James Hogg: A Brief Note on Celebrity
It has
been argued that Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott were the first ‘celebrities’
in the modern sense of the word. In Byromania
and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, Ghislaine
McDayter contends that “Byromania marks the emergence of
celebrity as a cultural industry” (8). In The
Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Josephine Guy
and Ian Small identify Byron and Scott as two of the first authors to take
advantage of the new “cultural apparatus” that developed after the timely “conjunction of a “Romantic cult of selfhood” and
“the growing industrialization of print culture” (30). As Penny Fielding notes
in her entry on Hogg in The Oxford
Encyclopedia of British Literature, “Hogg was very conscious of literary
celebrity” and felt diminished when he did not receive the same recognition as
Scott and other members of the Edinburgh literati (67). But as Peter Garside
reminds us in his chapter in James Hogg
and the Literary Marketplace, after Scott’s death, Hogg “found himself
lionized as a literary celebrity” after “a highly successful visit to London”
in 1832 (36). Even before then, Hogg was viewed as a celebrity of sorts,
serving the role, for example, of “celebrity speaker” at a Burns Supper in
Edinburgh in January 1815, as Clark McGinn recalls in his recent essay on Burns
celebrations in Robert Burns and Global Culture
(193). In Hogg’s case, celebrity was more of a double-edged sword than it was
for Scott, given that his fame was sometimes rooted in an understanding of him
as a strange curiosity: a peasant prodigy who made for an interesting spectacle
at the dinner parties of the elite. However, despite such condescension and some
negative publicity that figured him as an object of ridicule, Hogg established
himself as an important literary figure in Britain during his lifetime and
relished his fame in the Americas, writing in 1833 to an anonymous American
fan: “I am most proud of being valued so highly by my transatlantic brethren.”
Three
rather interesting aspects of Hogg’s celebrity that might resonate with the
experience of modern celebrities are (a) the appearance of fans at his home—whom
in Hogg’s case, his family couldn’t afford to feed; (b) the flow of fan mail
that appeared on his doorstep, which his wife Margaret had to read through,
evaluate, and cull; and (c) the reporting of his activities through gossip,
which he was concerned might negatively affect his family life. To learn more
about the celebrity of Hogg in the last few years of his life, read the third
volume of his letters: The Collected
Letters of James Hogg: Volume 3, 1832-1835, ed. Gillian Hughes with
associate editors Douglas S. Mack, Robin MacLachlan, and Elaine Petrie
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
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