James Hogg (‘H.’) ‘The Shepherd's Calendar. Class Second. Deaths, Judgments, and Providences’

In April and May of 1819, Blackwood’s published ‘Storms’, the first instalment in James Hogg’s ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ series (see p. 83 above). At the time, Hogg planned to write several more instalments of his ‘Calendar’, but an 1821 argument between the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ and William Blackwood interrupted the series for several years. In early 1823, however, the feud had simmered to the point where Hogg was willing to recommence his series, and in March of that year Maga published the first instalment of the second series of the ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’. ¹ Three months later, in June 1823, the second part of ‘Class Second’, entitled ‘Deaths, Judgments, and Providences’, appeared in the magazine. Hogg would write several more instalments in the series before 1829, when a hesitant Blackwood published The Shepherd’s Calendar, a two-volume collection that included all of Hogg’s ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ stories from Blackwood’s Magazine along with ‘several Tales hitherto unpublished’. ² Blackwood worried about the reception of these rustic pieces and asked Hogg’s nephew, Robert Hogg, to revise and correct them, a process that changed the stories considerably. ³