John Hogg of Devon

John Hogg was a Devon banker.  Formerly, he had been a Presbyterian (Unitarian) minister, first at Sidmouth (1759-71) and later at the Mint Meeting in Exeter (1772-89); he also served as a tutor at the Exeter Academy (Murch 402; Register of the Births).  Hogg edited the Unitarian Nathaniel Lardner’s posthumous work, The history of the heretics of the two first centuries (1780). He appears on several occasions in Stedman’s Journal, but Stanbury Thompson sometimes confuses the elder Hogg with his son, Joseph, a merchant (UBD 4.619).  Stedman writes on 20 December 1786, “Mrs. Dennys & Hogg dined with us &c.”  Thompson identifies this individual as Joseph Hogg, but since Joseph would have only been fifteen at the time, it seems likely that it was his father who attended the dinner. In a footnote Thompson cites a journal entry from another individual concerning a dinner party at the Dennyses, this one on 14 July 1793, in which “Mr. Hogg, a young Jacobin, said something improper about the army.  The Colonel [Stedman] frightened him, dragged him back and made him join the party again.  Mr. Dennys &c are not displeased as it may make Hogg more careful” (Thompson, Journal, 3, 42, n. 3).   This was most likely Joseph Hogg, who would have been twenty-two in 1793. See Stanbury Thompson, ed.,  Journal of John Stedman, 1744-1797 (London:  Mitre, 1962),  306; also Timothy Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008).