confessions of an english opium eater(fragment)
Dilluns desembre 28th 2009, 16:26 pm
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General It is so long since I first took opium, that if it had been a trifling incident in my life, I might have forgotten its date: but cardinal events are not to be forgotten; and from circumstances connected with it, I remember that it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. During that season I was in London, having come thither for the first time since my entrance at college. And my introduction to opium arose in the following way. From an early age I had been accustomed to wash my head in cold water at least once a day: being suddenly seized with toothache, I attributed it to some relaxation caused by an accidental intermission of that practice; jumped out of bed; plunged my head into a bason of cold water; and with hair thus wetted went to sleep. The next morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite for about twenty days. On the twenty-first day, I think it was, and on a Sunday, that I went out into the streets; rather to run away, if possible, from my torments, than with any distinct purpose. By accident I met a college acquaintance who recommended opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of Ambrosia, but no further: how unmeaning a sound was it at that time! what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances! Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance attached to the minutest circumstances connected with the place and the time, and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me the Paradise of Opium-eaters. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My road homewards lay through Oxford-street; and near “the stately Pantheon,” (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly called it) I saw a druggist’s shop. The druggist — unconscious minister of celestial pleasures! — as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on a Sunday; and, when I asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as any other man might do: and furthermore, out of my shilling, returned me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind as the beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. And it confirms me in this way of considering him, that, when I next came up to London, I sought him near the stately Pantheon, and found him not: and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one) he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford-street than to have removed in any bodily fashion. The reader may choose to think of him as, possibly, no more than a sublunary druggist: it may be so: but my faith is better: I believe him to have evanesced,or evaporated. So unwillingly would I connect any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and creature, that first brought me acquainted with the celestial drug.
Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking: and, what I took, I took under every disadvantage. But I took it: — and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: — this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me — in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea — a [pharmakon nepenthez] for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach. But, if I talk in this way, the reader will think I am laughing: and I can assure him, that nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion; and in his happiest state, the opium-eater cannot present himself in the character of Il Allegro: even then, he speaks and thinks as becomes Il Penseroso. Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible way of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery: and, unless when I am checked by some more powerful feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in these annals of suffering or enjoyment. The reader must allow a little to my infirm nature in this respect: and with a few indulgences of that sort, I shall endeavour to be as grave, if not drowsy, as fits a theme like opium, so anti-mercurial as it really is, and so drowsy as it is falsely reputed.
And, first, one word with respect to its bodily effects: for upon all that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium, whether by travellers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege of lying as an old immemorial right), or by professors of medicine, writing ex cathedra, — I have but one emphatic criticism to pronounce — Lies! lies! lies! I remember once, in passing a book-stall, to have caught these words from a page of some satiric author: — “By this time I became convinced that the London newspapers spoke truth at least twice a week, viz. on Tuesday and Saturday, and might safely be depended upon for — the list of bankrupts.” In like manner, I do by no means deny that some truths have been delivered to the world in regard to opium: thus it has been repeatedly affirmed by the learned, that opium is a dusky brown in colour; and this, take notice, I grant: secondly, that it is rather dear; which I also grant: for in my time, East-India opium has been three guineas a pound, and Turkey eight: and, thirdly, that if you eat a good deal of it, most probably you must — do what is particularly disagreeable to any man of regular habits, viz. die.These weighty propositions are, all and singular, true: I cannot gainsay them: and truth ever was, and will be, commendable. But in these three theorems, I believe we have exhausted the stock of knowledge as yet accumulated by man on the subject of opium. And therefore, worthy doctors, as there seems to be room for further discoveries, stand aside, and allow me to come forward and lecture on this matter.
First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for granted, by all who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that it does, or can, produce intoxication. Now reader, assure yourself, meo periculo, that no quantity of opium ever did, or could intoxicate. As to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum) that might certainly intoxicate if a man could bear to take enough of it; but why? because it contains so much proof spirit, and not because it contains so much opium. But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is incapable of producing any state of body at all resembling that which is produced by alcohol; and not in degree only incapable, but even in kind: it is not in the quantity of its effects merely, but in the quality, that it differs altogether. The pleasure given by wine is always mounting, and tending to a crisis, after which it declines: that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours: the first, to borrow a technical distinction from medicine, is a case of acute — the second, of chronic pleasure: the one is a flame, the other a steady and equable glow. But the main distinction lies in this, that whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self possession: opium greatly invigorates it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness, and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker: opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive: and with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections: but then, with this remarkable difference, that in the sudden development of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation, there is always more or less of a maudlin character, which exposes it to the contempt of the by-stander. Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed tears — no mortal knows why: and the sensual creature is clearly uppermost. But the expansion of the benigner feelings, incident to opium, is no febrile access, but a healthy restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep- seated irritation of pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heard originally just and good. True it is, that even wine, up to a certain point, and with certain men, rather tends to exalt and to steady the intellect: I myself, who have never been a great wine-drinker, used to find that half a dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the faculties — brightened and intensified the consciousness — and gave to the mind a feeling of being “ponderibus librata suis”; and certainly it is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor: for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety; and it is when they are drinking (as some old gentleman says in Athenaeus), that men [eantonz emfanixondin oitinez eidin]. — display themselves in their true complexion of character; which surely is not disguising themselves. But still, wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilize and to disperse the intellectual energies: whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. In short, to sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal, part of his nature: but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from any disease, or other remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect.
This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member — the alpha and the omega: but then it is to be recollected, that I speak from the ground of a large and profound personal experience: whereas most of the unscientific[3] authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of those who have written expressly on the materia medica, make it evident, from the horror they express of it, that their experimental knowledge of its action is none at all. I will, however, candidly acknowledge that I have met with one person who bore evidence to its intoxicating power, such as staggered my own incredulity: for he was a surgeon, and had himself taken opium largely. I happened to say to him, that his enemies (as I had heard) charged him with talking nonsense on politics, and that his friends apologized for him, by suggesting that he was constantly in a state of intoxication from opium. Now the accusation, said I, is not prima facie, and of necessity, an absurd one: but the defence is. To my surprise, however, he insisted that both his enemies and his friends were in the right: “I will maintain,” said he, “that I do talk nonsense; and secondly, I will maintain that I do not talk nonsense upon principle, or with any view to profit, but solely and simply, said he, solely and simply, — solely and simply (repeating it three times over), because I am drunk with opium; and that daily.” I replied that, as to the allegation of his enemies, as it seemed to be established upon such respectable testimony, seeing that the three parties concerned all agreed in it, it did not become me to question it; but the defence set up I must demur to. He proceeded to discuss the matter, and to lay down his reasons: but it seemed to me so impolite to pursue an argument which must have presumed a man mistaken in a point belonging to his own profession, that I did not press him even when his course of argument seemed open to objection: not to mention that a man who talks nonsense, even though “with no view to profit,” is not altogether the most agreeable partner in a dispute, whether as opponent or respondent. I confess, however, that the authority of a surgeon, and one who was reputed a good one, may seem a weighty one to my prejudice: but still I must plead my experience, which was greater than his greatest by 7000 drops a day; and, though it was not possible to suppose a medical man unacquainted with the characteristic symptoms of vinous intoxication, it yet struck me that he might proceed on a logical error of using the word intoxication with too great latitude, and extending it generically to all modes of nervous excitement, connected with certain diagnostics. Some people have maintained, in my hearing, that they had been drunk on green tea: and a medical student in London, for whose knowledge in his profession I have reason to feel great respect, assured me, the other day, that a patient, in recovering from an illness, had got drunk on a beef-steak.
Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error, in respect t opium, I shall notice very briefly a second and a third; which are, that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental. The first of these errors I shall content myself with simply denying; assuring my reader, that for ten years, during which I took opium at intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed myself this luxury was always a day of unusually good spirits.
With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if we were to credit the numerous pictures of Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany the practice of opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly, opium is classed under the head of narcotics; and some such effect it may produce in the end: but the primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system: this first stage of its action always lasted with me, during my noviciate, for upwards of eight hours; so that it must be the fault of the opium-eater himself if he does not so time his exhibition of the dose (to speak medically) as that the whole weight of its narcotic influence may descend upon his sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. But that the reader may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to stupify the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by way of treating the question illustratively, rather than argumentively) describe the way in which I myself often passed an opium evening in London, during the period between 1804-1812. It will be seen, that at least opium did not move me to seek solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, or the torpid state of self- involution ascribed to the Turks. I give this account at the risk of being pronounced a crazy enthusiast or visionary: but I regard that little: I must desire my reader to bear in mind, that I was a hard student, and at severe studies for all the rest of my time: and certainly had a right occasionally to relaxations as well as the other people: these, however, I allowed myself but seldom.
