Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

by Frances Wilson

A dynamic biography of one of the most mysterious members of Wordsworth's circle and the last of the Romantics

Thomas De Quincey--opium eater, celebrity journalist, and professional doppelgänger--is embedded in our culture. Modeling his character on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the latter's cottage in Grasmere and turned it into an opium den. Here, increasingly detached from the world, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and his obsession with murder as one of the fine arts.

Though De Quincey may never have felt the equal of the giants of Romantic literature, the writing style he pioneered--scripted and sculptured emotional memoir--would inspire generations of writers, including Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Virginia Woolf. James Joyce knew whole pages of his work by heart.

As Frances Wilson writes, "Life for De Quincey was either angels ascending on vaults of cloud or vagrants shivering on the city streets." In this spectacular biography, Wilson's meticulous scholarship and supple prose tells the riches-to-rags story of a figure of dazzling complexity and originality, whose life was lived on the run yet who came to influence some of the world's greatest literature. Guilty Thing brings De Quincey and his martyred but wild soul triumphantly to life, and firmly establishes Wilson as one of our foremost contemporary biographers.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Books About Books, 19th Century, British Literature, 18th Century

416 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2016

About the author

Frances Wilson was educated at Oxford University and lectured on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature for fifteen years before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She reviews widely in the British press and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She divides her time between London and Normandy.

Reviews

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
One of the best biographies I have read in the last couple of years. I picked it up based mainly on great reviews and not because I had any interest in De Quincey. But instantly you are drawn into Frances Wilson's excellent style ( a little bit quirky although hard to say exactly why).
I thought De Quincey's life amongst the Lake Poets (particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge) was excellent, and I also liked the way she brought Dorothy Wordsworth to life too.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas De Quincy is generally remembered for his Diary Of an English Opium Eater. I once had a 19th c copy of that book and read it, or rather read at it. As far as the Romantic Era in literature, I knew a little Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge from college days.

Then a few years ago, I read Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws, a marvelous book on Mary Shelly and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Godwin Shelly heard Coleridge recite his famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner one night when she was supposed to be in bed. I learned about Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord Byron.

This whole, crazy, pre-Victorian wild world was a marvel. Why didn't my teachers tell us these things back in the 60's? Surely we would have understood the Romantic counter-culture as similar to the world we were growing up in!

My interest piqued, I finally was able to pick up this biography of De Quincy and through his life learned about William Wordsworth and Coleridge and the movement they founded, which had lured De Quincy to them like a moth to a flame, sure he had found his true home in their philosophy

What an interesting life! De Quincy was well-read and had a capacious memory. He thought that school had nothing to teach him and he dropped out just before gaining his degree. He lived on the street, sharing any good fortune with a young prostitute. Coming of age, he inherited wealth, then squandered it.

Wilson describes this diminutive man, shy and uncertain, his brain packed with learning and books, standing on the path to Wordsworth's cottage with fear and trembling, then running away, gathering his courage to approach again several years later. First, he introduced himself to Wordsworth's special friend, Coleridge.

Finally meeting, De Quincy, an ardent apostle, was taken in by William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. William was distant but Dorothy became close to the younger De Quincy. And over the years, a disappointed De Quincy broke away from Wordsworth the man while still admiring his literary oeuvre.

Familiarity breeds contempt is one lesson from De Quincy's life.

Another lesson is that opium was perceived as a creative aid, but in reality, destroyed the body and pocketbook. And kept De Quincy from achieving the success that seemed to drop into Wordsworth's lap. The Romantic Era turned to sensibility, deeply felt emotions, in a pendulum swing away from the Age of Reason. Just as in the 1960s, drugs were believed to open the mind.

De Quincy was not alone in his opium use; along with Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, we can add Branwell Bronte, the brilliant and doomed brother of his more illustrious sisters, who appeared at De Quincy's door in homage. De Quincy, avidly avoiding his creditors, did not answer. The drug was easily obtained because it was standard pharmaceutical fare. And John Jacob Aster made a fortune by shipping it to England.

