Long before he tried opium, Thomas De Quincey, the English essayist, was addicted to books. The cycles of “remorse and deadly anxiety” that he suffered in his adult life began when he was seven, after a kindly bookseller lent him three guineas. This, according to Frances Wilson’s new biography, “Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was De Quincey’s “earliest trespass”: a “mysterious (and indeed guilty) current of debt” that he feared would carry him away. Among the books De Quincey acquired, there was a history of Britain, expected to grow in time to “sixty or eighty parts.” But he craved something vaster and more dangerous, so he purchased “a general history of navigation, supported by a vast body of voyages”: a work that was, like its subject, “indefinite as to its ultimate extent” and, as he was told by a jesting clerk, might involve as many as fifteen thousand volumes. It would “never end,” De Quincey reasoned, since by the time “all the one-legged commodores and yellow admirals” of one generation had finished, “another generation would have grown another crop of the same gallant spinners.” You can hear the elation mixed in with the dread: according to a logical short circuit that was characteristic of his thought, an infinite subject meant infinite books. Debt was only the punctuation between ecstasies. De Quincey was happiest when he was chipping away at the sublime, volume by volume or vision by vision, and his happiness was always dangerously leveraged.

Wilson’s book is a revelatory study of its subject. De Quincey was thirty-six when “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” his sensational memoir of addiction, was published, anonymously, in 1821. At the time, Wilson writes, England was “marinated in opium, which was taken for everything from upset stomachs to sore heads.” It was swallowed in the form of pills or dissolved in alcohol to make laudanum, the tincture preferred by De Quincey. The Turks, it was said, all suffered from opium dependence. But English doctors prescribed it with abandon. The drug was given to women for menstrual discomfort and to children for the hiccups. All the while, its glamour was growing: it was ancient, shamanic, a supernatural tether to otherworldly visions. You could find reference to it in Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Shakespeare. In his essay “Coleridge and Opium-Eating,” De Quincey wrote that he had found it referenced, too, in John Milton’s great Biblical epic:

You know the Paradise Lost? and you remember from the eleventh book, in its earlier part, that laudanum already existed in Eden—nay, that it was used medicinally by an archangel; for, after Michael had “purged with euphrasy and rue” the eyes of Adam, lest he should be unequal to the mere sight of the great visions about to unfold their draperies before him, next he fortifies his fleshly spirits against the affliction of these visions, of which visions the first was death. And how? “He from the well of life three drops instill’d.”

The image of Adam getting high in the Garden of Eden may seem outlandish, but opium had made a kind of Adam out of De Quincey: in “the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain,” he wandered through ancient cities “beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatómpylos,” crammed with “temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles.” Opium deepened his “natural inclination for a solitary life” by giving a cosmic cast to idleness. “More than once,” he wrote, “it has happened to me, on a summer-night, when I have been at an open window . . . from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, without wishing to move.”

Motionlessness is not peace of mind, but De Quincey, who struggled his entire life to find a comfortable way to inhabit time, had good reason to prize it. Writing late in his life to his daughter, he identified “procrastination,” which he linked with unpardonable guilt, as “that most odious of vices”: the procrastinator is doomed, since “in midst of too-soonness he shall suffer the killing anxieties of too-lateness.” “Our fate is always to find ourselves at the wrong station,” he wrote. Once he’d bought one book, it was too late; he had, in effect, bought them all, which excused him to buy a second book and then a third. This was the destructive logic behind his opium use: to have started something was to be already too late to stop it, as though a delegate, sent to the future, were messing things up for the innocent De Quincey, back here in the past. It was an insight about time, and also about identity. De Quincey seemed to fear the idea that there were others of him, distributed throughout time and space, acting as his agents without his explicit command. He understood himself, for good or for ill, to exist in duplicate or triplicate. Probably every great autobiographer, characterizing the choices and dilemmas faced by an almost unrecognizable younger person whose name he bears, feels a version of this; for De Quincey, it was a lifelong fixation, heightened by his addiction and marring his happiness even as it informed his greatest work.