The late Duke of Norfolk used to say, “Next Friday, by the blessing of Heaven, I purpose to be drunk:” and in like manner I used to fix beforehand how often, within a given time, and when, I would commit a debauch of opium. This was seldom more than once in three weeks: for at that time I could no have ventured to call every day (as I did afterwards) for “a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar.” No: as I have said, I seldom drank laudanum, at that time, more than once in three weeks: this was usually on a Tuesday or a Saturday night; my reason for which was this. In those days Grassini sang at the Opera: and her voice was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever heard. I know not what may be the state of the Opera- house now, having never been within its walls for seven or eight years, but at that time it was by much the most pleasant place of public resort in London for passing an evening. Five shillings admitted one to the gallery, which was subject to far less annoyance than the pit of the theatres: the orchestra was distinguished by its sweet and melodious grandeur from all English orchestras, the composition of which, I confess, is not acceptable to my ear, from the predominance of the clangorous instruments, and the absolute tyranny of the violin. The choruses were divine to hear: and when Grassini appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth her passionate soul as Andromache, at the tomb of Hector, &c. I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the Paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I honour the Barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman. For music is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to the temperament of him who hears it. And, by the bye, with the exception of the fine extravaganza on that subject in Twelfth Night, I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature: it is a passage in the Religio Medici[4] of Sir T. Brown; and, though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects. The mistake of most people is to suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not so: it is by the re-action of the mind upon the notices of the ear, (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed: and therefore it is that people of equally good ear differ so much in this point from one another. Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. But, says a friend, a succession of musical sounds is to me like a collection of Arabic characters: I can attach no ideas to them. Ideas! my good sir? there is no occasion for them: all that class of ideas, which can be available in such a case, has a language of representative feelings. But this is a subject foreign to my present purposes: it is sufficient to say, that a chorus, &c. of elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life — not, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five shillings. And over nd above the music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all around me, in the intervals of the performance, the music of the Italian language talked by Italian women: for the gallery was usually crowded with Italians: and I listened with a pleasure such as that with which Weld the traveller lay and listened, in Canada, to the sweet laughter of Indian women; for the less you understand of a language, the more sensible you are to the melody or harshness of its sounds: for such a purpose, therefore, it was an advantage to me that I was a poor Italian scholar, reading it but little, and not speaking it at all, nor understanding a tenth part of what I heard spoken.
These were my Opera pleasures: but another pleasure I had which, as it could be had only on a Saturday night, occasionally struggled with my love of the Opera; for, at that time, Tuesday and Saturday were the regular Opera nights. On this subject I am afraid I shall be rather obscure, but, I can assure the reader, not at all more so than Marinus in his life of Proclus, or many other biographers and auto-biographers of fair reputation. This pleasure, I have said, was to be had only on a Saturday night. What then was Saturday night to me more than any other night? I had no labours that I rested from; no wages to receive: what needed I to care for Saturday night, more than as it was a summons to hear Grassini? True, most logical reader: what you say is unanswerable. And yet so it was and is, that, whereas different men throw their feelings into different channels, and most are apt to show their interest in the concerns of the poor, chiefly by sympathy, expressed in some shape or other, with their distresses and sorrows, I, at that time, was disposed to express my interest by sympathising with their pleasures. The pains of poverty I had lately seen too much of; more than I wished to remember: but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil, can never become oppressive to contemplate. Now Saturday night is the season for the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest to the poor: in this point the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of brotherhood: almost all Christendom rests from its labours. It is a rest introductory to another rest: and divided by a whole day and two nights from the renewal of toil. On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used often, on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmurs of discontent: but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquility. And taken generally, I must say, that, in this point at least, the poor are far more philosophic than the rich — that they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediably evils, or irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always received indulgently. If wages were a little higher, or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad: yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consoling myself. For opium (like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into a compliance with the master key. Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney- coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been aid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience.
Thus I have shown that opium does not, of necessity, produce inactivity or torpor; but that, on the contrary, it often led me into markets and theatres. Yet, in candour, I will admit that markets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater, when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment. In that state, crowds become an oppression to him; music even, too sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much, and to observe too little, and who, upon my first entrance at college, was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. — I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius: and the remedies I sought were to force myself into society, and to keep my understanding in continual activity upon matters of science. But for these remedies, I should certainly have become hypochondriacally melancholy. In after years, however, when my cheerfulness was more fully re-established, I yielded to my natural inclination for a solitary life. And, at that time, I often fell into these reveries upon taking opium; and more than once it has happened to me, on a summer-night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of Liverpool, at about the same distance, that I have sate, from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, and without wishing to move.
I shall be charged with mysticism, behmenism, quietism, &c. but that shall not alarm me. Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our wisest men: and let my readers see if he, in his philosophical works, be half as unmystical as I am. — I say, then, that it has often struck me that the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such a reverie. The town of Liverpool represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquility that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose.
Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest and assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man, a brief oblivion for
Wrongs unredress’d, and insults unavenged;
that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury; and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges: — thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles — beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos: and “from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,” callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the “dishonours of the grave.” Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!
http://opioids.com/dequincey/index.html
biographies
Thomas De Quincey(1785-1859)
A prodigy, a runaway, and an addict, Thomas De Quincey was the black sheep of a family struggling to deal with the death of their father. Despite his academic muscle, De Quincey couldn’t keep himself in school, and by age 16, he found himself wandering the English countryside, stretching a guinea a week to make ends meet. After repeated attempts by his family to get him in school and keep him there, De Quincey was left to himself. He finally left college after five years, but his opium habits and his love of literature lead him to seek out the company and advice of the Lake District poets. He eventually married and ended up moving to the Lake District himself, where he wrote as much for the love of literature as for the exigency of food. His most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater,appeared serially in London Magazine and was eventually published in book form. He continued to contribute to magazines around London the rest of his life, and never kicked the opium habit.
http://essays.quotidiana.org/dequincey/
THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-18J9), English author, was born at Greenheys, Manchester, on the 15th of August 1785. He was the fifth child in a family of eight (four sons and four daughters). His father, descended from a Norman family, was a merchant, who left his wife and six children a clear income of £1600 a year. Thomas was from infancy a shy, sensitive child, with a constitutional tendency to dreaming by night and by day; and, under the influence of an elder brother, a lad ” whose genius for mischief amounted to inspiration,” who died in his sixteenth year,. he spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of their own creating. The amusements and occupations of the whole family, indeed, seem to have been mainly intellectual; and in De Quincey’s case, emphatically, ” the child was father to the man.” ” My life has been,” he affirms in the Confessions, ” on the whole the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been.” From boyhood he was more or less in contact with a polished circle; his education, easy to one of such native aptitude, was sedulously attended to. When he was in his twelfth year the family removed to Bath, where he was sent to the grammar school, at which he remained for about two years; and for a year more he attended another public school at Winkfield, Wiltshire. At thirteen he wrote Greek with ease; at fifteen he not only composed Greek verses in lyric measures, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment; one of his masters said of him, ” that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” Towards the close of his fifteenth year he visited Ireland, with a companion of his own age, Lord Westport, the son of Lord Altamont, an Irish peer, and spent there in residence and travel some months of the summer and autumn of the year 1800,– being a spectator at Dublin of ” the final ratification of the bill which united Ireland to Great Britain.” On his return to England, his mother having now settled at St John’s Priory, a residence near Chester, De Quincey was sent to the Manchester grammar school, mainly in the hope of securing one of the school exhibitions to help his expenses at Oxford.
Discontented with the mode in which his guardians conducted his education, and with some view apparently of forcing them to send him earlier to college, he left this school after less than a year’s residence -ran away, in short, to his mother’s house. There his mother’s brother, Colonel Thomas Penson, made an arrangement for him to have a weekly allowance, on which he might reside at some country place in Wales, and pursue his studies, presumably till he could go to college. From Wales, however, after brief trial, ” suffering grievously from want of books,” he went off as he had done from school, and hid himself from guardians and friends in the world of London. And now, as he says, commenced ” that episode, or impassioned parenthesis of my life, which is comprehended in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” This London episode extended over a year or more; his money soon vanished, and he was in the utmost poverty; he obtained shelter for the night in Greek Street, Soho, from a moneylender’s agent, and spent his days. wandering in the streets and parks; finally the lad was reconciled to his guardians, and in 1803 was sent to Worcester College, Oxford, being by this time about nineteen. It was in the course of his second year at Oxford that he first tasted opium, – having taken it to allay neuralgic pains. De Quincey’s mother had settled at Weston Lea, near Bath, and on one of his visits. to Bath, De Quincey made the acquaintance of Coleridge; he took Mrs Coleridge to Grasmere, where he became personally acquainted with Wordsworth.
After finishing his career of five years at college in 1808 he kept terms at the Middle Temple; but in 1809 visited the Wordsworths at Grasmere, and in the autumn returned to Dove Cottage, which he had taken on a lease. His choice was of course influenced partly by neighbourhood to Wordsworth, whom he early appreciated, – having been, he says, the only man in all Europe who quoted Wordsworth so early as 1802. His friendship with Wordsworth decreased within a few years, and when in 1834 De Quincey published in Tait’s Magazine his reminiscences of the Grasmere circle, the indiscreet references to the Wordsworths contained in the article led to a complete cessation of intercourse. Here also he enjoyed the society and friendship of Coleridge, Southey and especially of Professor Wilson, as in London he had of Charles Lamb and his circle. He continued his classical and other studies, especially exploring the at that time almost unknown region of German literature, and indicating its riches to English readers. Here also, in 1816, he married Margaret Simpson, the ” dear M ” of whom a charming glimpse is accorded to the reader of the Confessions; his family came to be five sons and three daughters.
