Thomas De Quincey

Thomas De Quincey (Manchester, 1785 - Edinburgh, 1859) was an English writer, essayist and critic associated with Romanticism. He is remembered above all for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), a work that many scholars regard as the starting point of addiction literature in the Western world. His writing moves between autobiography, literary criticism and the study of the troubled mind.

The son of a prosperous merchant, he received a demanding education under a strict mother. At seventeen he ran away from school and spent weeks wandering through Wales, living on blackberries and rose hips until his family found him. At Oxford, around 1804, he began taking opium to ease a facial neuralgia. Over time his use turned into dependence, and much of his later life revolved around that struggle. He left university without a degree, became a friend of Coleridge and, in 1809, settled at Grasmere, near Wordsworth and the Lake Poets.

The years that followed were marked by money trouble. He edited the Westmorland Gazette, a Tory paper, and then earned his living through articles, stories and reviews for magazines such as the London Magazine, Blackwood's and Tait's, mostly from Edinburgh, where he spent much of his mature life. Debt followed him almost constantly, and at times he had to seek shelter from his creditors.

In the Confessions he described his childhood and his life with opium in a prose that blends precision and fantasy and departs from the common sense of middle-class Britain. He also wrote Shakespearean criticism, including a famous analysis of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, and an essay on murder considered as one of the fine arts. Suspiria de Profundis, his 1845 sequel, explores a mind sinking into dreams and nightmares. He was also drawn to German philosophy and wrote about Kant's last days, published twenty-three years after the philosopher's death.

His influence was considerable. Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Jorge Luis Borges read him with admiration, and his mark can be seen in the aesthetics of decadence. Although he wrote a great deal, he published few books, since much of his work appeared scattered across magazines and newspapers.