Filed under: General
For me it is a new experience to work about Thomas de Quincey.I thought it was an easy author to work about because the amount of information about him(personal web page,biographies…).
I think that this form of looking for an exit to the reality isn’t good because you have to accept it. If you don’t,you can have a contradictory opinion.
Last year,it was the first appearance of Thomas de Quincey in my studies and was one of the options,but I didn’t pay special attention;but this year,I don’t know still why,he has wake-up my attention to work in my first paper about him .
VICTORIANS
The Victorian era is generally agreed to stretch through the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). It was a tremendously exciting period when many artistic styles, literary schools, as well as, social, political and religious movements flourished. It was a time of prosperity, broad imperial expansion, and great political reform. It was also a time, which today we associate with “prudishness” and “repression”. Without a doubt, it was an extraordinarily complex age, that has sometimes been called the Second English Renaissance. It is, however, also the beginning of Modern Times.
The social classes of England were newly reforming, and fomenting. There was a churning upheaval of the old hierarchical order, and the middle classes were steadily growing. Added to that, the upper classes’ composition was changing from simply hereditary aristocracy to a combination of nobility and an emerging wealthy commercial class. The definition of what made someone a gentleman or a lady was, therefore, changing at what some thought was an alarming rate. By the end of the century, it was silently agreed that a gentleman was someone who had a liberal public (private) school education (preferably at Eton, Rugby, or Harrow), no matter what his antecedents might be. There continued to be a large and generally disgruntled working class, wanting and slowly getting reform and change.
Conditions of the working class were still bad, though, through the century, three reform bills gradually gave the vote to most males over the age of twenty-one. Contrasting to that was the horrible reality of child labor which persisted throughout the period. When a bill was passed stipulating that children under nine could not work in the textile industry, this in no way applied to other industries, nor did it in any way curb rampant teenaged prostitution.
The Victorian Era was also a time of tremendous scientific progress and ideas. Darwin took his Voyage of the Beagle, and posited the Theory of Evolution. The Great Exhibition of 1851 took place in London, lauding the technical and industrial advances of the age, and strides in medicine and the physical sciences continued throughout the century. The radical thought associated with modern psychiatry began with men like Sigmund Feud toward the end of the era, and radical economic theory, developed by Karl Marx and his associates, began a second age of revolution in mid-century. The ideas of Marxism, socialism, feminism churned and bubbled along with all else that happened.
The dress of the early Victorian era was similar to the the Georgian age. Women wore corsets, balloonish sleeves and crinolines in the middle 1840’s. The crinoline thrived, and expanded during the 50’s and 60’s, and into the 70’s, until, at last, it gave way to the bustle. The bustle held its own until the 1890’s, and became much smaller, going out altogether by the dawning of the twentieth century. For men, following Beau Brummell’s example, stove-pipe pants were the fashion at the beginning of the century. Their ties, known then as cravats, and the various ways they might be tied could change, the styles of shirts, jackets, and hats also, but trousers have remained. Throughout the century, it was stylish for men to wear facial hair of all sizes and descriptions. The clean shaven look of the Regency was out, and mustaches, mutton-chop sideburns, Piccadilly Weepers, full beards, and Van Dykes (worn by Napoleon III) were the order of the day.
The “prudishness” and “repressiveness” that we associate with this era is, I believe, a somewhat erroneous association. Though, people referred to arms and legs as limbs and extremities, and many other things that make us titter, it is, in my opinion, because they had a degree of modesty and a sense of propriety that we hardly understand today. The latest biographies of Queen Victoria describe her and her husband, Albert, of enjoying erotic art, and certainly we know enough about the Queen from the segment on her issue, to know that she did not in anyway shy away from the marriage bed. The name sake of this period was hardly a prude, but having said that, it is necessary to understand that the strictures and laws for 19th Century Society were so much more narrow and defined that they are today, that we must see this era as very codified and strict. Naturally, to an era that takes more liberties, this would seem harsh and unnatural.
