According to the biography on pages 197-8, James Hogg is one
of the unfortunate writers whose rise to prominence did not occur until after
his death. Even his friends and contemporaries felt his work was substandard.
Sir Walter Scott once stated in a letter: "Hogg's Tales are a great
failure to be sure. With a very considerable portion of original genius he is
sadly deficient not only in correct taste but in common tact" (197).I
however found Hogg's works to be just as, if not more so, gripping than the
other works we have read this week. Why is it that despite being looked down
upon by his contemporaries Hogg has found himself in their company all these
years later? My guess is it was not Hogg's work that was found lacking, but
rather his background. It was a well known fact that Hogg worked as a shepherd
and was illiterate in his early life. His fellow Romantic authors who spoke so
boldly about the aristocracy seem to have some of their own preconceptions of
class and worthiness.
Many Romantic era writers, artists and painters whose work we value today had only a small following in their own time, and this was often because of their class status. Keats, for example, was lambasted by reviewers for writing poems about classical themes--partly because the poems were unusual and groundbreaking, but also because he was not educated and couldn't read Greek, so the critics disparaged his ability to write about something he had read in translation. This shows the class hierarchies of literature in the early 19th century--and the same applies to art and music. As we'll discuss in a few weeks, Blake was also scoffed at by critics, even though he was recognized as brilliant.
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