I mentioned in a previous post that Confessions of a Young Man first appeared across five serial instalments within the magazine Time from July to November of 1887. So, recently, I've trying to find out more about this.    To begin with, this Time was not the famous American publication to the cover of which American presidents aspire. (That was not established until 1923.) Time was a British publication, started in 1879 and published by the firm of Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey and Co. COVID conditions mean that I haven't been able to consult a physical copy of the magazine, but it has been digitised, so I have been able to get some idea of the contents. The covers describe it as 'A Monthly Magazine of Current Topics, Literature, & Art' and issues included articles, reviews and fiction.     Looking through these, it seems to have functioned as an in-house magazine for Sonnenschein authors: Moore signed up with the firm at the start of 1887...

Previous posts discussed the plot (such as it is) and the autobiographical origins of  Confessions of a Young Man. So I'm hoping it is obvious why the question 'Who was George Moore?' is such an important one for understanding the book.  George Moore was born at Moore Hall in County Mayo in 1852. As well as being a landowner, his father George Henry Moore had been an MP who fought in Parliament for the rights of Irish tenants. Unusually, for a wealthy family of Anglo-Irish roots, the Moores were Catholic.  As a child, Moore attended Oscott, a Catholic boarding school near Birmingham. He was not, however, a studious child and ended up being expelled. A career in the military was proposed, but Moore was more attracted to horse racing and the excitement of betting. He flirted with studying art, too.  Edward Manet 'George Moore' (1879) In 1870, Moore's father died suddenly on a trip to Ireland and the writer inherited land and money. In 1873 he moved to Paris in ord...

In this post, I'll provide some basic information about Confessions of a Young Man - what it contains and what it is about. In my next post, I shall say something about its author, George Moore. But as you'll see, it is hard to disentangle these things. Confessions of a Young Man was first published in five serial instalments, containing nine chapters within the magazine,  Time from July to November of 1887. A longer version with twelve chapters was then published in book form, the next year by Swan Sonnenschein. The serial version in Time ended with the narrator speculating about the power of music hall to revitalise the English stage; the book version ended with the narrator sitting at his desk, working at a novel that might be Confessions itself.  Although I will frequently refer to it as a novel, this work is hard to categorise exactly. Moore's book relates the experiences of the narrator (the 'young man') of the title, who is born in Ireland, inherits some mone...

Like many people, my intellectual faculties have felt dulled by lockdown and the restricted conditions under which we've all been living during the present coronavirus pandemic.* This blog represents an attempt to jumpstart work on a particular project which has suffered as a consequence.  In 2017, I was commissioned by the Jewelled Tortoise imprint of the MHRA to produce a critical edition of George Moore's novel Confessions of a Young Man . If you do not already know this series, it is dedicated to important works from the late nineteenth century associated with Decadence and Aestheticism. There are already wonderful scholarly editions of the poetry of Arthur Symons , the short stories of Walter Pater and the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and other fantastic volumes are planned or in print.    I completed the basic work of assembling and annotating the novel's text by the start of 2020, but the pandemic hit just as I started work on the volume's introduction. This ...