His confusion set in early. He was born Thomas Quincey, in Manchester in 1785; the prefix was added when he was around eleven, in one of his mother’s many attempts to suggest an aristocratic lineage. A series of blows levelled the family before De Quincey’s tenth birthday. His sister Jane died when he was four. Two years later, his beloved sister Elizabeth, his “leader and companion,” died at the age of nine, likely of meningitis. In “Suspiria de Profundis,” De Quincey writes that on the day after her death he sneaked up the back staircase to view her body, laid out in her bedroom:

Entering, I closed the door so softly, that, although it opened upon a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent walls. Then turning round, I sought my sister’s face. But the bed had been moved; and the back was now turned. Nothing met my eyes but one large window wide open, through which the sun of midsummer at noonday was showering down torrents of splendour.

The corpse is dispatched with stock adjectives: “frozen” eyelids, “marble” lips, “stiffening” hands. De Quincey is fixated, instead, on the “solemn wind” that “swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries . . . the one sole audible symbol of eternity.” He adds, “And three times in my life I have happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances, namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day.”

De Quincey’s writing often boils down trauma to its core variables—a window, a dead body, summer—so as to make the experience repeatable, both for him and for his readers. He called these “combinations of concrete objects,” recurring in time, “involutes,” a term he borrowed from conchology. The highly spatialized memory of his sister’s death, with its significant staircase and closed door and open window, as well as his insistence on later iterations of it, is emblematic of his thinking. The great endeavor of his writing was to convert time, with its irremediable losses, into space, a container where all things can exist simultaneously. But this tactic also turned grief into paranoia: if nothing was lost, much, he feared, must be hidden from him.

De Quincey’s father, then a prosperous merchant, died just a year after Elizabeth; soon, his loathed older brother, William, who was eleven, returned from boarding school. William was known for all manner of household torments, some directed at the pets—he “had succeeded,” De Quincey wrote, “at bringing down cats by parachutes”—and Wilson writes that he “despised” Thomas. Mrs. De Quincey soon moved the family to Bath, the “fine and striking” spa town where Jane Austen set “Northanger Abbey,” and rented a prominent house whose most recent occupant had been Edmund Burke. De Quincey was sent to the local grammar school, where he was considered a prodigy in Greek, but he suffered a setback when his teacher accidentally struck him in the head with a cane aimed at a misbehaving student. He spent several weeks in bed, cared for by his mother, who read Milton to him aloud; upon his recovery, she refused to send him back to school, on the ground that his success there might swell his ego, and instead hired a tutor. When William died, in London, at the age of seventeen, Thomas, now the male head of the family, saw it as “the answer to a prayer,” Wilson writes.

The turn of the nineteenth century is often described as the dawn of Romanticism, the movement in the arts that so enthralled Europe. But its early stirrings were strange and diffuse. In Bath, De Quincey was deeply affected by the unusual story of Thomas Chatterton, a teen-age poet from nearby Bristol who had found dusty medieval documents in the muniment room of his parish church and, his imagination ignited, invented the figure of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century blind monk and poet. Wilson writes that Chatterton smeared his forged poems with “yellow ochre and lamp charcoal” and passed them off as his discoveries. He died, a suicide, at the age of seventeen, but he became an idol of the Romantics. Keats dedicated “Endymion” to him, and Wordsworth, in homage, penned his famous couplet: “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Soon De Quincey, now around fourteen, made his own discovery: the anonymous manuscript copy of Wordsworth’s ballad “We Are Seven,” then making its way around Bath. He called it “the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind.” A new literary phase was taking shape, and it looked to be a weird one, distinguished by anonymity and hoaxes, made-up monks and rural sages. For De Quincey, a complex identification with Wordsworth began, tantalizingly, even before he had heard the man’s name.