De Quincy loved children, including his own, but was a lousy provider and part-time family man. Well, who can write at home surrounded by kids and wife and debt collectors? No, De Quincy needed a little open space amidst his piles of papers and tens of thousands of books. He was the original hoarder except he only hoarded the printed word.

I enjoyed Guilty Thing as a biography of De Quincy and as a colorful and delightful study of his world.

(What amazes me is that during this same time period Jane Austen was writing her comedies of manners, showing us the failings of Marianne's sensibility and Catherine's Gothic imaginings!)

I won this book from the publisher from a Goodreads Giveaway.

[David Cowling]

Frances Wilson’s excellent study of Thomas DeQuincey’s life is eminently readable, in the true DeQuinceyean spirit. Unusually for many literary biographies, the sources are skilfully deployed, and the story of the most shambling, classically gifted, high/low culture-straddling figure of the Romantics is told very artfully and with great momentum.

Dequincey is a fascinating subject, not least because he was an essayist of singular talent, and yet also because he led the life of an opium debauchee haunted by visions of a traumatic past. Much of the later stages of ‘Guilty Things’ has him fleeing from creditor after creditor, abandoning properties which are stacked to the rafters with dog-eared volumes of contemporary and classical literature. At a time when he was forced into selling his waistcoat and hat to feed his many children, he refused to part with several rare tomes by Giordano Bruno, which would have gone a huge way towards alleviating his financial woes. Concurrent with this drug-influenced penury, he was able to produce works of lasting brilliance, many of which influenced writers worldwide (from America - Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne - to Russia, where in 1822 the Confessions of an English Opium Eater was first translated, a copy of which Dostoevsky later carried into exile.)

Wilson is able to enter into her subject’s imagination in a way few others seem to have done. This culminates in a remarkable passage towards the end of the book where the disparate threads of DeQuincey’s essay on the infamous Ratcliffe murders of 1811 (if alive today, DeQ would definitely be a subscriber to true crime periodicals and a member of Websleuths) are related to the various psychological preoccupations he wrestled with his entire life - which range from the symbolic significance of his sister Elizabeth, to his attachment to Wordsworth and Coleridge, to the Piranesi-like architecture of his mind. It’s a strange moment of catharsis - as though we, the readers, having been witness to the growth of those preoccupations, finally see them achieve their literary absolution.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poor Thomas De Quincey: I knew nothing of the man beyond the confessions, but now I'm very curious to read more, and have downloaded his complete works from Internet Archive, to peruse in their original editions. The life depicted here is not a particularly happy one, but as odd and obsessive as one would hope/expect. I also really need to read the recent trilogy of crime novels by David Morrell featuring DeQ as protagonist, a brilliant move really, seeing as DeQ is in his way as close to the source of crime fiction as Vidocq. Having really enjoyed Poe and Hogg, it feels like I'm overdue to hang out w/ De Quincey.

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s hard sometimes to understand the enthusiasms of others. It can be especially difficult to sympathize with the fleeting and fashion-driven passions of the young. What forty-seven-year-old doesn’t blush at certain things he obsessed about when he was seventeen? But novelty can make admirers of people who ought by the logic of their own character to find no very fervent interest in the shiny new thing.

Consider the case of Thomas De Quincey. As described in Frances Wilson’s excellent biography, he became a teenage disciple of William Wordsworth after reading poems from the Lyrical Ballads in manuscript. It was the turning point of his life. Within a few years young De Quincey had so far insinuated himself into his guru’s family that he came to live with them, stood godfather to one of their children, and took over the lease of Dove Cottage at Grasmere when they moved out. And yet it’s hard to imagine two writers of the English Romantic period more different from one another than Wordsworth and De Quincey.

Wordsworth was a gangly hill walker with self-aggrandizing poetical theories who posed as a Cumbrian shepherd-philosopher and champion of rural England in his verse but who refused social contact with the love-match wife of De Quincey because she was the daughter of a peasant. He was, by his own estimate, a literary and moral genius whose exquisite attunement to the zephyrs of poesy set him apart from the multitude like a swan amid a throng of cormorants. If his poetry was not entirely an exercise in sentimentality, it was still boring enough to get him made Laureate.

