Thomas De Quincey, (1785 - 1859)
The famous literary figure, Thomas de Quincey was also a staunch and very eloquent supporter of the Ricardian Classical School. He records his encounter with Ricardian theory in his famous Confessions:
In this state of imbecility, I had, for amusement, turned my attention to political economy. My understanding, which formerly had been as active and restless as a hyena, could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at all), sink into utter lethargy; and political economy offers this advantage to a person in my state - that, though it is eminently an organic science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole, as the whole again reacts on and through each part), yet the several parts may be detached and contemplated singly. Great as was the prostration of my powers at this time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my understanding had been far too many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern economists. I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my desire, M.[argaret] sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus heads to powder with a lady's fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo's book: and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, "Thou art the man!" Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading: and much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking had been extinct in England. Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and a century of thought, had failed even to advance by one hair's breadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, à priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.
(Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, 1821 edition, p.99-100)
(later 1856 edition modified this passage considerably).His defense of Ricardo's theory of value is found in his famous "Dialogues of the Three Templars" (1824). De Quincey, however, disputed vigorously the traditional Classical notion of the "inexorable" tendency of the profit rate to decline. (e.g. 1841).
A largely broken and indebted man throughout his life, de Quincey did a lot of hack-work - notably for Blackwood's Magazine, Hogg's Instructor and Tait's Magazine - which have since become legendary pieces of intimate, long-winded but nonetheless witty and observant expositions of cultural life in Britain - e.g. "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth", "Murder as One of the Fine Arts" (1827), "Joan of Arc" (1847), "The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power" (1848), "The English Mail Coach" (1849), "Revolt of the Tartars" (1857) and an interminable series of autobiographical sketches which include his famous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and his Recollections of the Lakes (1834-40) with its not-so-flattering portraits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb and Southey.
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/quincey.htm
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