The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
ISBN: 9780141441535
Publication Date: 6 June 2006

James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) has been called 'the greatest novel of Scotland'. Robert Wringhim's family is composed of a father and brother, a pious mother, and a rival father in the person of a fanatical Calvinist minister. He comes to believe that he is one of the Elect, predestined to be saved, while others are damned. Sure of his freedom from the dictates of morality, he embarks on a series of crimes in the company of a new friend Gil Martin, a man of many likenesses who can be mistaken for Robert, and who explains that they are as one in the holy work of purifying the world. Who or what is this double? Is he the Devil? The divided self that appears in the literature of Romanticism is nowhere more powerfully imagined. This new edition has an introduction by Karl Miller, which discusses the presence in the novel of the life and times of James Hogg. It also contains two of Hogg's most interesting stories, Marion's Jock and John Gray o' Middleholm.

About the Author

James Hogg (1770-1835) was a Scottish poet and novelist. A growing enthusiasm for Scottish poetry led to the publication of his dialect Scottish Pastorals in 1801, and to the friendship of Sir Walter Scott. In later years he published a number of volumes of verse, encouraged by Scott, and in 1824 his masterpiece, The private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.