Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Long convinced of his genius, Hogg had been impatiently awaiting discovery for some years before his first patron, Walter Scott (six years his junior), took an interest in him. Scott was, as the century turned, not yet the author of Waverley but a Writer to the Signet (i.e. lawyer) with a life sinecure as Sheriff-Depute at Selkirk. He was, more avidly, a collector of border ballads. The ancient folk-art was dying out and urgently needed memorials. Antiquarians like Scott, Joseph Ritson and Bishop Percy set themselves to the task – typically quarrelling between themselves bitterly. In summer 1802 Scott had learned through his land agent, William Laidlaw, a relative of Hogg’s employers, that there was an aged balladeer in the Borders, who had, in her head, a complete version of a piece Scott particularly lusted after, ‘Auld Maitland’. This source was Hogg’s mother, Margaret.

  According to Hogg’s version (his most recent biographer offers a much duller scenario), Scott duly galloped, neck and crop, to ‘Ettrick’s bleakest, loneliest sheil’ to hear Mrs Hogg sing (she despised recitation). She crooned out a suspiciously word-perfect version of the 65-stanza ‘Auld Maitland’, hitherto known to Scott only in tantalising fragments. As with everything surrounding Hogg’s life (he confessed to being an incorrigible falsifier), there is the likelihood of stage-management. Hogg, not to mince words, primed his mother and wrote her script. Scott had his doubts but he wanted the ballad so much for the third volume of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border that he swallowed Hogg’s bait, hook line and sinker.

  More significantly, Scott recruited Hogg into his Edinburgh circle as a ‘brother poet’, introducing him ‘under the garb, aspect, and bearing of a rude peasant’. The Ettrick Shepherd was a role Jamie was happy to play and it gave lustre to his 1807 verse collection, The Mountain Bard. It was a fortuitous change of profession. His farming ventures had failed and he was bankrupt. He had at least one, perhaps two, illegitimate children and had been hailed up for ‘uncleanness’ by his local church. His native hills were becoming rather too hot for comfort. He moved to Edinburgh to make his way as a ‘literary man’ – and was taken up by the literary men of the Blackwood’s coterie and (after its launch in 1817) by their lively monthly magazine (nicknamed ‘Maga’). In the long-running, often scurrilous, tavern-conversation series, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, Hogg (‘the shepherd’) figures as a kind of Wamba, or jester figure to J. G. Lockhart (Scott’s son-in-law) and Christopher North (a university professor). Hogg’s interjections are in salty dialect.

  Over these years, Hogg was best known to his contemporaries as a poet, an anthologist and a local curiosity. His material wants were helped when Scott’s patron, the Duke of Buccleuch, gave him the freehold of a lakeside cottage, by Altrive at Yarrow, where he would live until the end of his life. With the runaway triumph of the Waverley novels, and the less spectacular but substantial success of John Galt, prose fiction was now a respectable line of writing in Edinburgh. Hogg’s first significant venture into the field, The Brownie of Bodsbeck, was published in 1818. It is set in the seventeenth century, shortly after one of the uprisings which would unsettle Scotland for a century. The Covenanters – religious reformers whose enthusiasm took on revolutionary fervour – had been savagely put down at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, in 1679. There ensued the purge called ‘the killing times’.

  Hogg’s hero, Walter, exonerated after much distress from his association with the insurgents, returns to his rural home. This is where most novels would wrap things up. But peeking through a window, Walter sees his true love, Katharine, in bed with a reanimated corpse. The denouement becomes increasingly gothic. Hogg’s fairies (‘brownies’) have nothing in common with Peter Pan. One of them castrates a foiled rapist in the narrative: his publishers rather balked at the scene.

