De Quincey

Abstract

Abstract There have been few stranger literary careers. By the age of seventeen De Quincey had decided that his life was to be that of a thinker and a man of letters, and he had jotted down an ambitious list of works that he intended to write: by his late twenties he was even more firmly resolved to become ‘the intellectual benefactor’ of his species, to accomplish ‘a great revolution in the intellectual condition of the world’ which would include in its scope a complete reform of education, philosophy, and mathematics. But since, ‘like all persons … in possession of original knowledge’, he was unwilling to ‘sell’ his wisdom ‘for money’, he seems to have published virtually nothing, except a long note on Sir )ohn Moore prefixed to Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra, until he was thirty-three. He then became editor of a provincial journal of small circulation and less importance, the Westmorland Gazette. By this time he seems also to have decided to contribute to the Reviews, for in August 1820 we find William Blackwood reproaching him with a ‘long bygone engagement to the Magazine’. The following year his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater were published in the London Magazine and he became a celebrity overnight.