De Quincey's Revisions in the “Dream-Fugue”

Abstract

The revisions that a writer makes in a work often reveal his method of composition and thus add to our knowledge of his creative process. In an effort to increase our understanding of the creative practices of De Quincey, I have undertaken an analysis of the revisions that he made in the “Dream-Fugue.”There are extant three different, but incomplete, versions of the “Dream-Fugue.” These are: (1) The manuscript submitted to Blackwood's Magazine in 1849, now in possession of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. The manuscript, which contains all except a portion of the last paragraph of the first four parts of the article, is a holograph and thus shows the revisions that De Quincey made while preparing the work. (2) The article as it appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in December 1849, being printed apparently from the holograph. (3) The article as it was published in the Author's Edition in 1854, showing the revisions De Quincey made in the magazine version when he included it as part of his collected works. In addition to these versions which are of some length, we have a fragment of three paragraphs found among De Quincey's papers after his death and published in 1891 by A.H. Japp in The Posthumous Works of De Quincey. Thus, we have four documents containing all or portions of the “Dream-Fugue,” with the holograph showing the most changes and therefore being the most useful in determining the author's pattern of revision.