Queen Gertrude: But, look, where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.
—Hamlet 2.2.171
It’s hard to know how to categorize the sublime oddity and sublimated genius of Thomas De Quincey. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick quips, “As an essayist and autobiographer, Thomas De Quincey was a great Gothic novelist.” In her superb new biography, Frances Wilson uses pithier labels: “Romantic acolyte, professional doppelgänger, transcendental hack.”
Born, like Keats, in 1785, Thomas De Quincey was the younger son of a Manchester merchant. Though acknowledged as precociously learned by others as well as himself, he dropped out of college in the middle of his final exams. De Quincey never finished anything he set his hand to. Indeed, until he went bankrupt in his early thirties and was faced with a wife and many children to support, he could barely even get started. The externals of De Quincey’s life are mostly interesting for his complicated friendships with Coleridge and the Wordsworths, which he recurrently memorialized, and his opium addiction, which he celebrated (initially, at any rate) in his astonishing and unforgettably titled memoir of 1821–22, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. That work isolates a few mysteriously potent figures—the dead body of his sister Elizabeth, a nameless London waif, the young prostitute Ann, the Malay—in order to reveal lines of psychological force in the way that iron filings show us the invisible power of a magnet.
Some readers find De Quincey repellent—his rival essayist Hazlitt didn’t like him (a
