Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

by Frances Wilson Narrated by Mil Nicholson

Overview

A dynamic biography of one of the most mysterious members of Wordsworth's circle and the last of the Romantics

Thomas De Quincey-opium eater, celebrity journalist, and professional doppelgänger-is embedded in our culture. Modeling his character on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the latter's cottage in Grasmere and turned it into an opium den. There, increasingly detached from the world, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and his obsession with murder as one of the fine arts.

Though De Quincey may never have felt the equal of the giants of romantic literature, the writing style he pioneered-scripted and sculptured emotional memoir-would inspire generations of writers, including Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Virginia Woolf. James Joyce knew whole pages of his work by heart.

As Frances Wilson writes, “Life for De Quincey was either angels ascending on vaults of cloud or vagrants shivering on the city streets.” In this spectacular biography, Wilson's meticulous scholarship and supple prose tells the riches-to-rags story of a figure of dazzling complexity and originality, whose life was lived on the run yet who came to influence some of the world's greatest literature. Guilty Thing brings De Quincey and his martyred but wild soul triumphantly to life and firmly establishes Wilson as one of our foremost contemporary biographers.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - John Sutherland

De Quincey recommended biography be written "con 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. But De Quincey's best biographer, Wilson reminds us, will always be De Quincey himself.

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/13/2016
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. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

Publishers Weekly Ten Best Nonfiction Books of 2016

"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, 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 . . . ." —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, 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 . . ." —Colin Dickey, The New Republic

"Frances Wilson's smart new biography of De Quincey, Guilty Thing, judiciously narrates the life of a writer who responded to the question 'How cam you to dream more splendidly than others?' with the answer 'He whose talk is of oxen, will probably dream of oxen.' . . . With the recent publication of a new Works of Thomas De Quincey and scholarly biographies by Grevel Lindop and Robert Morrison, perhaps attention is being redirected in a promising way. Frances Wilson's book will play no small part in this sublimely pleasant development." —Eric Banks, Bookforum

"[A] superb new biography . . . Wilson, who has shown herself to be a remarkable biographer of such strikingly different Romantic figures as the courtesan Harriette Wilson and Dorothy Wordsworth, sees the subterranean influence of the perennially peripheral De Quincey burbling up wherever she looks . . . Wilson is De Quincey’s first De Quinceyan biographer. Herself densely allusive, she follows him on his Piranesian stairways with balletic aplomb." —Alexandra Mullen, The New Criterion

"This is a mesmerizing and agile biography of the 19th century English writer, best known for the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Wilson captures De Quincey's multifaceted personality and career—as obsessive literary stalker, "born journalist," and visionary author, as well as his continuing influence on our own time." —Publishers Weekly (named one of the "Best Books of 2016")

“This is a seamless, stirring, sublime biography, which takes you to the heart, or rather the head, of the opium-eater.” —Daisy Dunn, Evening Standard

“There are plenty of stylistic fireworks worthy of De Quincey here . . . The result is a great, complicated book.” —Daisy Hay, The Guardian

“Wilson is steeped in her subject matter . . . A richly intelligent and well-informed study, which will surely become the favoured one for our time.” —Gillian Tindall, The Financial Times

“In her pursuit, Wilson often catches decisively this most elusive character, and the chase is exhilarating.” —Hermione Eyre, The Spectator

"Absorbing . . . De Quincey's previous biographers have sometimes felt duty bound to be balanced, comprehensive, to play the straight man in a double act with their grotesquely wayward subject. It's something of a relief, then, when Wilson suggests that what we need is not another biography of De Quincey but a 'De Quinceyan biography.' She takes pleasure in her quarry—and takes enjoyable risks with him—as she tracks him through his various lives . . . Wilson is responsive to [De Quincey's] writing throughout her book (she makes you want to read him, not merely know him)." —Matthew Bevis, Harper's Magazine

“Startling . . . By harnessing the sparks created by the friction of these twin obsessions, murder and imagination, Wilson ingeniously illuminates the dark realms De Quincey’s spirit prowled . . . Wilson circumscribes her subject in an ingeniously De Quinceyan fashion . . . Exhilarating . . . [Wilson’s] remarkable book engenders in its readers those modes of thinking necessary to follow De Quincey as he shifts unpredictably into and out of every imaginable shape.” —Kelly Grovier, The Times Literary Supplement

