Thomas De Quincey and the Edinburgh Saturday Post of 1827

Abstract

The Edinburgh Saturday Post was an eight-page weekly newspaper that ran from 12 May 1827 to 3 May 1828. After that it continued as the Edinburgh Evening Post. The Post would be of little importance today except that one of its weekly writers was Thomas De Quincey, the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and of several memoirs of his literary friends including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. Although De Quincey never mentions the Edinburgh Post in his other essays, there is no doubt he contributed many anonymous articles to it, from about the middle of 1827. His work for the paper was disregarded until 1966, when Stuart Tave reprinted twenty-three pieces from the 1827 Post (and sixteen from the 1828 Post ) that are clearly De Quincey's. 1 The first thirty-five of those articles, together with fifty newly-attributed articles from the same Edinburgh Saturday Post, now constitute Volume Five (which I edited) in The Works of Thomas De Quincey (gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols., London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003; hereafter cited as Works ). (The remaining four pieces in Dr. Tave's collection, from the same paper after it was renamed the Evening Post, are in Volume Six of the new Works. ) The purpose of the present essay is to tell, for the first time in print, the detailed story of De Quincey's involvement with the 1827 Post, with a view to supporting the attributions in Volume Five. It is hoped that this new contextual information concerning De Quincey's unusual position (as both an Englishman and the only writer of recognized literary ability on the staff of a tiny Scottish newspaper) will lend strength to the eighty-five attributions in Volume Five, which are necessarily brief and necessarily rely mainly on the internal evidence of style and content. De Quincey was forty-one when he started writing for the Post. He desperately needed money to support his wife and children in the English lake district. His only previous newspaper-work had been as the editor of the Westmorland Gazette in 1818-19. After that job ended, De Quincey wrote articles for the London Magazine, 1821-24, and for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, beginning in 1826. 2 Despite the success of his Confessions of an [End Page 235] English Opium-Eater in 1821, De Quincey was not yet well-known as an author in Edinburgh. When Thomas Carlyle met "De Quincy" there in November 1827, he was appalled at the poverty which kept the Englishman tied to the Post: It might soften a very hard heart to see him . . . so weak and poor; retiring home with his two children to a miserable lodging-house, and writing all day for the King of Donkies, the Proprietor of the Saturday Post. 3 No article in the Edinburgh Saturday Post ever carried the name of its author. Nor did the Saturday Post ever mention Thomas De Quincey by name, initials, or pseudonym "the Opium-Eater." As a result, critics until lately have underestimated his involvement. But in the last few years it has been shown that De Quincey was the paper's editor for two months in 1827, secondly that he furnished most of its leading-articles in that year, 4 and thirdly that he was still submitting essays to the Post well beyond 1827. 5 De Quincey's other Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood, confided privately in October 1827 that De Quincey "has been it seems for a few weeks the Editor" of the Post. 6 Years later, another writer recalled working for "the Saturday Evening Post . . . during the administration of De Quincey." 7 It is also now believed that De Quincey had a contract that required him to supply articles to the paper on a weekly basis. 8 One problem in investigating the Post is that many of its articles were revised by editors or typesetters, while other articles combined the efforts of more...