[In the following essay, Levin elucidates the ironies and ambiguities of Hogg's confessional writing in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.]

The confessor of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner kills his brother, mother, and finally himself. But his body is miraculously preserved, a freak of nature that may have to do with “the preservation o' that little book,—the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner: Written By Himself Fideli certa merces” (228).¹ “The reward for the faithful one is sure” is an epigraph that in its ambiguity points to the hideous irony of this confession. Assured of his own Election, Robert Colwan-Wringhim not only commits horrible crimes but writes of them as well. His reward is in one sense profitable—merces—for he becomes Laird of Dalcastle, but his reward is also death and damnation. His faith occasions the creation of a double that is at once part of a particular religious convention and a sign of the delineated image that the confessor seeks to create, a sign that finally destroys him at the same time as it allows his continuing existence. Like Lamb's Drunkard, Hogg's Justified Sinner conceives his story in and against specific nineteenth-century religious systems.

The confession is in three parts. An editor gives his version of the events, drawing on the found manuscript of the “little book,” “history, justiciary records, and tradition” (85). He provides an account of the ill-fated marriage of George Colwan, the Laird of Dalcastle, whose wife leaves him two days after their wedding. The Laird drags her back, however, and after bearing his son, George, she has a second son, Robert, probably by a fanatic minister, “the Rev. Mr. Wringhim” (13). Robert takes up with a strange companion and enters upon a life that he considers divine service—ridding the world of ungodly people like his brother and the local country minister. He inherits the title of Laird but disappears after apparently committing more crimes, such as killing his mother. The editor's rendition is a generally chronological presentation, although he occasionally refers to knowledge obtained from other sources. For instance, he tells us that Mrs. Logan, the old Laird's companion, is wrong in suspecting that Lady Colwan killed her first son, George, “as will appear in the sequel” (60). In keeping with the impossibility of ever fully explaining the self through confession, the editor does not really understand what he presents, and his narrative is further complicated by Robert's version of the story, which comes next. The events of the editor's presentation are related to include the participation of Gil-Martin, Robert's “second-self.” A hallucination? The devil? No clear answers can be given. The reader now is made aware, however, that Robert sees himself as one of God's elect and is acting accordingly—stamping out wrong. Robert also includes his wanderings after his disappearance from Dalcastle up to the moment of his death, probably by his own hand. Finally, the editor tells how a letter signed James Hogg, which was actually published in Blackwood's Magazine of August 1823, has impelled him to seek out its author. This letter described the suicide's grave, the tradition surrounding his death and burial, and the recent reopening of the grave by two young men. Now it is true that the editor has often “been hoaxed by the ingenious fancies displayed in that Magazine. …” And it is true that Hogg, also known as the Ettrick Shepherd, “has imposed as ingenious lies on the public ere now” (222). Still, the editor hopes he will take him to the grave and locates Hogg at the sheep market. But Hogg is trying to sell sheep and says he is much too busy for “ganging to houk up hunder-year-auld banes” (223). Not to be deterred, the editor finds others to accompany him and tells how he has dug up the corpse and unearthed the manuscript. His presentation of this found volume is part of a literary, historical convention at the same time as it points to the connection of death and writing: the killing of the self even as it is frozen and preserved in confession. Significantly, James Hogg as shepherd refuses to participate in such an act. While the editor and his friends literally create this text by unearthing it, Hogg's attitude, and the letter he has written Blackwood's about the book, emphasize the paradoxes involved in the act of writing autobiography.

These ambivalences of confession are reinforced by Hogg's appearance in the text itself as well as by his refusal to acknowledge the book when it first appeared. In the “Autobiography of The Author” with which The Works of The Ettrick Shepherd concludes, Hogg writes: “The next year, 1824, I published ‘The Confessions of a Fanatic;’ but it being a story replete with horrors, after I had written it I durst not venture to put my name to it: so it was published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well” (2: 459). The paucity of sales was also undoubtedly owing to reviews such as those in the New Monthly of November 1824, which characterized the work as “singularly dull and revolting” and ridiculed the author for expecting the public to be interested in “two versions of such extraordinary trash” (506).

Yet, as De Quincey is best known for his Opium-Eater and Musset for his Child of the Century, so the attention that Hogg's work has received often centers on the Justified Sinner as this author's most intriguing creation. Even before the First James Hogg Society Conference convened in the early 1980s (and published an interesting set of papers presented there), the Justified Sinner refused to stay buried. In 1924, André Gide was “so taken hold of, so voluptuously tormented” by the book (232). Subsequently, work by David Groves, Joseph Haggerty, Douglas Gifford, Nelson Smith, and Barbara Bloedé—to name only those on whose studies I have drawn the most—has been added to the two previous, standard books on Hogg, one by Edith Batho and the other by Louis Simpson. Northrop Frye speculated that Hogg's Confessions, like many romances and anatomies, “are neglected only because the categories to which they belong are unrecognized” (312). While “neglect” might not be particularly apt here, taking the work in the context of other romantic confessions helps explain some of the intricacies of the text that have come under discussion.

The form of the narrative has evoked much comment. Writing of the “odd things” that happened to the English novel during the romantic period, Richard Kiely suggests that Hogg's unhappiness with the novel as a genre caused him to try to reshape the form in his Confessions. Elizabeth Harris sees Hogg as presenting two inconsistent narratives in the Confessions in order to question the validity of forms available to him. This technique jeopardizes the success of the piece, according to Robert Langbaum, because it is “unable to combine deep psychological insight with a convincing view of everyday reality” (146).²

As it reveals the realities of the romantic confessional enterprise, however, the work is most convincing. A confessor who is an outcast, possibly a disguised version of the author himself, sets out his story in the context of the religious connotations of its title to question religious practices. The confessor hopes to be of service to others and also describes the difficulties of inscribing an identity.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner indulges one preference in the work Hogg formally designated as his autobiography: “I like to write about myself: in fact, there are few things which I like better” (II, 441). The temptation is great to apply the plural “things” to “myself” making “myselves,” as well as to “writings.” The self of an editor presents the self of James Hogg, a shepherd, and the self of Robert Colwan-Wringhim, justified sinner. The editor is similar in many ways to the Hogg who helped “edit” the “Chaldee manuscript” that launched Blackwood's. As Hogg appears in the Confessions as a blunt, Scots-speaking worker, so he sometimes projected a similar image of himself to the reading public, as well as to Edinburgh literary circles. Although it is difficult to know how much Hogg alters supposedly autobiographical material to complement the image he wished to advance, certain passages in the Confessions appear in other works as having happened to the author. For instance, citing a passage from “Nature's Magic Lantern,” Simpson identifies what he sees as “the most striking pages of the novel,” the scene at Arthur's Seat, as coming directly from Hogg's own experience (198-99). John Carey observes, “It is hard to resist seeing George, ‘always ready to oblige,’ and Wringhim with his ‘ardent and ungovernable passions,’ as the two sections of Hogg's personality. He was eager to be liked but suspicious and truculent” (xx-xxi).

