Hogg's Weekly Instructor

Hogg's Weekly Instructor is significant in the history of werewolf literature because its May 16, 1846 issue carried Catherine Crowe's “A Story of a Weir-Wolf.” The periodical thus became the original venue for a tale that was apparently never republished by Crowe, while also helping preserve a form of supernatural short fiction that was still emerging in English literature.

Publication and Literary Context

Hogg's Weekly Instructor published “A Story of a Weir-Wolf” in its May 16, 1846, issue, identified as Volume III. The story appeared during a period when werewolf fiction was still in its infancy. Between 1800 and 1849, only a small number of English-language werewolf stories had been written, making each surviving publication unusually important to the development of the genre.

The periodical's role belongs to a broader transition from inherited superstition and folklore toward modern literary horror. Earlier traditions had described werewolves under different names and connected their transformations with sorcery, the devil, enchanted girdles, and the appetite of wolves for human flesh. Medieval poetry continued the legend, while the nineteenth century carried the monster from verse into the short story. Hogg's Weekly Instructor therefore participated in a formative stage of literary transformation rather than merely printing an established genre.

Crowe's Story and Its Survival

Catherine Crowe is identified as the only female author in the collection from which this publication history is drawn, and “A Story of a Weir-Wolf” may have been the first werewolf short story written by a woman, although that possibility remains dependent on whether Elizabeth Stone wrote “Hughes the Wer-Wolf” in 1838. Crowe later became known especially for supernatural writing, including The Night-Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost-seers.

The story printed in Hogg's Weekly Instructor was not included in The Night-Side of Nature, despite that later book's compilation of supernatural narratives presented as accounts of real-life events. The omission appears to have contributed to the tale's rarity: the introduction states that Crowe's weir-wolf story was apparently never republished by her and could not be found in any anthology after its original appearance in 1846.

Its later afterlife depended on adaptation rather than ordinary reprinting. In 1876, four years after Crowe's death, William Forster produced The Weirwolf: A Tragedy and explicitly identified the play as being “from a story by Mrs. Crowe.” The periodical consequently served as the point from which the tale entered a second form, allowing a story that had vanished from Crowe's own collections to survive through theatrical transformation.

Place in Werewolf Publishing History

The publication belongs to a decade that also saw the first English novel with a werewolf protagonist. George W. M. Reynolds serialized “Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf” in Reynold's Miscellany from November 6, 1846, to July 24, 1847. Hogg's Weekly Instructor's earlier publication of Crowe's story therefore falls immediately before a major expansion of werewolf fiction into serialized popular narrative.

That proximity is important because the short story was not treated as an inferior form. The period's discussion of fiction emphasized its capacity for concentrated artistic effect, and Edgar Allan Poe had praised the tale as offering the best prose opportunity for displaying the highest talent. Hogg's Weekly Instructor's publication of Crowe's story exemplifies how the short form could carry folklore, supernatural terror, and literary experimentation at a moment when the novel had not yet supplied many werewolf protagonists.

Genre and Historical Significance

The story's original setting in the Middle Ages connects the periodical publication to older European traditions while its appearance in an English magazine places those traditions within nineteenth-century print culture. The werewolf legend had already moved among Greek, English, Italian, German, and French languages, appearing as the man-wolf, the loup-garou, the Wehr-Wolf, or the Bisclavaret. Hogg's Weekly Instructor helped make that transnational and historically layered material available as contemporary English short fiction.

Its importance is therefore archival as well as literary. The issue preserved a rare early werewolf narrative, introduced a potentially pioneering female contribution to the form, and became the source acknowledged by a later stage adaptation. The magazine's contribution is especially striking because the story's own survival mirrors the creature's traditional capacity for transformation: first a short story in a periodical, then a neglected text, and finally a tragedy adapted from the lost or overlooked original.