De Quincey, by contrast, was a sort of gremlin, less than five feet tall, with a giant’s head atop a child’s body. Intellectually gifted, he was shy and weak and seemed to take pleasure in the contempt of others. Shocked as a boy by the death and at-home autopsy of his sister Elizabeth, he was fascinated by violence and murder all his life. Nursed on Arabian Nights and the novels of Ann Radcliffe, De Quincey suffered Piranesian visions of infinite ladders, infinite rooms, and infinite seas even before he became the Opium Eater of his famous Confessions. He felt himself haunted by a double self he called the “Dark Interpreter.”

There was more of Coleridge in him than of Wordsworth. In fact, De Quincey usurped the place Coleridge once held in Wordsworth’s circle. Wordsworth never considered De Quincey anything more than a disappointing acolyte but Coleridge saw that De Quincey’s “façade of meekness disguised turbulence and ferocity.” That ferocity emerged when, sick of life in the great man’s shadow, De Quincey took an axe to the sacred grove of his idol and chopped down Wordsworth’s beloved orchard at Dove Cottage. He later observed that “men of extraordinary genius and force of mind are far better as objects for distant admiration than as daily companions.”

But De Quincey wasn’t altogether ferocious. He had been briefly homeless on the streets of London and had lived sympathetically among uneducated thieves and prostitutes. He loved children and would spend hours playing with the little Wordsworths. De Quincey’s letters to young John show real tenderness, and he shed more tears at the death of four-year-old Catherine than her father did. Unlike Wordsworth, De Quincy also had a sense of humor, as I rediscovered while reading some of the better passages from Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts to my family at the dinner table.

In midlife De Quincey traded the Lake District for Edinburgh. He published essays (often dishing on Wordsworth and Coleridge) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and London Magazine. His wife died in her forties. With the younger of their eight children in the care of the grown ones, De Quincey frequently relocated under cover of night to keep ahead of creditors and disgruntled landlords who held his papers for ransom. He claimed debtor’s sanctuary at Holyrood Abbey, only to find himself sued for debt by fellow asylum seekers, forcing him to flee again. His friends often regretted taking him in since he might come for an evening but stay six months. “The first difficulty,” one recalled, “was to induce him to visit you. The second was to reconcile him to leaving.”

For all his youthful adulation of the man, it’s hard to say what De Quincey got from Wordsworth beyond a second-rate father figure and marketable memories. If Wordsworth’s was the spirit of the age, it wasn’t near kin to De Quincey’s own spirit. His lineage as a writer seems to derive more straightforwardly from Jonathan Swift and the gothic novelists of the late eighteenth century; it leads on from himself to Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, and perhaps Conan Doyle. Jorge Luis Borges claimed De Quincey as an influence.

As it happens, I was first introduced to De Quincey in my teens. His writing was an adolescent enthusiasm that Frances Wilson’s book has helped to revive in me, without a blush. It was that flashy title Confessions of an English Opium Eater and the Chinese dragon on the cover that first hooked me, and I still own the Penguin paperback copy I bought in 1989. I was mesmerized by De Quincey’s drug-fueled dreamscapes and just able to catch some of the baroque music of his language. Impressionable as I was, I can at least report that reading it did not turn me into an opium addict.

Asked if he had tempted others into falling prey to his notorious infirmity, De Quincey answered: “Teach opium-eating! Did I teach wine drinking? Did I reveal the mystery of sleeping? Did I inaugurate the infirmity of laughter?”

[Cynthia Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, what a life!

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

When he was not much more than a teenager, Thomas de Quincey went to the Lake District. He was intending to visit the home of his hero, William Wordsworth. After much agonising De Quincey had eventually written to him, pledging his friendship in his typically overwrought, mannered style. The poet responded graciously, and gave what was effectively an open invitation for Thomas to stop by whenever he was in the area. And so he did. But the sight of Dove Cottage was too much for him. De Quincey stole away – he left without so much as a greeting.

