Thomas Penson De Quincey

Background

Thomas Penson De Quincey was born on August 15, 1785 in Manchester, Lancashire. 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.

Education

At the age of twelve Thomas Penson De Quincey was sent to the grammar school in Bath, at which he remained for about two years. For a year more he attended another public school in 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. On his return to England, 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.

In 1803 was sent to Worcester College, Oxford, being by this time about nineteen.

In 1807 Thomas Penson De Quincey left Oxford without a degree. He made no friends at Oxford, for his secret habit combined with studious inclination to make him a recluse.

Career

Thomas Penson De Quincey read widely in preparation for a philosophical work, but his patrimony dwindled and he made an abortive attempt to read for the bar. It was in the course of his second year at Oxford that he first tasted opium, -having taken it to allay neuralgic pains.

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.

For 18 months he edited the Westmorland Gazette, driving his gig each week 20 miles (32 km) through the mountains to Kendal.

During 1822 he wrote nothing, struggling to conquer the opium habit by reductions in dosage, but in 1823 every number of the London Magazine contained a contribution from him, including the classic essay in dramatic criticism "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth. "

In 1831 he finally left the Lakes to settle in Edinburgh.

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.

The Lambs received him with great kindness and introduced him to the proprietors of the London Magazine.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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, etc. ; 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, etc. ; and finally, as a third class, and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class of compositions.

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.

Though a flavour of high breeding runs through his writings, he has no vulgar sneers at the vulgar.

The same may be said of his biographies, notably of his remarkable sketch of Dr Parr.

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.

When his wife died in 1837, his eldest daughter managed his household, from which he was frequently absent to elude his creditors. After his wife’s death he often retreated for long periods into opium dreams.

The use of opium no doubt stimulated this remarkable faculty of reproducing in skilfully selected phrase the grotesque and shifting forms, 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.

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.

Two passages in his Confessions afford sufficient clues to this mystery.

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.

De Quincey began to prepare an edition of his works, Selections Grave and Gay.

The rest of his life followed the same pattern, bursts of intensive output for magazines being punctuated by periods of struggle with the drug habit; as he wrote in "Coleridge and Opium-Eating" (1845).

Achievements

• De Quincey’s masterpiece was the 1822 published book, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The highly poetic and imaginative prose of the Confessions makes it one of the enduring stylistic masterpieces of English literature.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey (20 Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey Including The Caesars, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, The English Mail-Coach & Joan of Arc, And More)

    (20 Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey Autobiographical ...)

  • On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts: Being an Address Made to a Gentleman's Club Concerning its Aesthetic Appreciation.

    (In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Q...)

  • On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (Quirky Classics)

    ( In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De...)

  • Confessions of an English Opium Eater

    (In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey haunt...)

  • Suspiria de Profundis

    (Thomas De Quincey's masterpiece of psychological fantasy ...)

  • Delphi Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey (Illustrated) (Series Six Book 4)

    (The master essayist Thomas De Quincey, famous for his ‘Co...)

  • On Murder (Oxford World's Classics)

    (The titular essay in this volume of work by Thomas De Qui...)

  • Suspiria de Profundis and Other Writings

    (Thomas De Quincey was an English author during the Romant...)

  • Miscellaneous Essays

    (Thomas De Quincey was one of England's most influential e...)

  • Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Dover Thrift Editions)
  • Ruler of the Night (Thomas and Emily De Quincey)
  • The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg
  • Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings (Oxford World's Classics)

Politics

As Thomas Penson De Quincey 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. 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.

Views

Quotations: "I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit of rectification applied to absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth."

Personality

Thomas was from infancy a shy, sensitive child, with a constitutional tendency to dreaming by night and by day. He spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of his own creating

On rare occasions, 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.

Connections

De Quincey entered into wedlock with Margaret Simpson in 1816. The couple was blessed with eight children of which only four survived. Margaret passed away in 1837.

Spouse:

Margaret Simpson

Friend:

Christopher North

References

• Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
• Murder as a Fine Art (Thomas and Emily De Quincey)
• Inspector of the Dead (Thomas and Emily De Quincey)