What is 'Confessions of a Young Man'?

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 money and then moves to Paris in order to become a painter. He describes some of his experiences in artistic and literary circles in Paris during the 1870s, but subsequently gives up his ambition to become a painter and decides to become a writer instead. A financial crisis with the rents on his family's lands in Ireland forces him to give up his life Paris too and the final chapters of the book find him living in less luxurious circumstances in London, publishing poems, articles and short stories and reflecting on his experiences as a literary artist.

In the early versions of the text, the name of this central character is given as 'Edward Dayne' and sometimes 'Edwin Dayne'. During 1888, however, Moore's book was translated into French and serialised in another magazine, La Revue indépendente. As part of the translation process, Moore made extensive revisions and changes. The most obvious and significant change that he made altered the central character's name so that it became 'George Moore'.

Front of second English edition of Confessions of a Young Man

This change was obviously important to him because he decided to issue a second English edition of the book that incorporated all the revisions he had made for the French translation and some new ones. This was published by Swan Sonnenschein in February of 1889.

All this is why the book is difficult to categorise: what was initially presented as fiction, becomes presented as autobiography. Admittedly, to anyone who knew Moore, the fiction of 'Edward (or Edwin) Dayne' was a very thin one - his experiences were clearly modelled on those of the author. But we tend to think of autobiography as a non-fictional genre of writing and Confessions of a Young Man is extremely unreliable - names, dates, events are altered and changed. A minor change, then, has consequences for how we understand the book in terms of genre, but also what it has to tell us about art and identity at the end of the nineteenth century.

These topics are rich and vital to Moore's book. So I will return to them  later posts. I hope this is plenty for now and should give you some idea of what the book is about.

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