SOURCE: Schoenfield, Mark L. “Butchering James Hogg: Romantic Identity in the Magazine Market.” In At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, edited by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson, pp. 207-24. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Schoenfield uses the example of Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and his relationship to Blackwood's Magazine to probe the social component of authorial identity in the early nineteenth century.]

[Hogg:] Were you the author of the article alluded to in my paper which places you at the head and me at the tail … of all the poets in Britain?

[Scott:] What right had you sir to suppose that I was the author of it?

[Hogg:] Nay what right had you to suppose that you were the author of it? The truth is that when I wrote the remarks I neither knew nor cared who was the author of the article [I] alluded to. … But if the feather suits your cap you are perfectly welcome to it.

[Scott:] Very well Hogg, that is spoken like a man and like yourself. I am satisfied.

Referring to at least three articles and invoking a body of British literature self-consciously bounded by Scottish talent, this exchange between James Hogg and Walter Scott, recorded in Hogg's Familiar Anecdotes (103), displays the entanglement of identity and authorship in periodical publication during the romantic period. Hogg's witticism—“what right had you to suppose that you were the author of it?”—acknowledges that authorship arises not merely by the writing of a work but by its deployment, circulation, reviews, and allusions. To speak “like a man and like [him]self,” and to have Scott say so, achieves a triumph of self-identity for Hogg. The incident ends with Scott declaring, with a touch of his native legalese, that he is “satisfied”; Scott's authorization affirms Hogg's identity by guaranteeing consistency of style both in the particular (Hogg) and in a class (man). Hogg replays this exchange in various guises throughout the Anecdotes: a misidentification creates a confusion, Hogg asserts himself, and Scott adjudicates. The repetition of this scene underscores Hogg's anxiety about, and rhetorical manipulation of, his identity within a profession for which he played both ventriloquist and dummy and in which his very name was asset and liability as reviewers butchered him with porcine puns.

In contrast to the contemporaries who have emerged as the dominant romantic voices, Hogg acknowledged the self as a function of professional contingencies and accidents. William Wordsworth portrays his career in the unifying architectural metaphor of a gothic church, with his unpublished autobiographical poem as the ante-chapel,¹ and Byron interweaves his poetry with the stabilizing (if fragile) sovereignty of his lordship through complex networks of autobiographical reference.² Both of these models propose a coherent inner self, or at least a self accountable for its own instabilities, and obscure the point that this self is a mediated public figuration. James Hogg's career, however, repeatedly emphasizes this figuration, even as he resists it. In each edition of his Memoir, Hogg listed and numbered his publications. Reviewers, however, routinely suspected the attributions, suppressions, and uniqueness of this curriculum vitae;³ in subsequent editions of the autobiography Hogg would then present evidence for the accuracy of his list. This textual flux suggests that the inward motion of romantic writers to establish an identity is accompanied by an outward, often concealed, passive, or defensive engagement with critics who had the institutional power to define literary identities.

In this essay, I continue the critical tradition of using James Hogg for my own ends, this time to focus on how his identity is constituted through a knot of textual interrelations. I neither cut nor untangle this Gordian knot, but tease out threads to argue the general proposition that the boundaries producing the notion of identity that Wordsworth and Byron exploited are not personal but institutional and always entail social agendas. The texts I will excerpt come from Hogg's curriculum vitae and from its primary review board, Blackwood's Magazine. Hogg published his Memoirs of the Author's Life in 1806 and 1821; in the intervening years, he had established his credentials in both poetry and prose and had published a journal, The Spy (1810-1811), as well as the pseudonymous Poetic Mirror (1816). In 1817, he wrote the Chaldee Manuscript, which, published anonymously, established the reputation of Blackwood's Magazine. Starting in 1819, John Wilson and John Lockhart, editors at Blackwood's, developed fictitious dialogues and adventures in which “Hogg” figured; these articles were the prototype for the regular feature of Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of dialogues in which “Hogg” appears, that ran from 1822 to 1835, the year of Hogg's death.⁴ In response to Hogg's 1821 Memoir, Blackwood's published a devastating review (as well as a disclaimer and rebuttal). In subsequent years, Hogg covertly replied to that review with the publication of a short letter, “A Scot's Mummy,” and, more substantially, with the anonymous Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). These efforts were followed by a reissue of the Memoirs in 1832, and the Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott in 1834. The publication of the Confessions especially generated reviews by several other magazines which referred, in turn, to Blackwood's. In this swirl of intertextuality, subjectivity is not only mirrored by its forms of representation but constituted by them.

