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De Quincey's Conception of the Novel as Literature of Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Thomas de quincey, who professed a hearty dislike for “the assumption of judicial functions and authority over … brother authors,” published only one review of a novel. But he yielded to the digressive spirit and frequently discussed throughout his writings both the genre and the novelists he read during his long life (1785–1859). These included Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Le Sage, Marivaux, Rousseau, Walpole, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Maturin, Godwin, Captain Marryat, Scott, Galt, Miss Ferrier, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne. His favorites were Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Hawthorne. Years after De Quincey's death his daughter Emily wrote: “No one will ever make much out of my father that does not take in [to account] the extreme mixture of childish folly joined to a great intellect. The novels of his youth were of the Mrs. Radcliffe order full of mysteries, murders, highwaymen, mysterious people and dark corners. … He never got beyond the Mrs. Radcliffe stage and he was but a poor judge of a novel. He could make nothing of the modern novel with its pictures of real life.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955
References
1 Collected Writings, ed. David Masson (London, 1896–97), in, 174; xi, 294 (henceforth cited by volume and page only). Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister De Quincey severely censured in the London Magazine, Aug. and Sept. 1824.
2 Horace A. Eaton, ed. A Diary of Thomas De Quincey (New York, 1927), pp. 153, 155, 172, 179, 189, 200, 207, 208, 211.
3 From a MS. letter to Mr. H. S. Salt, 24 July 1907, in Houghton Library, Harvard Univ.
4 x, 260. The rare ironic temper of Jane Austen would have been completely lost on De Quincey if he had read her, but I have found no evidence that he did. His interest in the manner of a writer centered upon actual word play, balance, and style rather than upon the finer nuances of attitude behind them.
5 iii, 206. The fact that Wordsworth liked them De Quincey mentions here as an example of the incompatibility that had resulted in his estrangement from the poet.
6 For a discussion of the matter, see Sigmund Proctor, Thomas De Quincey's Theory of Literature, Vol. xix of Univ. of Mich. Publications, Lang, and Lit. (Ann Arbor, 1943). 7 De Quincey acknowledged his indebtedness to Wordsworth in a footnote.
8 For De Quincey's possible indebtedness to Hazlitt for the distinction between knowledge and power see Elisabeth Schneider, Aesthetics of William Hazlitt (1933), p. 45, and Proctor, p. 122.
9 xi, 60–61 (1848). Cf. rv, 278; x, 212; Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. A. H. Japp (London, 1891–93), i, 302.
10 1, 378–379. Cf. Posthumous Works, i, 92.
11 I think it late because of its turbidity in places, seemingly characteristic of his later writing. The editor, A. H. Japp, gives no date and makes no conjecture (Posthumous Works, i, xi).
12 Posthumous Works, i, 300–301. Concerning the impressionism here, cf. xi, 335.
13 He occasionally used journalistic superlatives, such as “immortal novels of the last 150 years,” without any real significance (xi, 333).
14 A. H. Japp, Life and Writing of Thomas De Quincey (New York, 1877), i, 353 (henceforth cited as Japp, Life).
15 History of the English Novel (London, 1935), vi, 15. De Quincey's daughter reported that the Brontë sisters, and even brother Branwell, admired De Quincey, wrote to him, and sent copies of their works to him (De Quincey Memorials, ed. A. H. Japp, London, 1891, ii, 207–208); but I have found no evidence that he read them or remarked about them.
16 xi, 80 (1848). There is a marked resemblance here to Coleridge's conception of motive. The whole passage is good Romantic doctrine.
17 viii, 142; iv, 309; Proctor, p. 132; Posthumous Works, i, 12.
18 xi, 102–103; xiv, 333; iv, 90–91.
19 xiii, 238; vi, 85; i, 523. Posthumous Works, i, 90–91. James Hogg, De Quincey and his Friends (London, 1895), p. 225.
20 Works, i, 276. He thought Mrs. Inchbald had achieved it in the farewell scene that concludes the first part of A Simple Story (i, 276).
21 Proctor, pp. 85–86. In discussing the dark sublime, De Quincey seems to approach the hidden secrets of the creative process.
22 Harriet Lee, Canterbury Tales (New York, 1857), i, 64. De Quincey's attitude toward Gothic romances was not unmitigated admiration. Cf. Charles Pollit, De Quincey's Editorship of the Westmoreland Gazette (Kendal, 1890), p. 69; and Works, v, 150 n.
23 Horace A. Eaton, Thomas De Quincey: A Biography (New York, 1936), pp. 232–233. De Quincey's love for his children was deep and abiding. On one occasion he sold his shoes, hat, coat, and waistcoat to buy necessities for them and worked for months wrapped in an old bedspread (p. 387).
24 Willard H. Bonner, De Quincey at Work, Vol. xi of Univ. of Buffalo Studies (Buffalo, 1936), pp. 22, 26; Posthumous Works, i, 277; Hogg, pp. 198–234. De Quincey's daughters wrote several times to Hawthorne, who served at the Liverpool consulate during this time, praised his “awfully deep knowledge of human nature,” and invited him to visit the De Quincey household at Lasswade near Edinburgh, but I have found no reliable evidence that the visit was consummated except by William Ticknor, who was publisher for both writers in America.
26 iii, 88; cf. 153. At times he spoke more kindly of Scott, but always in circumstances which qualify the praise (v, 70–71, 139). Hazlitt disagreed with this judgment on Lamb (Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, xi, 181).
26 Japp, Life, i, 385. De Quincey's attraction to the mysterious is not always reverence for the mystery of life, but seems at times to border upon fascination with evil as interesting in and for itself. He may foreshadow the decadence at the end of the century. Cf. Posthumous Works, i, 9; Eaton, Life, p. 418.
27 i, 127–128; ii, 205; iv, 297.
28 Japp, Life, i, 385; Works, in, 204. His Klosterheim reads very much like Miss Lee's The German's Tale. In 1830 he had expressed a desire to write stories like Miss Lee's (Eaton, Life, p. 327).
29 Japp, Life, i, 384. Coleridge saw far more deeply into what Gait was doing in a novel with a similar technique, The Provost, as I have shown in “Coleridge's Conception of Dramatic Illusion in the Novel,” ELH, xviii (June 1951), 123–137.
30 This research has been supported by the Grant-in-Aid Program of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. I am indebted to Professors Royal A. Gettmann and Allan G. Holaday, Univ. of Illinois, for valuable suggestions during the preparation of this essay.