'Life for De Quincey was either angels ascending on vaults of cloud
or vagrants shivering on the city streets.' Thomas De Quincey -
opium-eater, celebrity journalist, and professional doppelganger -
is embedded in our culture. Modelling his character on Coleridge
and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the poet's
former cottage in Grasmere and turned it into an opium den. Here,
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. De Quincey may never have felt the equal of the
giants of the Romantic Literature he so worshipped but the writing
style he pioneered - scripted and sculptured emotional memoir - was
to inspire generations of writers: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Virginia
Woolf. James Joyce knew whole pages of his work off by heart and he
was arguably the father of what we now call psychogeography. This
spectacular biography, the produce of meticulous scholarship and
beautifully supple prose, tells the riches-to-rags story of a
figure of dazzling complexity and dazzling originality, whose
rackety life was lived on the run, and both brings De Quincey and
his martyred but wild soul triumphantly to life and firmly
establishes Frances Wilson in the front rank of contemporary
biographers.
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