IN A JULY 1907 LETTER TO H. S. SALT, EMILY DE QUINCEY CLAIMED THAT her father's taste in fiction got beyond Mrs. Radcliffe stage. He was but a poor judge of a novel, Emily affirms, make nothing of modern with its pictures of real life. (1) Emily's claim Quincey could make nothing of modern novel is, of course, something of a generalization (and no compliment to Anne Radcliffe). However, it is undoubtedly true--as D. D. Devlin points out--that De Quincey's failure to take seriously has damaged his prestige as a critic. (2) It must seem odd, Devlin concludes, that someone so intelligently alert to Wordsworth's greatness should [have been] blind to genius of Dickens or Emily Bronte (26). The aim of present piece is to reappraise this particular Quinceyan oddity, specifically to recover an historical and political context for Quincey's attitude to novel. This recovery is important, it seems to me, not only because Quincey's writing about writing has yet to benefit from recent renaissance in Quincey studies per se, but also because writing bears significantly upon Romanticism's arguably defining engagement with new reading public. (3) Quincey's dismissal of cannot be detached, I will argue, from his sense rise of represents a threat to model of and, moreover, to model of authorship, he valorizes under rubric of of Power. More precisely, Quincey sees rise of as symptomatic of a dangerous shift in balance of power in author-reader relationship, a shift provoked by enormous expansion of reading and attendant commercialization of Literature (4.298). His writing about writing construes this threat, explicitly, in terms of revolutionary social insurgency. In fact, as I will argue, Quincey's concern about threat to from rise of new reading public echoes his earlier anxieties about origins and implications of popular agitation for Parliamentary Reform. In both cases, an expanding merchant middle-class is understood to represent a revolutionary threat to traditional 'authority,' a threat is being facilitated by perceived apostasy of those who should have most reason to oppose it, be they landed gentry or gentleman scholars. Quincey's own allegiance in this revolution, as gentleman scholar turned professional journalist, remains self-consciously and uncomfortably ambiguous. The larger claim of present piece, then, is Quincey's writing about writing, and his writing about rise of in particular, sheds significant light on politics of Romanticism's relationship with literary marketplace. (4) We need to begin, I think, by recognizing extent to which scholarly accounts of Quincey's writing about writing have detached his dismissal of from its broader political context, both within Quincey's work and beyond it. In fact, scholarly accounts of Quincey's attitude to have continued to operate within a critical vocabulary derived largely from Quincey's own texts, although we might ultimately trace vocabulary to William Wordsworth. Quincey ostensibly relegates to the minor key of literature because it falls outside category of writing which he defines as of Power, writing, in short, which makes us feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting, which enables deep sympathy with truth (11.61; 10.48; 8.6). (5) In other words, Quincey's work draws a fairly consistent distinction between formal, thematic and affective characteristics of and those of poetry or impassioned prose comprise of Power. So, for example, while of Power produces an awareness of the infinity of world within, novels speak to what is least permanent in human sensibilities; while of Power organizes and actualizes inert and sleeping modes of feeling, novels cater only to meaner functions of mind; while of Power is immortal, all novels . …