De Quincey attended Worcester College, Oxford. It was around this time that he grew acquainted with the English romanticist poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and began experimenting with opium. In 1808, he dropped out of Oxford and moved to Grasmere, in the lake district where his literary friends lived. As his opium addiction grew deeper, he grew gradually estranged from the Wordsworths. In 1816, de Quincey married Margaret Simpson, the mother of his illegitimate child. In 1818-9, he was an editor for the Westmoreland Magazine, before being dismissed and joining the foundling Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. In 1821, he published his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, his greatest success. For the remainder of his life, De Quincey continued writing a fast and furious number of articles on all sorts of topics including literary criticism, theology, philosophy, politics, etc., for contemporary magazines, like Blackwood's, London Magazine, Tait's and Hogg's. Plagued by debt, de Quincey was convicted and imprisoned a number of times during the 1830's. His other works of note include Dialogues of the Three Templars on Political Economy, Chiefly in relation to the Principles of Mr. Ricardo (1824), Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts (1827), Klosterheim, or the Masque (1832), The Revolt of the Tartars (1837), The Logic of Political Economy (1844) and The English Mail-Coach (1849). He also published a sequel to his Confessions in 1854. |
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