  In 1820 Hogg married. Hitherto, his friends said, he would do anything for a woman except propose to her. His bride, Margaret Phillips, was more religiously devout than him, considerably younger, and the daughter of a prosperous Dunfermline farmer. The Hoggs would have five children and the marriage is recorded as happy. His finances, however, continued to be rocky; if, as Carlyle said of Scott, that he wrote novels to buy farms, Hogg did the same: fewer novels and smaller farms but just as unluckily. Worse still, Margaret’s dowry did not materialise when her father fell on hard times and came, with his wife, to live with (and on) the Hoggs in their cottage at Altrive. In a desperate attempt to raise money for family dependants now as numerous as a small clan, Hogg dashed off The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It was published in 1824, anonymously, by Longman in London.

  Months before the publication Hogg had published a letter in Maga, recounting the exhumation of a suicide’s grave, in the Borders, which had generated some mystery, hinting at supernatural phenomena. Was this ‘germ’ of the forthcoming novel authentic, or sly bait for prospective readers? The first half of the Confessions comprises an ‘editor’s narrative’. The editor is complacent, slightly dull and very unHoggish. The historical setting is the 1680s, an unsettled moment in Scottish history (but when isn’t?): the Laird of Dalcastle, an old-school rascal who loves life, takes a much younger, religiously hidebound wife. Her true mate, whom she brings in her entourage, is her spiritual adviser, Robert Wringhim. The Revd Wringhim is an ‘ultra-Calvinist’, one of the antinomian sect whose creed presumes that the elect have been preordained for salvation – whatever sins they commit. ‘Works’ are irrelevant. Historically the antinomians did not conceive this as a licence to do whatever they wanted, but as a Caledonian version of kismet. Hogg probes the doctrine, sceptically.

  Rabina Orde, the newlywed bride, is violated in the marriage bed and, before making her escape to live by herself, bears two sons. The elder, George, the Laird acknowledges as his. The younger, Robert, he believes (very plausibly) to be the offspring of Wringhim. The boys are brought up in their parents’ now separate establishments. George grows up a lusty young heir, the apple of his father’s eye. The hated Robert, who takes on the surname ‘Wringhim’, grows up a neurotic bigot, suffused with religious malignity. He justifies all his selfishness and malice by his confidence, instilled by his putative ‘father’, that he is one of the elect. As he enters manhood, Robert is egged on to ever more malicious acts by a mysterious companion, ‘Gil-Martin’ (the name means ‘fox’ in Gaelic). Gil has the strange capacity to morph into anyone. He manipulates Robert into assassinating his brother in a midnight brawl which he, Gil, has orchestrated. The Laird dies of grief and Robert inherits the estate. His crime is suspected, and finally detected, by two resourceful ladies of easy virtue, the Laird’s mistress, Miss Logan, and a branded prostitute (narrowly escaped from the gallows), Bell Calvert.

  The editor’s narrative has its unusual aspects but is not entirely unconventional. What sets the reader back is the second half of the novel, Robert’s own printed and manuscript ‘private memoir and confessions’. He is mad, but not deluded as to the fact that Gil (who is witnessed in both accounts by third parties) actually exists. But he takes his mentor to be Czar Peter of Russia, in disguise. It leads to such deliciously malapropos exchanges as:

  I asked, with great simplicity: ‘Are all your subjects Christians, prince?’ ‘All my European subjects are, or deem themselves so,’ returned he; ‘and they are the most faithful and true subjects I have.’

  Who could doubt, after this, that he was the Czar of Russia?

  By now the reader has apprehended – although Robert has not – that Gil is Satan incarnate. Strangely, and ambiguously, Robert confesses to more murders than we know him to have committed (including matricide). Indeed, at one point it seems that Gil has persuaded him that they should unite to slaughter the whole human race. Even Robert is rather daunted by that prospect. As the new Laird, he suffers months’ long blackouts after drinking bouts, then coming round to discover he has done ever more terrible things. His conviction that God will never punish him eventually dissolves into terror. He runs away but is pursued wherever he goes by his erstwhile ‘fri
end’, now his ‘tormentor’. Finally he descends to labouring as a rural shepherd and hangs himself with a hay rope. This, too, is mysterious to those investigating his death:

  Now the fact is, that, if you try all the ropes that are thrown over all the outfield hay-ricks in Scotland, there is not one among a thousand of them will hang a colley dog; so that the manner of this wretch’s death was rather a singular circumstance.

