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Hogg and the Necessity of Atheism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederick L. Jones*
Affiliation:
Mercer University

Extract

It is time that three things should be stated emphatically: (1) while at Oxford Hogg was fully as radical as Shelley and was Shelley's genuinely sympathetic coadjutor instead of his amused companion; (2) Hogg and Shelley were equally responsible for The Necessity of Atheism; and (3) it is more than probable that Hogg wrote the first draft of The Necessity. The first of these has been vaguely hinted at by Shelley's biographers; the second has been hazily confined by them to Hogg's writing of the Preface to The Necessity; the third has never been mentioned. The facts are abundant and reliable; but Hogg's Life of Shelley, in spite of its known inaccuracies and misinterpretations, has prevailed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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References

page 423 note 1 “Shelley's Leonora,” MP (May, 1935).

page 423 note 2 Letters of Shelley, ed. Ingpen (1914), i, 20, 31, 34, 43.

page 423 note 3 Life of Shelley, i, 114–115.

page 423 note 4 Life of Shelley, ed. Forman, p. 82. Earlier, in an Appendix to Robert Montgomery's Oxford, 4th ed. (1835), p. 163, appeared Medwin's statement that Hogg was expelled with Shelley “for having been partly the author of a treatise called The Necessity of Atheism.”

page 423 note 5 Hogg's Life of Shelley, ed. Dowden (1906), p. xvii.—The letter is given as it was corrected by Dowden; Hogg (p. 575) prints it with changes which throw all the responsibility on Shelley.

page 423 note 6 Ingpen, Shelley in England (1917), p. 201.

page 423 note 7 Printed from Bodl. MS. Top. Oxon. e. 51, p. 161, by S. Gibson and C. J. Hindle in'Thillip Bliss: Editor and Bibliographer,“ (Proceedings and Papers of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, iii, 230).—I am indebted to Prof. Newman I. White for this bit of evidence.

page 423 note 7a This letter was first printed in Ingpen's Shelley in England (1917), pp. 214–215. Peck, in Shelley: His Life and Work, i, 105, 109, prints the letter; but nowhere does he give any indication that he considers Hogg seriously involved in The Necessity affair.

page 423 note 8 Printed in an Appendix to Robert Montgomery's poem Oxford, Fourth Edition (1835).

page 423 note 9 Hogg printed “cudgel for blockheads,” Life of Shelley, ed. Dowden, p. 120.

page 423 note 10 Letters of Shelley (1914), i, 35.

page 423 note 11 Ibid., i, 45; ii, 1007.

page 423 note 12 Fraser's Magazine (June 1841), p. 703.