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 Poe, Baudelaire and ordinary readers tempted to experiment with opium, has been immense and malign.

"The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, the most to be distrusted; and yeat the great majority of people trust to nothing else, - which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes." (from 'The Knocking at the Gate in' Macbeth, 1823)

De Quincey was born in the burgeoning industrial city of Manchester, Lancashire, as the son of a wealthy linen merchant. He was educated at schools in Bath and Winkfield, ending at Manchester Grammar School from which he ran away to Wales at the age of 17 - with the knowledge and support of his mother and uncle. Later De Quincey returned to this period in his autobiographical book Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Between the years 1802 and 1803 he lived in London in poverty before returning back home. To opium De Quincey became addicted in 1804 when he studied at Worcester College, Oxford. He used it first to relieve acute neuralgia pains. He kept a decanter of laudanum by his elbow and steadily encreased to dose.

After De Quincey left Oxford without taking a degree, he became in 1807 a close friends with the romantic writers Taylor Coleridge, whom he met on a visit to the fashionable town of Bath. Coleridge introduced him to Robert Southey and William Wordsworth. In 1809 he went to live with them in the Lake District village of Grasmere. Suffering a series of debilitating illnesses between 1812 and 1813, De Quincey started to take opium, becoming in 1813 a daily user, although he was able to controll his habit until about 1817. He married Margaret Simpson, a farmer's daughter, by whom he had eight children. Having exhausted his private fortune, he started to earn living by journalism, and 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 tales, articles, and reviews.

Early in the 1820 De Quincey moved to London, where he contributed the London Magazine and Blackwoods. His chronicle Confessions of an English Opium Eater, was a mix stories about his life and descriptions both the ecstasies and the torments of the drug. It became an instant success and an important inspiration for other writers. His book also inclued quotes in Greek, Latin and Italian, and 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.

"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)

In 1826 De Quincey moved to Edinburgh and after the death of his wife, he was again using heavily opium. Between the years 1841 and 1843 he hide the creditors in Glascow. From 1853 until his death De Quincey worked with his SELECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY, FROM THE WRITINGS, PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED, BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY. Though he wrote voluminously he published only few books and had constant financial difficulties. Most of his works were written for periodicals. As a writer De Quincey's strong points were his sensitive, inward-turning imagination and his breadth of understanding. He also wrote studies about such German philosophers as Kant, Lessing, Richer.

De Quincey's influence, in depicting nightmarish movements of mind, is later seen in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. It has been suggested, that he 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)

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/quincey.htm

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