James Hogg – författare

James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a Scottish classic, a quintessentially Gothic tale of psychological horror, and a relentless attack on Calvinist dogma. The Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Karl Miller.Robert Wringham's family is composed of a dissolute father and brother, a pious mother, and a rival father in the person of a fanatical Calvinist minister. He comes to believe that he is one of the elect, predestined to be saved, while others are damned. Sure of his freedom from the dictates of morality, he embarks on a series of crimes in the company of a new friend Gil-Martin, a man of many likenesses who can be mistaken for Robert, and who explains that they are as one in the holy work of purifying the world. But who is Gil-Martin? And what does he truly desire? The Gothic double or doppelganger is nowhere more powerfully imagined than in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, once called 'the greatest novel of Scotland'.This new edition has an introduction by Karl Miller, which discusses the presence of the novel in the life and times of James Hogg. It also contains two of Hogg's most interesting stories, 'Marion's Jock' and 'John Gray o' Middleholm'.James Hogg (1770-1835) born in Ettrick, in the Scottish Borders. A shepherd for many years, Hogg was writing poems by the 1790s, aiding Walter Scott with material for his collection of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. In 1810 he moved to Edinburgh, where he published several volumes of verse, and worked on the Spy and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Confessions of a Justified Sinner was published anonymously in 1824, and is now generally seen as his masterpiece.If you enjoyed Confessions of a Justified Sinner, you might like Matthew Lewis's The Monk, also available in Penguin Classics.'A Scottish classic, a world classic'Ian Rankin'A sinister, funny, moving tale of demonic possession, murder and religious fanaticism'Sunday Telegraph

'We have heard much of the rage of fanaticism in former days, but nothing to this'A wretched young man, 'an outcast in the world', tells the story of his upbringing by a heretical Calvinist minister who leads him to believe that he is one of the elect, predestined for salvation and thus above the moral law. Falling under the spell of a mysterious stranger who bears an uncanny likeness to himself, he embarks on a career as a serial murderer. Robert Wringhim's Memoirs are presented by an editor whose attempts to explain the story only succeed in intensifying its more baffling and bizarre aspects. Is Wringhim the victim of a psychotic delusion, or has he been tempted by the devil to wage war against God's enemies? Hogg's sardonic and terrifying novel, too perverse for nineteenth-century taste, is now recognized as one of the masterpieces of Romantic fiction.The first edition text of 1824 has been freshly considered for this new edition. A critical introduction explores the remarkable career of the novel's author and its historical, theological, and cultural contexts. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

He's the man with short fat hairy legs who kept us laughing for decades, his comic timing sparking perfectly with the genius of his partner Eric Morecambe. Yet little has been known about Ernie's amazing story, until now.Little Ern! takes us from Ernie's childhood in Leeds, where he supported his family by performing on stage, to being left to fend for himself in London at thirteen, a star in the making. We see his friendship with the young comic Eric grow when they toured the theatres of war-torn Britain as teenagers, and discover how their double-act evolved. They survived numerous setbacks on the road to television stardom - and we learn the impact fame had on their lives and friendship. Fully exploring the crucial contribution he made to the act, this charming biography reminds us why Ernie Wise deserves his place in the pantheon of comedy greats.

The Private Memoirs, first published in 1824, is an early psychological novel, in which the phenomena of the split personality and the obsessed character are described with extraordinary insight. Set in the gloomy world of 18th-century Scottish Calvinism, the novel is a story of moral fanaticism, of a mind darkened by and overpowering conviction of its own righteousness. The story concerns two brothers: one murders the other and is in turn destroyed – or destroys himself. It is a book, Andre Gide wrote, “fitted to arouse passionate interest both in those who are attracted by religious and moral questions, and for quite other reasons, in psychologists and artists, and above all in surrealists who are so particularly drawn by the demoniac in every shape.”The book contains vivid pictures of the manners and morals of a chiaroscuro society remarkably similar in some ways to Dostoevsky’s, but seen from the outside by a man whose rebellious, independent disposition enabled him to survive in defiance of his own Establishment. It draws on some of the traditions and techniques of the “Gothic” school, but more importantly, it is an early exercise in narrative technique – in its deliberate manipulation of point-of-view – and in psychological realism.The text of this edition has been carefully collated with the first edition. It contains an introduction by Robert M. Adams, an afterword by Gide, and a glossary of Scottish words and phrases prepared by Mr. Adams.