For about a year and a half he edited the Westmoreland Gazette. He left Grasmere for London in the early part of 1820. The Lambs received him with great kindness and introduced him to the proprietors of the London Magazine. It was in this journal in 1821 that the Confessions appeared. De Quincey also contributed to Blackwood, to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, and later to Tait’s Magazine. His connexion with Blackwood took him to Edinburgh in 1828, and he lived there for twelve years, contributing from time to time to the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. His wife died in 1837, and the family eventually settled at Lasswade, but from this time De Quincey spent his time in lodgings in various places, staying at one place until the accumulation of papers filled the rooms, when he left them in charge of the landlady and wandered elsewhere. After his wife’s death he gave way for the fourth time in his life to the opium habit, but in 1844 he reduced his daily quantity by a tremendous effort to six grains, and never again yielded. He died in Edinburgh on the 8th of December 1859, and is buried in the West Churchyard.
During nearly fifty years De Quincey lived mainly by his pen. His patrimony seems never to have been entirely exhausted, and his habits and tastes were simple and inexpensive; but he was reckless in the use of money, and had debts and pecuniary difficulties of all sorts. There was, indeed, his associates affirm, an element of romance even in his impecuniosity, as there was in everything about him; and the diplomatic and other devices by which he contrived to keep clear of clamant creditors, while scrupulously fulfilling many obligations, often disarmed animosity, and converted annoyance into amusement. The famous Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in a small volume in 1822, and attracted a very remarkable degree of attention, not simply by its personal disclosures, but by the extraordinary power of its dream-painting. No other literary man of his time, it has been remarked, achieved so high and universal a reputation from such merely fugitive efforts. The only works published separately (not in periodicals) were a novel, Klosterheim (1832), and The Logic of Political Economy (1844). After his works were brought together, De Quincey’s reputation was not merely maintained, but extended. For range of thought and topic, within the limits of pure literature, no like amount of material of such equality of merit proceeded from any eminent writer of the day. However profuse and discursive, De Quincey is always polished, and generally exact – a scholar, a wit, a man of the world and a philosopher, as well as a genius. He looked upon letters as a noble and responsible calling; in his essay on Oliver Goldsmith he claims for literature the rank not only of a fine art, but of the highest and most potent of fine arts; and as such he himself regarded and practised it. He drew a broad distinction between ” the literature of knowledge and the literature of power,” asserting that the function of the first is to teach, the function of the second to move, – maintaining that the meanest of authors who moves has pre-eminence over all who merely teach, that the literature of knowledge must perish by supersession, while the literature of power is ” triumphant for ever as long as the language exists in which it speaks.” It is to this class of motive literature that De Quincey’s own works essentially belong; it is by virtue of that vital element of power that they have emerged from the rapid oblivion of periodicalism, and live in the minds of later generations. But their power is weakened by their volume.
De Quincey fully defined his own position and claim to distinction in the preface to his collected works. These he divides into three classes: – ” first, that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader,” such as the Narratives, Autobiographic Sketches, &c.; ” second, papers which address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so primarily,” such as the essays on Essenism, the Caesars, Cicero, &c.; and finally, as a third class, ” and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class of compositions,” he ranks those ” modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature,” such as the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis. The high claim here asserted has been questioned; and short and isolated examples of eloquent apostrophe, and highly wrought imaginative description, have been cited from Rousseau and other masters of style; but De Quincey’s power of sustaining a fascinating and elevated strain of ” impassioned prose ” is allowed to be entirely his own. Nor, in regard to his writings as a whole, will a minor general claim which he makes be disallowed, namely, that he ” does not write without a thoughtful consideration of his subject,” and also with novelty and freshness of view. ” Generally,” he says, ” I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit of rectification applied to absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth.” Another obvious quality of all his genius is its overflowing fulness of allusion and illustration, recalling his own description of a great philosopher or scholar – ” Not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones into the unity of breathing life.” It is useless to complain of his having lavished and diffused his talents and acquirements over so vast a variety of often comparatively trivial and passing topics. The world must accept gifts from men of genius as they offer them; circumstance and the hour often rule their form. Those influences, no less than the idiosyncrasy of the man, determined De Quincey to the illumination of such matter for speculation as seemed to lie before him; he was not careful to search out recondite or occult themes, though these he did not neglect, – a student, a scholar and a recluse, he was yet at the same time a man of the world, keenly interested in the movements of men and in the page of history that unrolled itself before him day by day. To the discussion of things new, as readily as of things old, aided by a capacious, retentive and ready memory, which dispensed with reference to printed pages, he brought also the exquisite keenness and subtlety of his highly analytic and imaginative intellect, the illustrative stores of his vast and varied erudition, and that large infusion of common sense which preserved him from becoming at any time a mere doctrinaire, or visionary. If he did not throw himself into any of the great popular controversies or agitations of the day, it was not from any want of sympathy with the struggles of humanity or the progress of the race, but rather because his vocation was to apply to such incidents of his own time, as to like incidents of all history, great philosophical principles and tests of truth and power. In politics, in the party sense of that term, he would probably have been classed as a Liberal Conservative or Conservative Liberal – at one period of his life perhaps the former, and at a later the latter. Originally, as we have seen, his surroundings were aristocratic, in his middle life his associates, notably Wordsworth, Southey and Wilson, were all Tories; but he seems never to have held the extreme and narrow views of that circle. Though a flavour of high breeding runs through his writings, he has no vulgar sneers at the vulgar. As he advanced in years his views became more and more decidedly liberal, but he was always as far removed from Radicalism as from Toryism, and may be described as a philosophical politician, capable of classification under no definite party name or colour. Of political economy he had been an early and earnest student, and projected, if he did not so far proceed with, an elaborate and systematic treatise on the science, of which all that appears, however, are his fragmentary Dialogues on the system of Ricardo, published in the London Magazine in 1824, and The Logic of Political Economy (1844). But political and economic problems largely exercised his thoughts, and his historical sketches show that he is constantly alive to their interpenetrating influence. The same may be said of his biographies, notably of his remarkable sketch of Dr Parr. Neither politics nor economics, however, exercised an absorbing influence on his mind, – they were simply provinces in the vast domain of universal speculation through which he ranged ” with unconfined wings.” How wide and varied was the region he traversed a glance at the titles of the papers which make up his collected – or more properly, selected – works (for there was much matter of evanescent interest not reprinted) sufficiently shows. Some things in his own line he has done perfectly; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humour and eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle force and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels; and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of opium no doubt stimulated this remarkable faculty of reproducing in skilfully selected phrase the grotesque and shifting forms of that ” cloudland, gorgeous land,” which opens to the sleep-closed eye.
To the appreciation of De Quincey the reader must bring an imaginative faculty somewhat akin to his own – a certain general culture, and large knowledge of books, and men and things. Otherwise much of that slight and delicate allusion that gives point and colour and charm to his writings will be missed; and on this account the full enjoyment and comprehension of De Quincey must always remain a luxury of the literary and intellectual. But his skill in narration, his rare pathos, his wide sympathies, the pomp of his dream-descriptions, the exquisite playfulness of his lighter dissertations, and his abounding though delicate and subtle humour, commend him to a larger class. Though far from being a professed humorist – a character he would have shrunk from – there is no more expert worker in a sort of half-veiled and elaborate humour and irony than De Quincey; but he employs those resources for the most part secondarily. Only in one instance has he given himself up to them unreservedly and of set purpose, namely, in the famous ” Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,” published in Blackwood, – an effort which, admired and admirable though it be, is also, it must be allowed, somewhat strained. His style, full and flexible, pure and polished, is peculiarly his own; yet it is not the style of a mannerist, – its charm is, so to speak, latent; the form never obtrudes; the secret is only discoverable by analysis and study. It consists simply in the reader’s assurance of the writer’s complete mastery over all the infinite applicability and resources of the English language. Hence involutions and parentheses, ” cycle on epicycle,” evolve themselves into a stately clearness and harmony; and sentences and paragraphs, loaded with suggestion, roll on smoothly and musically, without either fatiguing or cloying – rather, indeed, to the surprise as well as delight of the reader; for De Quincey is always ready to indulge in feats of style, witching the world with that sort of noble horsemanship which is as graceful as it is daring.