TO MARKET, TO MARKET

Two boundaries delineate the self for the late eighteenth century. The divide between the body and the external world limits the self in the present; and the distinction between memory and imagination separates the past from phantasms of uncertainty and madness. Yet, as David Hume argued, these distinctions are conventional and tentative. Samuel Johnson declared Berkelean idealism—which he thought threatened the boundary of self—refuted when he kicked a stone on his way out of church (Boswell, 333); in Boswell's Life of Johnson, however, the incident exists only as a sequence of Humean perceptions more illustrative of Boswell's “Johnson”'s personality than any epistemological proposition.⁵ The narration (or invention) of the event enmeshes Johnson and his anti-philosopher's stone in a dilemma of textual identity: how can (re)iterations of the incident—through editions, readings, paraphrases, and plagiarisms—maintain a self; and yet, without such reproductions which serve as cultural memory, in what sense does the incident exist? Although this question of dependency echoes the critique of writing by Plato's Socrates in Phaedrus and anticipates the hijinks of selfhood in Fowles's The Magus and other post-Freudian works, in the romantic period the problem derived a specific shape from a burgeoning periodical industry. Journalists and journals seized upon the possibilities implicit within an epistemological crisis which revealed a “self” created within a matrix of consumption and production.⁶

For many romantic writers, identity became vexed upon entering (or imagining entering) the literary marketplace, at the moment of glimpsing a literary double. “Who am I,” the questioning might run, “once a publisher, a journal, a series of reviews incorporate my labor? At what risk am I from the mediating persons and institutions? Does a double confirm the self, deny it, supplant it?” As early as 1794, when he considered producing a periodical, Wordsworth voiced contempt for magazines which echoed one another in a swirl of institutional solipsism.⁷ Wordsworth strategically integrated that contempt into a poetics which, in the Prelude, must transcend those “master pamphlets” organizing the ideology of the French Revolution debate. By contrast, in letters to potential publishers, Thomas De Quincey vows to convert his life experience into capital through the medium of print. His Confessions of an English Opium-Eater weaves this transformation as De Quincey seizes the advantage of what Coleridge warns against, turning oneself into “merely a man of letters” (Biographia I:229).⁸

Kenneth Simpson has suggested that eighteenth-century Scottish writers were “particularly prone to adapt personae and project self-images,” a tendency which “may well reflect a crisis of Scottish identity in the century after the Union” (Protean Scot, ix). A refiguration of that crisis emerged in the early nineteenth century as Edinburgh attempted to establish itself as a center of British, and European, culture and trade. Journals like Blackwood's Magazine and the Edinburgh Review presented themselves as distinctly Scottish, but expanded the Scottish empiricist tradition—spearheaded in the previous century by David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith—into a general theory of British nationalism.⁹ These tensions animate the representation of identity in periodicals; their pitfalls and possibilities shape the career of James Hogg and his best-known work, Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

In his 1821 autobiography Memoirs of the Author's Life, Hogg describes coming under the influence of the publisher James Robertson. Daily, they “drank whiskey and ate rolls with a number of printers, [so that] I was at times so dizzy, I could scarcely walk; and the worst thing of all was, I felt that I was beginning to relish it. … [I]nstead of pushing myself forward, as I wished, I was going straight to the devil” (20). Hogg saves himself by changing publishers, and deploys Robertson's name in his 1824 novel, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, when the “Justified Sinner” is reborn “Robert's son” through a series of linguistic transformations.¹⁰

First, the Editor describes Old Wringhim's nights with Rabina, Young Wringhim's mother, as a series of theological debates, laced with sexual innuendo:

[I]t was their custom, on each visit, to sit up a night in the same apartment, for the sake of sweet spiritual converse; but that time, in the course of the night, they differed so materially on a small point … that the minister, in the heat of his zeal, sprung from his seat, paced the floor, and maintained his point with such ardor, that Martha [the maid in the other room] was alarmed. …

(42)

The pun on “converse,” at once a symmetrical exchange of words and an asymmetrical transfer of semen, establishes a flux, continual throughout the novel, between the production of words and the procreation of mirroring, second selves. Yet identity, within patriarchy, is given not by bodily conception or birth but by the acquisition of a name. Old Wringhim “baptize[s] him by the name Robert Wringhim,—that being the noted divine's own name” (43). The phrase following the dash adds no new information but emphasizes the production of young Wringhim's linguistic continuity.

Struggling to establish his independence, Young Wringhim derides his mother's feeble theological understanding (and, therefore, unknowingly queries the “converse” of his own conception). Old Barnet, who overhears Young Wringhim's diatribe, worries that the lad will “turn out to be a conceited gowk”:

“No,” said my pastor, and father, (as I shall henceforth denominate him,) “No, Barnet, he is a wonderful boy; and no marvel, for I have prayed for these talents to be bestowed on him from his infancy; and do you think that Heaven would refuse a prayer so disinterested?”