  A documentary epilogue, picking up Hogg’s letter the year before to Blackwood’s Magazine, and introducing such real-life figures as Lockhart, describes the exhumation of Robert’s body, still pristine even after forty years in the soil.

  The Confessions failed spectacularly to hit the public taste of the time. It earned the author £2 in ‘profits’ (miscalled) in the two years Longman kept the book in print. There were moves on their part to recover the £100 advance. The few reviews the novel received concurred in finding it ‘trash’ – and indecent. It was certainly rawer meat than most fiction offered the circulating libraries. One strains, for example, to imagine Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland reading it together before going off to their morning session at the Bath Pump Room.

  In the last decade of his life, it was, as always, up and down with Hogg – down predominating. He found himself increasingly cold-shouldered by the Blackwood’s coterie. His major achievement in his late years was the founding of the St Ronan’s Border Games, the ‘Scottish Olympics’, as they would later be called. Hogg was, throughout life, a keen sportsman himself. In fact it precipitated his death: in 1832, while curling, he fell through the ice on Duddingston Loch, below Arthur’s Seat, and never fully recovered. Another late-life disaster was the publication of his wildly indiscreet ‘anecdotes’ of Scott, in 1834, capitalising on the excitement of the other writer’s death (among other things he reported Lady Scott’s addiction to opium). Hogg died, as he had begun life, in poverty.

  FN

  James Hogg

  MRT

  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

  Biog

  Gillian Hughes, James Hogg: A Life (2007)

  16. Charles Brockden Brown 1771–1810

  America has opened new views to the naturalist and politician, but has seldom furnished themes to the moral painter. From the Preface to Edgar Huntly

  Brown ranks as the first American novelist to have supported himself exclusively by his pen. He was born, one of many children, into a Philadelphia family of Quaker background. The Browns were prosperous import-export merchants. The home environment was liberal, upright, cultivated and open to Enlightenment thinking. And, like other of the community of friends, no enemy to Mammon. Brown’s first juvenile literary effort was an epic (unfinished), ‘The Rising Glory of America’. Arriving in the world when he did, Brown was born British, though it was no source of pride to him whatsoever. His family, exiles by origin, were pro-Republic – but by religion pacifist at a historical moment when non-violence was conceived as treachery. The family business premises were sacked during the War of Independence by ‘patriots’.

  Before turning to literature, Brown was, until 1792, a lawyer: it was his family’s sensible choice of occupation for him, there being no room in the family business for all its male progeny. He hated the office drudgery, meditated ambitious epic poems, and excitedly followed events in revolutionary Paris. He moved to New York in the mid-1790s – then, as now, where liberated thought was to be found. His principal literary influences were the Jacobin novelist, William Godwin (particularly Caleb Williams), Rousseau, Robert Bage and Coleridge – radicals all. A close friend at this period was the theatrical pioneer William Dunlap, who introduced Brown to the heady brew of German Schauerromantik, a genre addicted to ruined castles, flamboyant suicide, brigandry, Byronic despair and spectral phenomena.

  On the modest success of his first tale of terror, Wieland (1798, subtitled ‘An American Tale’), Brown tumbled out another three ‘Gothics’ over the next eighteen months: Ormond (1799); Arthur Mervyn (1800), subtitled ‘Memoirs of the Year 1793’, it deals with the yellow fever of that year in Philadelphia, which, it has been surmised, had life-changing effects on the author himself; and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799), the first novel to introduce American Indians (‘Red-men’) into popular fiction – and, for that reason, perhaps nowadays regarded as his best work. The depiction of these ‘tom-hawk’-wielding ‘savages’ is, it should be noted, less than sympathetic.