It has been complained that, in spite of the apparently full confidences of the Confessions and Autobiographic Sketches, readers are left in comparative ignorance, biographically speaking, of the man De Quincey. Two passages in his Confessions afford sufficient clues to this mystery. In one he describes himself ” as framed for love and all gentle affections,” and in another confesses to the ” besetting infirmity ” of being ” too much of an eudaemonist.” ” I hanker,” he says, ” too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little capable of surmounting present pain for the sake of any recessionary benefit.” His sensitive disposition dictated the ignoring in his writings of traits merely personal to himself, as well as his ever-recurrent resort to opium as a doorway of escape from present ill; and prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris, – there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect of regular hours or any considerations of health or comfort, – the habit of working as pleased himself without regard to the divisions of night or day, of times of sleeping or waking, even of the slow procession of the seasons, had latterly so disinclined him to the restraints, however slight, of ordinary social intercourse, that he very seldom submitted to them. On such rare occasions, however, as he did appear, perhaps at some simple meal with a favoured friend, or in later years in his own small but refined domestic circle, he was the most charming of guests, hosts or companions. A short and fragile, but well-proportioned frame; a shapely and compact head; a face beaming with intellectual light, with rare, almost feminine beauty of feature and complexion; a fascinating courtesy of manner; and a fulness, swiftness and elegance of silvery speech, – such was the irresistible ” mortal mixture of earth’s mould ” that men named De Quincey. He possessed in a high degree what James Russell Lowell called ” the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere persuasive, and nowhere emphatic “; and his whole aspect and manner exercised an undefinable attraction over every one, gentle or simple, who came within its influence; for shy as he was, he was never rudely shy, making good his boast that he had always made it his ” pride to converse familiarly more socratico with all human beings – man, woman and child “- looking on himself as a catholic creature standing in an equal relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated. He would converse with a peasant lad or a servant girl in phrase as choice, and sentences as sweetly turned, as if his interlocutor were his equal both in position and intelligence; yet without a suspicion of pedantry, and with such complete adaptation of style and topic that his talk charmed the humblest as it did the highest that listened to it. His conversation was not a monologue; if he had the larger share, it was simply because his hearers were only too glad that it should be so; he would listen with something like deference to very ordinary talk, as if the mere fact of the speaker being one of the same company entitled him to all consideration and respect. The natural bent of his mind and disposition, and his life-long devotion to letters, to say nothing of his opium eating, rendered him, it must be allowed, regardless of ordinary obligations in life – domestic and pecuniary – to a degree that would have been culpable in any less singularly constituted mind. It was impossible to deal with or judge De Quincey by ordinary standards – not even his publishers did so. Much no doubt was forgiven him, but all that needed forgiveness. is covered by the kindly veil of time, while his merits as a master in English literature are still gratefully acknowledged.’ [Bibliography. – In 1853 De Quincey began to prepare an edition of his works, Selections Grave and Gay. Writings Published and Unpublished (14 vols., Edinburgh, 1853-1860), followed by a second edition (1863-1871) with notes by James Hogg and two additional volumes; a further supplementary volume appeared in 1878. The first comprehensive edition, however, was printed in America (Boston, 20 vols., 1850-1855); and the ” Riverside ” edition (Boston and New York, 12 vols., 1877) is still fuller. The standard English edition is The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (14 vols., Edinburgh, 1889-1890), edited by David Masson, who also wrote his biography (1881) for the ” English Men of Letters “series. The Uncollected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (London, 2 vols., 1890) contains a preface and annotations by James Hogg; The Posthumous Writings of Thomas De Quincey (2 vols., 1891-1893) were edited by A. H. Japp (” H. A. Page “), who wrote the standard biography, Thomas De Quincey: his Life and Writings (London, 2 vols., 2nd ed., 1879), and De Quincey Memorials (2 vols., 1891). See also Arvbde Barine, Nevrose’s (Paris, 1898); Sir L. Stephen, Hours in a Library; H. S. Salt, De Quincey (1904); and De Quincey and his Friends (1895), a collection edited by James Hogg, which includes essays by Dr Hill Burton and Shadworth Hodgson.] (J. R. F.) 1 The above account has been corrected and amplified in some statements of fact for this edition. Its original author, John Ritchie Findlay (1824-1898), proprietor of The Scotsman newspaper, and the donor of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, had been intimate with De Quincey, and in 1886 published his Personal Recollections of him.
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Thomas_De_Quincey
A Biography of Thomas De Quincey
Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785 to a prosperous linen merchant. As a young boy he read widely and acquired a reputation as a brilliant classicist. “That boy,” said his headmaster at Bath Grammar School, “that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one.“
At seventeen, De Quincey ran away from Manchester Grammar School and spent five harrowing months penniless and hungry on the streets of London, an episode recorded with great vividness in his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Reconciled with his family, he entered Oxford in 1804, but left four years later without taking his degree.
He moved to the English Lake District to be near his two literary idols, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After an initial period of intimacy, he was gradually estranged from both men, and in 1813 he became dependent on opium, a drug he began experimenting with during his student days at Oxford. Over the next few years he slid deeper into debt and addiction before penury forced him to join Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1819 at the urging of his close friend John Wilson.
Following the success of the Confessions, he produced over two hundred magazine articles on topics ranging from philosophy and history to aesthetics, economics, literary criticism, and contemporary politics. His well-known essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827, and a second instalment appeared in the same magazine in 1839. His many “Literary Reminiscences” of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey, and others appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine beginning in 1834. Blackwood’s published his 1845 sequel to the Confessions, “Suspiria de Profundis.”
In 1854, as his Collected Works were appearing, The Westminster Review praised De Quincey’s writings as “filled with passages of a power and beauty which have never been surpassed by any other prose writer of the age.” The same year The Eclectic Review noted that, when completed, De Quincey’s Works would “constitute the most valuable and most enduring collection of papers, which had originally appeared in a periodical form, to be found in the entire world of literature.”
De Quincey died in Edinburgh on 8 December 1859.
http://www.queensu.ca/english/tdq/bio.html
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Child and student
He was born in 86 Cross Street, Manchester, England. His father was a successful businessman with an interest in literature who died when Thomas was quite young. Soon after Thomas’s birth the family went to The Farm and then later to Greenhay, a larger country house near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey’s mother, now a widow, moved to Bath and enrolled him at King Edward’s School, Bath.
Thomas was a weak and sickly child. His youth was spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, came home, he wreaked havoc in the quiet surroundings. De Quincey’s mother (who counted Hannah More amongst her friends) was a woman of strong character and intelligence, but seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children. She brought them up very strictly, taking Thomas out of school after three years because she was afraid he would become big-headed, and sending him to an inferior school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.
In 1800, De Quincey, aged fifteen, was ready for the University of Oxford; his scholarship was far in advance of his years. “That boy,” his master at King Edward’s School had said, “could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” He was sent to Manchester Grammar School, in order that after three years’ stay he might obtain a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, but he took flight after nineteen months.
His first plan had been to reach William Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) had consoled him in fits of depression and had awakened in him a deep reverence for the poet. But for that De Quincey was too timid, so he made his way to Chester, where his mother dwelt, in the hope of seeing a sister; he was caught by the older members of the family, but, through the efforts of his uncle, Colonel Penson, received the promise of a guinea a week to carry out his later project of a solitary tramp through Wales. From July to November, 1802, De Quincey lived as a wayfarer. He soon lost his guinea by ceasing to keep his family informed of his whereabouts, and had difficulty making ends meet. Still apparently fearing pursuit, he borrowed some money and travelled to London, where he tried to borrow more. Having failed, he lived close to starvation rather than return to his family.
This period of privation left a profound mark upon De Quincey’s psychology, and upon the writing he would later do; it forms a major and crucial part of the first section of the Confessions, and re-appears in various forms throughout the vast body of his lifetime literary work.
Discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home and finally allowed to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced income. Here, we are told, “he came to be looked upon as a strange being who associated with no one.” During this time he began to take opium. He completed his studies, but failed to take the oral examination leading to a degree; he left the university without graduating.He became an acquaintance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, having already sought out Charles Lamb in London. His acquaintance with Wordsworth led to his settling in 1809 at Grasmere, in the beautiful English Lake District; his home for ten years was Dove Cottage, which Wordsworth had occupied and which is now a popular tourist attraction. De Quincey was married in 1816, and soon after, having no money left, he took up literary work in earnest.
His wife Margaret bore him eight children before her death in 1837. Five, however, predeceased their father; three of De Quincey’s daughters survived him.