(111)

The son denominates—names—the father and becomes himself (“a wonderful boy”), and his father's double, in the gesture. Old Wringhim's “prayers” are the linguistic equivalent of genetic determinism, empowered by the empiricist guarantor of objectivity, disinterest. Finally, like Hogg, the adult Wringhim arrives in Edinburgh to discover himself in the power of a publisher: Gil-Martin. As the novel develops, both Old Wringhim and Gil-Martin in effect publish Young Wringhim, by circulating his name and his likeness respectively. In the gap between these two stories, Hogg's escaping Robertson and Wringhim succumbing to Old Wringhim and then Gil-Martin, we glimpse the conflict of identity that inheres in the hierarchical structure of the publishing industry. Robert Wringhim's name points not only to illegitimacy within the novel (he is, after all, a bastard) but also to the problem of legible identity within Hogg's career. Hogg's novel figures this problem as a negotiation between an editor (who mirrors not only Wringhim but his denominated father and “printer's devil,” Gil-Martin) and a self whose existence is implicated in works extending beyond the novel itself.

The Confessions was published anonymously, and in the coda the “Editor” explains how he came upon the manuscript that comprises the second part of the novel. Quoting the “Scots Mummy” letter, planted in Blackwood's Magazine the year before the novel's publication, he says that the manuscript “bears the stamp of authenticity in every line; yet, so often had I been hoaxed by the ingenious fancies displayed in that Magazine, that when this relation met my eye, I did not believe it” (234). This comment about the magazine, whose treatment of Confessions would most influence its reception, prepares to nullify a bad review. As Redekop points out, “Hogg has his editor interpolate this ‘authentic’ [and authenticating] letter at the end of the novel and embark on a search for [the mummy's] grave, taking the August issue of Blackwood's with him as a treasure hunter might take a map” (“Beyond Closure,” 160). In this extratextual encounter, a reader is invited to position the novel within the wider framework of material print production.

Hogg dissolves the margins of his fiction by marshaling procedures usually about a novel, including its typesetting, advertisement, and review, as part of the novel. For example, the Editor had wished to title the volume “Confessions of a Self-Justified Sinner,” but was prevented by his book-seller. Slipping the bounds of the novel, Longman's advertising list nevertheless offers the editor's title: Self-Justified Sinner. That document, like Blackwood's Magazine, becomes part of the fiction within the novel, despite being actually outside it. This strategy, literally a disappearing/reappearing “self,” raises doubts not only about Hogg's fictional editor but about the editorial role within publishing. The construction of a literary self was a corporate effort, even if, as Hogg often recognized, the corporation was an unholy alliance of writer(s), publishers, reviewers—anonymous, named, pseudonymous, and mistakenly or purposefully misidentified or unmasked in other publications. And, of course, only some readers would be in on the games.

Less an irony than a testament to the power of literary institutions to stereotype its professional servants, Hogg remains in the public eye the bumpkin Ettrick shepherd of Noctes Ambrosianae, the product of a collaborative dialogue masterminded by John Wilson for Blackwood's Magazine. Reviewing Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hunt's Examiner refers tactically to Noctes:

We gather from [Hogg], that every man is the child of his own creation, and may do or say what he pleases. If he can say as much of himself, well; but let him first pause and consider whether he has not more than once favoured himself with an unintended head-ach after spending the previous evening with Christopher North and Co.?

(483)

The pseudonymous Q challenges Hogg's self-reliance by employing Noctes as a historical representation with a physical trace—a hangover from alcohol or, perhaps, verbal abuse. He asks Hogg to contemplate his own existence, and body, through Christopher North's incorporation (“and Co.”). Q has constructed an analogy in which John Wilson (a.k.a. Christopher North) stands in the same relation to Hogg as Gil-Martin (who, like Wilson, is pseudonymous) does to Robert Wringhim. Wringhim, having fallen under Gil-Martin's control, is given to fits of amnesia during which he may or may not have committed various crimes and indiscretions. Hogg, similarly, could open Blackwood's Magazine to learn he had spent an evening drinking immoderately and bragging about his poetic abilities in a self-defeating doggerel. Q's observation is not original but a belated entry into an array of documents in which Hogg's identity is contested.

Hogg (dis)appears most famously as the caricatured “Ettrick Shepherd” in Noctes Ambrosianae. He could not refute the characterization without playing into it, nor could he ignore it. He sometimes dressed the shepherd's role, sometimes denounced it. He could also impersonate an editor; in the “Advertisement” to The Poetic Mirror, a collection of poems from “the principal living Bards of Britain,” Hogg announces that “after many delays and disappointments, he is at last enabled to give this volume to the public” (145). His authors had not sent their promised contributions, and his editorial solution was, simply, to write them himself. These parodies, including self-parodies, take advantage of the complexity of “self”-representation. In Hogg's aggressive response to his situation (which in turn partly validated Wilson's characterization), he exerts a limited agency within an institution, publishing, that seeks to be determinant but requires the fiction of the transcendent author.

