Book description
With an essay by David Groves.
'He was constantly harassed with the idea, that the next time he
lifted his eyes, he would to a certainty see that face, the most
repulsive to all his feelings of aught the earth contained'
A nightmarish tale of religious fanaticism and darkness, this
chilling classic of the macabre tells the tale of Robert Wringhim,
drawn in his moral confusion into committing the most monstrous acts
by an evil doppelganger. James Hogg's masterpiece is as troublingly
duplicitous as Wringhim himself, and was ignored and bowdlerized
before becoming a hugely influential work of Scottish literature.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
James Hogg (1770-1835) led a troubled life as a writer. Originally a
shepherd, he taught himself to write and finally achieved recognition
for his epic poem on Mary, Queen of Scots,
The Queen's Wake
, and was invited to write for the best-selling journal
Blackwood's Magazine
. However, Hogg soon became a figure of fun and ridicule in the
magazine's satirical 'Noctes Ambrosianae', in which the crude and absurd
'Ettrick Shepherd' was openly modelled on him. It is debated whether
this was a source of pain and humiliation to the increasingly ostracised
Hogg. His masterpiece,
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner
, only achieved recognition some 100 years after publication, but is now
one of the most important novels in the Scottish canon.