This book is intended for individuals or organizations (teachers, social workers, psychologists, community nurses, parents and carers) who wish to create leisure opportunities for people with profound and multiple impairments. The text reflects a number of leisure activities based on the authors' experience, from gardening to aromatherapy, drama to microtechnology. It also offers guidance for running and developing workshops for parents, carers and professionals. Useful addresses, contacts and resources are included.

A collection of thirteen tales and anecdotes, published for the first time as Hogg intended, and capturing the flavour of Border story-telling.

Both comical and horrific, The Three Perils of Woman is essentially a combination of two stories on similar themes. One is set in the Highlands following the Battle of Culloden and the other in Hogg's Edinburgh. Daring in its subject matter, the novel touches on such delicate topics as prostitution and venereal disease.

‘It will be a grand book for thae Englishers for they winna understand a word of it’Hogg’s boast to William BlackwoodWitty, humorous and comical as the title implies, the eccentric nature of many of the poems collected here nevertheless belies the often serious and moral issues contained within. Newly available in paperback, and including many of Hogg’s better known longer pieces, the present volume is based on the first edition of A Queer Book to be published since 1832 - though the similarity between the two editions ends with the running order. While the text for the original edition was substantially reworked by the publisher to smooth out Hogg’s use of Scots, this volume brings together manuscripts from all over the world to provide material as near to his final copy as possible. The result is a vibrant collection including many poems which have never been studied critically before. A thorough introduction to the best of Hogg’s poetry.

In Tales of the Wars of Montrose Hogg continues his examination of Scotland's past. Using different narrators and different moods in each of the five tales that comprise the work, Hogg leads the reader into (and eventually out of) a state of anarchy and confusion in his native country.

Lay Sermons offers, playfully, a series of lay sermons on good principles and good breeding - the last thing that one would expect from the pen of Blackwood's Ettrick Shepherd. But a significant part of the joke is that the Shepherd provides lay sermons that combine into a series of wise meditations on life and on literature.

James Hogg knew Sir Walter Scott well, and after Scott's death in 1832 he wrote an affectionate but frank account of their long friendship. Hogg arranged for his manuscript to be sent to John Gibson Lockhart, Scott's son-in-law and official biographer; but when Lockhart read the manuscript he declared himself to be filled with 'utter disgust and loathing' at the 'beastly and abominable things' he found it to contain. As a result, Hogg withdrew the manuscript from publication, but later arranged for the US publication of an extensively revised version, Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott. Professor Rubenstein has produced a meticulous new edition which includes both the first version, Anecdotes of Sir W. Scott and the later version. She provides a wealth of new information about these lively, readable, idiosyncratic, and disconcerting texts.

Heroic, radical and at times hilarious, Queen Hynde is Ossian with jokes; but Hogg's epic has serious purposes in mind. Its picture of the ancient Scottish past has much in common with stories of King Arthur and Camelot; and Queen Hynde aspires to emulate Paradise Lost as a Christian epic.

Hogg’s extremely rare periodical of 1810-11 shows him reacting to the writers, personalities, and locales of Scotland’s capital city after his move to Edinburgh from Ettrick and his career-change from shepherd and farmer to professional author. His characteristically astute and idiosyncratic vision reveals a rather different city from that of Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey, and his band of contributors form another audience for his work than the middle-class Tories associated with the later Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The Spy includes early versions of some of Hogg’s best-known poetry and prose besides a wealth of fascinating lesser-known material.This is the first edition of The Spy since the original edition of 1810-11 was published, and offers a carefully corrected text, full annotation, notes on Hogg’s contributors to his paper, and a history of its making. It represents an advance in our knowledge both of Hogg’s early writing career and of the city he encountered early in the nineteenth century.