In search of this fleeting authority, Hogg published his autobiographical Memoirs of an Author's Life four times, in conjunction with other literary ventures. Hogg intended these accretive versions to assist his claim to be the heir of Robert Burns in Scottish letters by exploiting his position outside the Edinburgh cartel of professional writers. Blackwood's Magazine replied to the 1821 Memoirs with a “Familiar Epistle,” a vitriolic attack couched in satire. Penned by Wilson, it asserted the primacy of Edinburgh's cultural position against an egotistical intruder. Hogg did not react directly to the “Old Friend's” review—he understood the rhetoric of satire too well for that. In the Confessions of a Justified Sinner, however, he responds to certain specific moments in the letter and, in doing so, enforces the correspondence between the procedures of the “Editor” in the novel, modeled on Wilson, and the “Old Friend,” the pseudonym under which Wilson wrote the “Familiar Epistle.”

SPECULATING IN HOGG FUTURES

In the August 1821 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, the second edition of Hogg's autobiography, Memoirs of the Author's Life, was scrutinized by Wilson in the guise of a correspondent (“an Old Friend with a New Face”) writing a “Familiar Epistle” to Christopher North, Wilson's usual pseudonym. Wilson conceals his own solipsism (as correspondent and recipient, author and editor, writer and reader) while exploiting Hogg's identity through plays on his name:

I take the liberty of sending back Hogg, which has disgusted me more severely than anything I have attempted to swallow since Macvey's Bacon.

Overdone by references to “pickled pork,” “roast pig,” “boar,” and so on, the puns position Hogg as consumable, uncouth, and, I suppose, unkosher. Besides objecting to Hogg's egotism, the Old Friend will not tolerate the proliferation of lives Hogg achieves through his writing:

Besides, how many lives of himself does the swine-herd intend to put forth? I have a sort of life of the man, written by himself about twenty years ago. There are a good many lives of him in the Scots Magazine—a considerable number even in your own work, my good sir—the Clydesdale Miscellany was a perfect stye with him—his grunt is in Waugh—he has a bristle in Baldwin. … This self-exposure is not altogether decent; and if neither Captain Brown nor Mr. Jeffrey will interfere, why I will—so please print this letter.

(43)

The transformation from “shepherd” to “swine-herd” attacks the self-authorship of Hogg tending Hoggs. The dissemination of lives, then, becomes a disintegration (butchering) of self, as body parts haphazardly disperse across periodicals dependant upon regularity of circulation. Although many of Hogg's “self-exposure[s]” are not by Hogg, the menace of indecency and contamination validates the reference to Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review and future Sessions Court Judge. Jeffrey's anonymous work did not obscure his presence but broadened it both across contributors (who complained of work edited beyond recognition) and across other journals that adopted the Edinburgh's standards of professionalism. The seeming erasure of identity by transforming it into an objective voice secures editorial power. The “Old Friend's” regulatory image has been prepared by the militaristic language of his wager to

undertake, in six weeks, to produce six as good poets as he [Hogg] is, from each county in Scotland. … I engage to draw them up two deep. … Lieutenant Juillinan shall be at their head—Mr.——shall officiate as chaplain—and——if he pleases, shall be trumpeter.

The sequence from “Lieutenant Juillinan” to “——” dissolves the authors into editorial anonymity. The phrase “if he pleases” suggests a subjective perspective, but one belied by the (non)denominating “——”; “——” cannot know if he pleases, since he cannot know he is being addressed. Although the “Old Friend's” boast begins by projecting the fantasy of poets running wild through Scotland, they can please, in both senses, only within the ranks of editorial authorization.

As neither judicial Jeffrey nor Brown, captain of the Edinburgh police, take up their duty, the Old Friend will. His own presence (“please print this letter”) relies on the policing function to expose, and decompose, the breeding Hoggs. A public letter by Brown defending his management of the Edinburgh police, and a subsequent vindication by Blackwood's, had recently answered accusations by the Caledonian Mercury, so the reference to Brown both suggests the criminality of Hogg's activity and highlights the press's function of regulating policy by manipulating public opinion. Preserving his own masks, the Old Friend exposes Hogg's—and creates a few new ones to expose. He maintains that Hogg takes credit for the notorious murder of Begbie, an act equated, in daring and elegance, to writing the “Chaldee Manuscript.” Despite Wilson's insinuation that Hogg wrongly claims authorship, Hogg's surviving holograph demonstrates his composition, aided afterward, as he observes, by “a good deal of deevilry” by Wilson and company (Memoirs, 43).

The Old Friend typically addresses North in an argumentative mode: “Come now, Christopher, and be honest with me. Do you believe that there is a man living who can repeat a single line of Hogg's?” (44). This particular jibe is, I think, a joke since Wilson could easily repeat, and invent, Hogg's poetry. After the Old Friend's letter, a note initialed “C. N.” (for Christopher North) justifies the publication of the letter since it will “tickl[e] the public sympathy … and put a few cool hundreds in [Hogg's] pocket” (52). Besides, he adds, “as [Hogg's] autobiography sufficiently proves, his fame can be in no hands more friendly than his own.” Whether Wilson formed an attitude toward Hogg's Memoirs outside his various personae is hard to know, because, finally, the journalistic function of Blackwood's, like the Edinburgh, was not to produce individual opinions but to establish the range of opinions that constituted public aesthetic (or political) thought. In the “Familiar Epistle,” the Old Friend marks one margin, and Christopher North marks the other.

