Ettrick Shepherd Quotes

“Association with Blackwood's came at a price, however. Hogg may have been one of the magazine's most recognisable figures, but he had little control over how he himself was represented on its pages. From the outset, Hogg was viewed by Wilson and Blackwood as an object rather than an architect of Blackwood's aggressive self-fashioning. Thomas Richardson points out that Hogg was never permitted to write review articles - an exclusion surely telling of his standing among the magazine's cognoscenti. William Blackwood, for his part, favoured Hogg's 'more predictable contributions, such as the comic ballad', and neither he nor Wilson considered Hogg to have the comportment or expertise to conduct the signal utterances of the magazine. In general, Hogg's function was to inhabit the role of the rustic genius-poet, the 'Ettrick Shepherd' - the residual embodiment of a specifically Tory fantasy of the Scottish peasant class, and a semi-serious, semi-comedic foil to the magazine's modernity and professionalism.”
― Adrian Hunter, James Hogg: Contributions to English, Irish and American Periodicals