In 1822 Rudolph Ackermann’s Forget Me Not [...] for 1823 established a fashion for handsomely produced and copiously illustrated annual anthologies of short literary works. Books of this kind were designed as Christmas and New Year’s presents, and in the 1820s and 1830s they became a significant publishing phenomenon. Like other well-known writers of the time (including Wordsworth, Scott, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Hogg was a contributor to the annuals, and Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books brings together all the Hogg texts that were either written for, or first published in, annuals and gift-books. ‘Invocation to the Queen of the Fairies’ in the Literary Souvenir for 1825 was Hogg’s first known contribution to an annual, and thereafter writing for the annuals became ‘a kind of business’ for him during the economic slump of the late 1820s. Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books contains some of Hogg’s finest short stories (for example ‘The Cameronian Preacher’s Tale’ and ‘Scottish Haymakers’), as well as some of his best-known poems (for example ‘A Boy’s Song’ and ‘The Sky Lark’). This volume highlights a coherent part of Hogg’s total literary output, and in doing so provides new insights into an area of nineteenth-century publishing history that is attracting increasing interest and attention.Hogg was a professional writer with an acute awareness of the shifting trends of the literary marketplace during the 1820s and 1830s, when annuals were at their peak of popularity. However, his literary objectives did not always match the needs of the annuals, and as a result some of his contributions were returned as unsuitable for a family-oriented audience. Hogg’s sometimes complex negotiations with the editors and publishers of the annuals are meticulously documented in Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books. In this context, the volume (for example) reprints both Hogg’s manuscript version of ‘What is Sin?’, and the version actually published in Ackermann’

Winter Evening Tales (1820; second edition 1821) was James Hogg’s most successful work of prose fiction in his lifetime. Exhibiting the most complex genesis of any of Hogg’s works, it is the outstanding example of a ‘national’ genre pioneered by him – the miscellaneous collection of popular and traditional narratives. Hogg’s experimental medley of novellas, tales, poems and sketches posed a lively alternative to the dominant form of the historical novel established by Walter Scott. The collection includes terse masterpieces of mystery and the uncanny, virtuoso improvisations on folktale themes, and – the highlights of the edition – two brilliant autobiographical novellas, The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee and Love Adventures of Mr George Cochrane.Reprinted in incomplete and unreliable texts in Victorian editions of Hogg’s works, Winter Evening Tales fell into almost total obscurity after the author’s death. The Stirling/ South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg is delighted to republish this key work in Hogg’s career in its entirety for the first time since the early nineteenth century.

James Hogg's Jacobite Relics - originally commissioned by the Highland Society of London in 1817 - is an important addition to The Collected Works of James Hogg. It created a canon for the Jacobite song which had an enormous influence on subsequent collections, and was of great importance in defining the relationship between the Scottish song tradition and its Romantic editors and collectors.From the first publication of the Relics in 1819, there has been speculation about how many of them were authored or at least substantially altered by Hogg. Professor Murray Pittock has conducted extensive research in this area since 1987, and has identified several previously unknown sources from which Hogg would have worked as he developed his collection.The introduction to volume two deals with the genesis of the text and Hogg's relationship with the Highland Society and there is also considerable annotation to accurately communicate the context of the songs and Hogg's relationship to the textuality of Jacobite culture.

James Hogg's Jacobite Relics - originally commissioned by the Highland Society of London in 1817 - is an important addition to The Collected Works of James Hogg. It created a canon for the Jacobite song which had an enormous influence on subsequent collections, and was of great importance in defining the relationship between the Scottish song tradition and its Romantic editors and collectors.From the first publication of the Relics in 1819 the majority of scholars have argued about how many of them were authored or at least substantially altered by Hogg. Professor Murray Pittock has conducted extensive research in this area since 1987, and has identified many previously neglected or unknown sources from which Hogg would have worked as he developed his collection. He has identified contemporary 17th- and 18th-century sources for the majority of the songs in the edition. This has implications not only for Hogg's integrity as a writer, but for our understanding of the history of the Scottish song as a whole.The introduction to volume one includes the crucial issue of Hogg's relationship to the Jacobite song tradition, and the place of the Relics within Hogg's career and personal context, facilitating further interpretations of Hogg's range of creative strategies. Considerable annotation accurately communicates the context of the songs and Hogg's relationship to the textuality of Jacobite culture.The introduction to volume two deals with the genesis of the text and Hogg's relationship with the Highland Society. This volume will be available from November 2002.

