The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg

About the Book

"Having been bred amongst mountains I am always unhappy when in a flat country."

With an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury.

In the early years of the 18th century, Scotland is torn by religious and political strife. Hogg's sinner, justified by his Calvinist conviction that his own salvation is pre-ordained, is suspected of involvement in a series of bizarre and hideous crimes. A century later his memoirs reveal the extraordinary, macabre truth. The tale is chilling for its astute psychological accuracy as it illustrates, with power and economy, the dire effect of self-righteous bigotry on a fanatical character.

In the first half of his new introduction David Blair provides a detailed explanation of the historical and religious contexts of Hogg's novel. In the second half he probes the book's brilliant, complex engagement with issues of identity, history and narrative itself.

About the Author

James Hogg

1770-1835 - SCOTTISH

Poet, journalist and novelist, James Hogg was born at Ettrick Forest, Selkirkshire in 1770. He was the fourth son of a poor farmer, and consequently received only a scant education. From 1790-1800 he was a shepherd to a farmer on Douglas Burn, Yarrow. Fortunately, he enjoyed access to books and through their influence he began to write poetry.

His first work of original ballads, The Mountain Bard, appeared in 1807. He continued to work in sheep farming, without success, and in 1810 he moved to Edinburgh, where he concentrated on writing poetry. The Forest Minstrel was published in 1810, and was followed in 1813 by The Queen’s Wake, the work which established him as a poet. This led to his friendship with Byron, Wordsworth, Southey and John Murray, who published an English edition of his work. Hogg joined the editorial board of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine where his contributions were published under the name of the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’. Hogg published mainly poetry for the first forty years of his life.

His main works of fiction are The Three Perils of Man (1822) and its sequel The Three Perils of Women (1823) followed in 1824 by his masterpiece The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In 1816 he was bequeathed a farm in Yarrow, where he spent most of his time for the rest of his life, combining farming with writing. He died on his farm on 21 November, 1835.