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Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)

English essayist and critic, best-known for his
autobiography Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater, which appeared first in 1821 in London
Magazine. De Quincey was addicted to opium from
his youth for the rest of his life. His influence on
such writers as Poe and Baudelaire, and a number of
readers tempted to experiment with opium, has
been immense and notorious.
"If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am
bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an
excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no
less true, that I have struggled against this
fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and
have, at length, accomplished what I never yet heard
attributed to any other man - have untwisted, almost
to its final links the accursed chain which fettered
me." (from Confessions of an English Opium Eater)
Thomas Penson Quincey was born in the industrial
city of Manchester, Lancashire. His father, Thomas
Quincey, was a wealthy linen merchant; he died in
1793. A few years later the family moved to Bath,
where his mother Elizabeth Penson took the name
'De Quincey,' which sounded more aristocratic.
De Quincey was educated at schools in Bath and
Winkfield. In Confessions De Quincey tells that when
he was thirteen he wrote Greek with ease, and at
fifteen he composed Greek verses in lyric metres
and conversed in Greek fluently. "That boy," his
master at Bath had said, "that boy could harangue
an Athenian mob better than you or I could address
an English one."
At the age of 17 De Quincey ran away from
Manchester Grammar School to Wales with the
knowledge and support of his mother and uncle.
Before returning back home, he lived on the streets
of London in poverty and hunger. Later in life he
often saw in his dreams "Anne of Oxford Street," a
15-year-old prostitute who showed kindness to a
young runaway.
Throughout his life, De Quincey suffered from
stomach pains. To opium, in the form of laudanum,
De Quincey became addicted in 1804, when he
studied at Worcester College, Oxford. He used it first
to relieve acute toothache. He kept a decanter of
laudanum by his elbow and steadily increased the
dose. The drug was widely used to treat everything
from syphilis to the common cold.
De Quincey left Oxford without taking a degree. In
1807 he became a close friends with the romantic
writer Taylor Coleridge, whom he met on a visit to
the fashionable town of Bath. Coleridge introduced
his new friend to Robert Southey and William
Wordsworth, whom De Quincey greatly admired. In
1809 De Quincey went to live with them in the Lake
District village of Grasmere. Suffering a series of
debilitating illnesses between 1812 and 1813, De
Quincey began to take opium again. A daily user, it
was not until about 1817 he was able to control his
habit.
In 1816, De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, a
farmer's daughter, with whom he already had a child.
She was the fixed point in his life; they eventually
had five sons and three daughters.
Having spent his private fortune, De Quincey started
to earn living by journalism. He was appointed as an
editor of a local Tory newspaper, the Westmoreland
Gazette. For the next 30 years he supported his
family, mainly in Edinburgh, by writing tales, articles,
and reviews. Early in the 1820s De Quincey moved to
London, where he contributed the London Magazine
and Blackwoods. His chronicle Confessions of an
English Opium Eater, which first was published in
London magazine and then reprinted in book form,
was a mixture of stories about his life, social
comments, cultural anecdotes, and descriptions
both the ecstasies and the torments of the drug.
Subtitled "Being an Extract from the Life of a
Scholar" De Quincey drew a sharp distinction
between himself and other junkies; moreover,
though he preferred laudanum, opium dissolved in
alcohol, he defined himself as an opium-eater, not
drinker or smoker. The book was an instant success
and an important inspiration for other writers.
Confessions its title noteworthy referring to the
Confessions of St. Augustine also included quotes
in Greek, Latin and Italian. Without considering its
intellectually and physically corruptive effects, De
Quincey took the drug in hope of increasing his
rationality and the sense of harmony. For him opium
was not a part of criminal, alienated lifestyle.