The Queen's Wake is one of the landmarks of British Romantic poetry. It focuses on the return of Mary, Queen of Scots to Scotland in 1561 to take personal rule of her kingdom after her years in France. In the poem poets and bards hold a poetic competition (a 'wake') in Holyrood Palace to welcome the Queen home. In the descriptions of the songs and the people who sing them various Scottish poets of Hogg's own period can be recognised, giving the reader a sense of the condition of poetry in Hogg's Scotland.Another key concern of the poem is the state of Scotland in 1561 - a crucial period in Scottish history, coming a year after the legislation was passed that brought in the Scottish Reformation. The Queen's Wake looks back to the pre-1560 world of Catholic Scotland and explores the tensions between that old world and an emerging modernity.When The Queen's Wake was published in 1813 it proved an unexpected popular success, placing Hogg for a while alongside Byron and Scott as one of the most admired British poets of that time. Over the next six years Hogg was encouraged by major players in the Edinburgh book trade to make substantial revisions, to make the poem even more attractive and saleable. The fifth edition (1819) is an enhanced and carefully polished version from the now established and respected poet. It is markedly different from the edgy, powerful and unsettling first version of The Queen's Wake, which was the work of an impecunious and marginalised outsider.Thus the poem exists in significantly different authorial versions, each reflecting Hogg's circumstances at the time. In recent years a consensus has emerged that in cases of this kind the modern reader is best served by having access to editions of both versions. The Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of The Queen's Wake therefore presents both the first and fifth edition of the poem.Key Features:* The publication of one of the lan

Hogg was a superb letter-writer, and this is the initial volume of the first collected edition of his letters (to be completed in three volumes). Many of the letters have never been published before, or published only in part. They vividly reflect Hogg’s varied social experience and shed new light on his own writings and those of his contemporaries. Among his famous correspondents were writers such as Scott, Byron, and Southey, antiquarians such as Robert Surtees, politicians such as Sir Robert Peel, and editors and publishers such as John Murray, William Blackwood, and Robert Chambers. But there are also letters to shepherds, farmers, aristocrats, musicians, young ladies, and bluestockings. Hogg first appears in this volume in 1800 as a young shepherd with literary ambitions, and becomes the famous author of The Queen’s Wake (1813) and a key supporter of the early Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817). Among the final letters it contains are some tender if idiosyncratic love-letters to the Dumfriesshire girl he married in 1820 at the mature age of forty-nine. Hogg’s entertaining and informative letters are supplemented by detailed annotation and a full editorial apparatus, including biographical notes on his chief correspondents and a concise overview of this phase of his life.This edition of Hogg’s Letters has its roots in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the four founder members of the James Hogg Society (Gillian Hughes, Douglas Mack, Robin MacLachlan, and Elaine Petrie) began work on tracing and transcribing Hogg’s surviving letters. The major tasks of completing this work and preparing a full-scale edition of Hogg’s Letters were subsequently passed to Gillian Hughes, who is now bringing this important research project to fruition.Key Features:* The first ever edition of Hogg’s letters to be published* Includes many letters never previously published* Features Hogg’s correspondence with figures such as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and

The letters in the second volume of Gillian Hughes’s pioneering edition vividly reflect Hogg’s varied social experience and shed new light on his own writings and those of his contemporaries. His correspondents included major writers such as Scott and Byron, politicians such as Sir Robert Peel, and publishers such as John Murray and William Blackwood. But there are also letters to shepherds, farmers, aristocrats, musicians, young ladies, and bluestockings.In this meticulous and thoroughly researched edition, Hogg’s entertaining and informative letters are illuminatingly placed in context by an editorial apparatus that includes full annotation and biographical notes on Hogg’s chief correspondents.

