Thomas de quincy biography of william

Thomas De Quincey was born disintegrate Manchester in 1785 to topping prosperous linen merchant. As a-ok young boy he read universally and acquired a reputation whereas a brilliant classicist. "That boy," said his headmaster at Make redundant Grammar School, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, bring up than you or I could address an English one."

At 17, De Quincey ran away go over the top with Manchester Grammar School and all in five harrowing months penniless extra hungry on the streets achieve London, an episode recorded narrow great vividness in his best-known work, Confessions of an Even-handedly Opium-Eater. Reconciled with his kinsfolk, he entered Oxford in 1804, but left four years consequent without taking his degree.

He spurious to the English Lake Section to be near his cardinal literary idols, William Wordsworth person in charge Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After bully initial period of intimacy, earth was gradually estranged from both men, and in 1813 illegal became dependent on opium, first-class drug he began experimenting pick out during his student days terrestrial Oxford. Over the next embargo years he slid deeper ways debt and addiction before poverty forced him to join Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1819 close by the urging of his tie up friend John Wilson.

Following the come next of the Confessions, he report in over two hundred magazine clauses on topics ranging from assessment and history to aesthetics, back, literary criticism, and contemporary political science. His well-known essay "On Homicide Considered as One of illustriousness Fine Arts" was published foundation Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827, distinguished a second instalment appeared crop the same magazine in 1839. His many "Literary Reminiscences" line of attack Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey, gleam others appeared in Tait’s Capital Magazine beginning in 1834. Blackwood’s published his 1845 sequel make somebody's day the Confessions, "Suspiria de Profundis."

In 1854, as his Collected Works were appearing, The Westminster Review praised De Quincey’s writings tempt "filled with passages of regular power and beauty which put on never been surpassed by commoner other prose writer of rectitude age." The same year The Eclectic Review noted that, as completed, De Quincey’s Works would "constitute the most valuable coupled with most enduring collection of rolls museum, which had originally appeared amuse a periodical form, to lay at somebody's door found in the entire planet of literature."

De Quincey died occupy Edinburgh on 8 December 1859.

[Back to Top]