Translator and essayist
In 1821 he went to London to dispose of some translations from German authors, but was persuaded first to write and publish an account of his opium experiences, which that year appeared in the London Magazine. This new sensation eclipsed Lamb’s Essays of Elia, which were then appearing in the same periodical. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater were soon published in book form. De Quincey then made literary acquaintances. Tom Hood found the shrinking author “at home in a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the tables, and the chairs — billows of books …”De Quincey was famous for his conversation; Richard Woodhouse wrote of the “depth and reality, as I may so call it, of his knowledge … His conversation appeared like the elaboration of a mine of results …”
From this time on De Quincey maintained himself by contributing to various magazines. He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh and its suburb Lasswade, and Glasgow; he spent the remainder of his life in Scotland.[10] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and its rival Tait’s Magazine received a large number of contributions. Suspiria de Profundis (1845) appeared in Blackwood’s, as did The English Mail-Coach (1849). Joan of Arc (1847) was published in Tait’s. Between 1835 and 1849, Tait’s published a series of De Quincey’s reminiscences of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey, and other figures among the Lake Poets — a series that taken together constitutes one of his most important works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_De_Quincey
Thomas De Quincey
Inglaterra (Manchester, 1785 – Edimburgo, 1859)
Escritor ingles de la época del romanticismo. De Quincey nació en el seno de una familia de ricos comerciantes y recibió una esmerada educación, con preceptores particulares y buenos colegios. Fue un niño solitario, introspectivo y de aspecto debil y enfermizo, que padeció frecuentes depresiones y una neuralgia que le acompañaría de por vida.
Estudió en Oxford y, aunque abandonó la universidad sin graduarse, fue allí donde desarrolló una de sus principales influencias literarias: su adicción al opio (que comenzó a consumir para mitigar los fuertes dolores de cabeza que sufría a causa de la neuralgia). Frecuentó el círculo de los poetas lakistas, William Wordsworth y Robert Southey, a los que conoció de la mano de su admirado Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Y vivió al margen de la fortuna de su familia, de su trabajo como escritor, que publicaba en forma de artículos, relatos y críticas en The Westmoreland Gazette, el London Magazine y Blackwoods.
Su obra, decadentista, oscura, violenta, extraña, estaba más allá de su tiempo. Su fantasía subvertia constantemente el buen sentido burgués; su busqueda y su experimentación con las drogas lo convierten en un precursor del malditismo (vida y obra maldita, consciente en una realidad brutal e infecta) que acompañaría a numerosos autores en el XIX: su influencia sobre Poe y Baudelaire fue muy grande.
http://www.lecturalia.com/autor/2511/thomas-de-quincey
Thomas de Quincey
(Manchester, Reino Unido, 1785-Edimburgo, 1859) Escritor, ensayista y crítico británico. El humor cáustico de Jonathan Swift tuvo su más ilustre heredero en la persona de Thomas De Quincey, gracias sobre todo a su corrosiva obra Del asesinato considerado como una de las bellas artes (1829). Alumno de la Grammar School de su ciudad natal desde los quince años, a los diecisiete huyó de esta institución para ir a Gales y de allí a Londres, donde llevó una vida bohemia. Tras reconciliarse con su familia en 1803, ingresó en la Universidad de Oxford, aunque abandonó sus estudios en 1808. Fue en Oxford donde De Quincey tuvo su primer contacto con el opio, droga a la que sería adicto durante toda su vida. Sus experiencias como opiómano se vieron reflejadas en la que quizá sea su obra más célebre, Confesiones de un opiómano inglés. Escrita en 1820 y publicada un año después en el London Magazine, su inesperado éxito le procuró una inmediata fama y le ayudó a paliar su maltrecha situación económica, agravada por la necesidad de mantener una familia cada vez más numerosa. Antes, en 1809, llevado por su temprano entusiasmo por las baladas líricas de Samuel Taylor Coleridge y William Wordsworth, se había establecido en Grasmere, donde entabló relación con estos dos poetas, así como con Robert Southey.
También fue allí donde inició su colaboración como crítico y comentarista con algunos periódicos, dirigiendo él mismo la Westmorland Gazette. En 1828 se trasladó a Edimburgo, donde residió hasta su muerte. Además de las mencionadas, entre sus obras cabe destacar el ensayo Leyendo a las puertas de Macbeth (1823), uno de los clásicos de la crítica shakeasperiana del siglo XIX, valioso por el agudo análisis psicológico que informa sus páginas, Suspira de Profundis (1845), Juana de Arco (1847), El coche correo inglés (1849) y Apuntes autobiográficos (1853).
www.ebiografias.com/125276/De-Quincey-Thomas.htm
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
1. Biografía
El propio Thomas de Quincey escribió su autobiografía en tres entregas, Confesiones de un inglés comedor de opio (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821), su continuación, Suspiria de profundis (1845) y Apuntes autobiográficos (1853). Hijo de un rico comerciante, recibió una educación esmeradísima con preceptores particulares y en los colegios de Bath y Winkfield, acabando sus estudios secundarios en Manchester. El administrador de la cuantiosa fortuna de sus padres le educó tan estrictamente que le hacía traducir al griego todos los días los titulares de la prensa. A los 17 años se escapó por fin para ir a Gales y de allí a Londres; en la capital sobrevivió en un palacio vacío gracias a las preocupación que sintió por él una generosa y angelical prostituta, Ann, que cuando creció nunca pudo encontrar para agradecerle sus atenciones. Después se reconcilió con su familia y estudió en el Worcester College de Oxford. Allí se hizo adicto al opio en 1804 cuando estudiaba en el Worcester College; primero lo usó para remediar los dolores agudos de una neuralgia que padecía, después fue incrementando progresivamente la dosis. Tras abandonar Oxford sin graduarse, se hizo amigo íntimo de Coleridge, a quien conoció en Bath en 1807; en 1809 se estableció en el distrito de los lagos, en Grasmere, donde Coleridge le integró en el círculo literario de los llamados Poetas lakistas: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth y Robert Southey. De Quincey editó la Westmorland Gazette y en 1817 se casó con Margaret Simpson, una hija de granjero con la que ya había tenido un hijo, y de la que tendría después otros siete. Habiendo agotado su fortuna privada, empezó a ganarse la vida como periodista y fue asignado como editor de un periódico local conservador, The Westmoreland Gazette. Durante los 30 años siguientes mantuvo a su familia gracias a cuentos, artículos y críticas, principalmente en Edimburgo. A principios de 1820, De Quincey se trasladó a Londres, donde contribuyó al London Magazine y Blackwoods. En 1820 escribió su famosísimo libro de memorias, Confesiones de un comedor de opio inglés (1821), una apasionante descripción de su infancia y su propia batalla contra el demonio del opio. Vivió en Edimburgo durante doce años (1828-1840). Durante los años 1841 y 1843, se ocultó de sus acreedores en Glasgow. Desde 1853 hasta su muerte, De Quincey trabajó en Selections Grave and Gay, From the Writings, Published and Unpublished.
http://wapedia.mobi/es/Thomas_de_Quincey
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) es uno de los prosistas más originales y vigorosos del romanticismo inglés. De vida solitaria, bohemia, azarosa y, en ocasiones, trágica, autor de una vastísima obra, admirado por Baudelaíre y Breton. Entre nosotros fue Borges quien lo recogió como una muestra de aquellos escritores a quienes agradecía el placer de la lectura. El presente volumen – traducido y prologado por Marcos Mayer – recoge alguno de los mejores trabajos de De Quincey, como: Los últimos días de Immanuel Kant, Goethe, Judas Iscariote y La esfinge y Edipo, claros exponentes de los fulgores de su estilo.
http://www.tematika.com/libros/ficcion_y_literatura–1/novelas–1/universal–2/seres_imaginarios_y_reales___562__–9978.htm
ESCRITOR, ensayista y crítico literario, Thomas
de Quincey (Gran Bretaña, 1785-1859) aportó un
rico legado a la literatura y al pensamiento en
Europa, aunque su trabajo no ha sido
suficientemente conocido y valorado en España.
http://www.multiforo.eu/Literatura/Ballesteros_TQuincey.pdf
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 such writers as Poe and Baudelaire, and a number of readers tempted to experiment with opium, has been immense and notorious.
“If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man – have untwisted, almost to its final links the accursed chain which fettered me.” (from Confessions of an English Opium Eater)
Thomas De Quincey was born in the industrial city of Manchester, Lancashire. His father, who was a wealthy linen merchant, died in 1793. De Quincey was educated at schools in Bath and Winkfield. In Confessions De Quincey says that at the age of thirteen he wrote Greek with ease, and at fifteen he composed Greek verses in lyric metres and conversed in Greek fluently. From Manchester Grammar School he ran away to Wales at the age of 17 – with the knowledge and support of his mother and uncle. Before returning back home, he lived on the streets of London in poverty and hunger. Later in life he often saw in his dreams “Anne of Oxford Street”, a 15-year-old prostitute who showed kindness to a young runaway. To opium, in the form of laudanum, De Quincey became addicted in 1804, when he studied at Worcester College, Oxford. He used it first to relieve acute toothache. He kept a decanter of laudanum by his elbow and steadily increased the dose.
De Quincey left Oxford without taking a degree. In 1807 he became a close friends with the romantic writer Taylor Coleridge, whom he met on a visit to the fashionable town of Bath. Coleridge introduced his new friend to Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, whom De Quincey greatly admired. In 1809 De Quincey went to live with them in the Lake District village of Grasmere. Suffering a series of debilitating illnesses between 1812 and 1813, De Quincey began to take opium again. He was a daily user, although he was able to control his habit until about 1817.
In 1816, De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, a farmer’s daughter, with whom he already had a child. She was the fixed point in his life; they eventually had five sons and three daughters.