The third and final volume of the first collected edition of Hogg's letters reveals his versatility in old age. In 1832 he visits London for the first time and becomes the literary lion of the season. As communications improve in the early 1830s he explores the possibility of writing for American periodicals, and deals (mostly) gracefully with the various claims made on his time as a celebrity author. The loss of old friends is compensated for by a circle of young admirers and protégés, and Hogg turns an acutely observant eye on an age of cheap periodicals and of political reform. A full editorial apparatus includes biographical notes on his chief correspondents and an overview of this phase of his life. The volume also contains an index to all three volumes of this complete edition of Hogg's letters.

With an Essay on Hogg's Literary Friendships by Janette Currie and an Appendix on the Popular Context by Suzanne GilbertScottish popular tradition includes a group of stories about a King who has adventures - amorous and otherwise - as he wanders in disguise among his people. Many of these stories focus on James V and in Walter Scott’s long narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) the King encounters a mysterious lady while he is wandering alone and unrecognised in the Highlands. At first sight Scott’s heroine seems to be a simple country girl, but she turns out to be a daughter of the great aristocratic house of Douglas, living for the time being in a rural exile.Scott’s romantic and aristocratic version of the old ‘wandering King’ stories was hugely popular in its day, but Hogg subverts and questions this tale in Mador of the Moor (1816). The name ‘Mador’ suggests ‘made o’er’, ‘made over’, and Mador of the Moor is in effect a makeover of The Lady of the Lake. Hogg’s poem, like Scott’s, tells how a deer-hunt in the Highlands leads a disguised King of Scots into a love-adventure with a young woman. However Hogg’s heroine, Ila Moore, is not a chaste aristocrat but a girl of low social standing who is made pregnant by the wandering King. Ila’s inherent resourcefulness and strength of character suggest that a peasant girl pregnant out of wedlock can be a heroine fully worthy of respect, and Mador (rejected as shocking and ridiculous by its original readership), now re-emerges as a flowing and immensely readable narrative that eloquently challenges the deeply-ingrained class and gender prejudices of Hogg’s society.

Altrive Tales was carefully prepared by Hogg in 1832 as the opening volume in a planned twelve-volume collected prose fiction series, intended as the culmination of his career as a storyteller. It opens with his own story of how a ragged servant-lad remade himself as a respected professional writer, the associate of Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth and Galt. Hogg’s frank and humorous ‘Memoir of the Author’s Life’ is widely recognised as a classic of Romantic autobiography and an important record of early nineteenth-century Scottish culture. Hogg’s sharp eye for the latest publishing phenomena and pawky self-mocking humour is evident in his awareness of Altrive Tales as a contribution to the monthly-volume classic fiction series of the early 1830s following Sir Walter Scott’s magnum opus edition of the Waverley Novels. Frankly pleading guilty to the egotism of presenting his own output to the world as a literary classic Hogg engagingly confesses, ‘I like to write about myself: in fact, there are few things which I like better [...]’.The themes of the ‘Memoir’ continue in the tales that follow. ‘The Adventures of Captain John Lochy’ is a fast-paced historical fiction, the autobiography of a social outcast adrift in Scotland, Russia, the Netherlands, and Sweden. ‘The Pongos’ (an early version of the Tarzan story) takes a look at Scottish involvement in the British empire in a comic parody of Enlightenment notions about the nature of man and of society. ‘Marion’s Jock’ is a virtuoso exercise in Scots and in Hogg’s ability to communicate the peasant lifestyle of his native Scottish Borders.This new edition, thoughtfully introduced and extensively annotated, presents Altrive Tales as a major achievement by one of Scotland’s finest storytellers.

