ABSTRACT
Hogg’s memoir, later to be absorbed into his controversial Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858), is the first in which the meeting and subsequent friendship of poet and memoirist is the focus of interest. As Hogg describes in the first of these articles, published a decade after Shelley’s death, the two young men met as fellow undergraduates at University College, Oxford. Hogg was a lawyer’s son from Durham (and would eventually become a lawyer himself). He was, he says, fascinated by ‘a character so extraordinary, and indeed almost preternatural’ (New Monthly Magazine, February, 1832, p. 136). He declares, indeed, that he immediately felt ‘reverence’ for Shelley. The impressions that he recalls in these articles are, of course, shaped by his sense, by 1832, of the poet’s greatness. Yet he was clearly gripped by Shelley, and rapidly became a kind of follower as well as a close friend. While the account that he gives here is scarcely disinterested, it has been treated by later biographers as essentially reliable. Pictures such as that of Shelley’s college rooms in the second of these extracts seem too vivid and too unusual to be invented. Our idea of Shelley the student – the galvanic experimenter and dabbler in sceptical thought – still derives almost entirely from these articles.
