THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER. [Hardcover]

James. Hogg (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: The Cresset Press; Reprint edition (1957)
• ASIN: B000UEIAP8
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Strange Case Indeed, September 13, 2000

By 

Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Penguin English Library) (Mass Market Paperback)

Hogg's novel is about 150 years ahead of its time. Published in 1824, the work has everything readers of post-modern novels could ask for, including clustered narratives, self-reflexive point-of-view, unreliable narrators, unsympathetic-protagonist, etc. Hogg is engaging in a highly playful exercise, yet at the same time the novel can be read as an entirely chilling depiction of what may happen to the human psyche when it is given absolutely free-reign. The story takes place in Scotland in the early 18th century, a time of political and religious foment. It chiefly concerns the religious "progress" of Robert Wingham. Robert's mother is a religious enthusiast who has left the household of her husband, George Colwan, laird of Dalcastle, because he does not meet her stringent standards of pious behavior. Before she leaves, she delivers a son, whom Colwan names after him and names him his sole heir. A year after she has left she delivers another son, Robert, whom the editor-narrator who first tells the story is too polite to say is illegitimate, but it's evident by all appearances and intimations that Robert is the son of Lady Colwan and the Reverend Wringhim, a dour, intolerant, "self-conceited pedagogue," who is the polar opposite of the easy-going laird. Reverend Wingham undertakes the instruction of young Robert and eventually adopts him. Robert, like his father, is a cold fish, who abhors the presence of women and anything else that he thinks will lead him to sin. Young George, on the other hand is naturally open and fun-loving, engaging in the "normal" activities young men of the time preferred. This attitude piques the ire of Robert, who sees any activity that is not directly related to religion as frivolous. He starts showing up uninvited whenever and wherever George and his friends get together. When they try to play tennis, Robert stands in George's way and interferes with the game. The same thing happens when they play a rugby-like game on a field outside Edinburgh. Even after George loses patience and punches Robert , the younger brother keeps on insinuating himself, uninvited, every time George and his friends meet. When the Reverend Wingham learns that his precious boy has been roughed up, he incites his conservative faction to retaliate against the liberals with which George and his friends are in league. A full scale riot ensues, reminiscent of the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. Neither the editor nor Wingham ever give full assent to the fantastic elements in the story. Events are depicted in as realistic a light as possible, which lends weight to the storyline and keeps things from drifting off into never-never land.

Everything about this novel "works." The editor's framing narrative subverts Wingham's "confession" narrative at just the right points, so the subversion actually adds to the solidity and texture of the work as a whole and adds to its plausibility. The comic characters are wonderfully depicted (including Hogg himself, who puts in an appearance as an unhelpful clod who's too busy observing sheep at a local fair to assist the editor and his party when they want to dig up Wingham's grave). Wingham's descent into fanaticism and his subsequent psychological disintegration is handled as well as it possibly could be. It is also a perfectly drawn cautionary tale about the pitfalls of antinomian religious beliefs. Hogg describes for the reader a splendid representation of just where the path of predestination can lead a susceptible mind. That's where the comparison's to Crime and Punishment evolve. Wringhim, like Roskolnikov, considers himself above the common rung of humanity. Unlike Rodyan, however, Robert never does discover the full import of his megalomaniacal doctrine until it is entirely too late. Readers might be interested to note that Hogg's novel had a direct influence on Stephenson' s Jekyll and Hyde and on Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Hogg was considered by his contemporaries to be something of a rustic genius, and the poetic successor to Robert Burns. He was known as the Ettrick Shepherd, because he did earn his livelihood from raising sheep and was entirely self taught. He was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. He's still highly revered in his home country. If more readers become familiar with this one-of-a-kind book, he will be revered more universally. It really is that brilliant a novel.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Doppleganger, March 16, 2007

By 

Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

Is Robert a schizophrenic to be pitied or a psychopath to be loathed?
Similar to Dostoyevsky's psychodrama, The Double, we find the exhileration of the psyche brought bare before our perusal. James Hogg's two part account of a "sinner" (a predestined and chosen one albeit) is on surface a derisive gothic narrative of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. The taut trance-like animated lustre it creates is exceptionally haunting. The author succeeds in invoking the sublime and supernatural within the fragile make-up of a psyche twisted and enlightened by the religious zeal it professes. If Percy Shelley found the tale as insightful as any upopn the workings of the mind it was primarily because of the tenacity of the precepts which justify the sinner's actions and provoke his behavior. A landscape of horrific charge stages a mind terrifying and a depth where foundations are dug to the root and these dragged with a vengence upon the highest peaks of a reprobates mind. Similar to the Marquis De Sade - studies on sexual allusions between the protagonist and the devil are amusing and should be dabbled into - in its use of reason to legitimize otherwise deplorable executions of conscience; this narrative strikes a balance between two accounts of the same fratricide and ensuing murders, where we are left dizzy and confused and thrown into a state of mind persecuted by truth and the mind's ability to obviate the most simple excesses as they are practiced and divined. At times we question the existence of the double, and on other occasions we are in awe of his personality and presence. The second account is of greater psychological depth and makes one confide with the mind of a murderer propelled by his faith. However we cannot but continue to query our sensibility imputing greed and a rationalizing tendency at play. The author's ambiguity make for rewarding continued readings for this is indeed a psychological analysis of exceptional powers.
Beautiful and unbelievable, wonderful and frightening. A pleasure to read and a wonder to study.
Of related study is Anthony Burgess' Enderby Trilogy, where the novel and Hogg are assimilated; the execution of the novel is very much in tune with the madness of James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Possessing Novel, November 6, 2000

By 

mp - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Penguin English Library) (Mass Market Paperback)

James Hogg's "Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a claustrophobic, terrifying spectacle of a novel. First published anonymously in 1824, the novel centers around the manuscript of an obscure Scottish Laird who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Robert Wringhim is a well-educated, but illegitimate child of the Laird of Dalcastle. He leaves the estate to live with his mother, also estranged from the estate. Raised by his adopted father, a zealous Calvinist preacher, Robert grows to despise his biological family. When, on his 18th birthday, God reveals through the preacher, that Robert is one of the elect, the true action of the novel begins.

The novel has an unusual and provocative structure: an editorial recounting of the story envelops the text of Robert Wringhim's actual 'memoirs and confessions'. The novel's temporal structure hinges on the 1707 Act of Union which annexed Scotland to England, forming Great Britain. With the editorial apparatus (and its debt to an oral tradition), and Robert's first person manuscript, Hogg seems to question the methods by which history is written and passed down. Several versions of Robert's story, from himself, his contemporaries, and the 'editor' who lives over 100 years after the events gives a startling, disturbingly incoherent vision of history.

This novel is great for its wranglings with the problems of reconciling money with morality, and religion with the law. Hogg's primary concern is with the religious issue of antinomianism - the notion that God's elect are free from the dictates of human law. Robert's election and subsequent relationship with the wildly mysterious, fantastically rendered Gil-Martin put antinomianism to the harshest test.

"The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a rather short novel which I recommend highly. It is an entertaining historical, religious, psychological rollercoaster. Its blend of sublimely dark humor and social comment is a high achievement in any century.