There was only one edition of The Confessions in Hogg's lifetime.[6] It was published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green in London on 12 July 1824 and in Edinburgh three days later. The print run was 1000, and the cost 10s 6d (52½p). Publication was anonymous. Sales were poor: of the 900 or so copies sent from the printers in Edinburgh to London little more than a third had been sold by June 1825.[7] Hogg was apparently prompted to suggest a relaunch in the summer of 1828 after an enthusiastic expression of appreciation of the work by Mrs Mary Anne Hughes, and left-over sheets of the first edition were re-issued in Edinburgh as The Suicide's Grave; or, Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner. Edited by J. Hogg.[8]
Hogg may have had an input into the text of the edition of the Confessions that appeared posthumously in 1837 in Volume 5 of Tales & Sketches by the Ettrick Shepherd, but the extensive bowdlerization and theological censorship in particular suggest publisher's timidity. It was not until 1895 that the original version was basically reinstated.[9]
The standard critical text is that edited by P. D. Garside in 2001 as Volume 9 of The Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of The Collected Works of James Hogg.
Some scholars who have extensively examined the original edition, such as Dr. JC Chaix,[10] acknowledge the invaluable background and context that later editions provide, but insist that the book must still be read in its original form to understand the extraordinary compositional significance and meaning of Hogg's original work.
