Lindop, Grevel, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London, 1981).
Sackville-West, Edward, A Flame in Sunlight: The Life and Works of Thomas De Quincey (London, 1936; reprinted, ed. John Jordan, London, 1974).
Editions
The Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols. (London, 2000–3).
Letters
De Quincey at Work, ed. W. H. Bonner (Buffalo, 1936).
De Quincey to Wordsworth, ed. John E. Jordan (Berkeley, 1963).
‘De Quincey and his Publishers’, ed. Barry Symonds, Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1994.
Criticism
Appleman, Philip, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Intrusive Knock’, Modern Fiction Studies, 3 (1958), 328–32.
Barrell, John, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (New Haven, 1991).
Baxter, Edmund, De Quincey’s Art of Autobiography (Edinburgh, 1990).
Benjamin, Walter, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), 277–300.
Black, Joel, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (Baltimore, 1991).
Breton, André, ‘Thomas De Quincey’, in Anthology of Black Humour, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco, 1997), 53–8.
Burke, Thomas, ‘The Obsequies of Mr Williams: New Light on De Quincey’s Famous Tale of Murder’, The Bookman, 68 (1928), 257–63.
Burwick, Frederick, ‘De Quincey and the Aesthetics of Violence’, Wordsworth Circle, 27 (1996), 78–86.
Byerly, Alison, ‘Accident or Murder? Intentionality, the Picturesque, and the Body of Thomas De Quincey’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 29/2 (2002), 48–68.
Carnall, Geoffrey, ‘De Quincey on the Knocking at the Gate’, Review of English Literature, 2 (1961), 49–57.
Chandler, Raymond, ‘The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay’, in The Simple Art of Murder (New York, 1988), 1–18.
Cohen, Michael, Murder Most Fair (Madison, 2000).
Critchley, T. A., and James, P. D., The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (London, 1971).
De Luca, V. A., Thomas De Quincey: The Prose of Vision (Toronto, 1980). Goldman, Albert, The Mine and the Mint: Sources for the Writings of Thomas De Quincey (Carbondale, Ill., 1965).
Gossman, Ann, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in “Markheim”’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (1962), 73–6.
Katz, Jack, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (New York, 1988).
Leask, Nigel, ‘Toward a Universal Aesthetic: De Quincey on Murder as Carnival and Tragedy’, in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore, 1995), 92–120.
Lehman, David, The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (Ann Arbor, 2000).
Leighton, Angela, ‘De Quincey and Women’, in Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London, 1992), 160–77.
Lindop, Grevel, ‘Innocence and Revenge: The Problem of De Quincey’s Fiction’, in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman, Okla., 1985), 213–37.
Long, John C., ‘Thomas De Quincey, Clinician’, Wordsworth Circle, 24 (1993), 170–7.
McDonagh, Josephine, ‘Do or Die: Problems of Agency and Gender in the Aesthetics of Murder’, Genders, 5 (1989), 120–34.
Malkan, Jeffrey, ‘Aggressive Text: Murder and the Fine Arts Revisited’, Mosaic, 23 (1990), 101–14.
Mandel, Ernest, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (Minneapolis, 1984).
Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, ‘De Quincey: Humour and the Drugs’, in Veins of Humour, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 109–29.
Moldenhauer, Joseph, ‘Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe’s Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision’, PMLA, 83 (1968), 284–97.
Morrison, Robert, ‘Poe’s De Quincey, Poe’s Dupin’, Essays in Criticism, 51/4 (2001), 424–41.
Most, Glenn W., and Stowe, William W. (eds.), The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory (New York, 1983).
O’Quinn, Daniel, ‘Murder, Hospitality, Philosophy: De Quincey and the Complicitous Grounds of National Identity’, Studies in Romanticism, 38 (1999), 135–70.
Orwell, George, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, in Smothered under Journalism, 1946, ed. Peter Davison (London, 1998), 108–10.
Playfair, G. M. H., ‘De Quincey: The Murderer Williams’, Notes and Queries, 11th ser., 5 (January 1912), 6.
Plotz, Judith, ‘On Guilt Considered as One of the Fine Arts: De Quincey’s Criminal Imagination’, Wordsworth Circle, 19 (1988), 83–8.
Plumtree, A. S., ‘The Artist as Murderer: De Quincey’s Essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”’, in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman, Okla., 1985), 140–63.
Rzepka, Charles, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst, 1995).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘On the Fine Arts Considered as Murder’, in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1963), 483–543.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, ‘Language as Live Burial: Thomas De Quincey’, in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York, 1980), 37–96.
Senelick, Laurence, The Prestige of Evil: The Murderer as Romantic Hero from Sade to Lacenaire (New York, 1987).
Snyder, Robert Lance, ‘De Quincey’s Liminal Interspaces: On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 28/2 (2001), 102–18.
Stephen, Leslie, ‘The Decay of Murder’, Cornhill Magazine, 20 (December 1869), 722–33.
