page_title: Thomas De Quincey
section_title: Financial pressures
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas De Quincey / Financial pressures
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Thomas DeQuincey
context_page_description: Thomas Penson De Quincey was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West.
context_section_description: Along with his opium addiction, debt was one of the primary constraints of De Quincey's adult life. He pursued journalism as the one way available to him to pay his bills; and without financial need it is an open question how much writing he would ever have done.
  De Quincey came into his patrimony at the age of 21, when he received £2,000 from his late father's estate. He was unwisely generous with his funds, making loans that could not or would not be repaid, including a £300 loan to Coleridge in 1807. After leaving Oxford without a degree, he made an attempt to study law, but desultorily and unsuccessfully; he had no steady income and spent large sums on books (he was a lifelong collector). By the 1820s he was constantly in financial difficulties. More than once in his later years, De Quincey was forced to seek protection from arrest in the debtors' sanctuary of Holyrood in Edinburgh. (At the time, Holyrood Park formed a debtors' sanctuary; people could not be arrested for debt within those bounds. The debtors who took sanctuary there could only emerge on Sundays, when arrests for debt were not allowed.) Yet De Quincey's money problems persisted; he got into further difficulties for debts he incurred within the sanctuary.
  His financial situation improved only later in his life. His mother's death in 1846 brought him an income of £200 per year. When his daughters matured, they managed his budget more responsibly than he ever had himself.
caption: Thomas De Quincey
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