Wilson's hidden division of self reinforces a unified editorial consciousness differentiated from Hogg's wildly proliferating lives, which Wilson links to sexual promiscuity and textual deviance. The Old Friend's letter precedes a long excerpt from Memoirs detailing Hogg's effort to publish The Spy with these remarks:

The author makes love like a drunken servant, who has been turned out of place for taking indecent liberties in the kitchen with the cook-wench. The Edinburgh young ladies did not relish this kind of thing,—it was thought coarse even by the Blue Stockings of the Old Town, after warm whiskey toddy and oysters; so the Spy was executed, the dead body given up to his friends—where buried, remains a secret until this day.¹¹

The model for this execution is Swift's literary assassination of the almanac-making Partridge (the bird as appropriately hunted as the swine slaughtered), and the Old Friend plays on the absurdity of someone as gross as Hogg acting the spy. Conflating work and human being, the Old Friend suggests that the always recognizable Hogg makes an equally unsuitable spy and editor.

Through both the Blue Stockings and Hogg, the Old Friend connects identity to the refinement (through eating) and sublimation of desires, and such sublimation then becomes the operative characteristic of Wringhim's misogyny and Gil-Martin's projection of violence and rape onto Wringhim. While maintaining his innocence based on “the purity of nature and frame to which I was born and consecrated” (177), Wringhim acknowledges:

Here I must confess, that, highly as I disapproved of the love of women, and all intimacies and connections with the sex, I felt a sort of indefinite pleasure, an ungracious delight in having a beautiful woman solely at my disposal.

(181)

The horror of this observation increases when the implicit pun on “disposal” becomes evident and Wringhim disposes of (murders) the woman. Where the Old Friend has argued that sexual impropriety results from Hogg's assertions of self, Hogg connects sexual violence to the denial of desire in the form of institutional fanaticism, both religious and editorial.

The Old Friend disputes the continuity between Addison's Spectator and The Spy. The character of the Spectator is chameleon, capable (like the successful journal itself) of infinite circulation:

I have been taken for a Merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten Years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the Assembly of Stock-Jobbers at Jonathan's.

(Spectator 1, 142)

Hogg, in the unsuccessful Spy, constantly points to the impediments to such circulation in contemporary Edinburgh. In “A Dialogue in the Reading Room” (December 29, 1810), someone is mistaken for “the Spy on account of his lean, starved appearance, while the true author turns his small legs and meagre hands to one side that the truth may not be discovered” (Hughes, 49). As Hughes and others have pointed out, Hogg was well built, and is here playing on a convention. But the Old Friend targets his attention on the physical body, precisely what Addison made invisible, by describing Hogg's visits to “bookseller's shops”:

What would he himself have thought, if a surly brown bear, or a huge baboon, had burst open his door when he was at breakfast, and helped himself to a chair and a mouthful of parritch?

(45)

The vulgarity of his ingestion anticipates the quality of his (literary) output. By contrast, according to the Old Friend, Byron wrote the two good poems in the Poetic Mirror (parodies of Wordsworth) “with an immense stack of bread and butter before him, and a basin of weak tea” (49).¹² To struggle over authorial identity meant contesting the body as a site of production. Only when dead, consigned to an unmarked grave, does the Spy achieve the paradoxical anonymity of editorial power.¹³

Hogg takes his revenge in the Confessions. David Groves points out that

“Nearly everything about … [the Confessions'] editor, his arrogance, his modern upper-class Toryism, his friendship with other Blackwood's writers like Lockhart, and his university background, indicates that he is based on the real-life John Wilson, although in a few other respects he is a more generalized portrait of a successful man-of-letters.”

(James Hogg, 114)

I would add that Wilson's identity is that of the generalizing man of letters, whose type is Addison's chameleon Spectator, and whose anti-type is Hogg's Spy. Christensen has shown in David Hume a generalizing impulse that fed on other identities in its self-figuring (Practicing Enlightenment, chapter 4). Wilson adopted this role as Christopher North and converted it into the Chair of Moral Philosophy that Hume had unsuccessfully sought. In Hogg's fiction, the Editor's situating of “traditionary facts,” re(as)sembling Wilson's editorial tyranny, contains the Burnsian (Hoggish?) voice of traditional farmhand within the Humean frame of Historian. The change from Longman's advertisement announcing “Historical Facts” to the title page's more modest “Traditionary Facts” indicates the slippage.

Hogg, in his Memoirs, argues that his late literacy allowed him to develop a personal integrity prior to his literary self. A friend “often remonstrated with me, in vain, on the necessity of a revisal of my pieces; but in spite of him, I held fast my integrity.” Revision, internalized editing, threatens integrity. The Old Friend responds vigorously, focusing on Hogg's physical production of literature:

He could not write, he says, till he was upwards of twenty years of age. This I deny. He cannot write now. I engage to teach any forthcoming ploughman to write better in three weeks. Let Hogg publish a fac-simile of his hand-writing, and the world will be thunderstruck at the utter helplessness of his hand.

