Confessions of a Young Man (First Edition)

MOORE, George. Confessions of a Young Man. London: William Heinemann, 1917.

Octavo. Original red publisher's cloth. Lettering and illustrations stamped on cover and spine in black. Original unclipped dust jacket. xiii, 224 pp., plus 16 pages of publisher's advertisements for "Heinemann's Colonial Library." Fourth English edition — first edition thus of the text as twice revised by the author, in 1904 and again in 1916. Front endpapers carry publisher's advertisements for "Heinemann's Favourite Classics." Previous owner's inscription neatly inked to first page.

George Moore (1852–1933) was twenty-one when he left Ireland for Paris, intending to become a painter, and spent the following decade and a half immersed in the bohemian artistic and literary life of the city before eventually settling in London and turning definitively to prose. Confessions of a Young Man, first serialised in 1887 and published in book form the following year, is his account of those fifteen formative years — nominally cast as the memoir of a fictional narrator named Edwin Dayne, though no reader was under any illusion that the "confession" was anything other than Moore's own. The book was, on its first appearance, a genuine sensation: its frank depiction of Parisian bohemian life, its unapologetic aestheticism, and its open contempt for the pieties of Victorian middle-class morality scandalised precisely the audience Moore intended it to scandalise. The novelist George Gissing, borrowing it from a subscription library in April 1888, described it in his diary as "an interesting but disgusting book" — a judgment that captures exactly the divided response Moore had set out to provoke.

The book's historical significance rests on more than its shock value. It is among the very first works in English to introduce British readers to the emerging French Impressionist painters — Manet, Degas, and their contemporaries — whom Moore had encountered directly during his years among the Parisian avant-garde, at a moment when their reputation had scarcely begun to cross the Channel. It incorporates, in its expanded 1888 edition, Moore's own translations of Stéphane Mallarmé's prose poems, introducing an English readership to Symbolist poetry years before it achieved wider currency. And its influence reached forward into the twentieth century in ways Moore could not have anticipated: critics have traced a clear line from Confessions of a Young Man, and its mediation of Walter Pater's aestheticism, to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) — another Irish writer's account of an artist's escape from the constraints of Catholic nationalism into exile and creative freedom.

Moore was, throughout his long career, an obsessive and unusually candid reviser of his own published work — his contemporaries in the George Moore Association's own account describe Confessions of a Young Man as "a lifetime work-in-progress" — and this 1917 Heinemann printing represents the fourth distinct English edition of the text, incorporating the substantial revisions Moore made in 1904 and again in 1916. The 1904 preface, added when Moore was fifty-two and looking back with wry, self-aware tenderness on the young man he had been thirty years earlier, is itself a small masterpiece of retrospective self-portraiture, and is included in full in this printing. The book was selected as one of the earliest titles reprinted in the Modern Library series in the same year as this Heinemann edition, a measure of its continuing critical standing three decades after first publication.

Very good in like dust jacket. Dust jacket unclipped, some faint markings here and there, very minor chipping at corners and on edges. Hardcover bindings very good, square and tight. Original black stamping on cover and spine still bold. Contents very good, mild toning and mild foxing throughout. Age toning much more pronounced on rear advertisement pages, likely printed on inferior paper stock; this has transferred onto the final page of the novel, which is markedly more toned than the rest of the contents. Overall, contents clean and bright, well preserved.

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Catalogue Number: HH000076