Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
    Unavailable
    Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
    Unavailable
    Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
    Ebook599 pages8 hours

    Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

    By Frances Wilson

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    'Life for De Quincey was either angels ascending on vaults of cloud or vagrants shivering on the city streets.'

    Thomas De Quincey - opium-eater, celebrity journalist, and professional doppelgänger – is embedded in our culture. Modelling his character on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the poet's former cottage in Grasmere and turned it into an opium den. Here, increasingly detached from the world, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and his obsession with murder as one of the fine arts.

    De Quincey may never have felt the equal of the giants of the Romantic Literature he so worshipped but the writing style he pioneered – scripted and sculptured emotional memoir – was to inspire generations of writers: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf. James Joyce knew whole pages of his work off by heart and he was arguably the father of what we now call psychogeography.

    This spectacular biography, the produce of meticulous scholarship and beautifully supple prose, tells the riches-to-rags story of a figure of dazzling complexity and dazzling originality, whose rackety life was lived on the run, and both brings De Quincey and his martyred but wild soul triumphantly to life and firmly establishes Frances Wilson in the front rank of contemporary biographers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateApr 7, 2016
    ISBN9781408839768
    Unavailable
    Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
    Author

    Frances Wilson

    Frances Wilson is a critic, journalist and the author of three works of non-fiction, Literary Seductions, The Courtesan's Revenge and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2009. She lives in London with her daughter.

    Read more from Frances Wilson

    Related to Guilty Thing

    Related ebooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      DANCING with DESTINY

      Oct 22, 2019

      FROM BACKING A newly electrified Bob Dylan to carving out woody, jagged guitar lines in the Band, Robbie Robertson has been part of the fabric of American rock. And no instrument is more associated with him than the bronze-coated ’54 Strat he used on

      8 min read

    • Article

      Window On Hotere

      Oct 18, 2020

      Window On Hotere
      6 min read

    • Article

      Le Carré's Dirty Linen

      Oct 18, 2023

      The Secret Life of John le Carré By Adam Sisman Profile Books £16.99 Halfway through Adam Sisman's 2015 biography of John le Carré, something odd occurs. The book simply shuts up shop. You can all but hear the rattle of the roller shutter as if it's

      3 min read

    • Article

      Sculptor, Wrecker And Seducer

      May 27, 2021

      Sculptor, Wrecker And Seducer
      4 min read

    • Article

      TALKING POINTS The Write Stuff

      Aug 6, 2020

      TALKING POINTS The Write Stuff
      1 min read

    • Article

      JEFF BECK & Jimmy Page

      Mar 7, 2023

      One day, maybe soon, geologists and hydrographers will perform studies in and around Surrey, England, to divine the magical compounds that have contributed to a strange and almost unbelievable phenomenon: Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton — thre

      9 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Nov 14, 2022

      Limberlost begins with a whale, not a marlin: an almost-mythical beast at the mouth of a Tasmanian river, troubling the waves with its fluked tail. But Robbie Arnott’s third novel carries echoes of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece. As its hero pits him

      3 min read

    • Article

      Encounters

      Nov 24, 2022

      Encounters
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Story Of Lakeland

      Apr 7, 2022

      The Story Of Lakeland
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen

      Mar 25, 2019

      Porter's second book is an attempt to capture a village, entirely, in language, and it does so by trying to represent the village’s breadth of narrative voices. The post The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen appeared first on The

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Unlikely Viking

      Sep 18, 2020

      The Unlikely Viking
      8 min read

    • Article

      Letter Boks

      Feb 4, 2021

      I READ that Christopher Columbus was 41 years old when he went to America, and as a consequence everyone celebrates him to this day. I was 25 when I first landed on the East Coast of the USA, and yet not one book has been written about me despite the

      18 min read

    • Article

      Unraveling the Questions

      Sep 1, 2022

      Unraveling the Questions
      4 min read

    • Article

      Hidden Histories

      Nov 25, 2021

      Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist who should be remembered not just for the quality of his writing, but as the earliest recorded writer from the Caribbean to make his living from the profession. I studied Caribbean literature at university,

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Guilty Thing

    4/5

    12 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Great read.
    • 5/5
      Great read.
    • 5/5
      Thomas De Quincy is generally remembered for his Diary Of an English Opium Eater. I once had a 19th c copy of that book and read it, or rather read at it. As far as the Romantic Era in literature, I knew a little Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge from college days.Then a few years ago, I read Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws, a marvelous book on Mary Shelly and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Godwin Shelly heard Coleridge recite his famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner one night when she was supposed to be in bed. I learned about Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord Byron. This whole, crazy, pre-Victorian wild world was a marvel. Why didn't my teachers tell us these things back in the 60's? Surely we would have understood the Romantic counter-culture as similar to the world we were growing up in!My interest piqued, I finally was able to pick up this biography of De Quincy and through his life learned about William Wordsworth and Coleridge and the movement they founded, which had lured De Quincy to them like a moth to a flame, sure he had found his true home in their philosophyWhat an interesting life! De Quincy was well-read and had a capacious memory. He thought that school had nothing to teach him and he dropped out just before gaining his degree. He lived on the street, sharing any good fortune with a young prostitute. Coming of age, he inherited wealth, then squandered it.Wilson describes this diminutive man, shy and uncertain, his brain packed with learning and books, standing on the path to Wordsworth's cottage with fear and trembling, then running away, gathering his courage to approach again several years later. First, he introduced himself to Wordsworth's special friend, Coleridge. Finally meeting, De Quincy, an ardent apostle, was taken in by William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. William was distant but Dorothy became close to the younger De Quincy. And over the years, a disappointed De Quincy broke away from Wordsworth the man while still admiring his literary oeuvre.Familiarity breeds contempt is one lesson from De Quincy's life. Another lesson is that opium was perceived as a creative aid, but in reality, destroyed the body and pocketbook. And kept De Quincy from achieving the success that seemed to drop into Wordsworth's lap. The Romantic Era turned to sensibility, deeply felt emotions, in a pendulum swing away from the Age of Reason. Just as in the 1960s, drugs were believed to open the mind. De Quincy was not alone in his opium use; along with Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, we can add Branwell Bronte, the brilliant and doomed brother of his more illustrious sisters, who appeared at De Quincy's door in homage. De Quincy, avidly avoiding his creditors, did not answer. The drug was easily obtained because it was standard pharmaceutical fare. And John Jacob Aster made a fortune by shipping it to England. De Quincy loved children, including his own, but was a lousy provider and part-time family man. Well, who can write at home surrounded by kids and wife and debt collectors? No, De Quincy needed a little open space amidst his piles of papers and tens of thousands of books. He was the original hoarder except he only hoarded the printed word.I enjoyed Guilty Thing as a biography of De Quincy and as a colorful and delightful study of his world. (What amazes me is that during this same time period Jane Austen was writing her comedies of manners, showing us the failings of Marianne's sensibility and Catherine's Gothic imaginings!)I won this book from the publisher from a Goodreads Giveaway.