This is a very familiar feeling to me. I feel it intensely, often with regards to anything I care about, and sometimes with things that are entirely inconsequential. I felt it just the other day in a mild form when going in to a new coffee shop for the first time; it was somehow so much worse because I'd walked past this shop what must be a thousand times, and now I was going in there to buy something new; and what business had I doing that? I am, after all, the person who walks away from opportunities. Would it not be easier to walk away? And frequently, I do.

The funny thing is that years later, De Quincey came back. And he and Wordsworth became friends for years. De Quincey even came to live in that place he'd once loved and feared, Dove Cottage. He lived there until the place became so full of books that for a while the house was used for nothing other than his library. All through his life books seemed to replicate and subdivide around him, forming new libraries within libraries wherever he stayed, new walls and halls of stacked paper.

De Quincey's relationship with the Wordsworths was complicated. As a younger man, he was so close to them as to almost be part of the family. He was good with their children. But later, things degraded; there was the difficult co-production of a political pamphlet, with William writing and Thomas editing. There was the time De Quincey cut down the orchard at Dove Cottage, beloved by the Wordsworths. And De Quincey never quite forgave their contempt towards his wife, Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a local farmer.

He felt, in short, that they were ungrateful. He had given them much in the way of time and attention over the years and had received little in kind. But his position was much of his own making. His use of opium is now perhaps the thing for which he is best known, if only because his experience of it led to his most acclaimed writing. But until you read an account of his life it is perhaps difficult to understand the extent to which he gave his life over to the drug. In his work opium was a way of seeing; it's harder to find within that the way of being that carried him from day to day.

His family inheritance, and the kindness of strangers, was what sustained him through life. Both were utterly depleted by his dependence. His best work was done as an essayist, but (especially in later years) it was done with the intent of keeping his creditors from the door. That much is an assessment quite separate from any judgement of its quality. But it was always fragmented.

When he was 21 he'd written a list of future goals, titled 'The Constituents of Happiness' -- one of those had been 'some great intellectual project to which all intellectual pursuits may be made tributary'. He would never really find that project, though it wasn't for want of trying. Better to say, perhaps, that all his pursuits were tributaries in angled parallels; an endless delta of pursuits, sub-dividing infinitely.

There is an image that recurs throughout this biography, especially in the later years of its subject: a small man working alone in a room full of books and papers tight around his shoulders, stopping only to accept trays of food and drink proffered at his door. He is at the heart of a labyrinth of his own making. But he is not trapped. He is at home. There is nothing inherently miserable about this except the thought of what sustains it: the writer's own children struggling to survive while the scratching of the pen goes on and on; in later life, the perpetual fear of the bailiffs at the door. The desperate night flight between sanctuaries for the bankrupt was a regular feature of De Quincey's later years. There, he was safe from arrest; but one has to wonder whether his family ever felt at home. Perhaps they were not permitted their own labyrinth.

And yet he wasn't a misanthrope. He couldn't afford to be. He was, after all, an addict. But he was also a sentimentalist. The death of young Catherine Wordsworth, who was born with what we might now call learning difficulties, crushed him. His wife bore him eight of his own kids. How they must have lived is scarcely conceivable now, and in fact half of them did not survive him. His eldest daughter, at eighteen, described how she was expected to keep house for him while minding her young siblings; she writes how he was kept at home for days on end, by fears of pursuit and arrest for crimes both real and imagined. The opium kept anxiety at bay, but it was also what kept him pinned in his labyrinth. Not that this necessarily meant staying in the same room forever: he was the kind of man who would come to your house for dinner and still be there months later, having refused to leave.

The remarkable thing is that young De Quincey got exactly what he wanted. He got to be friends with his literary idols, and his time with them eventually came to be the thing which sustained him, albeit not for the reasons he might not have thought. When he wrote his reminiscences of the Lake Poets, it was to cash in on his memories, and to settle a few scores. The innocent pleasures of youth become an opportunity in old age. He regretted this intensely; he later wrote that it would have been better not to have known his literary idols at all.

