ABSTRACT
James Hogg’s argument should be interpreted in the light of his status as a labouring-class writer in a society where knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics was the sign of an educated man and giving entry to the learned professions. Solitude appears as an ordeal, whether created by Robert Wringhim’s own broken-down personality that cannot even sustain the mental illusion of a demonic friend, or as a deliberate cause of suffering engineered by the devil in person. Gil-Martin gives Robert no name and does not use his own on the grounds that ‘there was no occasion for any one friend ever naming another, when their society was held in private’. Johann Georg Zimmermann’s theories on the disintegration of the personality as a result of prolonged solitude, with the imagination preponderating over reason in the absence of social interactions provide a contemporary psychological explanation of the final events of Robert’s narrative which is no less convincing and no less terrifying.
