Despite the ‘death of the author’ proclaimed by some literary theorists, it is clear that criticism of De Quincey at least is flourishing to judge by the several single-author studies that have appeared within the last decade. What has changed, certainly, is the extent to which authorial compulsion tends to be implicated in the wider cultural arena even while authorship remains a basic tenet of critical practice. De Quincey's case is the more telling on account of the journalistic context in which he operated, with little hope until towards the end of his life of collecting his works. The late collection and dissemination of his writings in the United States and Britain in the face of ‘insuperably, and for ever impossible’ odds has certainly aided in establishing De Quincey's literary reputation, while his influence on other writers enhances his standing and importance beyond the boundaries of his own works. Within a few years however we are to have a new collected edition of De Quincey comprising all his known writings. It has been over a century since David Masson's edition which is still regarded as ‘standard’ despite its known shortcomings. Not only are De Quincey's texts to be restored to their original versions (with appropriate indications of later revisions), but a large amount of new material will be made available to a worldwide scholarly community for the first time. The editorial interest in restoring works that De Quincey himself had apparently forgotten, or shown no interest in recovering, can be seen as part of the larger critical interest in De Quincey's historical provenance in which texts and contexts are clearly mutually illuminating.

Does Coleridge's example hold any implications for De Quincey at this critical moment? Interestingly, many De Quincey attributions in the 1960s were made in the light of the attributionary techniques developed in the late 1950s by David Erdman, who was to employ them in the attribution of several of Coleridge's pieces, including the newspaper articles for Courier and Morning Post published as Essays on His Times. Similar methods based on internal evidence have yielded rich dividends in locating De Quincey's newspaper articles for The Westmorland Gazette as well as the Edinburgh Saturday and Evening Post.