It's hard for me to see much in a biography of De Quincey beyond this figure of perpetual disappointment. Like Coleridge, he had a brilliant mind – he was one of the last men to have read everything – and it is tempting to look at his limited output and wonder what he could have become in a life free from addiction. Such speculation is pointless. You could say he might just as easily have passed his years clerking, like Charles Lamb, quietly working to the greater common weal, with writing coming as a sort of happy afterthought; but this feels like measuring his worth according to a certain standard of industrial productivity. If only he had written more, if only he had been more coherent, more consistent; as if there is not already enough coherence and consistency in the world.

[Fionnuala · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is all the good parts of a biography. It sticks strictly to the personal aspects, it presents a portrait of its subject and of the people that the subject interacts with but only through the lens of that subject, it doesn't derail, it doesn't get bogged down in details, and any outside information is also strictly related to the subject. Does this sound like common sense when writing a biography? Yes, I suppose it does, but I've read several biographies of both people and ages that have shown me just how distracted some biographies can become. This book, by contrast, was a fantastically detailed, streamlined thing, painting a clear portrait and progressing in a neat and fascinating manner. It was full over absolutely everything I like to see in biographies -- insights, anecdotes, plenty of stuff about childhood (I hate it when childhood is glossed over in biographies, or else summarised and then never revisited -- how can you adequately write about someone's life if you act as though their child self is a separate person?).

As well as being a great biography, this book is also a very good look at why it's said you should never meet your idols. This book contains a very strange story of obsession and hero-worship, and with it comes all the expected inconvenient of putting a person on a pedestal. It's impossible to not feel sorry for pretty much everyone involved here, even if there are multiple places that make it very clear that a lot of these people were not exactly stellar examples of conscience and morality. Still, such are the facts when you're dealing with real people -- this book's almost casual honestly makes it perfectly possible to recognise the weight of what's occurring (and its implications) without getting too caught up in judging the players. This book was clearly written to tell a story, rather than encourage readers to forgive or condemn. Biographies that can present facts and leave you to make up your own mind are always very enjoyable.

There were a couple of places -- and only a couple -- where things felt a little repetitive, but it wasn't enough to be really annoying and it didn't happen often. Some lenience has to be made for the fact that when dealing with people's real lived lives, there are going to be things that occur and reoccur many times, and attention has to be paid to them. Aside from these one or two brief incidents this really was everything I would want from a biography, and it's a fascinating look at an influential and very complicated person. It is a very entertaining read.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched and readable biography of a fascinating literary figure. Frances Wilson sets out her stall early on - this will be a 'De Quinceyan biography', revealing the man through an exploration of his twin obsessions of untimely death (particularly murder) and William Wordsworth. Although the biography does proceed chronologically, these themes are always to the fore.

The approach won't work for everyone. There is a lot written about his relationships with Coleridge and Wordsworth, while interesting aspects of his domestic life are dealt with very briefly. Wilson also sometimes strays into pure speculation about De Quincey's motives for his actions, such as his failure to complete his degree, while the facts are themselves eloquent enough. However, the book brilliantly captures De Quincey's eccentricity and his genius, and convincingly demonstrates his enduring influence - not only on memoir and journalism, but poetry and prose too.

A compelling and thoughtful portrait of a complex and mercurial figure.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Focused rather heavily on De Quincey's relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge to my taste, rather than on De Quincey's relationships with his family which are more important. I good read, as he still one of my favourite people.

[Mark Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, level-headed biography of a spoilt 19th century crackhead who was the original last Romantic; shines a light incidentally on the small coterie of the 'Lake poets' ( Wordsworth, Coleridge etc.) whose lives this 'opium-eater' came to disrupt. Frances Wilson shows how he hero-worshipped Wordsworth then turned on him,as his own life spiralled away into debt and addiction. It's the little details that stick in the mind: how Coleridge (another crackhead) messed up the domestic routine for his servant(!) by sleeping in due to a night on the opium(she couldn't get in to light the fire) ,how De Quincey in a fit of pique took a axe and destroyed a garden bower in Dove Cottage that Dorothy and William had built,married his servant,fathered several children he couldn't support -and later got publicly shamed several times in Edinburgh for his debts (being ’put to the horn').

