He was
physically small, just under five feet tall. He was constantly in debt, hounded
by his creditors, often shuttling between his family and an official sanctuary
at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh. As a young man, he stalked William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He married well below his station, and while fathering
nine children he would abandon his family for months at a time.
He was also one
of the most brilliant men of his age – an age that specialized in producing
brilliant men (and women). His essays are still considered among the best ever
written. He created a literary sub-genre – the memoir of addiction. He invented
a new kind of professional critic, creating the review-like essay (still a
trademark of The New York Times Book
Review, The London Review of Books,
and numerous other publications).
He helped invent
tabloid journalism. He had a direct influence on such authors as Edgar Allen
Poe, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jorge
Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Baudelaire, Nikolai Gogol, William
Burroughs, D.H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Henrik Ibsen, Vladimir
Nabokov, and Truman Capote, to mention a few. His influence even extended to
the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Thomas De Quincey
(1785-1859) came of age in the Romantic era, was friends with Wordsworth and
Coleridge and their families, and likely did more to shape the literary canon
of the 19th and 20th centuries than any other writer. And
he is the subject of a new biography, Guilty
Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, by Frances Wilson.
To continue
reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Painting: Thomas De Quincey, oil on
canvas by Sir John Watson-Gordon (1846).
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