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Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. Highly intelligent but with a rebellious spirit, he was offered a place at Oxford University while still a student at Manchester Grammar School. But unwilling to complete his studies, he ran away and lived on the streets, first in Wales and then in London. Eventually he returned home and took up his place at Oxford, but quit before completing his degree. A friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he eventually settled in Grasmere in the Lake District and worked as a journalist. He first wrote about his opium experiences in essays for The London Magazine, and these were printed in book form in 1822. De Quincey died in 1859.
Among the best essayists of the Romantic era . . . De Quincey may be viewed as a proto-Burroughs, as well as a British cousin to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire * Washington Post * Thomas De Quincey was the original cosmonaut of inner space, his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater predating the wave of drug buddy literature from William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh by half a century or more * Glasgow Herald * A stimulating cocktail: exotic dream sequences conjured up in baroque prose-poetry, camp Gothic effects worthy of Hammer Horror, classical quotations, London street-slang and sprawling footnotes on German philosophy * Mail on Sunday * The first – and still the finest – literary dope fiend * Guardian * It is one of the classics of nineteenth-century life writing and its influence is still felt * Observer *