Hogg's relationship with Blackwood's Magazine and its editors, John Wilson and John Lockhart, may have found its way into the Confessions. Hogg assumed these men returned his friendship. In the early 1820s, however, they began rejecting Hogg's own submissions and forging his name to articles they themselves had written. Hogg was thus falsely used as a Blackwood's mouthpiece and was even associated in the public's mind with the Scott-Christie duel, since Lockhart's treatment of Hogg became one of many issues in the rivalry between Blackwood's and the London Magazine. (Shortly after the London Magazine objected to Blackwood's use of Hogg's name, John Scott, the editor, was killed in a duel with Lockhart's friend, John Christie). Carey suggests, “Hogg, like Wringhim, was used to finding ‘acts of cruelty, injustice, defamation and deceit’ attributed to him, of which he was wholly ignorant” (xix). Furthermore, somewhat like Robert Wringhim, Hogg acquired an uncontrollable second self in the personage of the drunkard-shepherd of Noctes Ambrosianae. At first Hogg helped write the Noctes, but by 1823 Wilson had taken over the creation of the shepherd's character and Hogg was expected to be like his literary counterpart. Carey tells of how “… readers of the Noctes who, like William Howitt, met the actual James Hogg later, were astonished to find him smooth, well-looking and gentlemanly” (xx). In his James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer, David Groves traces a literary career for Robert that parallels Hogg's: “… a difficult journey through a hostile world. Both writers offended against social conventions, and Wringhim's crimes have their milder parallel in some of Hogg's questionable dealings with publishers and creditors” (127). Groves further considers the autobiographical source of the work in his essay “James Hogg's Confessions: New Information.” A letter of 1895 written to Hogg's daughter and biographer as well as the testimony of a boy who worked for Hogg refer to the opening of a suicide's grave in which Hogg participated. Trying to validate a story told him by his grandfather, Hogg actually obtained a piece of clothing from the grave. Groves quotes a contemporary account: “Some of the Edinburgh folk counted this a fable, so Hogg determined to put the tradition, which he had from his grandfather, to the proof” (241).

In two psychoanalytical studies, Barbara Bloedé traces the material of The Confessions to Hogg's childhood. At the age of six, James Hogg, the second son, was sent away from home to work owing to his father's bankruptcy. Before the age of fifteen, he had worked for a dozen different people; he had no permanent home until he was nineteen. Like Robert, then, he may be viewed as a rejected son who, as Bloedé continues, always felt himself to be something of an outcast.³ Having made some money from his writing, he invested in a farm that he attempted to work but which failed miserably. He wrote frantically to support himself and the large family he was finally able to start after the age of forty, but he was dependent on a literary Edinburgh that never accepted him. He felt the especially vicious review of Mountain Bard, which appeared in the August 1821 Blackwood's, as a bitter personal and professional betrayal. This autobiographical material is that of The Confessions, a work Bloedé aptly characterizes in her essay on “The Genesis of the Double” as “the exteriorization of Hogg's own conflicts and a projection of those unconscious feelings of guilt and unworthiness. Its force derives from there; it was the most personal thing he was ever to write, and it must have helped him to conserve his sanity in what was one of the most painful periods of a far from easy life” (186).

Isolation, pain, and guilt become generating forces in this mode of self-writing. Hogg places his longings and fears more overtly in confession than in the “autobiography,” which concludes the collected edition. In this fairly short piece, Hogg claims to be telling “the plain truth, and nothing but the truth,” although he warns that his life seems to contain “much more of a romance than mere fancy could have suggested” (2: 441). Elements of romance as well as the desperation of The Confessions find their way into one or two descriptions of the young boy working in the wilds of Scotland, exhausted from grueling labor and quoting verses to the cattle. The beginnings of his career as a public literary figure point to romance as a possible falsehood. Leaving his native mountains, he comes “to the metropolis with his plaid wrapped about his shoulders, and [is] all at once set up for a connoisseur in manners, taste, and genius” (2: 447). Somewhat diffusely including various events of his life, in this case those having to do with writing and publication, Hogg claims to have begun writing in the spaces of business, much like the editor who presents The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In Edinburgh on business, and “being obliged to wait a few days for the arrival of a friend from London,” the editor uses the time to visit the shepherd Hogg and the grave (222). Similarly, Hogg describes in the autobiography how he began putting some poems together while he was filling up time waiting for the conclusion of a transaction involving the buying and selling of sheep.

The purported autobiography has three parts. The first and longest, which might be called “Sheep and Poetry,” culminates in a list of his thirty published volumes. The second part, entitled “Random Reminiscences,” tells briefly of the publication of various works, among them The Confessions, and in a sentence or two mentions his marriage and his insistence that while his life may seem hard, he is a happy man. The third section is composed of sketches of seven contemporary writers.

The autobiography is not so very different from The Confessions as may at first appear. Hogg's life as narrated in the autobiography may be connected to the characters who speak in The Confessions: the editor, Robert, the shepherd. Hogg's experience may also be linked to the creation of Gil-Martin, the figure of the double that is so crucial in this confession. Feelings of isolation and difference, Bloedé suggests, engender the idea of the double. Moreover, the background that Hogg takes from himself and embellishes for his confessor is appropriate to the creation of a “second self.”

