The Meaning of Night: a Confession
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The following work, printed here for the first time, is one of the lost curiosities of nineteenth-century literature. It is a strange concoction, being a kind of confession, often shocking in it"s frank, conscienceless brutality and explicit sexuality, that also has a strongly novelistic flavour, indeed it appears in the hand-list that accompanies the Duport papers in the Cambridge University Library with the annotation (Fiction). Many of the presented facts-names, places, events that I have been able to check are verifiable; others appear dubious at best or have been deliberately falsified, distorted, or simply invented.As to the author, despite his desire to confess all to posterity, his own identity remains a tantalizing mystery. His name as given here, Edward Charles Glyver, does not appear in the Eton Lists of the period, and I hae been unable to trace it or any of his pseudonyms in any other source, including the London Post-Office Directories for the relevant years. Perhaps, after we have read these confessions, this should not surprise us; yet it is strange that someone who wished to lay his soul bare in this way chose not to reveal his real name. I simply do not know how to account for this, but note the anomaly in the hope that further research, perhaps by other scholars, may unravel the mystery.