Probably every great autobiographer, characterizing the choices and dilemmas faced by an almost unrecognizable younger person whose name he bears, feels a version of this; for De Quincey, it was a lifelong fixation, heightened by his addiction and marring his happiness even as it informed his greatest work. The Turks, it was said, all suffered from opium dependence. Journals ©2000-2020 ITHAKA. Ad Choices. He understood himself, for good or for ill, to exist in duplicate or triplicate. The Journals Division publishes 85 journals in the arts and humanities, technology and medicine, higher education, history, political science, and library science. In De Quincey’s mind, the disappearance was, like Margaret’s pregnancy, an interlude terminated by a transformative event: the Malay, he worried, would be found dead, poisoned by the drugs; likewise, his child would be born, which struck De Quincey as a different sort of tragedy. Ann was the first of many latter-day versions of his sister Elizabeth, whose centrality and loss were yoked together: lost because she was central, central because she was lost. He spent several weeks in bed, cared for by his mother, who read Milton to him aloud; upon his recovery, she refused to send him back to school, on the ground that his success there might swell his ego, and instead hired a tutor. Soon after his birth the family went to The Farm and then later to Greenheys, a larger country house in Chorlton-on-Medlocknear Manchester. The cycles of “remorse and deadly anxiety” that he suffered in his adult life began when he was seven, after a kindly bookseller lent him three guineas. He was born Thomas Quincey, in Manchester in 1785; the prefix was added when he was around eleven, in one of his mother’s many attempts to suggest an aristocratic lineage. The Confessions was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one which won him fame almost overnight..." But in De Quincey’s case the challenge is even bigger. Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) The writer, however did not sensationalise her subject - which would have been easy to do. These ironies were not lost on De Quincey: they fed his imagination. De Quincey and Coleridge in 1821 ROBERT MORRISON writics have often described Thomas De Quincey as the double of Sam uel Taylor Coleridge, yet have overlooked a remarkable series of events in 1821 that demonstrate how fully the lives and writings of the two English opium-eaters could mirror one another. He wrote in defiance of chronology, which he called a “hackneyed roll-call.” In his visions, events widely separated in time were yoked together by the imagination—which, in turn, because of his delusions, was his reality. When William died, in London, at the age of seventeen, Thomas, now the male head of the family, saw it as “the answer to a prayer,” Wilson writes. In 1805, while a student at Oxford, De Quincey again resolved to meet his hero, with whom he had now been exchanging letters. De Quincey was early to recognize Wordsworth’s genius—early in his own life, early in the career of the great poet—which meant, by his inescapable logic, that he was already too late to do anything about it. This is always the case with biographies of great autobiographers. The poet, then thirty-seven, looked, to his worshipper, “rather over than under sixty,” his body nearly “deformed” by the mismatch of his short legs and his long torso; he walked like “some sort of insect,” De Quincey wrote. All the while, its glamour was growing: it was ancient, shamanic, a supernatural tether to otherworldly visions. De Quincey resigned after eighteen months, but during his tenure he introduced the use of imaginative fantasias to frame his own travails as a subject worthy of the public eye. The Press is home to the largest journal publication program of any U.S.-based university press. De Quincey beheld, in the “theatre” of his mind, along with “more than earthly splendours,” horrors beyond belief: “vast processions” of “mournful pomp,” and “friezes of never-ending stories” as terrifying as Greek tragedies. This was the destructive logic behind his opium use: to have started something was to be already too late to stop it, as though a delegate, sent to the future, were messing things up for the innocent De Quincey, back here in the past. The first half of De Quincey’s life is a long and convoluted story. from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, without wishing to move.”. The turn of the nineteenth century is often described as the dawn of Romanticism, the movement in the arts that so enthralled Europe. Victorian Periodicals Review A paltry “two or three hundred volumes” of books, negligently arranged, filled a bookshelf. HFS clients enjoy state-of-the-art warehousing, real-time access to critical business data, accounts receivable management and collection, and unparalleled customer service. All Rights Reserved. In “Suspiria de Profundis,” De Quincey writes that on the day after her death he sneaked up the back staircase to view her body, laid out in her bedroom: Entering, I closed the door so softly, that, although it opened upon a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent walls. With critically acclaimed titles in history, science, higher education, consumer health, humanities, classics, and public health, the Books Division publishes 150 new books each year and maintains a backlist in excess of 3,000 titles. Nothing met my eyes but one large window wide open, through which the sun of midsummer at noonday was showering down torrents of splendour. Long before he tried opium, Thomas De Quincey, the English essayist, was addicted to books. In 1796, three years after the death of his father, Thomas Quincey, his mother – the erstwhile Elizabeth Penson – took the name "De Quincey." He witnessed with his senses what some of his contemporaries only pondered in the abstract; opium levelled, for him, the distinction between actual and imagined things. When, on November 4, 1807, De Quincey finally met Wordsworth, near his front door, the poet appeared “like a flash of lightning,” as De Quincey put it. One of the largest publishers in the United States, the Johns Hopkins University Press combines traditional books and journals publishing units with cutting-edge service divisions that sustain diversity and independence among nonprofit, scholarly publishers, societies, and associations. De Quincey had seen as a warning the escalating addiction of Coleridge, who, for his part, recognized in De Quincey a doppelgänger, their “two faces, each of a … These dramas were De Quincey’s specialty, and were certainly reënactments of his childhood. -- Hayter's well-researched and entertaining book is a scholarly look at drug use and its role in the creation of Romantic literature. Mrs. De Quincey soon moved the family to Bath, the “fine and striking” spa town where Jane Austen set “Northanger Abbey,” and rented a prominent house whose most recent occupant had been Edmund Burke. Writing late in his life to his daughter, he identified “procrastination,” which he linked with unpardonable guilt, as “that most odious of vices”: the procrastinator is doomed, since “in midst of too-soonness he shall suffer the killing anxieties of too-lateness.” “Our fate is always to find ourselves at the wrong station,” he wrote. But now there was a new addition to the sequence: writing. In Bath, De Quincey was deeply affected by the unusual story of Thomas Chatterton, a teen-age poet from nearby Bristol who had found dusty medieval documents in the muniment room of his parish church and, his imagination ignited, invented the figure of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century blind monk and poet. The division also manages membership services for more than 50 scholarly and professional associations and societies. Schneider writes "The relaxation of tension and conflict, accompanied by a sense of pleasant ease, occasionally helps to release for a time the neurotic person’s natural powers of though or imagination or (rarely) of action, … Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Books De Quincey’s father, then a prosperous merchant, died just a year after Elizabeth; soon, his loathed older brother, William, who was eleven, returned from boarding school. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. Once he’d bought one book, it was too late; he had, in effect, bought them all, which excused him to buy a second book and then a third. His sister Jane died when he was four. . “He from the well of life three drops instill’d.”, The image of Adam getting high in the Garden of Eden may seem outlandish, but opium had made a kind of Adam out of De Quincey: in “the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain,” he wandered through ancient cities “beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatómpylos,” crammed with “temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles.” Opium deepened his “natural inclination for a solitary life” by giving a cosmic cast to idleness. Login via your There's a problem loading this menu right now. De Quincey, by then renting Dove Cottage after Wordsworth’s departure, was abject. There are sections in “The Prelude” that tell us how to see things close up, from afar, from above and below. Debt was only the punctuation between ecstasies. De Quincey was an early admirer of Lyrical Ballads, and in 1807 he became a close associate of its authors, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content, providing access to journal and book content from nearly 300 publishers.
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