Hogg grew up in rural Ettrick Forest in a notable family of tradition-bearers, and in his first major poetry collection The Mountain Bard of 1807 he claims his rightful position at the centre of that culture. Whereas Scott collected the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Hogg was the sole author of The Mountain Bard. He learned to negotiate the erudite print culture of Edinburgh with the literary ballad, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by his powerful friend, shifting the shape of his earlier manuscript and periodical poems accordingly. Then in 1821, when he was an established literary man, he published a revised edition in keeping with his new professional status as Author of The Queen’s Wake. The present edition prints together, for the first time, the surviving pre-1807 versions of poems included in The Mountain Bard, the full 1807 collection, and the complete 1821 version. The Introduction (besides giving a full history of this complex, changing work) places it firmly within the eighteenth-century antiquarian projects of ballad-collecting and the intellectual currents of Romanticism, in particular the literary vogue for the ballad shown in works such as Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Available in Paperback:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified SinnerThe Shepherd’s CalendarTales of the Wars of MontroseThe Three Perils of WomanWinter Evening TalesAnecdotes of ScottThe Queen's WakeAltrive TalesAlso Available in Hardback:A Queer BookThe Shepherd’s CalendarThe Three Perils of WomanTales of the Wars of MontroseLay SermonsQueen HyndeAnecdotes of ScottThe SpyThe Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified SinnerThe Jacobite Relics of Scotland (First Series)The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (Second Series)Winter Evening TalesThe Queen's WakeAltrive TalesThe Collected Letters of James Hogg, Volume 1, 1800-1819

After Scott’s death in 1832 James Hogg wrote an affectionate but frank account of their long friendship. Scott’s son-in-law and official biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, declared himself to be filled with ‘utter disgust and loathing’ at the ‘beastly and abominable things’ he found it to contain.This edition includes both the original version, written as a contribution to a Scott biography planned by a young London friend of Hogg’s, and a revised version created subsequently for an American market. Those with an interest in Romantic biography and autobiography will be particularly fascinated by these lively, readable, idiosyncratic and disconcerting texts.A wealth of information is provided in the paperback edition of this volume, which also includes a useful Hogg chronology and reading list.

Winter Evening Tales (1820; second edition 1821) was James Hogg’s most successful work of prose fiction in his lifetime. Its experimental medley of novellas, tales, poems and sketches posed a lively alternative to the dominant form of the historical novel established by Walter Scott.The collection includes terse masterpieces of mystery and the uncanny, virtuoso improvisations on folktale themes, and two brilliant autobiographical novellas, The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee and Love Adventures of Mr George Cochrane.This paperback edition takes account of newly-discovered information about An Old Soldier’s Tale and The Long Pack. A critical introduction, explanatory notes, reading list and Hogg chronology are provided to assist the reader in appreciating Hogg’s entertaining and challenging tale collection to the full.

‘I like to write about myself: in fact, there are few things I like better…’So confesses Hogg with pawky self-mocking humour in Altrive Tales.The collection opens with Hogg’s own story of how a ragged servant-lad remade himself as a respected professional writer, the associate of Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth and Galt. Hogg’s frank and humorous ‘Memoir of the Author’s Life’ is widely recognised as a classic of Romantic autobiography and an important record of early nineteenth-century Scottish culture.The themes of the ‘Memoir’ continue in the tales that follow. ‘The Adventures of Captain John Lochy’ is a fast-paced historical fiction, the autobiography of a social outcast adrift in Scotland, Russia, the Netherlands, and Sweden. ‘The Pongos’ (an early version of the Tarzan story) takes a look at Scottish involvement in the British empire in a comic parody of Enlightenment notions about the nature of man and of society. ‘Marion’s Jock’ is a virtuoso exercise in Scots and in Hogg’s ability to communicate the peasant lifestyle of his native Scottish Borders.This new edition, thoughtfully introduced, extensively annotated and featuring a reading list and Hogg chronology, presents Altrive Tales as a major achievement by one of Scotland’s finest storytellers.

The Queen’s Wake is one of the landmarks of British Romantic poetry. It focuses on the return of Mary, Queen of Scots to Scotland in 1561 to take personal rule of her kingdom after her years in France. In the poem poets and bards hold a poetic competition (a ‘wake’) in Holyrood Palace to welcome the Queen home.When The Queen’s Wake was published in 1813 it proved an unexpected popular success, placing Hogg for a while alongside Byron and Scott as one of the most admired British poets of that time. Over the next six years Hogg made substantial revisions, making the poem even more attractive and saleable. The fifth edition (1819) is an enhanced and carefully polished version from a now established and respected poet. It is markedly different from the edgy, powerful and unsettling first version, which was the work of an impecunious and marginalised outsider. This book presents both the first and fifth edition of the poem.