Culturally, the novel continued to thrive through this time. Its importance to the era could easily be compared to the importance of the plays of Shakespeare for the Elizabethans. Some of the great novelists of the time were: Sir Walter Scott, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Bronte, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and, of course, Charles Dickens. That is not to say that poetry did not thrive – it did with the works of the Brownings, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the verse of Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling.
An art movement indicative of this period was the Pre-Raphaelites, which included William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and John Everett Millais. Also during this period were the Impressionists, the Realists, and the Fauves, though the Pre-Raphaelites were distinctive for being a completely English movement.
As stated in the beginning, the Victorian Age was an extremely diverse and complex period. It was, indeed, the precursor of the modern era. If one wishes to understand the world today in terms of society, culture, science, and ideas, it is imperative to study this era.
www.victoriaspast.com/FrontPorch/victorianera.htm
ROMANTICS
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature,and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
Our modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society.
Although the movement is rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, “Realism” was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, which would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
In a basic sense, the term “Romanticism” has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the twentieth century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article “On The Discrimination of Romanticisms” in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment—a Counter-Enlightenment—and still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.”
Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.
The European Romantic movement that took place in the late eighteenth century reached America in the early nineteenth century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe.
Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world is a source of goodness and human society a source of corruption.
Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which involved the belief that the universe and all the events within it are subject to the power of God. The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new religion presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion.
As a moral philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor systemized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom. It appealed to those who disdained the harsh God of their Puritan ancestors, and it appealed to those who scorned the pale deity of New England Unitarianism.They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. They believed in the transcendence of the “Oversoul”, an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come and of which all things are parts.
American Romance embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence modern writers. Novels, short stories, and poems began to take the place of the sermons and manifestos that were associated with the early American literary principals. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America’s preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters. “Heroes and heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and excitement”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Life and work
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.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.
Financial pressures
De Quincey was oppressed by debt for most of his adult life; along with his opium addiction, debt was one of the primary constraints of his existence.He pursued journalism as the one way available to him to pay his bills; and without financial need it is an open question how much writing he would ever have done.
De Quincey came into his patrimony at the age of 21, when he received ₤2000 from his late father’s estate. He was unwisely generous with his funds, making loans that could not or would not be repaid, including a ₤300 loan to Coleridge in 1807. After leaving Oxford without a degree, he made an attempt to study law, but desultorily and unsuccessfully; he had no steady income and spent large sums on books (he was a lifelong collector). By the 1820s he was constantly in financial difficulties. More than once in his later years, De Quincey was forced to seek protection from arrest in the debtors’ sanctuary of Holyrood in Edinburgh.(At the time, Holyrood Palace and Holyrood Park together formed a debtors’ sanctuary; people could not be arrested for debt within those bounds. The debtors who took sanctuary there could only emerge on Sundays, when arrests for debt were not allowed.) Yet De Quincey’s money problems persisted; he got into further difficulties for debts he acquired within the sanctuary.
His financial situation improved only later in his life. His mother’s death in 1846 brought him an income of ₤200 per year. When his daughters matured, they managed his budget more responsibly than he ever had himself.
Medical issues
A number of medical practitioners have speculated on the physical ailments that inspired and underlay De Quincey’s resort to opium, and searched the corpus of his autobiographical works for evidence. One possibility is “a mild … case of infantile paralysis” that he may have contracted from Wordsworth’s children. De Quincey certainly had intestinal problems, and problems with his vision — which could have been related: “uncorrected myopic astigmatism … manifests itself as digestive problems in men.” De Quincey also suffered neuralgic facial pain, “trigeminal neuralgia” — “attacks of piercing pain in the face, of such severity that they sometimes drive the victim to suicide.”
As with many addicts, De Quincey’s opium addiction may have had a “self-medication” aspect for real physical illnesses, as well as a psychological aspect.Psychologically, he had what Alethea Hayter has called the “pariah temperament” typical of drug addicts.
