend a session of parliament that took place in 1703; Mrs Calvert sees Drummond’s claymore glittering in the moon, and the surgeons testify that this sword fits George’s wound, whereas Wringhim, by his own and Mrs Calvert’s account carried a rapier; George’s body is found on a ‘little washing green,’ but Mrs Calvert remembers it as ‘not a very small one’; she thinks she sees him ‘pierced 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.