Having spent his private fortune, De Quincey 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 writing tales, articles, and reviews. Early in the 1820s De Quincey moved to London, where he contributed the London Magazine and Blackwoods. His chronicle Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which first was published in London magazine and then reprinted in book form, was a mixture of stories about his life, social comments, cultural anecdotes, and descriptions both the ecstasies and the torments of the drug. The book was an instant success and an important inspiration for other writers. Confessions – its title noteworthy referring to the Confessions of St. Augustine – also included quotes in Greek, Latin and Italian. 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.
In 1826 De Quincey moved to Edinburgh. After the death of his wife in 1837, he began to use opium heavily. Between the years 1841 and 1843 he hide the creditors in Glasgow, and published then THE LOGIC OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY (1844), a dissertation on David Ricardo’s economic theory, and SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS (1845), the sequel to his Confessions, in which De Quincey documented his childhood, dreams, and fantasies. From 1853 until his death De Quincey worked with his SELECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY, FROM THE WRITINGS, PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED, BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY. Althhough De Quincey wrote much, he published only few books and had constant financial difficulties. Most of his works were written for periodicals. He also examined such German philosophers as Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jean Paul Richer, and Friedrich von Schiller, and translated their writings. De Quincey’s strong points were his imagination and his understanding of altered states of consciousness, of which he had his own doubts: “The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else, – which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.” (The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, 1823)
De Quincey’s influence has been later seen in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, and William Burroughs. Like Poe, he was interested in the criminal mind, although he was not always deadly serious with the subject: “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) It has been suggested, that De Quincey 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)
Selected bibliography:
CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, 1822 (enlarged in 1856) -Englantilaisen oopiuminkäyttäjän tunnustukset (suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen)
ON THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE IN MACBETH, 1823
WALLADMOR, 1825
ON MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS, 1827, 1839, 1854
KLOSTERHEIM, OR THE MASQUE, 1832 (ed. by John Weeks, 1982)
LAKE REMINISCENCES, 1834-40
THE LOGIC OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1844
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS, 1845 (published incompletely)
THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH, 1849
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, 1853
CHINA: A REVISED IMPRINT OF ARTICLES FROM “TITAN”, 1857
SELECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY, FROM THE WRITINGS, PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED, BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1853-1860 (14 vols., ed. and rev. Thomas De Quincey)
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES AND THE LAKE POETS, 1862 (1948, ed. by Edward Sackwille-West; 1970, ed. by David Wright)
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS with CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, 1871 (1956, ed. by Malcolm Elwin)
THE UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS, 1890 (2 vols., ed. by James Hogg)
THE POSTHUMOUS WORKS, 1891-93
MEMORIALS, 1891
COLLECTED WRITINGS, 1896-97 (14 vols., ed. by David Masson)
LITERARY CRITICISM, 1909
THE DIARY, 1928
SELECTED WRITINGS, 1937
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKE POETS, 1948 (written 1830-40)
NEW ESSAYS BY DE QUINCEY: HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH SATURDAY POST AND THE EDINBURGH EVENING POST, 1827-1828, 1966 (ed. by Stuart M. Tave)
THOMAS DE QUINCEY AS CRITIC, 1973 (ed. by J.E. Jordan)
CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM EATER, AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1985 (ed. by Grevel Lindop)
THE WORKS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 2000- (22 vols., ed. by Grevel Lindop)
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/quincey.htm
Thomas de Quincey
(Greenheys, 1785 – Edimburgo, 1859) Ensayista inglés. Huérfano de padre un próspero hombre de negocios desde los siete años, sufrió durante la infancia el hostigamiento de su madre, una puritana depresiva, y sobre todo la brutalidad de su hermano mayor, que lo había elegido como víctima. Estudió en los colegios de Bath, Winkfield y Manchester, pero acabó huyendo en 1800 de la disciplina escolar y de los tormentos familiares: adoptado y amado por una prostituta que lo doblaba en edad, vagabundeó con ella durante tres años por tierras de Gales y Escocia, hasta que en 1803 se afincó en Londres.
Se relacionó allí con los poetas románticos ingleses de su época S. T. Coleridge, R. Southey y W. Wordsworth con los que convivió casi una década, integrándose a las propuestas utópicas de vida comunitaria, típicas de los lakistas, a quienes mucho después dedicaría las sutiles páginas de Recuerdos de los Lake Poets (1834). Trabajó como periodista, fue editor del periódico The Westmoreland Gazette y se ganó la vida publicando artículos, críticas y relatos, además de obtener la estima de J. Stuart Mill y de D. Ricardo por la agudeza de sus análisis económicos. En 1804 comenzó sus primeras experiencias con el opio, para combatir unas dolencias reumáticas, y en 1809 se instaló en la localidad rural de Glasmere, donde conoció a una muchacha de pueblo con la que se casó en 1816.
De entre sus obras destaca Confesiones de un comedor de opio inglés (1821), en la que relata precisamente las experiencias con esa droga como vehículo para explorar las posibilidades imaginativas de la mente humana. Las drogas eran para el autor parte de sus principios románticos: una ampliación de las posibilidades racionales, emocionales y perceptivas de la normalidad.
Su mente vio en los acontecimientos cotidianos de la realidad una actividad armoniosa de la fantasía, como manifiesta en el ensayo El asesinato considerado como una de las bellas artes (1827), en el que el crimen es tratado desde un punto de vista estético e intelectual, lo que lo diferencia del punto de vista basado en la moral corriente. Según el poeta y crítico A. Breton, en esta obra se realiza una abstracción del horror para encararlo como una cuestión plástica o un caso médico.
A medio camino entre el ensayo y la ficción, en sus creaciones el autor saca partido precisamente del equilibrio entre una mirada fría, imperturbable, que disecciona el tema, y una mirada imaginativa y perversa, que desliza el horror como una categoría de lo cotidiano. El correo inglés (1849) se cuenta también entre sus excelentes ensayos antológicos, así como Suspiria de Profundis (1845), un estudio sobre las posibilidades del sueño que anticipa a Freud.
http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/q/quincey.htm
WHO2 BIOGRAPHIES
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Born: 15 August 1785
Birthplace: Manchester, England
Died: 8 December 1859
Best Known As: Author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Thomas de Quincey was an English writer and a member of the snappy group of 19th-century writers and pals that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb. De Quincy ran away from home at a tender age, then got himself addicted to opium. It proved to be an excellent career move, as it resulted in his 1821 magazine serial Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The series was a smash and made his reputation. During his career he wrote primarily for journals and magazines, including the famous Blackwood’s.
http://www.answers.com/topic/thomas-de-quincey
Although better known as a 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 of an Opium Eater:
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, � 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).
De Quincey’s life was nothing if not frought with misfortunes, most of them of his own making. Born to a family of Manchester textile merchants, his father’s early death portended problems to come. After a brilliant early school career, he ran away from home at 17, living on the streets of London as a mendicant. Reconciled to his family in 1803, he attended Worcester College, Oxford the next year. It was around this time that he grew acquainted with the English romanticist poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and began experimenting with opium. In 1808, he dropped out of Oxford and moved to Grasmere, in the lake district where his literary friends lived. As his opium addiction grew deeper, he grew gradually estranged from the Wordsworths.
In 1816, de Quincey married Margaret Simpson, the mother of his illegitimate child. In 1818-9, he did a stint as an editor for the Westmoreland Magazine, before being dismissed and joining the foundling Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In 1821, he published his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater — his greatest hit. For the remainder of his life, De Quincey continued writing a fast and furious number of articles on all sorts of topics — literary criticism, theology, philosophy, politics, etc. — for contemporary magaizines, like Blackwood’s, London Magazine, Tait’s and Hogg’s.
Economics was one of his topics. In 1823-4, de Quincey reviewed David Ricardo’s work and entered into the debates then raging in economics on the theory of value and the Malthusian population doctrine. De Quincey’s “Dialogues of the Three Templars” (1824) are a very capable defense of Ricardo’s theory. He had his reservations as well: e.g. he was never keen on the repeal of the Corn Laws and also disputed the notion that there was an “inexorable” tendency for profits to decline. His apologism for the Ricardian doctrine did not prevent the flowering of an intimate friendship with Thomas Carlyle.
All the while, de Quincey was sliding deeper into debt and trouble. De Quincey moved to Edinburgh in 1830, but the creditors and the furies were fast at his heels. He was convicted and imprisoned in 1831 for debts. He was convicted twice more in 1833 and three times in 1834, forcing him to take refuge in a debt sanctuary for a time. In the meantime, two of his sons died — the first, aged two, in 1832, the second, aged eighteen, in 1834. In 1837, his wife died and he was convicted twice more for debts. De Quincy started taking opium intensely again, got into more debt and went into hiding in Glasgow. To cap his misfortunes (and not without a trace of irony), another son died in 1842, during the Opium War against China.