In 1826 De Quincey moved to Edinburgh. After the
death of his wife in 1837, he began to use opium
heavily. Between the years 1841 and 1843 he hide
the creditors in Glasgow, and published then The
Logic of the Political Economy (1844), a dissertation
on David Ricardo's economic theory, and Suspiria De
Profundis (1845), the sequel to his Confessions, in
which he documented his childhood, dreams, and
fantasies. From 1853 until his death De Quincey
worked with his Selections Grave and Gay from
Writings Published and Unpublished by Thomas De
Quincey.
Althhough De Quincey wrote much, he published
only few books and had constant financial
difficulties. Most of his works were written for
periodicals. He also examined such German
philosophers as Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, Jean Paul Richer, and Friedrich von
Schiller, and translated their writings. De Quincey's
strong points were his imagination and his
understanding of altered states of consciousness, of
which he had his own doubts: "The mere
understanding, however useful and indispensable, is
the meanest faculty in the human mind, the most to
be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people
trust to nothing else, which may do for ordinary life,
but not for philosophical purposes." (The Knocking at
the Gate in Macbeth, 1823)
De Quincey's influence has been later seen in the
works of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Aldous
Huxley, and William Burroughs. Like Poe, he was
interested in the criminal mind, though he was not
always deadly serious with the subject: "If once a
man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes
to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes
next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from
that to incivility and procrastination." (from Murder
Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 1827) It has been
suggested that De Quincey prefigurated modern
Outsider-writers such as Alexander Trocchi, for
whom drugs served as confirmation of their
alienation from mainstream society.
For further reading: Thomas De Quincey: His Life And
Writings by Alexander Hay Japp (1877); A Flame in
Sunlight by E. Sackwille West (1936); Thomas de
Quincey by H.A. Eaton (1936); Thomas De Quincey,
Literary Critic by J.E. Jordan (1952); The Mine and the
Mint by A. Goldman (1965); The Infection of Thomas
De Quincey: The Psychopathology of Imperialism by
John Barrell (1991); De Quincey's Art of
Autobiography by E. Baxter (1991); De Quincey's
Disciplines by Josephine McDonagh (1994); A
Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey
and the Intoxication of Writing by Alina Clej (1995);
De Quincey Reviewed: Thomas De Quincey's Critical
Reception, 1821-1994 by Julian North (1997); The
Romantic Art of Confession: De Quincey, Musset,
Sand, Lamb, Hogg, Fremy, Soulie, Janin by Susan M.
Levin (1998); Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender,
Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke,
Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and
Hazlitt by Tim Fulford (1999); Thomas De Quincey:
Knowledge and Power by Frederick Burwick (2001);
De Quincey's Gothic Masquerade by Patrick
Bridgwater (2004); Thomas De Quincey: New
Theoretical and Critical Directions, edited by Robert
Morrison and Daniel S Roberts (2008); The English
Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey by
Robert Morrison (2009)
Selected bibliography:
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821
(revised edition, 1856)
- Englantilaisen oopiuminkyttjn
tunnustukset (suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen, 2007)
On The Knocking At The Gate, In Macbeth, 1823
Walladmor: Freely translated into German from
the English of Sir Walter Scott and now freely
translated from the German of G W H Haering
into English, 1825
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,
1827 (in Blackwood's Magazine, extended in
1839, a "Postscript" in 1854)
- Murha taiteenlajina (suom. Ville-Juhani
Sutinen, 2009)
Klosterheim; or, The Masque, 1832 (edited by
John Weeks, 1982)
Letters of De Quincey, the English Opium-Eater,
to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been
Neglected, 1843
The Logic of the Political Economy, 1844
Suspiria De Profundis, 1845 (published
incompletely)
Joan of Arc, 1847 (in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine)
The English Mail Coach, 1849 (in Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine)
Biographical Essays, 1851
The Csars, 1851
De Quincey's Writings: Thomas De Quincey, Vol
5, Life and Manners: from The Autobiography of
an English Opium-Eater, 1851
De Quinceys Works..., 1853-63 (15 vols.)
