De Quincey filled his letters and manuscripts with abbreviations, which I have expanded for the sake of clarity. Thus, for example, I have amended his ‘hittg him a dab on his disgustg face’ to read ‘hitting him a dab on his disgusting face’; his ‘the Rels of Xty to man’ to read ‘the Relations of Christianity to man’; and his ‘yt I am thus made a party … to the ill-treatmt, ye undervalun of my own truth’ to read ‘that I am thus made a party… to the ill-treatment, the undervaluation of my own truth’.
De Quincey wrote his last name with both an upper and a lower case ‘d’, and friends, correspondents, and critics regularly produced other variations: ‘Quince’, ‘Quincy’, ‘De Quincy, ‘Dequincey’, and so on. I have allowed all of these inconsistencies to stand, though he appears as ‘De Quincey’ in my own references to him, in accordance with long-established custom and the precedent of his four previous biographers.
In the Notes and Bibliography, references to some nineteenth-century magazine articles contain a question mark in square brackets to indicate that the authorship of those articles is conjectural.