A new edition of the “greatest novel of Scotland” The Romantic notion of the divided self is nowhere more powerfully conceived than in James Hogg’s masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. An account of a man haunted by the Devil in the form of his own evil double, it precedes Dostoyevsky’s great dramas of sin, self-accusation, and damnation by half a century.

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.