1781 Posthumous publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions.
1785 15 August: birth of Thomas Penson Quincey in Manchester (his mother alters the name to the more aristocratic-sounding ‘De Quincey’ in 1796).
1788 Birth of Lord Byron.
1789 Storming of the Bastille marks the beginning of the French Revolution.
1792 Death of sister Elizabeth, the first great trauma of De Quincey’s life. Birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1793 Death of De Quincey’s father.
1795 Embassy to Peking of Lord Macartney, charged with improving Anglo-Chinese trade relations. Birth of John Keats.
1796 De Quincey moves with his family to Bath and enters Bath Grammar School. Birth of Margaret Simpson, his future wife, at Grasmere in the Lake District.
1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge drafts ‘Kubla Khan’ (published 1816).
1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads published.
1799 De Quincey enters Winkfield School in Wiltshire. Wordsworth completes the first version of his autobiographical poem ultimately known as The Prelude.
1800 De Quincey enters Manchester Grammar School. France defeats Austria at the Battle of Marengo in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars.
1802 De Quincey runs away from school to ramble in Wales, then goes to London.
1803 Enters Worcester College, Oxford; writes to Wordsworth for the first time. German pharmacist F. W. A. Sertürner isolates a crystalline alkaloid of opium and dubs it ‘morphium’.
1804 According to De Quincey’s later claim in the Confessions, he first takes opium this autumn.
1805 Britain’s Navy defeats France’s at the Battle of Trafalgar. Wordsworth completes the second version of his autobiographical poem ultimately known as The Prelude.
1807 De Quincey meets Wordsworth at Grasmere.
1808 Leaves Oxford without taking a degree.
1809 Oversees publication of Wordsworth’s pamphlet criticizing the Convention of Cintra, an agreement made between the French, British and Portuguese during the Peninsular War (1808–14). Moves into the Wordsworths’ former home, the cottage at Town End at Grasmere (later known as Dove Cottage). Wellington’s forces defeat Napoleon at the Battle of Talavera in Spain during the Peninsular War. Birth of Edgar Allan Poe.
1812 De Quincey reads law briefly. Wordsworth’s daughter Kate dies, plunging De Quincey into deep mourning. Wellington defeats French forces at the Battles of Badajoz and Salamanca in Spain, turning the tide towards ultimate British victory in the Peninsular War. First two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage published. Birth of Charles Dickens.
1814 Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley published.
1815 Wellington’s forces defeat Napoleon’s at the Battle of Waterloo.
1816 Birth of son William to De Quincey and Margaret Simpson. Coleridge’s Christabel and Other Poems, containing ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’, published.
1817 De Quincey marries Margaret Simpson. David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation published.
1818 De Quincey is appointed editor of the Westmorland Gazette (and dismissed the following year). Birth of daughter Margaret.
1821 De Quincey makes his first contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater published anonymously in two parts in the London Magazine. Death of Keats. Birth of French poet Charles Baudelaire. Confessions is widely reviewed; although some critics balk at the author’s apparent egotism and immorality, there is consensus that both style and subject are remarkably original.
1822 Death of Shelley. First book edition of Confessions published.
1823 ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ published in the London Magazine. Birth of De Quincey’s son Francis John. Second and third editions of Confessions published; also the anonymous Advice to Opium-Eaters, emulating Confessions. Eclectic Review notice of Confessions impugns De Quincey’s credibility because he uses opium.
1824 De Quincey ‘translates’ the German imitation of Scott, Walladmor. Death of Byron.
1825 Publication of Charles Waterton’s Wanderings in South America (describing his riding a cayman, to which De Quincey later alludes in ‘The English Mail-Coach’).
1826 Fourth edition of Confessions.
1827 ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ and ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ published in Blackwood’s. Birth of De Quincey’s son Paul Frederick and daughter Florence. Death of William Blake.
1829 Birth of De Quincey’s son Julius. Robert Christison’s Treatise on Poisons cites Confessions as ‘a very poetical, but I believe also a very faithful, picture of the phenomena’ accompanying opium use.
1830 De Quincey moves permanently to Edinburgh. Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical published.
1832 De Quincey publishes gothic novel Klosterheim. Death of son Julius.
1833 Birth of daughter Emily. Evading arrest for debt, De Quincey takes up residence in Edinburgh’s Holyrood Sanctuary. Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus begins appearing in Fraser’s Magazine.
1834 Death of De Quincey’s son William. Death of Coleridge.
1837 De Quincey contributes articles on Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare and Pope to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Death of his wife Margaret. Victoria’s accession to the throne. First serial instalments of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers published.
1839 First Opium War between Britain and China begins.
1840 Two articles by De Quincey on the First Opium War published in Blackwood’s.
1842 Death of De Quincey’s son Horace in military service in China. Treaty of Nanking ends First Opium War, with China ceding Hong Kong to Britain. William Blair’s ‘An Opium Eater in America’ published.
1845 De Quincey’s ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ and ‘Coleridge on Opium Eating’ published in Blackwood’s, and ‘On Wordsworth’s Poetry’ in Tait’s. Fifth edition of Confessions published. Robert Gilfillan’s Gallery of Literary Portraits praises De Quincey’s ‘pencil of fire’, assesses his faculties as ‘powerfully developed but not properly balanced’. Medical Times & Gazette avers that ‘the law of his self-experience is paramount in the profession’.
1848 De Quincey receives an admiring Ralph Waldo Emerson on visit to Edinburgh.
1849 ‘The English Mail-Coach’ published in Blackwood’s. Death of Poe.
1850 Death of Wordsworth.
1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London.
1851–9 Boston (Mass.) edition of De Quincey’s Writings (20 vols.) published.
1853 De Quincey participates in publication of vols. 1 and 2 of Selections Grave and Gay, his collected works (14 vols.; last, 1860). Crimean War begins. Two new editions of Confessions published. Surge of critical interest in De Quincey accompanies publication of his collected works.
1854 London Globe prints large extracts from vol. 3 of Selections Grave and Gay; Eclectic Review: ‘each personal pronoun is an algebraic symbol of great and general truths’; David Masson in British Quarterly Review praises De Quincey’s innovative combination of subjective poetry and didactic prose. Dublin University Magazine: De Quincey’s style is a ‘figured Babylonian robe… possibly plague-tainted’.
1856 Publication of Selections Grave and Gay, vol. 5, containing significantly revised Confessions. Second Opium War begins. Crimean War ends.
1857 The Indian Mutiny. London Quarterly Review: De Quincey’s prose is ‘haunted by the fiend of subjectivity’. Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hashish Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean published in the USA.
1858 Medical Act brings about unprecedented unity of British medical professions.
1859 7 December: Death of De Quincey in Edinburgh. Athenaeum: De Quincey’s prose is ‘steeped in egotism’ and ‘diseased introspection’.
1860 Second Opium War ends. Final volumes of Selections Grave and Gay published. Baudelaire’s free French translation of sections from Confessions published in his Les Paradise artificiels.