As the second son, Robert has a kind of double from birth, a relationship to George accentuated when Gil-Martin becomes the elder brother. Rejection by his legal father places Robert in opposition to this double who is all that he is not—loved, popular, pleasing. Robert is smart, but he is a creep. Everybody despises him except his mother and the man who is probably his father, and they instill in him values that isolate him further from the rest of the world. The first meeting of the two brothers at the tennis match emphasizes the contrast between them. At that moment, George is a hero. “The prowess and agility of the young squire drew forth the loudest plaudits of approval from his associates, and his own exertion alone carried the game every time on the one side, and that so far as all along to count three for their one. The hero's name soon ran round the circle. …” (21). Robert, clothed in black, is the outsider who places himself under foot and gets kicked about by others.

As a confessor sets out his identity, various possible defining factors of his existence are considered. Robert serves as an alien other for his brother, a force that will tempt and destroy him. George who has everything—looks, money, wit, charm—is faced by that which is ugly, repulsive, and negative in the personage of his brother. And yet, the situation is not so clear-cut. When George attempts to dismiss Robert as “the crazy minister's son from Glasgow,” he goes beyond the bounds of perceived propriety and is made to feel rude and out of place (23). While Robert may be “an object to all of the uttermost disgust,” both he and Reverend Wringhim do have a following in Edinburgh. Both present themselves with a certain logic, and while he may be deluded, Robert is no fool. By the end of his narrative, through which the reader is given to understand his motivations, he even evokes our sympathy. As Nelson Smith puts it, we see the “human traits behind his inhumanity”; we can all identify with him to some extent as “a human being pushed beyond all his spiritual and psychological limits” (159).

The complexity of Robert's character, in keeping with the background that allows the projection of a double, is crucial to the methods of autobiographical self-analysis that romantic confessions bring into focus. In a connection of the psychological and grammatical, Robert's self-presentation reflects his consciousness of doublings. The first two paragraphs of his narrative establish a mind weighed down by pairings.

My life has been a life of trouble and turmoil; of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and of vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries. Therefore, in the might of Heaven, I will sit down and write: I will let the wicked of this world know what I have done in the faith of the promises, and justification by grace, that they may read and tremble, and bless their gods of silver and of gold that the minister of Heaven was removed from their sphere before their blood was mingled with their sacrifices.

I was born an outcast in the world, in which I was destined to act so conspicuous a part. My mother was a burning and a shining light, in the community of Scottish worthies, and in the days of her virginity had suffered much in the persecution of the saints. But it so pleased Heaven that, as a trial of her faith, she was married to one of the wicked; a man all over spotted with the leprosy of sin. As well might they have conjoined fire and water together, in hopes that they would consort and amalgamate, as purity and corruption: She fled from his embraces the first night after their marriage, and from that time forth his iniquities so galled her upright heart that she quitted his society altogether, keeping her own apartments in the same house with him.

(89)

When Robert takes over, the text switches from the editor's more matter-of-fact prose style. Robert writes in pairs: “trouble and turmoil,” “change and vicissitude,” “anger and exultation,” “sorrow and vengeance,” “sit down and write,” “read and tremble,” “of silver and of gold,” “burning and a shining,” “fire and water,” “consort and amalgamate,” “purity and corruption.” The man uses a prodigious number of “ands.” Furthermore, the pairings vary to show many possible kinds of doublings: pairings of like terms, pairings of antithetical terms, pairings that may work, pairings that fail. In contrast to the editor, Robert tends to write in metaphors, thus describing representatively, seeing one thing in terms of another, revealing a mind conscious of doubling. Moreover, while doublings exist, intermeshings seem to fail. Robert sees himself as the “minister of Heaven” who dies before the blood of the wicked was “mingled with their sacrifices.” He describes the implausible coupling of his parents: “As well might have they conjoined fire and water together, in hopes that they would consort and amalgamate.” The hoped-for union does not occur but results in division: “she quitted his society altogether, keeping her own apartments in the same house with him.”

Robert Colwan-Wringhim would like to keep his own apartments and attempts to do so through an assertion of his religious vision that justifies fratricide and matricide. But this division from others comes with self-division and a strange joining to Gil-Martin, who assures him, “Our beings are amalgamated, as it were, and consociated in one …”(172). Gil-Martin and Robert are also figures of schizophrenia, as Robert's statement in Edinburgh emphasizes:

I generally conceived myself to be two people. When I lay in bed, I deemed there were two of us in it; when I sat up I always beheld another person, and always in the same position from the place where I sat or stood, which was about three paces off me towards my left side. It mattered not how many or how few were present: this my second self was sure to be present in his place, and this occasioned a confusion in all my words and ideas that utterly astounded my friends, who all declared that, instead of being deranged in my intellect, they had never heard my conversation manifest so much energy or sublimity of conception; but, for all that, over the singular delusion that I was two persons my reasoning faculties had no power.

(139-40)

Again it is worth noting Robert's puzzlement and self-loathing. He is not simply presented as an evil, disgusting person. Appropriately terrified, he appears to be “seized with a strange distemper” that he decides comes from being bewitched by his “father's reputed concubine,” Mrs. Logan (139). Fastening on Mrs. Logan this way is characteristic of Robert's general misogyny, which has been seen as indicative of latent homosexuality. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's fascinating reading, the relationship of Robert, Mrs. Logan, Gil-Martin, and George involves homosexuality, homophobia, the intricacies of “homosocial desire,” “struggle and desire between masculine men and feminized men” (109). Robert's psychological and physical symptoms find parallels in a number of medical case histories documenting such syndromes as paraphrenia or autoscopic syndrome.⁴

But Robert's is a hard case that defies description solely in terms of hallucination. His projections work in religious terms as a real devil and in social terms as a companion whom other people see with him. This particular textual strategy suggests one possible metaphoric reading through what Jacques Lacan calls the “mirror stage.” The terms of this type of analysis help clarify how Hogg's handling of Robert's character has particular relevance to the construction of the self attempted in romantic confessions.

Robert's relationship to his “second self” corresponds in many ways to Lacan's narrative of the mirror stage—“drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation” (4). The child moves out of a primal bond with the mother to an identity that always contains the anticipation of return to her. The image in the mirror that so fascinates a child from the time that he is very little is an other, a coherent image that is difference but that is still the same. The drama of the mirror stage, Lacan continues, comes “lastly to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development” (4). Robert can be seen as getting stuck in a version of this mirror stage, in a kind of perverse aggressiveness, a fanatic pushing of an image onto the world that is not a fully developed, differentiated identity. In a certain sense, the writer of autobiography does the same—pushing his image onto the world as it is differentiated, in the cases we have been considering, by the language of confession.