And all these privileged writers living off inherited wealth - which allowed them the luxury of time to write,and think and wander about the countryside,instead of having to work in a factory. In a sense,De Quincey was the Romantics' Nemesis. They had it coming to them.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid look at De Quincey, which isn't obsessed with the effects of opium as much as most biographies of this author usually are.

While it is covered, and the negative impacts of its abuse must be noted on Thomas de Quincey's life, this is a much more rounded look at the life: the authorship, the friendships, and the usages of that drug. In fact, this is the biography of de Quincey to read if you want to focus more on his relationships with his fellow Romantics, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth does not come off well, and rarely does when he is not the subject of the biography, though his impact on de Quincey's life is immeasurable. De Quincey's life was a life of lifelong debt and evading creditors, while attempting to get his vision of the world into print. He was young when Lyrical Ballads made a sensation in the literary world, and he outlived all the Romantics well into the Victorian age, dying in 1859.

If there is a focus for Wilson's take, it is de Quincey's obsession with tales of murder and gruesomeness. Doors seem to have a massive importance for de Quincey, ever since his sister died when they were young and he waited outside the door as they knew the doctors were carrying out an autopsy by opening her skull. This moment seemed to impact his life ever after, and it appears he even referred to it on his own deathbed. It also appears, according to Wilson, that de Quincey essentially invented the murder mystery as we know it by reporting true stories of gruesome butcheries reported in the newspapers and trying to solve them. Even Edgar Allen Poe and Dickens was influenced by his articles on murder. As Wilson notes in the end, this makes us all de Quinceyan, with the prevalence of CSI tv shows, murder movies and stories, and the continuing popularity of mystery fiction. A balanced and highly readable approach. If you want another good recent biography that focuses more on the impact of opium and de Quincey's incredible writings on the subject, Robert Morrison's "The English Opium Eater" is another good one to read.

[Jen Crichton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frances Wilson brings to life this exceptional, maddening, and mad De Quincey and his fellow Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge. None of them are the sappy, moony figures you might imagine. They were ambitious, self-centered, perpetually broke, often aggrieved, brilliant, snobby, quick to use social connections professionally, bad husbands, and (not Wordsworth) drug addled. De Q was the most extreme of the bunch, though his fellow opium eater Coleridge comes in a close second. You will no longer view the whole Lake District gig with the same sentimentality after reading this biography (but important to realize this bunch elevated this region into a gold standard of natural beauty which became a core belief of modern Britain and ensured its survival and protection by the National Trust). And you will look upon the publishing world of Edinburgh as the precursor to our own sharp elbowed competition of wits. Dead broke, clothes in tatters, surrounded by towers of books and papers, De Q did some of his best work while still addicted to opium as well as to books and writing. He lived in an outsider land of dreaming-while-awake and waking-while-dreaming, in long communication with the dark spirits in his soul and in the past, present and future worlds, his many doppelgängers, his paradises lost and their many layers. Frances Wilson captures all this with a light, precise hand and shines a clear light on these Piranesi-like inner workings. Whew. What a writer they both are -- these polar opposite doppelgängers!

