INTRODUCTION

I. LIFE


Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785.
His father was a man of high character and great taste for literature
as well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately,
when Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the
family removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country
place near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years
a widow, removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there.

Thomas, the future opium-eater, was a weak and sickly child. His first
years were spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, a
real boy, came home, the young author followed in humility mingled with
terror the diversions of that ingenious and pugnacious "son of eternal
racket." De Quincey's mother was a woman of strong character and
emotions, as well as excellent mind, but she was excessively formal,
and she seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children,
to whom she was for all that deeply devoted. Her notions of conduct in
general and of child rearing in particular were very strict. She took
Thomas out of Bath School, after three years' excellent work there,
because he was too much praised, and kept him for a year at an inferior
school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.

In 1800, at the age of fifteen, De Quincey was ready for Oxford; he had
not been praised without reason, for his scholarship was far in advance
of that of ordinary pupils of his years. "That boy," his master at Bath
School had said, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than