A double is an other that is yet the same. The way Robert projects this double is an assault on basic social structures, an assault on the father's law that demands difference. His double is a self that points to sameness. In the law and language of the father, such unity may not occur. While a person longs for the unity that precedes the father's insistence on denial and difference, this oneness with the mother is something he must go beyond. In living through his double, Robert defies the father as that which demands difference and separation, as that which forces the child out of the primal bond, as that which defers desire. Yet in articulating this sameness through the language of confession, Robert is caught in the difference he tries to defy, a dilemma of the writer seeking definition through language.

Literally, Robert breaks the father's law, the rules of civilization through the murders, thefts, and seduction he and/or his double commit. George's murder so destroys the old Laird that he too dies. His mother's murder may also be interpreted, again through Lacan, as relating to the development of the self Robert's confession sets out. Although he at first seems to praise her as a put-upon virgin, Robert despises his mother. The following exchange provides as good an example as any of his hatred, which is encouraged by Wringhim's abusive condescension toward her. Coming home after his first encounter with Gil-Martin, Robert is a changed person, as his mother cries with “a smothered scream.” His reply: “‘It appears that the ailment is with yourself, and either in your crazed head or your dim eyes, for there is nothing the matter with me”’ (109). When she continues with the observation that the devil often appears in a pleasing form, Reverend Wringhim cuts her off. “‘Woman, hold thy peace!’ said my reverend father. ‘Thou pretendest to teach what thou knowest not”’ (110). Robert is delighted to find that his mother has disappeared during one of his “spells.” Claiming to be unconscious of his actions for six months—which he thinks have been one night—he feels his “spirits considerably buoyant. It appeared that I was rid of the two greatest bars to my happiness, by what agency I knew not. My mother, it seemed, was gone, who had become a grievous thorn in my side of late; and my great companion and counsellor, who tyrannized over every spontaneous movement of my heart, had likewise taken himself off” (170). Gil-Martin returns in the next paragraph, but Robert most probably did kill his mother. This matricide is perhaps another version of what happens in La Confession d'une jeune fille. The mother's death or absence is necessary to language and culture. The myth of Orestes offers an “acceptable” explanation for this essential matricide, but in his egotistical fanaticism, Robert attempts to arrogate to himself all forms of power. In his confession, he is the law and the word.

Robert's assault on the “non-du-père” through the crimes he commits and the second self he projects finds a complement in the significance given the “nom-du-père” in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Lacan's suggested pun may again be relevant. Like other romantic confessors, Robert has a particularly complicated relationship to his father's name. According to the editor's narrative, the old Laird, realizing Robert is not his natural son, agrees to support him financially but refuses to recognize him in other ways. A year after George is born, Robert, his brother, comes on the scene.

A brother he certainly was, in the eye of the law, and it is more than probable that he was his brother in reality. But the laird thought otherwise; and, though he knew and acknowledged that he was obliged to support and provide for him, he refused to acknowledge him in other respects. He neither would countenance the banquet nor take the baptismal vows on him in the child's name; of course, the poor boy had to live and remain an alien from the visible church for a year and a day; at which time, Mr. Wringhim, out of pity and kindness, took the lady herself as sponsor for the boy, and baptized him by the name of Robert Wringhim—that being the noted divine's own name.

(18)

The details here are puzzling. Why is it “more than probable that he was his brother in reality?” Are both boys Wringhim's progeny? We are meant to think they have different fathers. Why, one wonders, can the Laird not take action against his wife's betrayal? What is clear is the relationship between having a father's name—in this case Wringhim—and the possibility of being brought into some organizing system—in this case the church. Robert's telling of the story further confuses the issue, for he writes of “my father according to the flesh” at the same time as he presents his coming into the world as a kind of virgin birth and traumatizing rejection. Just how was Robert conceived when his mother, outraged by her husband's “iniquities,” refused to have any contact with him? Robert describes his birth.

I was the second son of this unhappy marriage, and long ere ever I was born, my father according to the flesh disclaimed all relation or connection with me, and all interest in me, save what the law compelled him to take, which was to grant me a scanty maintenance; and had it not been for a faithful minister of the gospel, my mother's early instructor, I should have remained an outcast from the church visible. He took pity on me, admitting me not only into that, but into the bosom of his own household and ministry also, and to him am I indebted, under Heaven, for the high conceptions and glorious discernment between good and evil, right and wrong, which I attained even at an early age.

(89-90)

Robert tells of how he begins naming Wringhim as his father—“father (as I shall henceforth denominate him)”—after he and the minister correct his mother on a theological point involving the naming of several men: “Ardinferry,” “Patrick M'Lure,” “the Laird of Dalcastle and his reprobate heir” (90-91). Enraged at the Laird and his son, the two George Colwans, Robert finds another father, another name.

This connection is one of hostility, ambiguity, and irony that helps generate Robert's second self. Wringhim rejects Robert as a son almost more categorically than Colwan does. Both hopefully and maliciously, Robert relates honest John Barnet's implication that Wringhim is his natural father. The minister counters with the assertion that Robert resembles him because of the thoughts and affections of Lady Dalcastle. In the same way, he says, he has known of a lady “who was delivered of a blackamoor child, merely from the circumstance of having got a start by the sudden entrance of her negro servant, and not being able to forget him for several hours” (97). Wringhim will not publicly entertain the notion of Robert's really being his son, and when Barnet refuses to go along with him, he throws him out.

Wringhim does give Robert his name, thereby allowing him entrance into his “church visible.” His name, however, warns of the hysterical appeal of his brand of religion: he wrings souls and twists hearts. The good and evil, right and wrong that Robert acquires through him center on interpretations of election that the minister advocates. Most of all, Robert seeks to have his name “written in the book of life from all eternity” (91). Not having a name would make this goal difficult to achieve, and Wringhim helps him out through his baptism but also through continual prayer, which God could simply not refuse. God grants his prayer; Robert becomes one of the elect—“a justified person, adopted among the number of God's children—my name written in the Lamb's book of life. …” (105). It is on this very day that Robert first meets “that stranger youth. … What was my astonishment on perceiving that he was the same being as myself!” (106).

