James Hogg's life-story is one of extraordinary transitions and in his own lifetime he was best known as a heaven-inspired and naive Scottish rustic who featured as the boozing buffoon of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. In his own fascinating Memoir this notoriously open-hearted man was curiously reticent about certain passages in his life. He was a man of apparent contradictions: a partisan Tory with Radical friends; an upholder of oral tradition who eagerly embraced every new development in early nineteenth-century print culture; a man who wrote against biographical intrusions yet in his own life writing, stories and poems emphasised his persona and origins as the Ettrick Shepherd. His formidable intelligence and drive were seldom acknowledged, and his most challenging work disturbed conventional readerly preconceptions.