author
Thomas Jefferson Hogg
1792–1862
Best known as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s close friend and early biographer, this English barrister left one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of the poet’s youth. His own life mixed law, letters, and a lasting place in Romantic literary history.
1 Audiobook
Shelley at Oxford
by Thomas Jefferson Hogg
About the author
Born in County Durham in 1792, Thomas Jefferson Hogg studied at University College, Oxford, where he met Percy Bysshe Shelley. The two became close friends, and both were expelled in 1811 after the controversy around The Necessity of Atheism. Hogg later continued his legal training at the Middle Temple and worked as a barrister.
He is remembered chiefly as a writer and man of letters connected with the Romantic circle around Shelley. His recollections and later biographical work helped shape how later readers pictured Shelley’s student years and personality, especially through Life of Shelley and the material later known as Shelley at Oxford.
Hogg died in 1862. Although he wrote on other subjects as well, his reputation has remained closely tied to his lifelong friendship with Shelley and to the value of his firsthand memories for literary history.