  Brown published seven romances in all, conducted various New York-based literary journals, and enjoyed the reputation of a man of letters of progressive views. His fiction was admired overseas by Shelley and Scott (like his father, the venerable Elijah Brown, Charles was in the export business). His novels are marred, however, to modern eyes, by clunky narrative devices: Wieland, for example, pivots on the voice-throwing (‘biloquism’) of a maleficent ventriloquist, Carwin; and Ormond on a heroine who cross-dresses to participate in the French Revolution. But, despite the improbabilities, Brown had an extraordinary vitality of imagination. He plausibly influenced Poe, Hawthorne and Melville.

  For unascertained reasons, Brown turned away from fiction after 1800. He may have regarded it as unworthy of a philosopher like himself. He seems to have been afflicted with nagging religious doubt at the same period. He married in 1804 and had four children in six years. Everything in his life, including death, came in a rush. Brown died prematurely of tuberculosis, aged thirty-nine, having left a primal mark on his national fiction. At the time of his death, he had embarked on a ‘Complete System of Geography’. He had worlds to conquer: but fiction would not be one of them.

  FN

  Charles Brockden Brown

  MRT

  Wieland; or, the Transformation, an American Tale

  Biog

  P. Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (2004)

  17. Walter Scott 1771–1832

  He desired to plant a lasting root, and dreamt not of present fame, but of long distant generations rejoicing in the name of Scott of Abbotsford. Scott’s biographer and son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart

  The only novelist to have a railway station named after one of his novels, ‘the Author of Waverley’ was born the ninth child of a Scottish Writer to the Signet (i.e. solicitor) in Edinburgh’s Old Town – the ‘Heart of Midlothian’ – whose wynds and towering tenements were famous for their ‘Gardy Loo!’ insanitariness. The most beautiful city in Europe, Edinburgh was always liable to drop an unexpected bucket of filth on your head. He was never sure of the month, or even the year, of his birth. Two little ‘Walters’ had been born before him and promptly died and Walter III barely made it through the dangerous years of babyhood. At eighteen months old he was lamed for life by infantile paralysis. Scott died, never knowing, any more than did the eminent doctors in his family, what disease it was that had cruelly robbed him of half his manhood. There are accounts of him in his adolescence, hanging crucified from his bedroom rafters, with heavy weights attached to his withered leg, to make it whole again.

  Too delicate for the polluted airs of ‘Auld Reekie’, his early childhood was spent with grandparents on a farm in the Borders, an experience which steeped him in regional folklore and balladry. After education at the High School and Edinburgh University (which he entered at twelve and left at fourteen), Scott was put to work in his father’s law firm. Had he not been disabled he would, he said, have entered the army. There were some exciting wars going on. Scott eventually qualified as an advocate, after a second spell at the university, then the centre of European Enlightenment. He married Charlotte Charpentier in 1797. Allegedly the daughter of a French refugee from the ‘Terror’, she was more probably the by-blow of an English aristocrat. No novelist has been better at keeping his family skeletons in the closet than Walter Scott. The couple were to have four children, including the required son and heir, ‘Walter’.

  Scott began in authorship with some gentlemanly collecting of Border ball
ads. His first narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, came out in 1805. It sold amazingly and was followed by Marmion (1808), for which the author received a mighty advance of £1,000 from Archibald Constable, the enterprising publisher with whom Scott’s career was to be intertwined. By now, a favourite among the Tory oligarchy who ran Scotland, he had consolidated his professional position with well-paying legal sinecures. His run of bestselling narrative poems continued with The Lady of the Lake (1810), a poem whose florid Highlandery – swirling kilts, heather and claymores everywhere – is plausibly credited with founding the Scottish tourist industry. But for all his success, and the money, he was astute enough to realise his thunder was comprehensively stolen by the runaway success of Childe Harold in 1812: ‘Byron beat me’, he confessed candidly. Literary history agrees.