"In connecting the architecture of De Quincey’s wild, opium-fuelled mind with physical surroundings, Wilson provides a handrail through the pandemonium and isolation. He emerges from her book a sympathetic but irresponsible obsessive… Wilson has successfully brought De Quincey out from under the shadow of his contemporaries. He stands before us deeply flawed … But he was also a dreamer of the best dreams in literature" —Ruth Scurr, Daily Telegraph

"Multilayered and wonderfully insightful" —John Walsh, Sunday Times

"Stunning … A brilliant, giddy-making portrait not of a literary hanger-on, which is how posterity tended to see De Quincey, but of a genius, which is how he saw himself … Wilson’s narrative [has] a wonderfully hallucinatory effect … Energetic and wonderfully compelling"—Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

"Guilty Thing brings triumphantly into focus a life racked by opium’s insidious effects … Beautifully crafted, Frances Wilson’s narrative sets up patterns, mirrors and doublings that make multiple intersections between De Quincey’s inner and outer worlds. An impressive contribution to literary biography, her book amounts to the most ‘De Quinceyan’ account of De Quincey we are likely to see"—Nicholas Roe, Literary Review

"Wilson is forensic about the terrors lurking in De Quincey’s imagination … Wilson’s quirky, urgent biography, which is clearly steeped in extensive knowledge of the period, is an essential guide to this remarkable drug addict" —Daisy Goodwin, The Times, 9 April 2016

"Wonderfully insightful" —Sunday Times

"Wilson will enthrall readers with this mesmerizing and agile biography of English writer Thomas De Quincey . . . An impressively researched biography as dazzling as its subject." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"Well-researched and elegantly written." —Kirkus Reviews

Library Journal

06/15/2016
A genius addicted to opium, fascinated by murder, and pursued by creditors, Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) was one of the lesser-known English romantics, who influenced generations of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Wilson (How To Survive the Titanic), in this valuable addition to De Quincey scholarship, has written an informative and carefully researched critical biography that captures her subject's strangeness, incredible imagination, and observations of his legendary peers. Recognized primarily for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the first account of drug-induced creativity, De Quincey became acquainted with poet William Wordsworth while a young man and remained obsessed with him for a lifetime, even after their estrangement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also became an object of De Quincey's scorn after early admiration had faded. De Quincey's essays on Macbeth and Wordsworth's poetry established him as an important critic as well as memoirist. In later life he turned to journalism to support his ever-growing family of eight children while his extravagances and debts piled up, sending him frequently into hiding to avoid debtor's prison. VERDICT Strongly recommended for students and scholars of the romantic era as well as readers seeking an enlightening and amusing biography. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/16.]—Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

Kirkus Reviews

2016-06-21
The trials and passions of the romantic essayist and memoirist.Until 2009, when Robert Morrison's The English Opium Eater appeared, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) had been ignored by biographers for nearly 30 years. Morrison's fine biography offered a nuanced portrait of the opium-addicted, debt-ridden writer whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) proved one of the most startling and brilliant essays to emerge from the prolific British romantics. Critic and journalist Wilson (How to Survive the Titanic; or, the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, 2011, etc.) mines a wealth of archival and published sources (De Quincey's writings alone comprise 21 volumes) to produce in her own well-researched and elegantly written biography a portrait largely indistinguishable from Morrison's. Her emphasis, she writes, is "to follow the growth" and intersection of De Quincey's two major obsessions—murder and William Wordsworth—placing the writer's other interests in the background. To that end, she succeeds in conveying in grisly detail the two sensational murders of December 1811 that so indelibly captured De Quincey's imagination. Wilson also sensitively handles De Quincey's yearning for the friendship of the author of Lyrical Ballads, which so deeply impressed him. Eighteen-year-old De Quincey's plaintive letter to the poet, Wilson writes, was his "first masterpiece." Although Wordsworth cautioned his admirer against conflating the poetry with the poet, De Quincey idolized and idealized Wordsworth, whom Wilson reveals as increasingly unsympathetic and self-absorbed. She is certain (where Morrison was not) that Dorothy Wordsworth, 13 years older than De Quincey, expected his marriage proposal. Overall, though, De Quincey's addiction (Wilson documents the drops of laudanum he took at any time) and perpetual debt (a repetitive chronicle) dominate the narrative. Nor does Wilson persuasively argue for his enduring influence. He may have anticipated tabloid sensationalism, the recovery memoir, and "the fine art of character assassination," but to assert, "We are all De Quinceyan now," is a horrifying notion. A new, but not revisionist, portrait of a troubled artist.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169693195
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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