The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey
Known for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), De Quincey was a penetrating essayist whose reputation also rests on critiques of English literature and stories regarded as progenitors of horror fiction. However muchDe Quincey’s place in letters may interest modern readers, his chaotic life will augment their number. An absolute fool about money, De Quincey continually astounds biographer Morrison by his repetitious descents into barefooted destitution and heroic but desperately fantastic schemes to recoup his fortunes. His woes were exacerbated by lifelong opium ingestion, a continuous thread throughout Morrison’s narrative, which partakes of De Quincey’s self-lacerating candor in letters to creditors, editors, family, and friends. If expressive intensity from the despondent to the ecstatic defines the romantic sensibility, De Quincey exemplified the zeitgeist. That he also knew everybody—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb—spices up Morrison’s vivid portrait of an unprepossessing, painfully polite, but determined personality who, though he did not invent confessional self-dramatization, innovated within the form through his crisis-ridden literary life. Connoisseurs of biography in any subject area will relish Morrison’s pace and occasional puzzlement toward his subject. --Gilbert Taylor