FOR some time now lots of people here and abroad have been celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of James Hogg, the poet and author known as the Ettrick Shepherd.

Most famous for his extraordinary novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published anonymously in 1824, Hogg really was a shepherd from a very poor family who, like his great hero Robert Burns, overcame the disadvantages of his lowly birth to achieve recognition in his own lifetime.

The 250th anniversary of his birth thoroughly deserves to be noted, and there have been numerous events held online to mark the occasion – the problem is we do not know the exact date on which Hogg was born.

The only certainty about his infancy is that he was baptised 250 years ago this week on Sunday, December 9, 1770, which is why we are celebrating him in The Sunday National today and in Back In The Day on Tuesday when I will be examining his life and writing career in much greater detail, believing as I do that Hogg deserves to be much better known.

Due to the fact that births were not recorded by a national system, and since the man himself was somewhat hazy about the details, we are unlikely ever to know exactly when Hogg was born, but we can take an educated guess that his birthday was sometime in late November or the first week of December in 1770. I am sure it would be a fascinating piece of detective work to discover the exact date not least because Hogg himself said he was born in 1771,while we know for a fact that he was baptised in Ettrick Parish Church on December 9, 1770.

The record of his baptism is held in the National Records of Scotland which confirms: “James Hogg was baptised on 9 December 1770, the lawful son of Robert Hogg and Margaret Laidlaw, tenant in Ettrick Hall. The entry in the Old Parish Register for Ettrick in the county of Selkirk doesn’t include a date of birth.”

It is that last detail which is so maddening for Hogg fans. One of the foremost scholars of Hogg and his work is Dr Robin MacLachlan, treasurer of the James Hogg Society which does an excellent job of promoting Hogg’s legacy.

In a recent blog for the Society, MacLachlan wrote: “All that’s certain is that according to the parish records he was baptised in Ettrick Parish Church on 9 December 1770. However the records do not include his date of birth.

“According to Hogg’s daughter Mary, writing under her married name Mrs Garden, Hogg’s friend Alexander Laidlaw had written to her that on the basis of information from Hogg’s mother Margaret (keep up!) Hogg was born in “the latter end of 1770”. Mary Garden assumes from that information a date in November and concludes that 25 November is “not unlikely”.

“The man himself is no help. For most of his life he maintained that he was born on 25 January 1771, which not entirely coincidentally would have meant that he shared a birthday with Robert Burns. But I’m afraid, to misquote Burns, that fact’s a chiel that most definitely dings.”

MacLachlan points out that Hogg himself wrote that in the 18th century, children were usually baptised on the first Sunday after the birth, but my own researches indicate that in the 1770s there was no hard and fast rule, except for Anglicans and Episcopalians who had to have their children baptised within eight to 10 days of birth.

Looking at genealogical records from the 18th century in Scotland, which I have done for several projects, it seems that most children were baptised within the first week or so of life. That makes a great deal of sense when you consider child mortality was sadly all too common in those days – if you have an old graveyard near you, take a tour and see just how many infants and young children died before their parents.

Various fevers and epidemics took away whole generations of children, but thankfully for us, Hogg was not among them. He was the second oldest of four boys born to Robert and Margaret. His elder brother William and James stayed in Scotland all their lives but his younger brothers Robert and David emigrated to the USA.

His early life was spent on the farm where Robert Hogg was both a shepherd and a dealer in sheep. It was Robert’s attempts to become a stock farmer which made James’s childhood traumatic because his father made some poor investments and eventually went bankrupt. That event happened just a few months after Hogg began his education at the local parish school, and with his father unable to pay the fees, he had to leave school at the age of just six.

According to Hogg that was the extent of his formal education and thus was unlike Burns, who received a good education at John Murdoch’ school in Alloway. Interestingly Burns also had to leave school when financial problems meant he was needed for farm work, but by that time he could read, write, count and had a knowledge of Latin.

There’s a remarkable coincidence between Burns and Hogg. Both had parents who strove to educate them, in Rabbie’s case his father William and in Hogg’s case his mother Margaret. Even as a child shepherding sheep, Hogg also educated himself.

On Tuesday in Back in the Day, I will show how Hogg developed as a writer and made friends with many of the leading literary figures of the day. I will also explain why I think he wrote Confessions, a great and very Scottish novel, and will also ask how the Ettrick Shepherd came to write this famous line in Confessions: “Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.”