Hogg writes of doubling elsewhere, most notably in “Singular Dream from a Correspondent,” a short story in letter form published in 1820, and in “Strange Letter of a Lunatic: To Mr. James Hogg of Mount Benger,” published in Fraser's Magazine in 1831.⁵ In The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, however, the drawing together of naming, doubling, election, and religion works to establish a complex of possibilities particularly associated with the romantic works called confessions. As romantic confessions demonstrate, the attempt to establish a self-delineated image is extraordinarily problematic. While Gil-Martin may be an arrested version of Robert's “armoured image,” he is also a visible demon, a good old-fashioned devil.

Everything Gil-Martin says may with hindsight be interpreted to mark him as a traditional Devil figure, as Satan. He will not pray with others because he is certain the bounds of his faith are different; he has more servants and subjects than he can count; he has no permanent lodgings but never has trouble finding welcome in various dwellings. His name, which he finally reveals after much questioning, may also give a clue to his character. “Gill” is a verb meaning to catch in a net.⁶ “Gil” is an obsolete form of “guile.” His name thus associates him with deceit, treachery, entrapment. “Gil” also connects to “gillie,” a Scottish-Gaelic word meaning a male attendant on a Scottish Highland chief. As the devil with supernatural powers, Gil-Martin makes Robert the Laird of Dalcastle and attends him.

In On The Nightmare, Ernest Jones shows how the devil develops in various theologies as God's terrible double (154-89). This division of God into two powerful entities comes fairly late in Christian theology. As Bloedé points out: “When the Church no longer had important enemies to contend with outside, she turned her attention to the heretics inside her own organization and deliberately exploited the idea of the Devil as a weapon against heresies, which she declared were born of the Devil” (185). The “Martin” half of the character's name possibly relates to this development of the devil as well as to the general emphasis on doubling and division in the book. Saint Martin I, a seventh-century pope, may have been remembered by Hogg's readers for the council he convened to condemn monotheletism—the theological doctrine that in Christ there is but one will though two natures—and to establish the Catholic dogma of two natures, two wills, and two energies in the one person of Jesus Christ.

With Gil-Martin as his double, in his association with him, Robert himself comes to resemble a traditional devil figure. Robert dresses all in black, the devil's color. Satan is known by his cloven hoof, as the story of Penpunt, the down-to-earth servant, emphasizes; Robert has a hooflike foot and abnormal legs, resulting in a strange, identifying walk. Bell Calvert knows him by his walk: “his gait was very particular. He walked as if he had been flatsoled, and his legs made of steel, without any joints in his feet or ancles” (73). When Robert flees into the country, the peasants with whom he seeks shelter address him as “Mr. Satan.” He becomes entangled in a weaver's net, perhaps the net of Gil-Martin's name, perhaps the web of deceit, perhaps an echo of the lines in Scott's Marmion—“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive” (Canto VI, stanza 17). Whatever the exact meaning of the net, Robert ends up in it in the same position as Dante's devil—upside down. At Ellanshaws, the horses are afraid of something in the stable, causing the field hand to exclaim, “‘Lord be wi us! What can be i' the house?”’ (203)

Practically everyone who comes into contact with Gil-Martin has a different notion of what he is, perhaps an intentional ambiguity meant to indicate evil's infinite adaptability.⁷ While the twentieth-century reader is easily prepared to see the devil in psychological terms, Hogg's own background would prevent his presenting a devil only as Robert's projection. Scottish folklore and superstition habitually took psychological phenomena and manufactured devils who were quite real. Many of Hogg's works concern supernatural realities as he would have known them from the Scottish folklore and tradition with which he was imbued. His mother was such an authority on folktales, ballads, and country traditions that she became a source for materials in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. In “Welldean Hall,” having explained away “the appearance of anything superhuman” with the most fearsome scientific jargon, Dr. Leadbetter is knocked unconscious by an apparition (I, 163). “The Witches of Traquir” and “The Witch of Fife” are people who are undeniably in this world as are the ghosts and wraiths appearing in such pieces as “Young Kennedy,” “The Pedlar,” and “Tibby Johnson's Wraith.” Hogg's reader remains perplexed, however, much like the narrator in “The Brownie of the Black Haggs,” who says of Merodach, “What he was I do not know, and therefore will not pretend to say” (I, 333).

This narrator's reticence, however, is not shared by romantic confessors. Concern with the nature of ghosts and devils is a question of epistemology that is extremely important to the confessional enterprise in its attempts to clarify the analysis of a person's perceptions. That individual sense perception determines reality is a commonplace of eighteenth-century empiricism. Romantic confessors participate in the early-nineteenth-century recognition of the possible unreliability of the senses in determining what is real, a dilemma Hogg presents at some length. When Mrs. Calvert sees Gil-Martin transformed into Drummond, she knows “all the senses of mankind could not have recognized him” (153). And yet, she and Mrs. Logan agree, “we have nothing but our senses to depend on, and, if you and I believe that we see a person, why, we do see him” (78). The imagination's truth becomes one possible means of understanding, as Mrs. Logan could be suggesting when she mixes empirical data and belief. In a more direct statement in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake asks “does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?” The reply is “All poets believe that it does.”

This faith in the power of individual imagination was one frequent assertion of romantic thought that in Scotland found a curious religious expression as well. All romantic confessions work in relationship to the religious connotations of their titles. Central to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a particular twisting of the basic tenets of Calvinism, aberrations that were part of the religious and political history of Scotland. Hogg's focus on this particular aspect of Scottish theology may relate to certain theological and political issues of his own time.

In The Confessions, Hogg makes use of a religious form to demonstrate the intolerance he saw characterizing various sects of the Scottish Church, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was undergoing a period of reaction and repression. Robert and James Haldane fanatically, and successfully, promoted Evangelicalism. Navy men who became preachers, the Haldane brothers journeyed throughout Scotland. They would attend local Sunday morning services and later in the day would hold open meetings attacking the standards of the parish preacher. In 1799, steps were taken to crush these movements; a law was passed forbidding laymen to preach.⁸

Significantly, in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the most moral, righteous Christians seem to be laymen, in contrast to the professional preacher, the Reverend Mr. Wringhim. At Auchtermuchty, the “eloquent and impressive preacher of Christianity” is the devil, “the auld thief” himself (183). By 1830, only six years after Hogg had written The Confessions, there was such repression that a minister named John M'Leod Campbell was banned from the pulpit for emphasizing the importance of faith and for maintaining that Christ died for all men. Hogg must have felt the pressures of various kinds of religious censorship, for as Haggerty points out, he never acknowledged a full version of The Confessions (79-114). Even when the collected works were published, he presented a text to the public in which he deleted anything particularly offensive to Scottish Presbyterians, who could be fearful in their fanaticism.