Selections Grave and Gay, from the Writings,
Published and Unpublished, by Thomas De
Quincey, 1853-1860 (14 vols., ed. and rev.
Thomas De Quincey)
Biographical Essays, 1854
Literary Reminiscences, 1854 (2 vols.)
Autobiographical Sketches: With Recollections
of the Lakes, 1854
Letters to a Young Man, and Other Papers, 1854
Miscellanies: Chiefly Narrative, 1854 (2 vols.)
Theological Essays and Other Papers, 1854 (2
vols.
Essays on Philosophical Writers and Other Men
of Letters, 1854-60 (2 vols.)
Sketches: Citical and Biographic, 1857
Studies on Secret Records, Personal and
Historic, 1857
China: A Revised Imprint of Articles from "Titan,"
1857
Essays Sceptical and Anti-Sceptical on
Problems Neglected or Mis-conceived, 1858
Leaders in Literature with a Notice of
Traditional Errors Affecting Them, 1858
The Avenger, a Narrative; and Other Papers,
1859
Classic Records Reviewed or Deciphered, 1859
Critical Suggestions on Style and Rhetoric, 1859
Speculations Literary and Philosophic: with
German Tales and Other Narrative Papers, 1859
(2 vols.)
Beauties, Selected from the Writings of Thomas
De Quincey, 1862
Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets,
1862 (1948, ed. by Edward Sackwille-West;
1970, ed. by David Wright)
Biographies of Shakespeare, Pope, Goethe, and
Schiller, and on the Political Parties of Modern
England, 1863
Essays on Philosophical Writers and Other Men
of Letters, 1865 (2 vols.)
Memorials and Other Papers, 1865 (2 vols.)
Suspiria De Profundis with Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater, 1871 (1956, ed. by
Malcolm Elwin)
Essays on Christianity, Paganism, and
Superstition, 1877
The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 1878-81 (12
vols.)
The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey,
1889-90 (14 vols.)
The Uncollected Writings, 1890 (2 vols., with a
preface and annotations by James Hogg)
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey,
1891-93 (2 vols.)
De Quincy Memorials, 1891 (2 vols.)
Joan of Arc, The English Mail Coach, 1893 (ed.
with introduction and notes by J. M. Hart)
De Quinceys Revolt of the Tartars, 1896 (ed.
with notes and an introduction by Charles Sears
Baldwin)
Revolt of the Tartars; or, Flight of the Kalmuck
Khan, 1896 (ed. by Franklin T. Baker)
Collected Writings, 1896-97 (14 vols., ed. by
David Masson)
De Quinceys Literary Criticism, 1909 (ed. with
an introduction by H. Darbishire)
A Diary of Thomas De Quincey, 1803, 1928
Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 1937
(selected and edited, with an introduction, by
Philip Van Doren Stern)
California and the Gold Mania, 1945 (illustrated
with sketches from "Punch")
Recollections of the Lake Poets, 1948 (ed., with
an introd., by Edward Sackville-West)
Niels Klim, Being an Incomplete Translation by
Thomas De Quincey from the Danish of Ludvig
Holberg, 1953 (edited from the manuscript by S.
Musgrove)
Unpublished Letters of Thomas De Quincey and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning , 1954 (edited by S.
Musgrove)
New Essays by De Quincey: His Contributions to
the Edinburgh Saturday Post and the Edinburgh
Evening Post 1827-1828, 1966 (edited by Stuart
M. Tave)
Selected Essays on Rhetoric, 1967 (edited by
Frederick Burwick, foreword by David Potter)
De Quincey as Critic, 1973 (edited by John E.
Jordan)
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: and
Other Writings, 1985 (ed. by Grevel Lindop)
The Stranger's Grave, 1998 (edited and
introduced by Edmund Baxter)
The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 2000-2003
(21 vols., edited by Grevel Lindop)
On Murder, 2006 (edited by Robert Morrison)
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