In 1843, De Quincey, now a broken man, retired to a cottage in Lasswade. It was here that he finished his treatise on economics, The Logic of Political Economy (1844). His Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to the Confessions, were published in 1845. In 1850, he moved back to Edinburgh and, around the same time, a pair of English and American publishers separately began putting out his collected works. De Quincey’s collected writings, widely praised, brought him finally the ounce of joy he needed before he died.
http://homepage.newschool.edu/het//profiles/quincey.htm
Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on 15 August 1785, the second son and fifth of eight children born to a successful and wealthy linen merchant, Thomas Quincey. de Quincey initially was educated at Salford but in 1792, de Quincey’s father died and his mother took the family to live in Bath. de Quincey was educated in schools at Salford, Bath and Winkfield; at the age of 15 he began to attended Manchester Grammar School from which he ran away eighteen months later. After spending time wandering in Wales, de Quincey arrived in London in November 1802 where he struck up a friendship with a young prostitute called Ann.
Reconciled with his family, de Quincey was persuaded to go to university and in 1803 was registered as a student at Worcester College, Oxford. It appears that he spent little time at university and never graduated. He was a very solitary student who read widely and absorbed the Classics readily. Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) contains many classical allusions and Latin quotations. In 1804, whilst he was at Oxford, de Quincey first took opium, to relieve toothache. By 1813 he was addicted to the drug, eventually consuming ten wine-glasses of the drug each day.
de Quincey spent a great deal of time in London; in 1807 he met Coleridge there and in November de Quincey visited Coleridge in the Lake District, where also he met the Wordsworths at their home, Dove Cottage, in Grasmere. The following year, de Quincey again visited the Lakes and in the spring of 1809 he went to live there, in Dove Cottage: the Wordsworths had moved elsewhere by that time. By this time, he had spent his fortune through a mixture of bad luck and recklesness. He was obliged to take up writing to earn sufficient money on which to live. His early works were mainly for newspapers and magazines.
In 1817 de Quincey married Margaret (Peggy) Simpson; they had eight children before her death in 1837. In 1830 the family moved from the Lakes to Edinburgh. de Quincey continued writing and taking opium for the rest of his life. He died on 8 December 1859 and was buried with his wife.
http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/dequincey/bio.html
Thomas de Quincey
(1785-1859):
De Quincey was the son of a Manchester merchant. There were eight children in the family, four girls and four sons. Thomas was born the 15th of August, 1785, the fifth child, the second son. He was but seven years old when his father died; the family, however, due to the success of Mr. de Quincey’s business was to be left fairly well off. Mrs de Quincey, in 1796, was to move to the fashionable city of Bath. De Quincey was an able student but was soon caught up with the romantic notions of the age and ran away, ending up wondering around Wales. De Quincey was to write of it:
“On leaving school clandestinely, which I did some weeks before my seventeenth birthday, I went into Wales; where I continued for months to walk about. As long as I kept up any negotiations with my guardians, I received a regular allowance of a guinea a week.”
Eventually he found himself in London in November of 1802. For months thereafter, de Quincey was to live on the streets. Here, in London, he was to pass a number of months “of wild, haggard, Bohemian roaming and staggering from worse to worse!” By the autumn of 1803, de Quincey was back with his family, members of whom prevailed, and, so, it was off to Oxford (Worcester College). He was registered at Oxford for a number of years, though it doesn’t seem he spent much time there; he much preferred to go down and spend time at London. From what I can see, he never sat for his degree. (It was at Oxford, incidently, that de Quincey, seemingly, permanently, became addicted to opium.)
It was in 1807, that de Quincey was to meet Coleridge, I think on the occasion of a visit to de Quincey’s mother who was located, as we have seen, at Bath. At the time of this visit, Coleridge, who was temporarily there in the area with his family, was trying to figure out how he might get his family back to their home at Keswick in the Lake District. It seems that Coleridge was preparing to give a series of lectures at London and he wished to proceed directly to London. De Quincey, only too keen to ingratiate himself to his hero, Coleridge, volunteered to accompany the family and see to their safe arrival. Thus it was, that, in November of 1807, de Quincey by “post-chaise” in the company of Mrs. Coleridge and the two Coleridge children, was to first came to the Lake District.It was then, too, that de Quincey was to make the acquaintance of the Wordsworths. Paul Johnson was to describe the reaction that the Wordsworths had to de Quincey:
“… he [William Wordsworth] soon fell for de Quincey’s relentless flattery and Dorothy was delighted with him: She was only five feet tall herself, but de Quincey, she wrote, was so ‘diminutive’ that she had the unusual experience of looking down on him. De Quincey became immensely attached to the Wordsworth children, especially the luckless little Catherine, and when she died, he was heartbroken. He tutored the poet’s son John, and his fine library, which he carried about with him, proved a further attraction. When he finally decided to settle in the Lakes, the Wordsworths made Dove Cottage, which they no longer used, available to him.”
One should not conclude by Johnson’s entry that de Quincey was to immediately squat down when he first arrived at Grasmere in November of 1807. How long he stayed during this first visit, I cannot say. A year later, we know, in November of 1808, de Quincey “paid a second visit to Wordsworth at the Lakes; and he remained there until February, 1809, when he returned to London.” Though he returned to London, it seems clear that de Quincey had formed the intention during his second visit to make Grasmere his home. He returned for the third time in the spring of 1809 to settle. De Quincey, in his remembrances, was to describe Grasmere as consisting of “about sixty-three households in the vale; and the total number of souls was about 265 to 270.” De Quincey was to see Coleridge daily. Coleridge, as de Quincey observed lived, at this time, being separated from his family (one of a number of separations) as a visiter in the Wordsworth home, Allen Bank, a distance of barely one mile, “I myself had a cottage, and a considerable library. Many of the books being German, Coleridge borrowed them in great numbers.”
As between de Quincey and Wordsworth, there was to be a gradual falling-out. The Wordsworths noticed, as they had already sadly seen in the case of their former intimate, Coleridge, that de Quincey was an addict. As Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, put it, “He does himself with opium and drinks like a fish.” Worse, in Dorothy’s eyes, he cut down her precious wild plants at Dove Cottage to get more light in at the windows. Dove Cottage being the place where the Wordsworths had resided for eight happy years until, in 1807, the growing Wordsworth family moved to a larger place; and, it seems, made arrangements so that de Quincey could rent the place.
At some point, while visiting the Wordsworths, de Quincey “did the unthinkable,” he seduced a local girl, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, Peggy Simpson (b.1796); well, not so unthinkable to Thomas and Peggy, obviously; but it was so to Wordsworth. Wordsworth disapproved of cross-class marriages, and as for his sister Dorothy, she thought Peggy stupid. In any event, Peggy presented de Quincey with a son and the couple was married in 1817; the union proved to be long lasting and was to produce three daughters and five sons.
Our essayist, Thomas de Quincey, was 36 years of age before he had any of his works published. It was in the London Magazine, in 1821, that he was to make his writing debut. The first part of his work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater appeared. In it, de Quincey cast himself, and, as well, Coleridge as being addicted to opium. This was not to be a revelation to the family and close friends of Coleridge, but to put it out in the public press “exceedingly annoyed and distressed” them. The success of Confessions led to a number of writing assignments which was to keep de Quincey pretty much in London for the next couple of years.
In 1826, now having his work published in Blackwood’s including his famous essay, “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” de Quincey was to make Edinburgh his principal place of operations; though he did not give up his connections with Grasmere until 1830, at which time he moved his family from Grasmere to Edinburgh. Edinburgh, thereafter, was to be home for de Quincey until his death until 1859.
From the biographical sketch in Chambers, we read:
“The brilliance of his articles was marred by an incurable tendency to digress, which, though harmless and even enjoyable in the Confessions, is a constant irritation in an essay on an abstract subject. His vast and curious erudition, too, got in his way and he did not know when to stop.”
After describing de Quincey as shiftless Henry Crabb Robinson writes in his diary:
“Outraging all decency he betrays private confidence without the slightest scruple, relating the most confidential conversations… utterly regardless of all delicacy. De Quincey is ‘a sad example of the wretchedness that attends the life of a man of superior intellect whose conduct is the sport of ill-regulated passions.'”
At the same time de Quincey, it is now known, would come, anonymously, to the aid of needy friends, for instance he once saw that Coleridge got £300 and wanted no one including Coleridge to know about it.
De Quincey was to die in 1859 and buried “in the West Church-yard of Edinburgh, beside his wife and two of their children.”
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Literary/DeQuincey.htm
English writer Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) wrote prolifically and in numerous fields, ranging from fiction to biography to economics, and often crossing genre boundaries in unclassifiable works that mixed exposition of others’ ideas with autobiography and personal reflections. He remains best known, however, for a single work: Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). That work, too, was difficult to classify—it mixed autobiographical elements with description and evaluation of the effects of the addictive, analgesic, and psychoactive drug named in its title.
