‘By famine, sword, and pestilence’: James Hogg and Cholera in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country

Abstract: James Hogg’s short poem ‘One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-one’ was published in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country in February 1832, and its refrain, ‘Burking, Bill, and Cholera’, calls attention to the major news stories during his first and only visit to London. The poem is relatively well known amongst Hogg scholars and has been read alongside his macabre tale about Scotland’s experience of the cholera epidemic, ‘Some Terrible Letters from Scotland. Communicated by the Ettrick Shepherd’, published in the Metropolitan Magazine in April 1832. In my recent editorial work on the volume James Hogg, Contributions to Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country , for the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, I discovered that Hogg returns to the topic of the cholera epidemic in a slightly later poem for Fraser’s , ‘An Auld Wife’s Dream’, in the January 1833 issue. In this article I read ‘An Auld Wife’s Dream’ within the discursive context of Fraser’s and in relation to key events of this period to provide a fuller picture of Hogg’s literary response to the cholera epidemic and his engagement with the politically charged literary context of Fraser’s , the leading London magazine of the 1830s.