[Dr Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

In depth biography of author famed for his 'Confessions of an Opium-Eater', who after tumultuous years of chasing Wordsworth finally came into his own through writing murder accounts. Marrying Margaret, whom the Wordsworths disdained, brought De Quincey loads of children that he periodically abandoned, along with their mother. Eventually his children wound up looking after the widowed deQuincey, who had made an art out of living.
deQuincey inspired many others, not only through his Confessions but also his murder stories, notably Edgar Allen Poe.
This is a thoroughly de Quinceian biography, interwoven with tales of his childhood obsession with the death of his sister and with a street waif who befriended him in Soho. Vivid with details of poverty, street life in London, especially Soho and de Quincey's travels throughout England and Scotland. He infuriated and enchanted, made the ordinary strange.
Wilson's a sterling biographer, deeply immersing into details that bring de Quincey's audacity in life onto the page, making me marvel at how he, like the characters in his murders, could get away with it. Some details go heavily on, encouraging me to skip passages, yet still glued to the page, finding out 'whatever outrageous thing he did next?' I walked afterwards through Soho Square, somehow feeling de Quincey's and the waif's ghosts walking with me, imagining the grime, squalor and still somehow the mystery hanging in the air, looking at trees de Quincey could well have slept under, homeless and lusting for fame.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly entertaining work, well-written and researched on the weirdest and last romantic. A friends and acolyte of Coleridge and Wordworth when he was young, the obsessive-compulsive Quincey was addicted to buying books and (of course) opium. Wilson does a great job of showing the reader that De Quincey's genius was to have written so much despite being an opium addict, living on the run for fear of being thrown in the Scottish equivalent of debtors prison--he 'wore the horn' of a debtor ten times, having seven (or was it eight?) children and doing a poor job of providing for them. And yet... though the concept of the personal confession being with Rousseau (as opposed to the confessional for sin), De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater begat innumerable Confessions--I just looked up confessions on Google and came up with Confessions of a Shopaholic. He wrote fascinating accounts of grisly murders that were incredibly popular, and was a profound influence on writers in the United States, such as Poe, Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Britain Jane Austen and Charles Dickens sang his praises.
Not for everyone, no, but if you'd like to read a fascinating biography of one of the trailblazers of autobiography, murder mystery and non-fiction (though his non-fiction was more often than not fictional), this is the guy for you.

[SibylM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to win this book in a Goodreads Giveaway from the publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. An honest review was requested.
Let me start by saying I have never read anything by De Quincey, and very little by the English poets he was obsessed with (Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc.). I added this book to my TBR after seeing it get so many accolades last year. Nevertheless, it was an absolutely mesmerizing read. This is not a traditional biography, tracking the life of the subject in neat chronological order. Instead, you spend a lot of time inside the mind of De Quincey, learning about what influenced him, how he thought, and what he thought about. He's a much more interesting person than I had any idea before, and I'm so pleased that the author was able to help me learn about him in a new way. Highly recommended, especially for lovers of British history and literature.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good biography, although I think that Frances Wilson and I were primarily interested in different things. I wanted to read a little less a bout his writings and his opium habits and a little more about his shabby treatment of Dorothy Wordsworth and his poor long-suffering wife, who bore him eight children while living in poverty and died when her children were still young, presumably from exhaustion. (This aspect of De Quincey's life reminded me quite a bit of Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution.) Recommended if you're interested in the very Dickensian life of a Victorian writer.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this not for De Quincey, but to learn how Frances Wilson writes. The book shines in places, for instance I thought the opening third was very good. I think the book drags and meanders however, and this may simply be because De Quincey's life was not a scintillating story. He is foolish, squanders money, insults friends, and lives in poverty, on the run from debt collectors and addicted to opium.
De Quincey's greatness lies in his writing, but even there I felt Wilson was repetitive and focused so much on the murders that interested him that the book at times felt like it was about those murders and not the man himself. A.N. Wilson praised Frances and that is why I read the book, but I much prefer A.N to Frances so far. Perhaps her other books are better.

[James S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

De Quincey should be an interesting story: a literary celebrity destroyed by drugs, a stalker, an obsessive, a fraud. Yet this book tends to lose this story in thickets of detail. It can also be too academic at times. Finally, the (English) author presupposes that her readership will be intimately familiar with the geography of London and of England in general, which only adds to the frustrations of reading this book. Not recommended as a starting point.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think i went a bit weird reading this -- had dreams about de quincey, which was odd. he's super interesting! and very strange. v good biography, although v clear that wilson is just as interested in wordsworths + coleridge (if not more so) and while the tangents are interesting, they're not really necessary.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rich, dynamic, insightful, passionate portrait of the obsessive, perplexing, drug-addicted Romantic essayist, and his relationships with Coleridge, the Wordsworths and others in the Romantic circle.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this biography, and learnt so much about why DeQuincy is so influential, and all about the Romantic poets. It was a perfect follow up to Possession, by AS Byatt, both in terms of the author’s fascination and understanding of DeQuincy, and in DeQuincy’s fascination with Wordsworth.

