“Romantic acolyte, professional doppelganger, transcendental hack”: thus Frances Wilson characterises Thomas De Quincey at the beginning of her new biography. It is a bravura opening to a book that captures in both form and focus something of its subject’s disorienting, brilliant unpredictability. “There have been several fine biographies of De Quincey,” Wilson writes, “but so far no De Quinceyan biography.”
There are plenty of stylistic fireworks worthy of De Quincey here. Comets whiz through the pages, as do snippets of poetry, narrative diversions and gruesome details of the various contemporary murders by which De Quincey was fascinated. Wilson maps her account of De Quincey’s life on to the structure of Wordsworth’s Prelude and then proceeds to pull apart that crowning glory of Romantic autobiography according to the messy dictates of De Quincey’s life. The result is a great, complicated book, in which a host of competing ideas and images jostle for supremacy.
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