The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a deeply disturbing book: it is also, in the words of Iain Crichton Smith “a towering Scottish novel, one of the very greatest of all Scottish books”, and a major text in European Romanticism. It has been variously interpreted as a set of narrative games, a Gothic novel, a psychological case-study, a satire of extremist theology and by extension of all forms of totalitarian thought, and an analysis of the Scottish national psyche, but any one explanation of its power seems inadequate. It is clear, however, that the novel is firmly rooted in the entire output of its author, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (1770-1835), particularly in his other novels of the 1820s, which similarly experiment with multiple narratives and conflicting voices and seek to unsettle the reader's preconceptions as they proceed.

As Peter Garside explains in his recent edition of the novel there is little surviving evidence of its genesis and no surviving manuscript, but it seems clear that Confessions of a Justified Sinner was probably written and printed during the autumn of 1823 and spring of 1824. Hogg was then living at Altrive in Yarrow, Selkirkshire, a small farm he held on a rent-free life-tenancy, thanks to the kindness of the Duke of Buccleuch. He had recently completed The Three Perils of Woman, a national tale with a double narrative, the first of which takes place in the Edinburgh of the 1820s while the second centres on the devastation of the Scottish Highlands after the failed Jacobite Rising of 1745-46. This was published in August 1823, and while he was waiting for it to appear Hogg's imagination seems to have been caught by the exhumation of a suicide's corpse on a neighbouring farm. He describes this in a letter dated 1 August 1823 and contributed to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for that month under the title of “A Scots Mummy”. With a number of strategic modifications the letter appears within the final section of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in June 1824.

The novel apparently takes the familiar form of a first-person narrative from a manuscript or printed original discovered by an editor and embedded in his own account of its finding and significance. (This convention is parodied by Jane Austen, for example, in the heroine's night-time retrieval of farrier's and laundry bills in Northanger Abbey.) The Editor's narrative, however, does not confine itself to an explanation of the circumstances leading up to the discovery of the manuscript, which, in this case, succeeds rather than precedes the core narrative. The Editor's narrative begins in a pseudo-antiquarian style that on one level gently mocks the opening of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and then quickly turns into a grotesque and exuberant account of a wedding that might have been written by Tobias Smollett (1721-71). The jovial old Tory landowner, George Colwan of Dalcastle (“or Dalchastel, as it is often called” remarks the Editor) marries a young Covenanting bride, gets drunk on his wedding night, falls asleep while she is praying, and discovers on the following morning that his bride is absent:

The laird half dressed himself in an instant, and strode through every room in the house, opening the windows as he went, and scrutinizing every bed and every corner. He came into the hall where the wedding festivities had held; and, as he opened the various window-boards, loving couples flew off like hares surprised too late in the morning among the early braird.

The ill-assorted couple eventually separate, the Laird taking a housekeeper-mistress named Arabella Logan, and his wife living in the household of an Antinomian minister, Rev. Robert Wringhim. The foundered marriage has, however, produced two sons, one for each parent. The elder son, George, is sociable, good-looking, athletic and hearty, his father's heir in every respect, while the younger, Robert, is an ill-favoured and dishonest religious bigot, the mental (and perhaps physical) fruit of the relationship between Lady Dalcastle and her favourite minister. Their birth, in historical terms, seems to fall on each side of the Revolution settlement of 1688-89, which in Scottish terms meant the replacement of the Royalist and Episcopalian party with that of the Presbyterian Whigs. The two young men, known as George Colwan and Robert Wringhim, meet and quarrel in Edinburgh. Robert's subsequent haunting of George (“like the attendance of a demon on some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction”) includes an uncanny encounter on mountainous Arthur's Seat where his enlarged form appears to George on a cloud before their flesh-and-blood collision. There are parallels with E. T. A. Hoffmann's Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16) here, which Hogg may have known through his friendship with its translator, R. P. Gillies (1788-1858). After visiting a bagnio (brothel) one night with his friends George is murdered under mysterious circumstances, his father dies of grief, and Robert inherits the Dalcastle estate. Mrs Logan's subsequent investigation of the death and hunt for the murderer should then, by utilising the detective element of the Gothic novel, lead to a narrative resolution, but this possibility, far from being fulfilled, gradually recedes, and the reader's confidence in the Editor is undermined.

The prostitute Arabella Calvert, a fallen woman of a lower grade than her namesake Arabella Logan, gives another view of the jovial Colwans as exploiters of women such as herself, shivering in a hired dress, “perishing with famine, and . . . like to fall down”. Her eye-witness account of George's death reveals that he was stabbed in the back by Robert, while engaged in duelling with a mysterious opponent who is identical to and yet distinct from Thomas Drummond, the man responsible for the killing by law and in public opinion. The two women pursue Robert to Dalcastle, only to find that his mysterious associate is now identical to and yet distinct from the murdered George himself. Robert vanishes just as he seems about to be arrested and the once-confident Editor rather vaguely offers his reader “an original document of a most singular nature”, claiming (somewhat mendaciously after the lengthy preceding narrative) to “offer no remarks on it . . . leaving every one to judge for himself”.