The Presbyterians had suffered greatly under both the English and the Scottish Episcopalians. Hogg sets the story at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a time of religious and political conflict that included what Robert calls “the persecution of the saints” (89) as well as the horror of the Highland Clearance that Scott writes of in the Waverly novels. Hogg's placing of the main confrontation between the two brothers as taking place during the 1704 Parliament in Edinburgh may be a reflection of political and religious feuding between the Scottish Episcopalians, generally aristocrats, and the Scottish Presbyterians, the faction to which Wringhim and Robert belong. In 1703, the government had passed an “English Bill against Occasional Conformity,” which took away the citizenship rights of dissenters, thus assuring the supremacy of the Episcopalians. Whig Presbyterians of the 1703 Parliament countered by passing an Act of Security that provided for a Protestant ruler descended from the House of Stuart. This act was unacceptable to the government, so that in the 1704 session the conflict between various members of the House and the government was intense.

In the context of all this turmoil, Calvinism was turned by some to elitism and repressive righteousness. For Robert, believing that he is one of God's elect, predestined to be saved, justifies all he does. His religious beliefs are peculiar variations of the main tenets of Calvinism and of the particularly Scottish character they attained in the theology of John Knox. Any detailed discussion of these systems is beyond the bounds of this study, but a few generalizations should be helpful in understanding Robert's point of view and the way Hogg presents it in Robert's confession.

Hogg works with the Five Essential Points of Calvinism in The Confessions: election, or predestination; limited atonement; total depravity; irresistibility of grace; perseverance of the saints. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin emphasizes the mysteries of grace, the mysteries of why God gives salvation to men who are basically unworthy of it. Even though grace comes from God, man can play a role in his own salvation through faith, repentance, and obedience. Revising this notion, Robert, like some of Hogg's contemporaries, rejects man's role in his own salvation. God, not man, determines salvation; man can do nothing to change the decision God has made before the world began, writing names in the Book of Life from all eternity (91). The creed is antinomian: “anti”—“against,” “nomos”—“law” and can be taken to mean that Grace frees certain Christians from obeying laws. During the period of the Commonwealth, a number of antinomian sects developed, among them a group called the Ranters who asserted that nothing is a sin but what a man believes to be a sin.

It is easy to see how a logical young man like Robert, with the aid of his family and friends, could take these beliefs to the conclusion he does in his Confessions. Julie Fenwick writes of “psychological and narrative determinism” in the novel, and argues that while Hogg may indicate the rejection of the idea that Robert has no choice, the psychological portrait of Robert makes what happens seem inevitable. His family background sets up these events. His mother, Rabina, whose name suggests rabid, and the Reverend Mr. Wringhim, who is assured of his own infallibility, teach Robert that he is one of “the society of the just made perfect.” Wringhim promises: “‘All the powers of darkness,’ added he, ‘shall never be able to pluck you again out of your Redeemer's hand”’ (105). Robert then reasons that if you don't believe that good works have anything to do with salvation, then you don't have to do any good works. He does have a few pangs of doubt and suggests to Gil-Martin that “indubitably there were degrees of sinning which would induce the Almighty to throw off the very elect” (115). But Gil-Martin quickly convinces him that as long as a man is predestined to be saved, he can do anything. What might appear to be heinous actions are judgments inflicted on others for their sins. Clark Hutton's interesting discussion of this process takes the work of Kirkegaard to illuminate the fallacy of Robert's position. Robert moves away from what he ethically and subjectively knows to be true into the rationality of Gil-Martin, accepting reason rather than what he knows is right. Robert can thus conclude that election places one above the law and that instead of trying to save those “doomed to destruction” as ministers do by “remonstrating” with them, it would be much wiser, more practical, and more efficient to “begin and cut sinners off with the sword” (112).

The state of the Scottish Church during the eighteenth century encouraged the aberrations Hogg portrays. While the Church had prospered under William and Mary, who recognized the Presbyterians, thereby ending decades of persecution, friction began again after William's death. John Knox's Liturgy provided for the election of ministers by the congregation, but in 1711, Queen Anne's Parliament passed an act giving landowners the power of assigning pastorates. Because they were forced on the people instead of being elected, ministers were often unpopular, and the congregation of an unwanted minister would split from the Established State Church to form a separate group. One such splinter group called itself “The Men of Marrow,” claiming as its members those who subscribed to the Auchterarder creed (a name rather close to Auchtermuchty where Hogg's devil preached). The oath as stated in The Marrow of Modern Divinity, a work ascribed to a man named Edward Fisher, was: “I believe that it is not sound and orthodox to teach that we must forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ.” The subtitle of the book is a further indication of its focus: “Touching the Covenant of works, and the Covenant of Grace: with their use and end, both in the time of the Old Testament, and in the time of the New. Clearly describing the way to eternal life by Jesus Christ. In a dialogue betwixt Evangelista, a minister of the Gospel. Nomista, a legalist. Antinomista, an antinomian. And, Neophytus, a young Christian.” The Men of Marrow, like Robert and Gil-Martin, asserted that one could sin and be a saved Christian, since God, not man, determines salvation. Hogg was connected with the Marrow dispute in that Thomas Boston, a minister in Hogg's parish of Ettrick from 1707 to 1737, was instrumental in propagating the creed; and by a strange coincidence, a man named James Hog was the publisher of a new 1718 edition of The Marrow of Modern Divinity.⁹

Thomas Boston's book Human Nature in Its Fourfold State was something of a best-seller, among those “religious pamphlets” that Mr. Watson of Her Majesty's printing office assures Robert are “the very rage of the day” (200). The satire on Boston and his beliefs, which Hogg includes in such stories as “The Mysterious Bride,” “Odd Characters,” and “The Prodigal Son,” is heightened in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Following antinomian notions, Robert's confession turns into a written testament to the power of evil. The devil even appears twice to assist the workmen at the printing of the book; so here Gil-Martin becomes a “printer's devil.”

