- 417 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
National Book Critics Circle Award,
Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
New York Times Book Review,
Times Literary Supplement and
The Guardian Best Books of 2016
Thomas De Quincey was an obsessive. He was obsessed with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose
Lyrical Ballads provided the script to his life, and by the idea of sudden death. Running away from school to pursue the two poets, De Quincey insinuated himself into their world. Basing his sensibility on Wordsworth's and his character on Coleridge's, he forged a triangle of unusual psychological complexity.
Aged twenty-four, De Quincey replaced Wordsworth as the tenant of Dove Cottage, the poet's former residence in Grasmere. In this idyllic spot he followed the reports of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families, including a baby, were butchered in their own homes. In his opium-soaked imagination the murderer became a poet while the poet became a murderer. Embedded in
On Murder as One of the Fine Arts, De Quincey's brilliant series of essays, Frances Wilson finds the startling story of his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Opium was the making of De Quincey, allowing him to dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, and divest himself of guilt. Opium also allowed him to write, and under the pseudonym "The Opium-Eater" De Quincey emerged as the strangest and most original journalist of his age. His influence has been considerable. Poe became his double; Dostoevsky went into exile with
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in his pocket; and Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vladimir Nabokov were all De Quincey devotees.
There have been other biographies of Thomas De Quincey, but
Guilty Thing is the first to be animated by the spirit of De Quincey himself. Following the growth of his obsessions from seed to full flowering and tracing the ways they intertwined, Frances Wilson finds the master key to De Quincey's vast Piranesian mind. Unraveling a tale of hero worship and revenge,
Guilty Thing brings the last of the Romantics roaring back to life and firmly establishes Wilson as one of our foremost contemporary biographers.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Notice
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Maps
- The Prelude
- 1. Books
- 2. Childhood and Schooltime
- 3. Schooltime (continued)
- 4. Residence in London
- 5. Summer Vacation
- 6. Residence at Oxford
- 7. Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind
- 8. Home at Grasmere
- 9. Residence in Dove Cottage and the Revolution
- 10. Residence in London and Grasmere
- 11. The Recluse
- 12. Imagination, Impaired and Restored
- 13. Same Subject (continued)
- 14. Postscript
- The Tables Turned
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- Also by Frances Wilson
- A Note About the Author
- Newsletter Sign-up
- Contents
- Copyright