De Quincey's early reading of Lyrical Ballads has widely been hailed as a germinal event in his literary development. Biographers and critics have focused on De Quincey's astonishing recognition, at the age of fifteen, of Wordsworth as the predominant poetic figure of his age. By the age of seventeen, De Quincey had declared to Wordsworth his unsurpassed admiration for ‘those two enchanting volumes’ of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and, in 1834, over three decades on, he still regarded his discovery of Lyrical Ballads as ‘the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind’ (W, p. 33). The testimony of De Quincey's Diary of 1803, his early correspondence with Wordsworth, and his later absorption into the poet's family circle, all serve to confirm the extraordinary precognition of De Quincey's first reading of the Lyrical Ballads. Yet, despite the seminal importance accorded to that reading and to the Wordsworth/ Coleridge influence derived therefrom, critics and biographers have been surprisingly tardy in addressing the prior issue of mediation involved in such a textual encounter. The canonical status of Lyrical Ballads as a foundational text of English Romanticism has perhaps tended to obscure the mediatory aspects of De Quincey's reading experience. It has been assumed that the young De Quincey's discovery of the Lyrical Ballads was made in some more-or-less direct fashion, the elemental simplicity and genius of the poems achieving an instant impact on the imaginative and sensitive boy. It is not so much my intention to challenge here the premises of either Coleridge's and Wordsworth's genius, or of De Quincey's imaginativeness as a reader— both of which I hold to be essential for a true understanding of De Quincey's reading of Lyrical Ballads—as to suggest in addition that ‘genius’ and ‘imagination’ are themselves not unconditioned, and that it may require greater circumstantial attention than previously granted to understand why De Quincey was so sympathetically attuned to the reception of Lyrical Ballads.

I shall attempt to uncover in this chapter some of the likely contexts in which De Quincey encountered Lyrical Ballads, and to suggest thereby a more politicized view of his childhood reading and imagination than has hitherto been obtained.