Thomas De Quincey by "UNKNOWN"

Inside front cover leaf of 1827 edition of the book "Confessions of an English Opium Eater". Additional information/research pending, please check back.

Thomas De Quincey born in Manchester in 1785, and died in Edinburgh in 1859.

As a young boy he read profusely and was considered by many as a critic of the classics. During his youth De Quincey spent five months hungry and penniless on the streets of London, an episode he faithfully recorded in his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In 1804 after reconciling with his family, he entered Oxford. After four years there, he left without earning his degree.

After college he moved to the English Lake District, and was near his mentors William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A short time later he became embittered from both men. In 1813, he became dependent on opium, a drug he experimented with during his days at Oxford, along with many of his peers while there. The next few years of his life he became more indebted and given to addiction, and his circumstances caused him to join Blackwood's Magazine in 1819 at the behest of his friend John Wilson.

He wrote many articles on topics ranging from philosophy and history to aesthetics, and contemporary politics, after the success of the "Confessions". His other works include ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ published in Blackwood's in 1827, with a second in the same magazine in 1839. His works ‘Literary Reminiscences of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey, and others, appeared in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine beginning in 1834. His sequel to the Confessions, ‘Suspiria de Profundis, was published in Blackwood's in 1845.

The Weshtmlinster Review in 1854, praised De Quincey's writings, and the same year the Eclectic Review stated that 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.’