Robert writes and prints his confession in the hope that his work will live so that he will live on in the church. As the editor's recovering of the manuscript suggests, Robert may literally be preserved because of his confession, but it helps situate him as a kind of devil, that greatest outcast from the church. In Robert's case, this form of confession, originally used in a religious context to bring people back into the church, ensures that he remains an outcast. All romantic works called confessions place a basically antisocial, individualizing content in a form meant to socialize people, but Robert's impulse is to total social anarchy, to destruction of others through self-assertion. His story suggests what happens when the individuality emphasized by all romantic confessors is carried to the utmost—the extreme example of written individuation.

Unlike other romantic confessors, however, Robert does not worry overly much about being self-centered and therefore irrelevant. The spiritual autobiographies that Mr. Watson says are such best-sellers dated from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and were often written by those who opposed the Anglican Church. Writing of these various texts, R. D. Lerner finds one quality that is “portrayed unforgettably by every autobiographer, permeates his whole book, and can be understood as never before after we have read them: the sense of election, and the consequent stress on one's own importance” (381). Who could be more certain than Robert that his life should be studied because he is one of the elect? Didacticism and self-advertisement, the forces behind that writing of Puritan spiritual autobiography, inspire Robert too.

As Lamb parodies the testimonies of alcoholics in “Confessions of a Drunkard,” so Hogg uses confession to examine these spiritual autobiographies. Lerner points to a pattern in works such as Vavasour Powell's God's Teachings and Christ's Law, A Brief Relation Concerning Myself, Hansard Knolly's The Life and Death of Mr. Hansard Knolly, and Anna Trapnell's A Legacy for Saints. He identifies five main parts in these texts: serious childhood, sinful youth, legal righteousness, spiritual struggle, and final illumination. Hogg undoubtedly knew these Puritan works and incorporated the pattern into Robert's confession. Robert spends a most serious childhood, and becomes first at school through sneakiness. He is weighed down by sin in adolescence because he cheats and lies, but mainly because he does not know if he is one of the elect; and according to his beliefs, if one is not predestined to be saved, one can only sin. He meets Gil-Martin on the day of his election and enters the struggles of the supposed righteous. By now Hogg's parodying of the traditional pattern should be clear. Robert experiences spiritual struggles both in the doubts he has about Gil-Martin and in his feelings that he is not doing enough for his cause. He does have a final illumination, but it is not what Puritan spiritual autobiographers had in mind, for he becomes engrossed in pure naked evil, as a figure approaches, “furiously, his stern face blackened with horrid despair!” (217).

Robert ends miserable but still convinced that he has set out his identity as one of the elect. He visualizes himself taking on mythic significance. His name means bright in fame, and he sits down to write “in the might of Heaven” (89). He speaks of himself in phrases that connect him to biblical heroes: “I was like Daniel in the den of lions” (174). He wonders, “Why then art Thou laying Thy hand so sore upon me? Why hast Thou set me as a butt of Thy malice?” (216). His words echo Job 7:8: “why has thou set me as a mark for Thee, so that I am a burden to myself?” At the same time, however, as he is a shepherd like Christ, also tempted by the devil to kill himself, Robert is like Cain who kills his brother and must wander the earth.

Traditional Christian myths structure and explain Robert's life as he presents it in confession, but how are we to interpret these stories? Are they ironic comments on Robert's life or do they fit him as well as anyone else? Like those of the Drunkard, or Octave, or the Opium-Eater, or Lucienne, Robert's sets out the identity delineated in his title. He writes about himself as one who sins with justification, and like other writers of romantic confessions assumes a sympathetic reader. If, indeed, certain men can commit no crimes because they are of the elect—and there were many who so believed—then Robert does sin with justification and his life fits certain heroic structures. On the other hand, Hogg as shepherd dismisses the whole enterprise at the end of the book. And Robert himself, we should not forget, is a chronic liar from childhood. How much of what he says can we really believe? How are we to interpret what he writes?

The editor, too, is perhaps not to be trusted. He does not understand the material he presents. He fails to “comprehend the writer's drift,” finds it impossible that such events could happen, and feels that the story can have little real meaning for his contemporaries. “But in this day, and with the present generation, it will not go down that a man should be daily tempted by the Devil, in the semblance of a fellow creature” (229). Presenting the work mainly as a curiosity, the editor is portrayed as having a rather pedestrian mind, unable to see the archetypal or psychological aspects of the story. The long, clinical description of the corpse and of the way it is clothed, point to the mind of one who would “botanize on his mother's grave.” The editor tries to come to some interpretive conclusion about the piece. “In short, we must either conceive him not only the greatest fool, but the greatest wretch, on whom was ever stamped the form of humanity; or, that he was a religious maniac, who wrote and wrote about a deluded creature, till he arrived at that height of madness that he believed himself the very object whom he had been all along describing” (229-30).

The editor's dismissive “In short” contradicts the complex of possibilities he raises: delusion, misery, wretchedness, fanaticism, and what can happen in writing an autobiography. Common assumptions about religion and about human relations, as well as the editor's tone, militate against Robert's frame of reference. Yet, norms and ideas about what may be real or moral or right are constantly being shifted as the confessional process proceeds.

These complexities are in line with a basic tradition in Scottish psychology and literature, according to Kurt Wittig, who speaks of the “subjective impressionism” characteristic of Scots and Gaelic poetry and offers several possible causes for this “tendency to create one's own subjective version of reality.”¹⁰ The varying points of view and the importance of doubling in Hogg's Confessions partly allow Hogg's ironic use of romantic confession. Although he goes through the same process as other romantic confessors for the same reasons, Robert arrives at one conclusion while believing he has shown the opposite.

