Guilty Thing
A Life of Thomas De Quincey
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ISBN10: 0374537259
ISBN13: 9780374537258
Trade Paperback
416 Pages
$21.00
CA$28.50
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Biography
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Biography
Thomas De Quincey was an obsessive. He was obsessed with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose Lyrical Balladsprovided the script to his life, and by the idea of sudden death. Running away from school to pursue the two poets, De Quincey insinuated himself into their world. Basing his sensibility on Wordsworth’s and his character on Coleridge’s, he forged a triangle of unusual psychological complexity.
Aged twenty-four, De Quincey replaced Wordsworth as the tenant of Dove Cottage, the poet’s former residence in Grasmere. In this idyllic spot he followed the reports of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families, including a baby, were butchered in their own homes. In his opium-soaked imagination the murderer became a poet while the poet became a murderer. Embedded in On Murder as One of the Fine Arts, De Quincey’s brilliant series of essays, Frances Wilson finds the startling story of his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Opium was the making of De Quincey, allowing him to dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, and divest himself of guilt. Opium also allowed him to write, and under the pseudonym “The Opium-Eater” De Quincey emerged as the strangest and most original journalist of his age. His influence has been considerable. Poe became his double; Dostoevsky went into exile with Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in his pocket; and Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vladimir Nabokov were all De Quincey devotees.
There have been other biographies of Thomas De Quincey, but Guilty Thing is the first to be animated by the spirit of De Quincey himself. Following the growth of his obsessions from seed to full flowering and tracing the ways they intertwined, Frances Wilson finds the master key to De Quincey’s vast Piranesian mind. Unraveling a tale of hero worship and revenge, Guilty Thing brings the last of the Romantics roaring back to life and firmly establishes Wilson as one of our foremost contemporary biographers.
Reviews
Praise for Guilty Thing
"Wilson’s book is a revelatory study of its subject . . . She is a biographer with a De Quinceyan eye for pattern, and a sharp sense of the ironies that made her subject’s life at once so rich and so depleted."—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"De Quincey recommended biography be written 'com amore' and 'con odio.' Love and hate. Frances Wilson delicately flavors her biography of the early-19th-century writer with both condiments but, above all, without censure . . . There have been many excellent biographies of De Quincey. Wilson's is original by virtue of being primarily an investigation into the extraordinary 'palimpsest' of his mind . . . [An] exemplary book."—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review
"She has set out, with immense energy and flait, to 'hunt' De Quincey 'though all his doubles,' and unlike previous biographers . . . Wilson [is] especially prepared for the ambiguous, shape-shifting, changeling, illusive quality in De Quincey. She sees the need for stylistic fireworks as well as steady scholarship to illuminate his life. She writes with speed, flamboyance, and constant changes of viewpoint and perspective, offset by moments of calm, shrewd analysis . . . [A] risky, sprightly, passionate biography, which goes further than anything previously in catching the strange, elusive Opium Eater."—Richard Holmes, The New York Review of Books
"In Guilty Thing, her entertaining, intellectually brilliant biography of De Quincey, Frances Wilson is just as truthful and evocative as her subject."—Jamie James, The Wall Street Journal
"Wildly entertaining . . . Wilson renders De Quincey's life with extraordinary sympathy and sensitivity, a beautifully written account of one of our oddest writers."—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
"[Guilty Thing] eschews the traditional modes of biography—the recitation of a life’s arc, its major milestones, and an even-tempered portrayal—in favor of something as death-haunted and murder-obsessed as De Quincey himself . . . Wilson’s prose is at its best . . . when she mirrors and amplifies De Quincey’s own style . . . Guilty Thing is less unruly but still captures that propulsion that drives De Quincey’s greatest writings . . . Wilson’s book seeks to capture the rush and urgency of a life lived in extremis. It is a portrait that, to quote De Quincey himself in one of his essays on Shakespeare, offers a 'life below a life;' a subterranean thread picked out from the totality of biography, brought to the surface."—Colin Dickey, The New Republic
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BOOK EXCERPTS
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Books
In memory of all books which lay
Their sure foundations in the heart of man
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Fifth
The first chapter of Thomas De Quincey’s...
About the author
Frances Wilson
