George Moore wrote Confessions of a Young Man as a memoir, which constitutes one of the most significant documents of the passionate revolt of English literature against the Victorian tradition. It is significant because it reveals clearly the sources of that revolt and is, in a sense, the history of an era—the one that is just closing. The book represents one of the great discoveries of English literature: a discovery that had been made from time to time before, and that is now being made anew in our own generation—the discovery of human nature. The book is remarkable for being one of the first writings in English that named important emerging French Impressionists, its literary criticism and depictions of the bohemian lifestyle in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s.