In this confession, however, I think Hogg goes beyond a display of inversion and irony and the possibilities of relative viewpoints. Robert indicates some of the complexities that the act of confession occasions. “Should any man ever read this scroll, he will wonder at this confession, and deem it savage and unnatural. So it appeared to me at first, but a constant thinking of an event changes every one of its features” (133). His words point to more than just the specific topic at hand—the killing of his brother. How do we establish what is real? Robert here echoes the concerns of Mrs. Logan and Mrs. Calvert about the validity of sense perception. He also suggests the way Gil-Martin operates—the more he is contemplated the more he changes. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner offers the possibility of complete ambiguity and uninterpretability. This confession suggests the impossibility of self-definition. What can autobiographical discourse achieve?

As in other romantic works entitled confessions, a religious form is filled with antireligious material, and the possibility of finally defining that material is denied at every turn. It cannot be explained, “leaving everyone to judge for himself” (85). “Judging” then becomes a matter of reading and trying to interpret, an activity the futility of which is demonstrated in the narrative and complemented by its religious context. The notion of names being “written in the book of life from all eternity” (91) brings with it the demand that this book be read and deciphered. For those who live by predestination, life becomes an attempt to read moral significations in the world. Robert keeps seeking the validation for his election that can never be found. What he gets is Gil-Martin,—indeterminacy imaged—a stunning demonstration of confession that clarifies autobiographical writing as the impossible search for the signifying image of the ego.

Notes

1. All quotations from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner come from the Adams edition unless otherwise noted. I have also used John Carey's edition. Quotations from Hogg cited in the text by volume and page number come from Thomson's 1865 edition.

2. Exactly what form Hogg came up with, however, was problematic to both confessor and editor, who cannot tell whether to call it an “allegory” or “a religious parable” (217). Haggerty attributes Simpson's inability to “come to grips with the various elements in the Justified Sinner to an erroneous assumption on his part about Hogg's work—namely that it is a novel” (183). Haggerty's own analysis sees the work as both romance and antiromance, given its hero's background, the mysterious powers involved, and the recognition scene that occurs. In “The Concept of Genre in Hogg's Scottish Pastorals, Basil Lee, Three Perils of Woman, and Confessions,” David Groves points to the increase in the use of the word “genre” during Hogg's lifetime to define categories of literature. His discussion of The Confessions describes how Hogg creates both a comic and tragic version of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (Gillian Hughes, 6-14).

3. In her work on “The Genesis of the Double,” Bloedé points out that many other writers who created fictional doubles—E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poe, Dostoevsky, Wilde—were second sons who, from around the age of six, had severed or abnormal relationships with their fathers.

4. Discussing what she sees as “the paranoic nucleus,” Bloedé describes several cases of women whose symptoms approximate Robert's. Taking a definition from Kraepelin, she describes paraphrenia as “a chronic psychosis which includes paranoiac symptoms but which has strong schizophrenic tendencies characterized by hallucination and fabulation” (Hughes, 17). In The Double in Literature, Robert Rogers distinguishes autoscopy—doubling—and general hallucination (13-17).

5. David Groves's analysis of these works and the Confessions finds that the outcome of an encounter with the second self is to emphasize “the oneness of all mankind; its full effect on the narrator is to restore him to a Christian, social, and human perspective which stresses the bonds of humanity, friendship, community” (57). This implied theme, however, is counter to the practice of romantic confession in which Hogg leaves his man totally out of community.

   Groves's essay is one of a number of studies that consider the double, a figure that became especially prevalent in nineteenth-century literature. Among them, I found C. F. Keppler's Literature of the Second Self especially helpful in its consideration of Robert as a tempter of George

6. In James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer, Groves points to other uses of the net in the Confessions, seeing it as a central image in the work. The tennis net, the makeshift net the women use to ensnare Robert, the weaver's web, symbolize “the strands of doctrine which Wringham tries to foist upon other people” (123).

7. In his Afterword, printed in the Adams edition, Gide sees the power that activates Gil-Martin as being of a psychological nature, “the exteriorized development of our own desires, of our pride, of our most secret thoughts” (237). Simpson, on the other hand, emphasizes Gil-Martin's physical presence. Williston Benedict suggests that the interpretations of Gil-Martin as a Christian devil and the interpretations of the figure as a “second self,” “a materialization in physical form of Colwan's own demented impulses and convictions … are not mutually exclusive” (2). According to Benedict, Robert's childhood, the ways in which he was emotionally repressed and religiously oppressed, combined with his particular mental makeup to drive him to a life of crime justified by a “second self projected from his imagination. Furthermore, the projected second self' assumed in Colwan's memoir and in the Editor's narrative the attributes of the Devil of traditional Christianity” (215). By having Gil-Martin so universally visible, continues Benedict, Hogg shows the proclivity of all people for conjuring up a second self.

8. Louis Simpson's discussion of Scottish church history in connection with Hogg's book forms the basis for my observations. As Simpson emphasizes, the history is much too complex to summarize; the relationship between the Presbyterian Kirk and the Episcopal Church of Scotland, a branch (like the Church of England) of the Anglican Communion, is particularly complicated.

9. Louis Simpson discusses these events in some detail and relates them to Hogg's book (171-173).

10. In considering this “subjective impressionism,” Wittig writes: “The same thing can be seen from different angles, as a whole series of variations on a single theme. … This emotional and intellectual dualism—the “Caledonian Antisyzygy” as Gregory Smith called it—may possibly have been reinforced by the schizophrenic tendencies of a nation which came to use one language to express thought, another to express feeling. It may also have been hardened by the stern intellectual discipline of Calvinism; and as the impact of the Reformation gradually wore off, people may have become increasingly conscious of the latent emotional and moral dualism implicit in the overt contradiction between the Scottish Sabbath and the Scottish Saturday (or Friday night). Yet it would be wrong to explain the underlying dualism simply, or even chiefly in terms of them. At any rate, the problem of a strangely subjective vision of reality is dominant in much of modern Scottish literature” (250).

    In discussing the character of the editor in Growth of a Writer, Groves points out another possible doubling, that of the editor and Robert Wringhim—both narrators of the story, both trying to put a form on chaotic events. Hogg's work, writes Groves, often “requires us to see underlying parallels between opposite personality types, to discover the theme of community. …” (131).

Works Consulted

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———. James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1988.

———. “James Hogg's Confessions: New Information.” Review of English Studies New Ser. (XL) 158 (May 1989): 240-242.

———. “James Hogg's ‘Singular Dream’ and the Confessions.” Scottish Literary Journal 10 (1983): 54-66.

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