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Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) |
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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. "For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm, that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature: and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. 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, third edition, Taylor and Hessey, 1823, pp. 4-5) 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. Quincey lost his nine-year-old sister
Elizabeth in June 1792; this was the moment in his life when he realized,
for the first time, the human condition – "All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone." (Autobiographic Sketches, Ticknor and Fields, 1853, p. 50) The family doctor, Charles White, was a craniologist. He said
that Elizabeth's head was "the finest in its development of any
that he had ever seen". (Ibid., p. 35) De Quincey himself had a tiny body, but his skull
was enormous. 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 could harangue an Athenian, mob better than you or I could address an English one," "that boy," his master at Bath had said. (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, p. 17) 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. De Quincey died in
Edinburgh on December 8, 1859. The night before he died he said to his
daughter, "I cannot bear the weight of clothes on my feet." When she
pulled off the blankets, De Quincey said, ". . . that is much better; I
am better in every way. You know these were the feet that Jesus
washed." (Last Words of Saints and Sinners: 700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History by Herbert Lockyer, Kregel Publications, 1969, p. 30) Although 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. He even suggested that Kant should have tried opium to relieve his stomach pains. 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." ('On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,' in Miscellaneous Essays, Ticknor and Fields, 1853, pp. 9-10) De Quincey has been seen as a precursor of writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, and Alexander Trocchi. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he viewed murder as an artistic opportunity, though he was not always deadly serious with the subject: "Practice and theory must advance pari passu. People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed — a knife — a purse — and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature." ('On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts,' Miscellaneous Essays, p. 20) De Quincey wrote often of murder and had fantasies of violence, sometimes from the viewpoints of the victim or the witness. When he edited the Westmoreland Gazette, its columns were filled with murder stories. His short story 'The Avenger' (1838) introduces many of the essential elements of detective fiction. 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): 'Introduction' by Robert Morrison, in On Murder by Thomas De Quincey (2006); 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); Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey by Frances Wilson (2016); Pipe Dreams: the Drug Experience in Literature , edited and with an introduction by by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (2016); Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Adam Colman (2019); Pipe Dreams: The Drug Experience in Literature, edited and with an introduction by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (2022) Selected bibliography:
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