WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
R. A. STREATFEILD
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1904
Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s account of Shelley’s career at Oxford firstappeared in the form of a series of articles contributed to the NewMonthly Magazine in 1832 and 1833. It was afterwards incorporated intohis Life of Shelley, which was published in 1858. It is by commonconsent the most life-like portrait of the poet left by any of hiscontemporaries. “Hogg,” said Trelawny, “has painted Shelley exactly as Iknew him,” and Mary Shelley, referring to Hogg’s articles in her editionof Shelley’s poems, bore witness to the fidelity with which her husband’scharacter had been delineated. In later times everyone who has writtenabout Shelley has drawn upon Hogg more or less freely, for he ispractically the only authority upon Shelley’s six months at Oxford. Yet,save in the extracts that appear in various biographies of the poet, thisremarkable work is little known. Hogg’s[Pg vi] fragmentary Life of Shelley wasdiscredited by the plainly-expressed disapproval of the Shelley family andhas never been reprinted. But the inaccuracies, to call them by no harsherterm, that disfigure Hogg’s later production do not affect the value ofhis earlier narrative, the substantial truth of which has never beenimpugned.
In 1832 the New Monthly Magazine was edited by the first Lord Lytton (atthat time Edward Lytton Bulwer), to whom Hogg was introduced by MrsShelley. Hogg complained bitterly of the way in which his manuscript wastreated. “To write articles in a magazine or a review,” he observed in thePreface to his Life of Shelley, “is to walk in leading-strings. However,I submitted to the requirements and restraints of bibliopolar discipline,being content to speak of my young fellow-collegian, not exactly as Iwould, but as I might. I struggled at first, and feebly, for full libertyof speech, for a larger license of commendation and admiration, for entirefreedom of the press without censorship.” Bulwer, however, was inexorable,and it is owing, no doubt, to his salutary influence that the style ofHogg’s account of Shelley’s Oxford days is[Pg vii] so far superior to that of hislater compilation. Hogg, in fact, tacitly admitted the value of Bulwer’semendations by reprinting the articles in question in his biography ofShelley word for word as they appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, notin the form in which they originally left his pen.
Hogg himself was unquestionably a man of remarkable powers, though hispresent fame depends almost entirely upon his connection with Shelley. Hewas born in 1792, being the eldest son of John Hogg, a gentleman of oldfamily and strong Tory opinions, who lived at Norton in the county ofDurham. He was educated at Durham Grammar School, and entered UniversityCollege, Oxford, in January 1810, a short time before Shelley. The accountof his meeting with Shelley and of their intimacy down to the day of theirexpulsion is told in these pages.
On the strength of a remark of Trelawny’s it has often been repeated thatHogg was a hard-headed man of the world who despised literature, “hethought it all nonsense and barely tolerated Shakespeare.” Such is not theimpression that a reader of these pages will retain, nor, I think, will hebe inclined to echo...