De Quincey was considered one of the greatest prose stylists of the English Romantic era, otherwise best known for poetry, and his imaginative, convoluted prose style, best exemplified in Confessions of an English Opium Eater but also on display in a great variety of other works that were widely read in 19th-century England and America, exerted a vast influence on later literary radicals such as American mystery pioneer and experimentalist Edgar Allan Poe and the French poet Charles Baudelaire.
Shaken by Deaths of Siblings
“Among his earliest memories were dreams,” wrote De Quincey biographer Grevel Lindop—appropriate for a writer who put a powerful stream of his interior life into everything he penned. De Quincey was born Thomas Quincey in the English city of Manchester on August 15, 1785. The family later adopted the name De Quincey, hypothesizing that they were related to an old Anglo-French family named de Quincis that dated back to the time of the Norman Conquest. De Quincey’s father Thomas was a cloth merchant in Manchester, the cradle of English industry, and the family lived in a pleasant country home. De Quincey was the fourth of five children; he was close to his siblings and was deeply affected by the deaths of his sisters Jane and Elizabeth during his childhood. With his brother William he created a rich fantasy life centered on the two imaginary warring kingdoms of Gombroon and Tigrosylvania. De Quincey’s father died in 1793, leaving the family with sufficient financial resources for the time being.
De Quincey was educated in private schools and quickly showed a gift for language in general. When he was about eight, he impressed a local bookseller by translating a book of a Latin-language copy of the Bible into English at sight, and by the time he was 15 he could speak, read, and write ancient Greek fluently. One teacher at the Bath Grammar School remarked to a visitor that De Quincey could have given a better oration in front of an ancient Athenian mob than he, the teacher, could have done before an English one.
In 1801 De Quincey began attending the Manchester Grammar School, a prep school-like institution that could have earned him a valuable Oxford University scholarship. He learned some important literary lessons while he was there, reading the early works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other English Romantic poets who would greatly influence his own writing in the future. At the time, however, De Quincey was bored. He ran away from the school, defying the wishes of his mother, and wandered around the Wales region, sleeping outdoorsin order to stretch his money supply. Finally broke, he went to London to try to borrow money on the strength of his family’s good name.
Things went from bad to worse. Lenders refused his applications for loans, and he nearly starved to death. He was apparently befriended by a prostitute named Ann, who at one point revived him after he collapsed on the street by spending her own meager savings on a bottle of port wine and bringing it to him. When De Quincey later returned to London to look for her, she had disappeared, and no record of her other than De Quincey’s recollections has ever surfaced. Readers have occasionally wondered whether she might have been a product of De Quincey’s imagination, but the details he provides in his descriptions of her are convincing ones.
Began Taking Opium
Eventually De Quincey worked out his problems with his family, and he enrolled in Oxford University’s Worcester College in 1803. It was while he was a student there that his opium addiction began. At first he took the drug in the form of laudanum, a liquid tincture (an alcohol-based distillate) that he sought out for toothache relief. De Quincey’s career at Oxford was mercurial; he was a brilliant student in English literature and in the Greek, Latin, and German languages. Embarking on his final exams in 1808 he started out strongly but left school before finishing, and he never received his degree.
Instead he plunged more deeply into the literary life. By the time he left Oxford, he had made the acquaintance of several of the leading writers of the day, central figures in what would be known as the Romantic movement. He donated five hundred pounds anonymously to “Kubla Khan” author and fellow opium user Samuel Taylor Coleridge when Coleridge was in dire financial straits, and he lived for a time with poet William Wordsworth and his wife. Moving frequently from place to place, De Quincey lived in absolute disorder. He accumulated a huge library of books, and his friends began to treat him as something of a mobile lending library. Sometimes he would move out of a house or country cottage when it became too clogged with his papers and unfinished projects—sometimes his landlords had a strong enough belief in his potential that they carefully stored his materials. Despite his often chaotic life, De Quincey was known as a loyal and supportive associate; when his friend John Wilson became a professor and was placed in the position of having to give lectures on subjects with which he was unfamiliar, De Quincey cheerfully ghostwrote the lectures for him.
In 1817 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a farmer in the Grasmere district of northern England. They eventually had eight children. By the time of the marriage, De Quincey had burned through much of the money he had coming from his family, and his opium usage had ballooned to a massive 340 grains daily—more than 20 grams. Periodically he tried to give up the drug, but he succeeded only in lowering his intake and keeping it at a consistent level.
By the late 1810s, well into his fourth decade of life, De Quincey had written only a few articles and pamphlets despite the brilliance many friends recognized in him. But now, faced with the necessity of supporting his family, he began to contribute prolifically to magazines, submitting everything from popularizations of the theories of pioneer British economist David Ricardo, to literary criticism, to translations of German poetry and drama. His greatest success, however, came when he wrote about himself, in a dizzying style that combined erudition, flights of prose complexity, and bald honesty. His first work in this vein was Confessions of an English Opium Eater , which appeared in London Magazine in 1821 and was soon reprinted in book form. It remained the best known of all De Quincey’s writings.
Described Effects of Drug
The form of Confessions of an English Opium Eater was and remains unusual; it is partly memoir and partly an exploration of the effects of a mind-altering substance. In a lengthy section of “Preliminary Confessions,” De Quincey recounted the story of his wanderings as a young man, including his encounters with Ann, the London prostitute. But the bulk of the work is given over to personal descriptions of “The Pleasures of Opium” and “The Pains of Opium.” At the beginning of the work De Quincey seems to promise a moralistic antidrug stance, observing that “If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man—have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.”
The rest of the document, however, gives equal weight to both the positive and negative aspects of opium usage. “[T]hou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples … beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos,” wrote De Quincey, “and, ‘from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,’ callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the ‘dishonours of the grave.’ Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!” He rhapsodized about his heightened perceptions of music while under the drug’s influence.
De Quincey was equally eloquent in describing the depressive states that came with drug usage. “But for misery and suffering, I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state,” he recalled. “I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words, to any that I received, was the utmost that I could accomplish; and often that not until the letter had laid weeks, or even months, on my writing-table. Without the aid of M. [his wife], all records of bills paid, or to be paid, must have perished; and my whole domestic economy … must have gone into irretrievable confusion.”
Confessions of an English Opium Eater was a major success and put De Quincey on the literary map. For the next two decades he was in demand as a contributor to England’s leading periodicals. He made money off of a translation of a German hoax novel called Walladmor that had been promoted as a lost work by Scottish historical fantasy novelist Sir Walter Scott. De Quincey wrote some fiction of his own: the novel Klosterheim (1832) and short stories such as “The Household Wreck” (1838) had elements of description and fantasy that anticipated the styles and themes of avant-garde writers such as Poe and Franz Kafka. He also penned a widely read series of biographies of writers, with subjects ranging from Roman emperors to the Romantic poets he personally knew. The latter group was as unconventional in form as were his drug memoirs; De Quincey inserted himself into the narratives, producing a unique mix of biography and autobiography.
De Quincey suffered anew from the deaths of family members in the 1830s. One son, Julius, died at age four; another, William, suffered from a brain disorder and died at 18; and De Quincey lost his wife to typhus in 1837. His opium dosages increased sharply. By this time he had moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, in whose environs he spent most of the rest of his life. The aging writer once again was forced to juggle creditors, but things changed for the better when his oldest daughter, Margaret, took charge of the household.
They improved further in the 1840s and 1850s when De Quincey’s reputation as one of Britain’s greatest writers expanded. He gained readers in the United States, and his collected works were issued in Boston (they ran to 22 volumes) by the Ticknor, Reed and Fields publishing firm. Although it was not required to do so (Britain and the United States had no reciprocal copyright protection at the time), the firm paid DeQuincey royalties. He continued to write in his old age, and to assemble and revise his works for new collected editions. He died in Edinburgh on December 8, 1859. Many critics in the following decades thought of De Quincey as a writer of genius who had never quite reached his full potential, but a new spate of studies and biographies of the author began appearing in the late 20th century—an age sympathetic to outsider figures and to experimenters with psychoactive substances.
Books
Dendurant, Harold O., Thomas De Quincey: A Reference Guide , G.K. Hall, 1978.
Lindop, Grevel, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey , Taplinger, 1981.
Sackville-West, Edward, Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Work , Yale University Press, 1936.
Whale, John C., Thomas De Quincey’s Reluctant Autobiography , Barnes & Noble, 1984.
Online
De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium Eater , full text, http://users.lycaeum.org/∼sputnik/Ludlow/Texts/Opium/prelim.html (October 3, 2006).
“Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859),” Books and Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/quincey.htm (October 3, 2006).
http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Ca-Fi/De-Quincey-Thomas.html
Thomas de Quincey
Writer
Born: 15 August 1785
Died: 8 December 1859
Birthplace: Manchester, England
Best known as: Author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Thomas de Quincey was an English writer and a member of the snappy group of 19th-century writers and pals that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb. De Quincy ran away from home at a tender age, then got himself addicted to opium. It proved to be an excellent career move, as it resulted in his 1821 magazine serial Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The series was a smash and made his reputation. During his career he wrote primarily for journals and magazines, including the famous Blackwood’s.
http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/thomasdequincey.html