(44)

The attack on Hogg's irregular handwriting foreshadows the extended pun in the Confessions on “justification,” as the epitome of both textual and spiritual regularity. Further, the choice of a “ploughman” as a pupil recalls Robert Burns, and so the phrase “write better” combines mechanical and imaginative skills.

But Hogg pushes the Old Friend's joke further in his novel, having his Editor produce a manuscript page in Wringhim's hand. The use of the facsimile, an effort for unmediated proof, satirizes the inherently mediating position of the editor as a consumer of truth.¹⁴ As the handwritten page turns into facsimile, it loses its status as handwriting and becomes another form of justifying print, another mechanical reproduction. Blanchard, Wringhim's first murder victim, warns him, “There is no error into which a man can fall, which he may not press [pun intended] Scripture into his service as proof [pun still intended] of the probity of.” The message for Wilson and his readers is that the mechanics of justification delude, precisely because of their pseudo-objectivity. Because identity always refers beyond the self toward that to which the self is identical, any representation of self can be only a facsimile, a similarity masquerading as a fact.

To write a memoir is to edit a life, and if Wringhim's life is preordained, then such editing is liable to the curse that ends his manuscript: “cursed be he who trieth to alter or amend.” Hogg, in contrast, acknowledges omissions in his own Memoirs, and refers to a larger, obscure master-text (the existence of which remains conjectural):

In this short Memoir, which is composed of extracts from a larger detail, I have confined myself to such anecdotes only as relate to my progress as a writer.

(51)

He reserves himself, as individual and text, but this is also a rhetorical strategy to suggest that a reserved self exists apart from its published manifestations—a claim targeted by the Old Friend. Wringhim, by contrast, intends to present the entire story; omissions cease to exist. Wringhim is advised to keep the actual type “close,” a word that coordinates the secretive production of the text with the condensing procedures that result in Wringhim's repeated amnesia; in his next encounter with Gil-Martin, the latter says, “I am wedded to you so closely, that I feel as if I were the same person” (220). The correspondence of the contents and the form of production highlight the transforming character of print.

The use of justified print implies a teleological perspective that novelists evade with various ploys; the found diary, private letters, and the hiatus in a mutilated journal all allow the introduction of an editorial figure who offers the transformation of handwritten forms into print as a transparent procedure that preserves their unjustified (subjective) character and deflects the teleology onto the editor. He grasps the public meaning of what was intended only privately. The private character of the manuscript, then, becomes evidence of truth as an admission against interest. Hogg's presentation of the typesetting, however, constructs both justified print and unjustified handwriting as tentative positions. Wringhim errs in trusting his own editing and typesetting, and the linguistic puns that pervade the descriptions of his crimes emphasize the mistake as symptomatic of a particular perspective.

Wringhim does not begin his memoirs until after he has learned to set type, and the confession begins:

My life has been a life of trouble and turmoil; of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and of vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries.

(109)

The implied perspective is that of completion, of a life summed up, as certain as the Gospel to which it is dedicated. The balanced construction of the sentences work an illusion of completeness, and the final contraries of the first sentence become the reconciled antitheses of the second. This is a life, the rhetorical structure tells us, whose meaning may be read.

The confession within the novel is typeset almost to completion. Under the sign of justified print, Wringhim “will let the wicked of this world know what I have done in the faith of the promises, and the justification by grace, that they may read and tremble” (109). The reader does not interpret but merely recognizes his own fallenness in contrast to Wringhim. Yet near the end, Hogg creates an intermediate stage of text, handwritten but part of the typeset work, that indicates a change in Wringhim's program:

I must furnish my Christian readers with a key to the process, management, and winding up of the whole matter; which I propose, by the assistance of God, to limit to a very few pages.

(215)

“Winding up” puns inadvertently (from Wringhim's perspective) on the winding sheet in which Wringhim is buried and the winding, circular chase described by the “driver” in Hogg's “Scot's Mummy” letter. The pun undermines the hope of making the matter whole by resolving the doubles and divisions within the convention of a printed conclusion. In the process of composing, Wringhim has transformed his audience; moreover, the shift from “the wicked” (109) to “my Christian readers” reconceptualizes Wringhim's own role as narrating subject of an autobiography. In the paragraph following this shift, set off by an italicized date, he writes: “My hopes and prospects are a wreck.” This collapse begins the “handwritten” section. The play on “prospects” remind us that, so far, Wringhim has pointed his confessions toward a specific conclusion—one they will never reach. Now each day's entry only guesses at the continuation. September 7, 1712, finds Wringhim handing over to the reader the task of judgment: “And to what I am now reduced, let the reflecting reader judge” (229). A final curse ends Wringhim's tale:

now my fate is inevitable.—Amen, for ever! I will now seal up my little book, and conceal it; and cursed be he who trieth to alter or amend!

