Talent and Self-Destruction

By the close, on December 8, 1859, of Thomas De Quincey’s troubled and chaotic life, which endured far longer than the opium dependence infiltrating every aspect of it made predictable, he was the last representative of the cluster of evocative names— Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Blake, Southey, Hazlitt, Lamb—that had defined English Romanticism. He outlasted his only rival, Leigh Hunt, by a few months. Of the circle surrounding Wordsworth and Coleridge, only the assiduous diarist and indefatigable correspondent Henry Crabb Robinson outlived him, and while Robinson was certainly an attentive eyewitness to literary history, he did not himself make it. De Quincey, by contrast, decidedly did, although it was not until the publication of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) at what was for a writer of his generation the advanced age of 36 that his name gained currency with the expanding reading public that kept afloat a burgeoning array of...