De Quincey was early to recognize Wordsworth’s genius—early in his own life, early in the career of the great poet—which meant, by his inescapable logic, that he was already too late to do anything about it. He was still in his teens when he encountered “Lyrical Ballads,” published anonymously in 1798 and in a second edition, signed by Wordsworth, in 1800. Resolving to meet Wordsworth as soon as he could, he set out on a northern road, but soon decided that he was unworthy of presenting himself to such a “hallowed character.” After wandering in Wales, he found himself penniless in London, an adolescent runaway squatting in the empty residence of his attorney and spending his days with a fifteen-year-old prostitute named Ann, whose companionship he soon lost. Ann was the first of many latter-day versions of his sister Elizabeth, whose centrality and loss were yoked together: lost because she was central, central because she was lost. For the rest of his life, whenever he visited London, he scanned “many, many myriads of” strangers’ faces in the hope that he would find Ann again. On one of these missions, in 1804, a fellow-student recommended opium to De Quincey, for pains. It was his first experience with the drug.

At the time, Wordsworth was living with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary in a former inn in Grasmere, which by the time of his death was known as Dove Cottage. In 1805, while a student at Oxford, De Quincey again resolved to meet his hero, with whom he had now been exchanging letters. He boarded an English mail coach headed to the Lake District but, a few miles south of his target, panicked and turned back; a year later, he tried again, got within spotting distance of Wordsworth’s “little white cottage,” and once more lost his nerve. When, on November 4, 1807, De Quincey finally met Wordsworth, near his front door, the poet appeared “like a flash of lightning,” as De Quincey put it. He was ushered up to Wordsworth’s study, which served also as the family’s dining room, the children’s playroom, and the drawing room. A paltry “two or three hundred volumes” of books, negligently arranged, filled a bookshelf. The poet, then thirty-seven, looked, to his worshipper, “rather over than under sixty,” his body nearly “deformed” by the mismatch of his short legs and his long torso; he walked like “some sort of insect,” De Quincey wrote. It is hard to know exactly what De Quincey wanted from Wordsworth, but, whatever it was, it seems clear that he could tell from the start he wouldn’t be getting it. Veneration can be a stop on the road to contempt, and De Quincey, who had so much of his self-esteem invested in his idolatry of Wordsworth, behaved around the poet like a man who, in being let down by his hero, had been confronted with his own insufficiencies.

In time, needing to act out his cycles of approach and withdrawal in tighter and tighter circuits, De Quincey ingratiated himself into Wordsworth’s family, acting as a surrogate uncle to the children and kindling the affections of poor Dorothy Wordsworth, whom many believed to be in love, and some believed to be in a sexual relationship, with her brother. These dramas were De Quincey’s specialty, and were certainly reënactments of his childhood. He had even selected his latest version of Elizabeth in the person of the young Catherine Wordsworth, who was born with a condition consistent with Down syndrome and died of “convulsions” at the age of three. De Quincey, by then renting Dove Cottage after Wordsworth’s departure, was abject. He slept on the girl’s grave for more than two months, and witnessed her apparition walking the nearby fields. The grief led to stomach pains; the stomach pains, De Quincey said, “yielded to no remedies but opium.”

De Quincey had seen as a warning the escalating addiction of Coleridge, who, for his part, recognized in De Quincey a doppelgänger, their “two faces, each of a confused countenance,” blended with the same mixture of “muddiness and lustre.” But De Quincey’s opium use now passed the point of no return, peaking at a rate of approximately four hundred and eighty grains per day, or twelve thousand drops of laudanum. The next several years of his life, though they coincided with the birth of his first child, William, in 1816, and his subsequent marriage to the mother, Margaret Simpson, a pure-of-heart girl from a farm family of primordial English stock, can be understood only in terms of the dark visions and anxieties that dogged him constantly. Coleridge had his “person from Porlock,” whose knock at the door of his cottage both interrupted and made possible the composition of “Kubla Khan.” For De Quincey, his anxiety about the birth of his child was linked to the sudden appearance of a mysterious Malay in “turban and loose trousers of dingy white,” who turned up on the doorstep of Dove Cottage and, having ingested a large share of De Quincey’s opium, bolted and was never seen again. In De Quincey’s mind, the disappearance was, like Margaret’s pregnancy, an interlude terminated by a transformative event: the Malay, he worried, would be found dead, poisoned by the drugs; likewise, his child would be born, which struck De Quincey as a different sort of tragedy.