(230)

The insistence on completion exposes an anxiety about teleological possibilities having escaped Wringhim. To unseal (and to unconceal) by publication is an alteration that questions the inevitability of Wringhim's suicide, since fate depends on the certainty of text.¹⁵ The reader and the mediating Editor discover that no text is transparent, nor any interpreter a free agent. Wringhim's insistence on a justified identity, like the Editor's guise of objectivity, fails to notice institutional constraints such as those Hogg faced. The reflective reader, like Wringhim and the Editor (who offers himself as surrogate reader), gazes into a maze of refracting texts, in which the “stamp of authenticity” is only a facsimile.

The novel, however, does not mark a final retort to periodical machination, but only part of a sequence that Hogg struggled to control. He had hoped to have his Confessions reviewed in Blackwood's, but failed; the journal teased both author and readers with references to the novel and hints of a review. A few brief anecdotes, which will wind up the matter, suggest that Hogg's identity continued to be reconstructed at the margins of his novel. For instance, The British Critic reviewed Confessions:

Write what he will, there is a diseased and itching peculiarity of style, … which, under every disguise, is always sure to betray Mr. Hogg.

(July 1824)

Hogg's publication appeared near the end of June, and it is unlikely that the reviewer would have obtained such an early copy other than from Longman's. Thus, he deduces the author via style, because he knows the author. Such fraud is the wit of the critical trade.¹⁶ Like the reviewer's own work, prose style should not betray particularity. In this regard, the anonymity of the Waverley novels pointed to their value, though that value depended upon the suspicion of Scott's authorship (in which Hogg asserts a “fixed belief” until “Johnny Ballantyne had fairly sworn me out” of it). By contrast, Blackwood's Magazine blasts Hogg's anonymity for the Confessions in the June 1824 Noctes Ambrosianae and reenforces the unmasking when the Ettrick Shepherd offers a subsequent denial. The play between the anonymous and the named as a struggle for self-authorship charts a more general tension between the journals of judgment and the authors of identity who came before their bar. A second anecdote concerns the last version of Confessions published in Hogg's lifetime. Among the significant changes are the elimination of “Hogg”'s appearance at the end and the signature of “JH” as the editor. The retitled Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic (1837) traps Hogg in the snare he set for Wilson. Doubt as to the edition's authorization reiterates the confusions of identity and style that the novel opens.

George Saintsbury, a Victorian canon-builder, expatiates on Confessions of a Justified Sinner:

[That novel is] one of the most remarkable stories of its kind ever written—a story which … is not only extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader shall wonder how the devil it got where it is.

(English Literature, 43-44)

The joke of “devil,” though feeble, rhetorically aids the shift from the novel's problematizing its own authorship (the Editor exclaims, at the end of Wringhim's tale, “What can this work be? … I cannot tell”) to questioning Hogg's actual authorship. The novel is, Saintsbury maintains, so much better than anything else Hogg wrote that someone must have ghostwritten at least portions of it (Saintsbury suggests John Lockhart). Saintsbury's ad hominem attack depends upon the Blackwood's construction of the “Ettrick Shepherd” to which Lockhart substantially contributed. Since, however, that persona was the implied author for the reading public, at least after reviews unmasked Hogg's anonymity, Saintsbury is, in a sense, right: James Hogg may have written the novel, but the identity of its author(s) is a complicated question of editorial interaction. For Hogg, then, the literary marketplace was not a site for the romantic expression of identity but rather the place of contention in which the self was revealed as a social construction, a mediation between personal agency and institutional power. Last, a twentieth-century critic offers Wringhim's fictional facsimile as a sample of James Hogg's holograph—a mastery of confused identities, or, if you will, pickled Hogg.

Notes

1. In 1805, Wordsworth recognized his autobiographical project as “a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself,” and he announced that he would never publish the poem during his life. Wordsworth translated this reluctance to publish into a professional asset by asserting, in the 1814 preface to The Excursion, that the “preparatory poem” (The Prelude) was the ante-chapel of The Recluse, which was itself the “body of the gothic church.” His lesser pieces constituted the “little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses” that will make Wordsworth's career whole. Strategically withholding a crucial document (but allowing hints of it to circulate in the works of Coleridge and De Quincey), Wordsworth projects the possibility of a unified identity of both poetry and poet; in doing so, he typifies Marlon Ross's generalized description of romantic poetic activity:

   Convinced that within the individual an autonomous and forceful agent makes creation possible, they [romantic poets] struggle to control that agent and manipulate its energy; they struggle for self-possession—a state in which the individual has mastered his genealogy, his internal contradictions, his doubts about his power of mastery and the world that seems to obstruct its sway.

