A spectacular biography of the most mysterious member of the Wordsworth circle and the last of the Romantics.
'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.
With meticulous scholarship and beautifully supple prose, Guilty Thing tells the riches-to-rags story of a figure of dazzling complexity and dazzling originality, whose rackety life was lived on the run, and brings both De Quincey and his martyred but wild soul triumphantly to life, firmly establishing Frances Wilson in the front rank of contemporary biographers.
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