De Quincey, THOMAS, author of Confessions of an English Opium-eater, and of many volumes of essays, criticism, and narrative, was born in Manchester on 15th August 1785. His father, Thomas Quincey, was a linen-merchant with a turn for literature; his mother, whose maiden name was Penson, was a woman of superior position and culture. Of eight children, Thomas was the fifth. An elder brother of imaginative temperament exercised much influence over him; and he records that he was profoundly impressed in childhood by the death of an infant sister. His early years were spent at a mansion built by his father near Manchester, named Greenhay; there his father died of consumption in 1792, leaving his widow and family well provided for. Thomas attended school first at Salford, then at Bath grammar-school, later at Winkfield, Wiltshire, and lastly at Manchester grammar-school. He was an apt scholar; he could converse fluently in Greek at fifteen. In 1802, when he was seventeen years of age, his health failed; and as his guardians refused to remove him from school, he ran away, to wander and study in Wales. He was allowed a guinea a week; but restlessness and want of books and of social intercourse impelled him towards London. There, failing to raise money on his expectations, he underwent singular experiences and privations, related with picturesque power in the Confessions. Ultimately he was sent to Worcester College, Oxford, on the inadequate allowance of £100 a year. He disliked and perhaps despised the university system, and left in 1807.
It was in Oxford that De Quincey first resorted to opium to allay pain; the use of the drug for that purpose, and also as a mental stimulant, subsequently became an overmastering and lifelong habit. His mother had now settled near Bath, and at Bristol De Quincey became acquainted with Coleridge's family; and through that connection visited Wordsworth and Southey at the Lakes. In 1808 he revisited Oxford; then went back to London, where he associated with Knight, Lamb, Hazlitt, and other men of letters. In 1809, having provided himself with an ample library, he settled to a literary career at Grasmere.
Here, in 1816, he married Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a 'statesman,' one of nature's gentlewomen. They had eight children, three daughters and five sons, two of whom distinguished themselves as soldiers. For about a year (1819) he edited the Westmoreland Gazette, a weekly paper published at Kendal, and was an undistinguished contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, the Quarterly Review, and other periodicals, till, returning to London in 1821, his Confessions appeared in the London Magazine, and at once made him famous. His nom de plume, 'The English Opium-eater,' was used till he came to be known by his proper name, in writing which he assumed the Norman prefix de. From London he returned to his wife and family at Grasmere, but finally left Westmorland in 1828, and settled in Edinburgh; and there, or at Lasswade, near Edinburgh, with only an occasional visit to Glasgow, he lived and worked till his death, on 8th December 1859. Blackwood's, Tait's Magazine, and latterly Hogg's Instructor, were for upwards of twenty years the successive receptacles of his brilliant though often diffuse and discursive papers. The Logie of Political Economy (1844), a philosophical contribution to that study, and a romantic story or novel, Klosterheim (1839)—his sole and not very successful effort in regular fiction—were issued as books; all his other writings appeared in magazines.
No 'periodical' writer of the 19th century holds a like high and apparently permanent place in English literature with De Quincey. Of several collected editions of his works, the first was one issued in America (1852-55), in 20 vols.; a second, revised by De Quincey, in 14 vols.; another, extended, in 17 vols.; and a fifth, in 1889-91, in 14 vols., ed. by Prof. Masson. De Quincey's writings range over a vast field of literary and semi-philosophical speculation and discussion; and there, as well as in his narrative, historical, critical, and biographical essays, almost faultless refinement of style and marvellous mastery of phrase are conspicuous and charming. In criticism he is original and acute, if not exhaustive or profound; in narrative he marshals facts and incidents in the most picturesque garb and order; in argument he is always subtle, and often vigorous. His playful fancy and wealth of whimsical and humorous allusion enliven almost every topic, and the daring conception and gorgeous colouring of his opium-haunted dreams are not less admirable than the pomp and refinement of the language in which he clothes those weird and wondrous visions. De Quincey is, however, often distressingly diffuse and provokingly addicted to complex involutions of phrase and statement—parenthesis within parenthesis. He is therefore at his best when those tendencies are under control, as in certain passages in the Confessions, or in the splendid apostrophes—examples of what he himself calls 'impassioned prose'—that glorify such papers as 'Joan of Arc.' See Page's (A. H. Japp's) Life and Writings of De Quincey (1877), and Memorials (2 vols. 1891); Masson's De Quincey ('English Men of Letters' series, 1881), Selections (2 vols. 1888); Personal Recollections, by the present writer (1886); Hogg's De Quincey and his Friends (1895).