Thomas De Quincey wrote some of the most eloquent and searching prose of the nineteenth century. The mass media that now dominates our lives developed during his lifetime, and he was a popular and prolific contributor to it for more than forty years, whether writing for liberal-minded publications such as the London Magazine or Tait’s, or for conservative journals such as the immensely successful Blackwood’s. He was close to some of the key literary figures of his era, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his biographical accounts of both poets continue to inform our understanding of them. His essays such as ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ range from brilliantly funny satiric high jinks to penetrating cultural criticism, and had a remarkable influence on crime, terror, and detective fiction, as well as on the rise of nineteenth-century decadence. His Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1821 and revised in 1856, is the first account of drug euphoria and addiction that was consciously aimed at a broad commercial audience. The work has had an enormous impact on popular culture from De Quincey’s day to ours, and has inspired a long line of writers, from Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Conan Doyle to Jean Cocteau, W. S. Burroughs, Ann Marlowe, and beyond. As long ago as 1975, the social psychologist Stanton Peele remarked that ‘addiction is not, as we like to think, an aberration from our way of life. Addiction is our way of life’. De Quincey’s Confessions signal the birth of the modern age, and speak directly to our ongoing fascination with habit, desire, commercialism, and consumption.
This is the first biography of De Quincey in nearly three decades, and it takes into account a vast array of new material that has come to light in recent years. For more than a century, David Masson’s fourteen-volume edition of The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey was the standard edition, and by far the best edition available. But it was woefully incomplete: a great deal of material was missing altogether; most essays – including the Confessions – were printed only in their revised form; there was no manuscript material; and Masson sometimes silently tampered with essays by removing whole sections of prose. In 2000–03, this situation improved dramatically when Grevel Lindop and an international team of editors produced The Works of Thomas De Quincey, a new, fully-annotated, twenty-one-volume edition that reprinted virtually everything De Quincey published, together with all known manuscript material, and an extensive series of textual variants that charted the substantive differences between his essays in their original and revised versions. For the first time, everything that De Quincey published is easily accessible.
The situation with De Quincey’s letters is very different. There are several editions of his correspondence, but none of them approaches completeness, and many of his letters have still not been published. My solution to this problem was to compile – with the crucial assistance of Barry Symonds – a database which contains transcriptions of, as far as I know, all of the De Quincey letters housed in public archives, and as many as possible of those housed in private collections. This database is the most comprehensive archive of De Quincey’s correspondence ever assembled, and it contains an abundance of hitherto unknown or neglected material.
In the past twenty-five years, valuable new information on his life has also come from a variety of other sources. Scholarly editions of writings by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Clare, James Hogg, Richard Woodhouse, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth have all brought fresh material to light. In March 2009, the British Library purchased 119 previously unknown letters written by De Quincey’s three daughters, all of whom comment with often disarming frankness on their father during the final decade of his life. The critical writings of a number of fine scholars, including John Barrell, Patrick Bridgwater, David Groves, Grevel Lindop, Barry Milligan, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Charles Rzepka, and Barry Symonds, have exposed a host of new perspectives on De Quincey’s life and autobiographical writings.
This diverse and fascinating body of material has enriched our understanding of almost every aspect of De Quincey’s life and career: his enduring sorrow over the loss of his beloved sister Elizabeth; his masochistic desire for humiliation; his association with prostitutes; his pursuit of and subsequent alienation from Wordsworth and Coleridge; his struggle with drugs and alcohol; his exhilarating engagement with the London Magazine circle of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Edward Irving, John Clare, and Thomas Carlyle; his complicated and sometimes hostile relationship with John Wilson, his Blackwood’s colleague and closest friend; his horrendous battles with debt; his imprisonment in Edinburgh gaols; his meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson; his interest in the Brontës; and much else.
Yet despite the wealth of new information, De Quincey remains in many ways a remarkably elusive figure. To some extent, this is simply the nature of biography: it is difficult in any study of another person to gain access to what De Quincey himself once described as ‘that inner world – that world of secret self-consciousness – in which each of us lives a second life apart and with himself alone’. Access to De Quincey is additionally complicated by the fact that opium was one of the central features of his existence, and that in innumerable instances he prevaricated in an attempt to keep his abuse of it hidden from others and, more importantly, from himself, his many public celebrations of the drug notwithstanding. Of his fellow opium habitué Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth once observed that ‘his whole time and thoughts … are employed in deceiving himself, and seeking to deceive others’. The same might often be said of De Quincey. Finally, in his autobiographical writings, it is clear that De Quincey often worked hard to disguise, rather than to reveal, his own experience. As Virginia Woolf once discerningly put it, in his many pieces of autobiography De Quincey tells us ‘only’ what he ‘wished us to know; and even that has been chosen for the sake of some adventitious quality – as that it fitted here, or was the right colour to go there – never for its truth’. De Quincey’s accounts of his past, in the Confessions and elsewhere, are powerfully seductive. But they need to be resisted. This biography points on several occasions to the gaps and inconsistencies that lie both within and between his various accounts of his past, and highlights the ways in which, for De Quincey, self-representation was often the subtlest form of self-concealment.
The portrait that emerges in these pages is of a man of enormous gifts who was both damaged and inspired by his fate. I have attempted to reveal De Quincey in all his complexity, to strip away the notion of him as simply a ‘disciple’ of Wordsworth and Coleridge, or a ‘hack’ writer who spent his career churning out respectable padding for the magazines, or a famous ‘addict’ who happened also to be a writer, or a Tory ‘bigot’ who despised radicalism and – especially – the East. As this book argues, De Quincey transcends these reductions. He was a supreme stylist with a remarkably diverse repertoire that extended from the impassioned and the humorous to the conversational and the taut. He was an iconoclast who repeatedly confounded his own sometimes virulent conservatism with both public acts of defiance and unconventionality, and with profound expressions of sympathy for the disenfranchised, the impoverished, and the abused. He made valuable contributions to political economy, biography, autobiography, philosophy, satire, translation, history, classical scholarship, and terror fiction. He is commonly thought of as a ‘Romantic’ essayist, but he produced some of his finest work – including Suspiria de Profundis, The English Mail-Coach, ‘A Sketch from Childhood’, the ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder’, and the revised version of the Confessions – in the Victorian age, and while he remained deeply invested in the genius of Wordsworth and Coleridge, his work is often most revealingly read alongside the writings of Poe, Barrett Browning, the Brontës, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, all of whom read and admired him. Far more than the other great essayists who were his contemporaries – Lamb, Hazlitt, Emerson, and Carlyle – De Quincey speaks to us directly about our divisions, our addictions, our losses, our selves. This is the first biography to take account of the complete range of his published and unpublished writings, and to demonstrate both the vital role he played in shaping his own age, and his enduring relevance in ours.