Thomas Quincey

THOMAS PENSON DE QUINCEY (1785 – 1859) was an English essayist. It is believed that he started the tradition of addiction literature in the West. His writing career started when he became editor of The Westmorland Gazette, a Tory newspaper published in Kendal. But he was blamed for the lack of “regular communication between the Editor and the Printer”, and he resigned from the post.

In 1821 he was asked to write and publish an account of his opium experiences. He wrote the experiences which appeared in the London Magazine the same year. This new sensation eclipsed Charles Lamb’s “Essays of Elia”, which were then appearing in the same periodical. When “The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” were published in book form, De Quincey made literary acquaintances. He was famous for his conversation. Richard Woodhouse wrote of the “depth and reality of his knowledge”, and his conversation which “appeared like the elaboration of a mine of results.”

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Tait’s Magazine received a large number of contributions of De Quincey’s writings. Tait’s published a series of his reminiscences of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey and other figures among the Lake Poets. It became a series that taken together constitutes one of his most important works.

The Works of Thomas De Quincey appeared in fourteen volumes in 1889 and 1890. His writings were so voluminous and widely-dispersed that more collections followed: two volumes of The Uncollected Writings (1890), and two volumes of Posthumous Works (1891 and 1893). Yet another volume, New Essays by De Quincey, appeared in 1966.

De Quincey influenced many writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire and Nikolai Gogol. Some major 20th-century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges admired him and claimed to be partly influenced by his work.