Sullivan, Margo Ann, Murder and Art: Thomas De Quincey and the Ratcliffe Highway Murders (New York, 1987).
Super, Robert H., ‘De Quincey and a Murderer’s Conscience’, Times Literary Supplement (5 December 1936), 1016.
Whale, John, ‘“In a Stranger’s Ear”: De Quincey’s Polite Magazine Context’, in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman, Okla., 1985), 35–53.
Ziolkowski, Theodore, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Criminal’, in Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton, 1969), 289–331.
Fiction and Poetry
Ackroyd, Peter, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (London, 1994).
—— Hawksmoor (London, 1985).
Kerr, Philip, A Philosophical Investigation (London, 1992).
Long, Gabrielle Margaret Vere [as Joseph Shearing], ‘Blood and Thunder’, in Orange Blossoms (London, 1938).
Nabokov, Vladimir, Despair (New York, 1966).
Sinclair, Iain, Lud Heat (London, 1975; repr. in Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge, London, 1998).
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop.
Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Richard Lancelyn Green.
—— The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Christopher Roden.
Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. John Carey.
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy.
Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer.
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, ed. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick.
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray.
A CHRONOLOGY OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY
1785
Born (15 August) in Manchester, son of Thomas Quincey, textile importer, and Elizabeth Penson.
1790
Death of his sister Jane, aged 3.
1792
Death of his sister Elizabeth, aged 9.
1793
Death of his father.
1796
Moves to Bath and enters Bath Grammar School. His mother takes the name ‘De Quincey’.
1799
Enters Winkfield School, Wiltshire. Reads Wordsworth a
nd Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which he later describes as ‘the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind’.
1800
Translation from Horace’s Twenty-Second Ode wins third prize in a contest, and is published in the Monthly Preceptor. Accidentally meets George III at Frogmore. Summer holiday in Ireland. Enters Manchester Grammar School.
1801
Spends summer in Everton, near Liverpool, where he meets William Roscoe, James Currie, and other Whig intellectuals.
1802
Flees from Manchester Grammar School. Wanders in North Wales and then spends five months penniless and hungry on the streets of London.
1803
Reconciled with his mother and guardians. Spends another summer in Everton. Reads gothic fiction voraciously. Deepening admiration for Coleridge, whom he begins to think ‘the greatest man that has ever appeared’. Writes fan letter to Wordsworth, and the two begin a correspondence. Enters Worcester College, Oxford.
1804
Begins occasional use of opium. Meets Charles Lamb.
1805
Travels to the Lake District at the invitation of Wordsworth, but loses his nerve and turns back without meeting the poet.
1806
Travels again to the Lake District to meet Wordsworth, and again loses his nerve.
1807
Meets Coleridge. Gives him £300 under the polite pretence of a ‘loan’. Escorts Coleridge’s family to the Lake District and meets Wordsworth at Grasmere.
1808
Sees Coleridge daily and assists him with his lectures for the Royal Institution, on Poetry and Principles of Taste. Bolts from Oxford midway through his final examinations and does not receive his degree. Introduced to John Wilson, the future ‘Christopher North’ of Blackwood’s Magazine. The two become close friends.
1809
Supervises the printing of Wordsworth’s pamphlet on The Convention of Cintra, and contributes a lengthy ‘Postscript on Sir John Moore’s Letters’. Moves to Grasmere, where he rents Dove Cottage, the former home of the Wordsworths.
1810
Enters period of greatest intimacy with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Reads manuscript of Wordsworth’s Prelude. With Wilson and Alexander Blair, contributes the ‘Letter of Mathetes’ to Coleridge’s metaphysical newspaper, The Friend.
1812
Enters the Middle Temple briefly to read for the Bar. Grief-stricken by the death of Wordsworth’s 3-year-old daughter Catherine.
1813
Becomes addicted to opium. Strained relations with the Wordsworths. Courts Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a Lake District farmer.
1814
Visits Edinburgh with Wilson, where he meets leading members of the Scottish literary scene, including J. G. Lockhart, the future biographer of Walter Scott, and James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’.
1816
Birth of son, William Penson, by Margaret Simpson. Estranged from the Wordsworths.
1817
Marries Margaret Simpson. William Blackwood founds and edits Blackwood’s Magazine, with Wilson, Lockhart, and Hogg as major contributors.
1818
With Wordsworth, publishes the Tory jeremiad Close Comments upon a Straggling Speech, a denunciation of Henry Brougham, Independent Whig candidate in the parliamentary election campaign in Westmorland. Appointed editor of the local Tory newspaper, the Westmorland Gazette. Slides deeper into debt and addiction. Lucid opium nightmares.
1819
Dismissed from editorship of the Westmorland Gazette. With Wilson and Lockhart, writes review of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam for Blackwood’s Magazine.
