The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Wednesday, August 5 2009.

• Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, the novel recounts the corruption of a boy of strict Calvinist parentage by a mysterious stranger under whose influence he commits a series of murders. The stranger assures the boy that no sin can affect the salvation of an elect person. The reader, while recognizing the stranger as Satan, is prevented by the subtlety of the novel's structure from finally deciding whether, for all his vividness and wit, he is more than a figment of the boy's imagination. This edition reprints the text of the unexpurgated first edition of 1824, later 'corrected' in an attempt to placate the Calvinists.

Shelfari edited the contributors of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Wednesday, July 22 2009.

• Added a contributor: James Hogg: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Thursday, July 16 2009.

• In August 1823 Blackwood's Magazine, the celebrated literary periodical which was the mouthpiece of an important group of Edinburgh literati, published a letter, under the heading 'A Scots Mummy', which described the digging up of a suicide's grave.