HOGG, James.

£15,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself. First edition of Hogg's uncommon gothic masterpiece, "one of the great classics of supernatural fiction [and] perhaps the finest English supernatural novel of its century" (Bleiler). Of the 1,000 copies printed, over half were remaindered due to slow sales. The puzzling work was not printed again in unbowdlerized form until its republication as The Suicide's Grave (1895).The novel "offers competing attempts to tell the story of the life of Robert Wringhim; first a fictional 'Editor' produces a narrative constructed after the manner of one of Scott's Waverley novels, then the 'Editor' prints Robert's own private memoirs and confessions" (ODNB). A 17th-century Calvinist killer, Wringhim is led on by his companion Gil-Martin, who has been variously interpreted as the devil, Wringhim's twin, and a figment of his imagination. This characterization opened "a new vein of horror by denying the possibility or even the existence of any psychological unity" (Barron). Robert Louis Stevenson, who likely took inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde, called Hogg's novel "without doubt a real work of imagination, ponderated and achieved... I never read a book that went on the same road with the Sinner. It is odd, though I may have heard the story told when a child, but it is odd that somewhat a similar idea exercised me for some time, and the Sinner damped it out: though perhaps unconsciously it came again in a new form"

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