[Matt Mackane | Books & Walking · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Readable biography of this literary pathbreaker.

[Helen Geng]

Read March 2021

[Lucas Foster]

No mental midget, but physically, yeah.

[Arnulfo Velasco · Rating 4 out of 5]

De todos los escritores ingleses del periodo romántico, probablemente es Thomas de Quincey el autor que finalmente ha tenido una mayor y más amplia aceptación fuera de su país. Los ingleses admiran mucho a William Woodsworth, el amigo y posteriormente rival de nuestro personaje. Pero yo, personalmente, encuentro la poesía de Woodsworth bastante carente de vigor. Más interesante es la obra de de Samuel Taylor Coleridge, otro de los iniciadores del movimiento romántico inglés, con poemas como "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" y "Kubla Khan", que contienen algunas imágenes formidables. Pero Thomas de Quincey sobresale por su prosa elegante e irónica, precisa y limpia, misma que fue muy admirada por autores como Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf y Jorge Luis Borges. Sus "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" siguen siendo el modelo de cualquier texto que plantee el problema de la adicción desde un punto de vista autobiográfico, y su "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" es el arquetipo de los libros que intentan hacer la reconstrucción de crímenes reales. Esta biografía ayuda a entender al hombre que escribió esas obras (y quizá también a las obras mismas) al plantearnos la figura de un individuo excéntrico y autodestructivo, notablemente inteligente y erudito y, sin embargo, totalmente incapaz de adaptarse a las circunstancias de la realidad.

[Ebirdy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not a biography for the likes of me. My knowledge of English literature is not broad enough for me to be able to appreciate the genius that others believe de Quincey to be. I had to really push myself to get through this. The first 150 pages were really a struggle; then it got somewhat more appealing to me, but it continued to gain and (mostly) lose momentum all the way to the end.

Perhaps a better way to approach this book would be to 1) read some of de Quincey's actual writing, and then 2) read another biography about him and only then turn to this one.

De Quincey wrote under the influence of opium most of his life; this book certainly gave you an idea of what that might have been like in it's style. I will say the author did a good job at the end of trying to show the power of his influence on others. It's clear she really respects her subject and she remained fairly dispassionate about him, portraying both his good and bad sides.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received Guilty Thing as part of a Goodreads giveaway.

Thomas de Quincey, known as the last of the Romantics, influenced generations of writers with his dark and haunting tales. Talent aside, however, he faced his own, very real, demons. A onetime protégée of Coleridge and Wordsworth, his addiction to opium eventually severed those relationships and sent de Quincey on a painful downward spiral that jeopardized his professional and personal lives.

I didn't know much about de Quincey, though the Bronte sisters (among many other great writers) were great admirers. As Jane Eyre is my favorite novel of all time, I was interested to learn more. His fascination with the more macabre aspects of our society was interesting, though I admit, the complicated tangle of relationships got a bit exhausting and dry. At times, I had hard time keeping track of who was whom. After reading, however, I'm interested in reading de Quincey's works, as I've enjoyed what I've read of 19th century Gothic literature.

[Bookforum Magazine]

"Frances Wilson's smart new biography of De Quincey judiciously narrates the life of a writer who responded to the question 'How came you to dream more splendidly than others?' with the answer, 'He whose talk is of oxen, will probably dream of oxen.'"

Wilson, who navigates De Quincey's work with a concision that is the polar opposite of her subject's restless prolixity, observes that there have been plenty of biographies of De Quincey, but her aim in Guilty Thing is to present the first 'De Quinceyan biography.'"

- Eric Banks on Frances Wilson's Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey in the Fall 2016 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/