   (“Troping Masculine Power,” 26)

2. “The Byronic text heroically pretends to resist the massive encoding of culture while providing an ensemble of identificatory procedures and inducements that ‘solve’ the incompatibility between general law and individual application by mystifying it. … Critical employment of Byron's biography has consistently recapitulated this mystification: the poems are imagined as an elaborate code which, by way of a handily metaphoric secret, can be brought into some determinate relation with a singular circumstance of Byron's life” (Jerome Christensen, “Theorizing Byron's Practice: The Performance of Lordship and the Poet's Career,” 482-83).

3. “The Hunting of Badlewe is reprinted in Dramatic Tales,—therefore, strike off one volume for that. The Pilgrims of the Sun, Mador of the Moor, may sleep in one bed very easily, and the Sacred Melodies and the Border Garland may be thrown into them. This most fortunately cuts off three volumes” (Wilson, “Familiar Epistle,” 31).

4. Several of the earlier articles, including the Chaldee Manuscript and “Christopher in the Tent” (which uses “Tickler—Hogg—Odoherty” intermittently as a running head) appear in the collected Noctes Ambrosianae (1855).

5. Charles Rzepka points out that by kicking the stone in Boswell's presence, “Johnson is playing himself; he is becoming what Boswell expects him to be” (Self as Mind, 1). In his introductory chapter, Rzepka delineates the problem of skepticism about the self in the romantic period as a post-Johnsonian phenomenon. See also Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and the Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey.

6. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things provide the broad conceptual base for this claim. Polanyi demonstrates the transformation of labor into a commodity produced for sale within the enforced wage-market of laissez-faire economics (139). Foucault recognizes at this same moment a corollary development in the intellectual perceptual frame of what he calls the “new empiricities,” scientific discourses which produce labor as “an irreducible unit of measurement” (223) and allow “general grammar to be logic” (296). Both theorists, interestingly, look to Scottish Enlightenment figures for verification.

7. “All the periodical miscellanies that I am acquainted with, except one or two of the reviews, appear to be written to maintain the existence of prejudice and to disseminate error” (Wordsworth, Letters, 119).

8. Jerome Christensen argues that in the Biographia this phrase is “taken literally and feared” (“Mind at Ocean,” 156).

9. See Robertson (200-28) for the role Hume played in beginning this transformation, and Harvie (118-35) for a more general consideration. Harvie notes that Francis Jeffrey “headed the movement for political assimilation” (121).

10. His surname Wringhim (more punned against than punning) plays on the sense of “wring” as a wine-press, a common figure for a printing press. That Hogg himself was a Robert's son adds an additional layer of nominal play; for Robert Hogg's contribution to Hogg's writings, see Petrie's “Odd Characters: Traditional Informants in James Hogg's Family.”

11. The reference to the Blue Stockings silently paraphrases Hogg's assessment: “The literary ladies, in particular, agreed, in full divan, that I would never write a sentence which deserved to be read” (20). For Blackwood's readers, who would encounter this sentence in the midst of a several-hundred-word excerpt, the Old Friend puts a lascivious spin on “in full divan.”

12. The Old Friend, again linking text and body, reading and sexual desiring, continues the joke: “Does Hogg believe, that if he were to walk down the Rialto, that the Venetian ladies would mistake him for his lordship?” (49).

13. Hogg does not take this attack lying down. The spy's burial is undone in the final section of Confessions when the Editor discovers the grave and body of the suicide in a parodic replication of what “Hogg” has already accomplished. The Editor reprints so much of the “Scot's Mummy” letter that the omission of the final paragraph is striking. While suggesting the appropriateness of a single fate for Christopher North and the Scot's Mummy, the deleted passage also recalls the Old Friend's treatment of the Spy:

    … I am sure you will confess that a very valuable receipt may be drawn from it for the preservation of dead bodies. If you should think of trying the experiment on yourself, you have nothing more to do than hang yourself in a hay rope … you shall set up your head at the last day as fresh as a moor-cock.

    (“Scot's Mummy,” 190)

    Hogg's language of objectivity—“receipt,” “experiment,” “venture to predict”—mimics an editorial tone, revealing its ambition not to arise and crow at judgment day but to maintain an ambiguous identity—the sexual ambivalence of a moor cock. By omitting this paragraph, the Editor hides the anxieties about editorial identity and mortality that Wringhim's story has activated.

14. Hogg had already observed of booksellers in The Spy that “there is a numerous race of beings in this world who feed themselves upon the brains of their own species” (“The Spy's Account of Himself,” September 1, 1810, 4).

15. Hogg emphasizes the ironic teleological significance of the suicide by retitling the 1828 edition The Suicide's Grave.

16. Hunt's Examiner, August 1824, attributes the “very singular production” to the Ettrick Shepherd:

    … its principal defect is, that with much elaboration in the assumption of disguise, no one can be deceived for a moment. In other respects, the strong hand of Mr. Hogg is often recognizable.

    (482)

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———. “The Mind at Ocean: The Impropriety of Coleridge's Literary Life.” Romanticism and Language. Ed. Arden Reed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984, 144-67.

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