Guilty Thing
A Life of Thomas De Quincey
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
**LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2016**
**New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement and Guardian Best Books of 2016**
'Life for De Quincey was either angels ascending on vaults of cloud or vagrants shivering on the city streets.'
The last of the Romantics, Thomas De Quincey is a name synonymous with scandal. Modelling his character on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the latter's former cottage and turned it into an opium den. Here, in the throes of his high, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and wrote the notorious and fascinatingly strange essay 'On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts'.
Despite never achieving the literary deification of his contemporaries, his narrative style – 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.
Guilty Thing tells the riches-to-rags story of a dazzlingly complex and troubled figure, whose life was lived on the run, and affords De Quincey the literary biography he deserves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson (How to Survive the Titanic: or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay) will enthrall readers with this mesmerizing and agile biography of English writer Thomas De Quincey, "the last of the Romantics." De Quincey (1785 1859) is best known for the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which kicked off his literary career and arguably gave birth to the genre of literature devoted to addiction and recovery. Wilson makes a good case that opium, which De Quincey began taking at 19, was the making of him, freeing him from his "torments" and allowing him unfettered access to his inner life. Wilson captures De Quincey's riches-to-rags story, complex personality ("at core were his addictions. Opium was one and debt another"), and obsession with the poet William Wordsworth, whose writing he revered, but whom he grew to loathe personally. Wilson also reveals that, for all of De Quincey's classical learning, he was a "born journalist" with a taste for sensationalism, as well as a talented biographer responsible for some of the best portraits of Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy. In an impressively researched biography as dazzling as its subject, Wilson highlights De Quincey's influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Baudelaire, and many others, amply demonstrating his lasting influence.
