Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hogg, James (1806-1888)
HOGG, JAMES (1806–1888), publisher, son of James Hogg, was born near Edinburgh on 26 March 1806, and educated under the Rev. Thomas Sheriff, who became minister of Fala, in the presbytery of Dalkeith, in 1828, and died in 1836. On 24 Aug. 1818 Hogg was bound apprentice to James Muirhead, printer, Edinburgh. He subsequently entered the book house attached to the ‘Caledonian Mercury,’ where the printing of the seventh edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ had been commenced in 1827, and became reader on the ‘Caledonian Mercury.’ In 1837 he commenced business on his own account as a printer and publisher in Edinburgh. The first publication which bears his imprint is ‘The Honest Waterman,’ a small tract brought out in 1837. On 1 March 1845 appeared the first number of ‘Hogg's Weekly Instructor,’ an unsectarian periodical of promise. In 1849 the title was changed to the ‘Instructor;’ later on it was known as ‘Titan.’ The last number is dated December 1859, and the entire work is comprised in twenty-nine volumes. Hogg was his own editor, being in the later part assisted by his eldest son, James. He also published the principal works of George Gilfillan [q. v.] In 1849 he made the acquaintance of Thomas de Quincey. To the ‘Weekly Instructor’ De Quincey contributed his ‘Autobiographic Sketches’ and other papers, and then agreed with Hogg to bring out his ‘Collected Works’ [see under De Quincey, Thomas]. In 1858 Hogg's printing office was discontinued, and in the autumn of that year his sons John and James, who had been taken into partnership, established a branch publishing office in London, whither Hogg afterwards removed the whole business. Besides other works, including the ‘Churchman's Family Magazine,’ the firm now published several series of successful juvenile books, and the periodical entitled ‘London Society,’ which was projected by James Hogg, jun., in February 1862, and attained at one time a circulation of twenty-five thousand monthly. The firm of James Hogg & Sons was dissolved in July 1867. Hogg died at the residence of his son John, The Acacia, Crescent Road, St. John's, Kent, on 14 March 1888. He married, 13 Nov. 1832, Helen Hutchison (1803–1890) of Hutchiestown Farm, near Dunblane.
[Bookseller, 7 April 1888, p. 363; Nicoll's Landmarks of English Literature, 1883, pp. 454–5; H. A. Page's (i.e. A. H. Japp's) Thomas de Quincey's Life, 1877, i. 396, ii. 1–33, 339; information from John Hogg, esq.]