Guilty Thing

Starred review from June 13, 2016
Wilson (How to Survive the Titanic: or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay) will enthrall readers with this mesmerizing and agile biography of English writer Thomas De Quincey, “the last of the Romantics.” De Quincey (1785–1859) is best known for the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which kicked off his literary career and arguably gave birth to the genre of literature devoted to addiction and recovery. Wilson makes a good case that opium, which De Quincey began taking at 19, was the making of him, freeing him from his “torments” and allowing him unfettered access to his inner life. Wilson captures De Quincey’s riches-to-rags story, complex personality (“at core were his addictions. Opium was one and debt another”), and obsession with the poet William Wordsworth, whose writing he revered, but whom he grew to loathe personally. Wilson also reveals that, for all of De Quincey’s classical learning, he was a “born journalist” with a taste for sensationalism, as well as a talented biographer responsible for some of the best portraits of Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy. In an impressively researched biography as dazzling as its subject, Wilson highlights De Quincey’s influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Baudelaire, and many others, amply demonstrating his lasting influence.

July 1, 2016
The trials and passions of the romantic essayist and memoirist.Until 2009, when Robert Morrison's The English Opium Eater appeared, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) had been ignored by biographers for nearly 30 years. Morrison's fine biography offered a nuanced portrait of the opium-addicted, debt-ridden writer whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) proved one of the most startling and brilliant essays to emerge from the prolific British romantics. Critic and journalist Wilson (How to Survive the Titanic; or, the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, 2011, etc.) mines a wealth of archival and published sources (De Quincey's writings alone comprise 21 volumes) to produce in her own well-researched and elegantly written biography a portrait largely indistinguishable from Morrison's. Her emphasis, she writes, is "to follow the growth" and intersection of De Quincey's two major obsessions--murder and William Wordsworth--placing the writer's other interests in the background. To that end, she succeeds in conveying in grisly detail the two sensational murders of December 1811 that so indelibly captured De Quincey's imagination. Wilson also sensitively handles De Quincey's yearning for the friendship of the author of Lyrical Ballads, which so deeply impressed him. Eighteen-year-old De Quincey's plaintive letter to the poet, Wilson writes, was his "first masterpiece." Although Wordsworth cautioned his admirer against conflating the poetry with the poet, De Quincey idolized and idealized Wordsworth, whom Wilson reveals as increasingly unsympathetic and self-absorbed. She is certain (where Morrison was not) that Dorothy Wordsworth, 13 years older than De Quincey, expected his marriage proposal. Overall, though, De Quincey's addiction (Wilson documents the drops of laudanum he took at any time) and perpetual debt (a repetitive chronicle) dominate the narrative. Nor does Wilson persuasively argue for his enduring influence. He may have anticipated tabloid sensationalism, the recovery memoir, and "the fine art of character assassination," but to assert, "We are all De Quinceyan now," is a horrifying notion. A new, but not revisionist, portrait of a troubled artist.

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Starred review from September 1, 2016
Thomas De Quincey (17851859) was born fairly rich but lived dodging creditors from the moment he ditched grammar school. A voracious reader, he schlepped book-filled trunks with him every time he movedas long as the landlord he was stiffing hadn't preemptively seized themand every room he inhabited was soon flooded with paper. He wrote highly imaginative and witty journalism, autobiographical or literary-critical, about the other British romantics, primarily Wordsworth and Coleridge. If he later became disillusioned with them as persons, he never denied their gifts and achievements. Like Coleridge, he became an opium-eater or, since, following Coleridge, he preferred the liquid medium, laudanum, drinkerfor life. So delightful a conversationalist that those he offended usually made up with him (though he occasionally chose not to with them), he always carried a streak of paranoia, also a fascination with murder. His lastingly influential writings include the macabre humorous essays On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, and The English Mail-Coach as well as the prototype of the recovery memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He had one great American disciple: Edgar Allan Poe. Married and the father of eight, he led a life packed with interest, as Wilson (How to Survive the Titanic, 2011) enthrallingly demonstrates.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2016

An essayist and critic initially associated with the great Romantic poets, Thomas De Quincey gradually withdrew into bitter disregard for his former companions. He's still acknowledged for the polish and emotional depth of his writing, which influenced Dostoyevsky, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. From the multi-award-winning critic/journalist Wilson (e.g., The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth).

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2016

A genius addicted to opium, fascinated by murder, and pursued by creditors, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was one of the lesser-known English romantics, who influenced generations of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Wilson (How To Survive the Titanic), in this valuable addition to De Quincey scholarship, has written an informative and carefully researched critical biography that captures her subject's strangeness, incredible imagination, and observations of his legendary peers. Recognized primarily for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the first account of drug-induced creativity, De Quincey became acquainted with poet William Wordsworth while a young man and remained obsessed with him for a lifetime, even after their estrangement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also became an object of De Quincey's scorn after early admiration had faded. De Quincey's essays on Macbeth and Wordsworth's poetry established him as an important critic as well as memoirist. In later life he turned to journalism to support his ever-growing family of eight children while his extravagances and debts piled up, sending him frequently into hiding to avoid debtor's prison. VERDICT Strongly recommended for students and scholars of the romantic era as well as readers seeking an enlightening and amusing biography. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/16.]--Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.