1821
‘The Sport of Fortune’, translated from Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Spiel des Schicksals’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine. Quarrels with William Blackwood. Publishes Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in the London Magazine. Conversations with John Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse. Meets William Hazlitt.
1822
First publication of the Confessions in book form. Projects a work entitled Confessions of a Murderer but it does not appear.
1823
‘Notes from the Pocket Book of a Late Opium-Eater’, including ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in the London Magazine. Appears as ‘The Opium-Eater’ in the Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of raucous and wide-ranging dialogues published in Blackwood’s Magazine (completed 1835).
1824
Reviews Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a translation by Thomas Carlyle, in the London Magazine.
1825
Translates and abridges the German pseudo-Waverley novel Walladmor. Probably composes manuscript on Peter Anthony Fonk, which he later attempts to incorporate into a sequel to ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. Leaves the London Magazine.
1826
Rejoins Blackwood’s Magazine, where he publishes his review of Robert Gillies’s German Stories.
1827
‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. Begins to write for the Edinburgh Saturday Post. Meets Carlyle and an intimacy develops.
1828
‘Toilette of the Hebrew Lady’ and ‘Elements of Rhetoric’ in Black-wood’s Magazine. Writes the manuscript fragment ‘To the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine’, which he attempts to incorporate into a sequel to ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.
1829
‘Sketch of Professor Wilson’ in the Edinburgh Literary Gazette.
1830
‘Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays’, ‘Richard Bentley’, and a series of heated Tory diatribes, including ‘French Revolution’ and ‘Political Anticipations’, in Blackwood’s Magazine. Moves permanently to Edinburgh.
1831
‘Dr Parr and his Contemporaries’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. Prosecuted and briefly imprisoned for debt.
1832
Klosterheim: or, the Masque, a one-volume gothic romance, published by Blackwood.
1833
Contributes ‘The Age of the Earth’, translated from Kant’s ‘Die Frage, ob die Erde veralte, physicalisch erwogen’, and an assessment, ‘Mrs Hannah More’, to Tait’s Magazine, the leading Scottish rival of Blackwood’s Magazine. Twice prosecuted for debt. Takes refuge in the debtor’s sanctuary at Holyrood. Death of son Julius, aged 3.
1834
‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ and ‘Sketches of Life and Manners from the Autobiography of a Late Opium-Eater’ (sporadically until 1841) in Tait’s Magazine. Three times prosecuted for debt. Death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and William Blackwood. Blackwood’s sons Robert and Alexander take over the management of the magazine.
1835
‘Oxford’ and ‘A Tory’s Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism’ in Tait’s Magazine.
1837
‘The Revolt of the Tartars’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. Twice prosecuted for debt. Death of his wife Margaret.
1838
Two tales of terror, ‘The Household Wreck’ and ‘The Avenger’, in Blackwood’s Magazine. ‘Recollections of Charles Lamb’ in Tait’s Magazine.
1839
‘Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. ‘William Wordsworth’ in Tait’s Magazine.
1840
‘The Opium and the China Question’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. Prosecuted for debt.
1843
Moves to Mavis Bush Cottage, Lasswade, outside Edinburgh.
1844
Publishes one-volume treatise, The Logic of Political Economy, with Blackwood. Manuscript fragment of ‘a new paper on Murder as a Fine Art’.
1845
‘Coleridge and Opium-Eating’ and ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. ‘On Wordsworth’s Poetry’ and ‘Notes on Gilfillan’s “Gallery of Literary Portraits”: Godwin, Foster, Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats’ (completed 1846) in Tait’s Magazine.
1846
; ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescope’ in Tait’s Magazine.
1847
‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘The Nautico-Military Nun of Spain’ in Tait’s Magazine.
1848
‘Final Memorials of Charles Lamb’ in North British Review. Meets Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1849
‘The English Mail-Coach’, his last essay for Blackwood’s Magazine.
1850
Contributes several essays to the Edinburgh publisher James Hogg’s weekly magazine, The Instructor. Ticknor, Reed, and Fields of Boston begin publication of De Quincey’s Writings (twenty-two volumes, completed 1856). Death of Wordsworth.
1851
‘Lord Carlisle on Pope’, his last essay for Tait’s Magazine.
1853
Begins sometimes extensive revision of his work for Selections Grave and Gay, an edition issued by Hogg (fourteen volumes, completed 1860). Autobiographic Sketches (completed 1854) appear as volumes i and ii of Selections Grave and Gay.
1854
Takes lodgings at 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh. Publishes his ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ in volume iv of Selections Grave and Gay. Death of Wilson.
1856
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, revised and expanded, appears as volume v of Selections Grave and Gay. Begins to contribute to Hogg’s monthly magazine, The Titan.
1857
Publishes pamphlet on China with Hogg. Articles on the Indian Mutiny for The Titan (completed 1858).
1859
Dies (8 December) in Edinburgh. Buried beside Margaret in St Cuthbert’s churchyard.
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