By his own testimony, De Quincey first used opium in 1804 to relieve his neuralgia; he used it for pleasure, but no more than weekly, through 1812. It was in 1813 that he first commenced daily usage, in response to illness and his grief over the death of Wordsworth’s young daughter Catherine. In the periods of 1813–16 and 1817–19 his daily dose was very high, and resulted in the sufferings recounted in the final sections of his Confessions. For the rest of his life his opium use fluctuated between extremes; he took “enormous doses” in 1843, but late in 1848 he went for 61 days with none at all. Notably, his periods of low usage were literarily unproductive.
Collected works
During the final decade of his life, De Quincey labored on a collected edition of his works.The idea originally came from the American publisher Ticknor and Fields; that Boston firm first proposed such a collection, and solicited De Quincey’s approval and co-operation. It was only when De Quincey, a chronic procrastinator, failed to answer repeated letters from James Thomas Fields that the American publisher proceeded independently, reprinting the author’s works from their original magazine appearances. Twenty-two volumes of De Quincey’s Writings were issued from 1851 to 1859.
The existence of the American edition provoked and prompted a corresponding British edition. Since the Spring of 1850 De Quincey had been a regular contributor to an Edinburgh periodical called Hogg’s Weekly Instructor; publisher James Hogg undertook to publish a collected edition of De Quincey’s work, under the cumbersome title Selections Grave and Gay from Writings Published and Unpublished by Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey edited and sometimes re-wrote his works for the Hogg edition; the 1856 second edition of the Confessions was prepared for inclusion in Selections Grave and Gay. The first volume of that edition appeared in May 1853, and the fourteenth and last in January 1860, a month after the author’s death.
Both of these were multi-volume collections, but made no pretense to be “complete” editions. Scholar and editor David Masson attempted a more definitive collection: The Works of Thomas De Quincey appeared in fourteen volumes in 1889 and 1890. Yet De Quincey’s writings were so voluminous and widely-dispersed that further collections followed: two volumes of The Uncollected Writings (1890), and two volumes of Posthumous Works (1891–93). De Quincey’s 1803 diary was published in 1927.Yet another volume, New Essays by De Quincey, appeared in 1966.
Influence
His immediate influence extended to Edgar Allan Poe, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire, and Nikolai Gogol, but even major 20th century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges admired and claimed to be partly influenced by his work. Berlioz also loosely based his Symphonie Fantastique on Confessions of an English Opium Eater, drawing on the theme of the internal struggle with one’s self. De Quincey is also referred to in the Sherlock Holmes short story The Man with the Twisted Lip.
Online texts
Wikisource has original works written by or about: Thomas de Quincey
Project Gutenberg e-texts of some of Thomas De Quincey’s works
Wikisource : Les Derniers jours d’Emmanuel Kant, translated in French by Marcel Schwob
Thomas De Quincey elibrary PDFs of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, and The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power
Thomas De Quincey in Spanish
Bibliography
Selected works:
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1822
On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, 1823
Walladmor, 1825
On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, 1827
Klosterheim, or The Masque, 1832
Lake Reminiscences, 1834-40
The Logic of the Political Economy, 1844
Suspiria de Profundis, 1845
The English Mail-Coach, 1849
Autobiographical Sketches, 1853
Selections Grave and Gay, from the Writings, Published and Unpublished, by Thomas De Quincey, 1853–1860 (14 vols.)
Romances and Extravaganzas, 1877
Collected Writings, 1889
Uncollected Writings, 1890
The Posthumous Works, 1891-93
Memorials, 1891
Literary Criticism, 1909
The Diary, 1927
Selected Writings, 1937
New Essays, 1966
Literarische Portraits. Schiller, Herder, Lessing, Goethe, German Translation by Thomas Klandt. revonnah Verlag Hannover. ISBN 3-927715-95-6
The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000–2003) [This is the most up to date and scholarly edition]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_de_Quincey
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Biography
(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/