The Confessions of J. Lackington

The Confessions of J. Lackington (1804) is a late-life recantation, written by the famous London bookseller as a series of letters. His earlier and hugely popular Memoirs had made light of religion and had been sharp toward the Methodists among whom he had once moved; the Confessions set out expressly to retract that earlier tone and to record his return to Christian faith.

Cast in the epistolary form common to the period, the book is candid about the self that wrote the Memoirs — the prosperous, self-made tradesman confident in his own cleverness — and about the change of mind that led him to disown it. Lackington reflects on his rise, his earlier scorn, and the convictions that reshaped his outlook in later life.

As a firsthand Georgian conversion narrative it is distinctive: not the testimony of an obscure penitent but the public retraction of a celebrated and quotable man taking back, in print, what he had earlier put into print. It is his own account of that reversal, in his own voice.

Our public-domain edition presents Lackington’s text in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link to a free source as well.

This is a modern reading edition of The Confessions of J. Lackington, published in London in 1804. James Lackington (1746–1815) was a Somerset shoemaker's apprentice who became the most famous bookseller in England: his Temple of the Muses in Finsbury Square sold cheap books by the hundred thousand and made him rich. His earlier Memoirs had made light of the Methodists among whom he was converted as a young man, and had sold very well doing it. These Confessions, written in his retirement as a series of letters to a friend, take that back. He died in 1815, so the work has been in the public domain everywhere for well over a century.

A note on what we changed. Four separate scans of this book exist, and they are not equally good. We set this edition from the University of Michigan copy of the 1804 first edition, which is the cleanest, and we used three others as witnesses: a Harvard copy of the same edition, a University of California copy, and an American reprint of 1808. Where the Michigan scan had destroyed a word and one of the others had not, we took that printing's reading — fifty-eight times in all, each one recorded with the words on either side of it, so the claim can be checked. We did not guess at a single one of them. Where every scan is damaged, we left the damage.

Beyond that the work was mechanical and every rule is written down. We removed the debris the camera took from the gutter and the edge of each page; the printer's running head from the top of every page, and his signature marks from the foot; and his catchwords — the word an eighteenth-century printer set at the foot of each page to show the binder the next page's first word, which reads as a stammer once the pages are joined. We rejoined the words broken at the end of a line. We repaired the letter-shapes this particular printing loses: its h reads as "li", so "Although" arrived as "Altliough" two hundred and fifty times. We turned the scanner's typewriter quotes into real quotation marks, and removed the opening quote the printer repeated at the head of every line of a long quotation. And we marked the verse as verse — Lackington quotes Young's Night Thoughts on almost every page, and without that it would be set as prose.

We have also done something no edition of this book has done since it was printed. Lackington's own preface says: "This work being printed in London, and I living about one hundred and twenty miles distant, some errors of the press have been made, which the reader is requested to correct." The errata list at the back names nine of them, and we have made every one. Some are small — "haste" for hate, "cut" for eat, a stray "the" struck out of a line of Shakespeare. One is not: on page 91 the scan and the printing both say that Young's poetry works on him "like the music of David on the soul", and Lackington's correction is that it should read on Saul, which is 1 Samuel xvi. 23 and the whole point of the comparison. Two lines the printer set in the wrong place are restored to where he says they belong. His own page numbering is wrong in one entry — it gives page 27 for two corrections that are on page 51 — and we have followed the line numbers, which are exact.

What we did not change. We did not rewrite a sentence, modernise a spelling, or remove a passage. Lackington's Georgian English stands as he wrote it. He is frank about the lives of the freethinkers he kept company with, and about his own; none of that is softened. The free scan is linked from this book's page.