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