The opening of the second narrative, Robert Wringhim's first-person account, signals a drastic shift of tone (“Therefore, in the might of heaven I will sit down and write”) suggestive of religious allegory. Influences here may include John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), Covenanting testimonies, or the autobiography of the Rev. Thomas Boston, Calvinist author and divine, and former minister of Ettrick, the parish in which Hogg was born. Soaked in the retributive imagery of the Old Testament, Robert's language reveals him to be a liar, a cheat, a rapist, a murderer, and (as a self-deceiver) an unreliable narrator. After a self-revelatory account of his childhood and upbringing Robert recounts how at the age of seventeen he was assured by his “father” that he was now a justified person, and that “no bypast transgression, nor any future act” can change his eternal destiny as one of the saved. Ignoring what Hogg in his Lay Sermons (1834) later termed “the religion of Jesus” which presents “a suitable stimulus to every generous, kind, and amiable affection” Robert immediately conceives of himself “as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures below”. It is at this point that he meets a mysterious stranger, his “brother” or his “second self”, who, it is hinted, may be either the projection of mental illness or the devil in person. His name, he says, is Gil-Martin (which “is not my Christian name; but it is a name which may serve your turn”) and he has only one parent whom he does not acknowledge. Gil-Martin also claims that he has thousands of subjects and is a great prince – so Robert immediately thinks he must be Peter the Great of Russia. A fragmented and confused account of events leading up to the murder of George Colwan follows, the details of which almost (but frustratingly not quite) match those of the Editor's narrative. Robert is vainly warned away from evil by visions and by a mysterious white lady.

In Robert's confessional narrative, with its delusional appearances and bouts of amnesia during which he is apparently responsible for crimes he has no memory of having committed, Hogg seems at points to allude to Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). A number of critics have argued that Hogg has provided a counterbalancing centre to this unstable narrative in a number of Scots-speaking minor characters, but their characters and accounts too are frequently ambiguous. The old servant John Barnet assesses Robert as a disturbed child only to scorn him, and the peasant Samuel Scrape, who recounts a cautionary tale in which the devil appears disguised as a powerful preacher and who reminds Robert of the Golden Rule of Jesus, takes as his motto “Man mind yoursel”. If there is a figure of moral authority it is the Presbyterian minister Rev. Blanchard, who defines religion as “the bond of society on earth, and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature”. He alone shows real concern for Robert, insisting on warning him of his spiritual danger and attempting to persuade him to give up his mysterious friend. His exemplary Christian death, moreover, clearly indicates that the novel is no straightforward satire of Calvinism. The reader's easy distance from Robert and his crimes, however, is steadily reduced after his flight from Dalcastle to avoid arrest. As Robert is hounded by Gil-Martin from Edinburgh to the Scottish Borders, and finally to suicide, the reader shares the horror of being approached by demonic forces in the stable-loft, of being “lame, hungry, fatigued”, and of being “seized with terrors indefinable”. Like Lautréamont's Maldoror (1868) Hogg's novel is an important precursor of surrealism.

The final section of the novel returns to the 1820s and gives an account of an expedition by the Editor and his friends to Hogg's native district to unearth the suicide's body. This expedition is triggered by Hogg's letter to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which provides a traditional account of the suicide's death and subsequent burial and its recent exhumation by local shepherds. Hogg himself is then described to the Editor by John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) as a maker of “ingenious lies”, before making a cameo appearance at a local sheep-fair to repudiate the whole enterprise with a curt “I hae mair ado than I can manage the day, foreby ganging to houk up hunder-year-auld banes”. The Editor and friends unearth the body again, and describe it in minute and gruesome detail, also lighting upon the Sinner's narrative itself. Far from closing the narrative, the Editor is only able to speculate vaguely as to the significance of what he has dug up, making the admission, “I do not understand it”.

Most of Hogg's contemporaries did not understand it either, though clearly some were unnerved and disturbed by reading the novel, one reviewer remarking that “the impression which the volume has left on our mind is so unpleasant, that we wish we had not read it”. It sold poorly, most of the initial impression of 1000 copies being remaindered and the author receiving little or nothing for it. Hogg's deliberate instability of tone and the ambiguity as to whether Gil-Martin is the devil or a projection of Robert's mental state were seen as involuntary faults rather than deliberate achievements. More seriously, it was widely held (like Robert Burns's “Holy Willie's Prayer”) to satirise orthodox Calvinism, a verdict that led to the 1837 reprint of the novel (and reprints for most of the nineteenth century) being bowdlerised and stripped of theological references and allusions. When read in this form it appeared to be of little importance, and it was not until 1895 and the publication of a first-edition based text that its reputation began to rise. The Cresset Press edition of 1947, with a critical introduction by the influential French writer André Gide was the real turning-point in its fortunes, however, sparking a large number of editions and focusing widespread critical attention on Hogg's outstanding achievement. More recently, the work of Douglas Mack, David Groves, and Peter Garside has rightly emphasised the Scottish background of the book, and its primary context of Hogg's other writings.