Thomas Jefferson Hogg

Thomas Jefferson Hogg 1857

Thomas Jefferson Hogg (born May 24, 1792 in Stockton-on-Tees , County Durham , † August 27, 1862 in London ) was a British lawyer ( barrister ), writer and friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley .

Like Shelley, Hogg was a student at University College (Oxford) and befriended it there. The two shared freethinking and unconventional views and worked on joint literary projects that were to get them into considerable trouble. A joint pamphlet of parodistic revolutionary poetry, which the two wrote in late 1810, the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson , pretending to come from Margaret Nicholson , a mentally confused laundress who in 1786 King George III. tried to stab her. They also wrote a joint novel, Lenora , which was considered too subversive to be printed. Their joint pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism was printed (but anonymously) in early 1811 . The suspicion of authorship fell on the two rebellious students. When questioned, they did not admit their text, but did not distance themselves from it either. As a result, both were expelled from Oxford.

The rest of Hogg's life was quieter. He did, however, show a tendency to fall in love with Shelley's women, for example Harriet Westbrook (unsuccessful) and, in 1814, Mary Shelley (with more prospects of success, favored by Percy - but she was pregnant). He processed his complicated relationship with Shelley in the novel Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, published anonymously in 1811 .

Mary Shelley, 1820

His parents, John and Prudentia Hogg, saw Shelley as a source of ill influence on their son, but found over time that he was no longer a vegetarian and occasionally accompanied them to church. He also completed his legal training, but was neither financially nor hierarchically particularly successful. He was unable to get a judicial position or that of a professor. However, he made a name for himself as a connoisseur of ancient Greek and after Shelley's death he made Jane Williams, whom he had recently greatly admired, to his wife - against the resistance of his family and with great legal difficulties (her first marriage to a John Johnson was formally still in existence ).

In 1857, Percy Florence Shelley , the poet's surviving son , asked him for a biography of his father. Hogg published two volumes in 1858, but they were not very well received.

His brother was the naturalist John Hogg (1800–1869).

literature

• Bloom, Harold; Edmundson, Melissa (2009), Percy Shelley, Chelsea House Publications, ISBN 978-1-60413-447-6 .
• Norman, Sylva (1934), Norman, Sylva, ed., After Shelley: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Hogg to Jane Williams, Oxford University Press
• Rees, Joan (1985), Shelley's Jane Williams, William Kimber, ISBN 978-0-7183-0549-9 .
• Scott, Winifred (1951), Jefferson Hogg: Shelley's Biographer, Jonathan Cape
• St Clair, William (1991), The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 978-0-8018-4233-7 .