Wilson’s book is on a collision course with her subject. This is always the case with biographies of great autobiographers. Somehow one needs to figure out how to do more than tidy up after the subject’s mind has swept, cyclone-like, through the details of his life. But in De Quincey’s case the challenge is even bigger. He wrote in defiance of chronology, which he called a “hackneyed roll-call.” In his visions, events widely separated in time were yoked together by the imagination—which, in turn, because of his delusions, was his reality. “Our deepest thoughts and feelings,” he wrote, “pass to us” through “compound experiences” that dissolve the gap between one end of the time line and the other. The details of his life were like carrousel horses, disappearing around the bend and reappearing, in his visions as in his writing, with fresh intensity and vividness.

The first half of De Quincey’s life is a long and convoluted story. But the second half is the story of his retelling of that story, first in stray passages in his journalism, then in the articles that became the “Confessions,” and later in many remarkable extracts from his autobiographical work. De Quincey’s life, like that of Beckett’s Krapp, was fundamentally the record he kept of it, and that record owes its existence and its brilliance to the drug that all but destroyed him. De Quincey knew, as one scholar put it, “how one thing has a bearing on another,” and so does Wilson. She is a biographer with a De Quinceyan eye for pattern, and a sharp sense of the ironies that made her subject’s life at once so rich and so depleted.

These ironies were not lost on De Quincey: they fed his imagination. His writing career began with a series of failures that nevertheless opened to him his true subject. A longtime conservative, he got a lucky break when asked, in 1818, to take over as editor of a local Tory newspaper, the Westmorland Gazette. Under his editorship, the quiet family paper started running columns about opium trips, opinions about Kant, and salacious tabloid items about murders across Europe. De Quincey resigned after eighteen months, but during his tenure he introduced the use of imaginative fantasias to frame his own travails as a subject worthy of the public eye. His pieces were often marked by accounts of the dramas he suffered while trying to write them, the odd personal intercalations reliant upon the expectation that he would write straight journalism. The formula had been set early: debt, here in the form of deadlines unmet; procrastination; and opium. But now there was a new addition to the sequence: writing.

In “The Age of Wonder,” Richard Holmes writes that “the idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science.” That idea was easily internalized, and brought together in one heroic quest De Quincey’s opium visions and the writing that he concocted to describe them. When the “Confessions” was first published, in The London Magazine, it appeared in two installments; the second included sections on the “Pleasures of Opium” and the “Pains of Opium.” There were familiar disputes about whether De Quincey was corrupting the young, but the main intoxicant on display was his prose, which derived its power from being written in the grip of its subject. De Quincey beheld, in the “theatre” of his mind, along with “more than earthly splendours,” horrors beyond belief: “vast processions” of “mournful pomp,” and “friezes of never-ending stories” as terrifying as Greek tragedies. Space “swelled” around him; time hemorrhaged so that he seemed “to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night.” He especially dreaded a recurring vision of the ocean “paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries.”

Romanticism wasn’t a term in broad use in England when De Quincey began writing. It wasn’t like modernism, a movement founded more or less intentionally, its constitution refined and defended in strategic ways by its adherents. Wordsworth and Coleridge had no idea they were “Romantics.” But M. H. Abrams’s distinction in the title of his seminal study of the period, “The Mirror and the Lamp,” still holds. Abrams argued that early eighteenth-century literature was a mirror, reflecting reality as it was, while the new Romantic literature acted like a lamp generated by individual minds, peering into spaces illuminated by their subjectivity. De Quincey is a special case, since he experienced subjective impressions as though they were real and wrote about them as though their reality could be conveyed, in all its Technicolor wonder and horror. He witnessed with his senses what some of his contemporaries only pondered in the abstract; opium levelled, for him, the distinction between actual and imagined things. “I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths,” he wrote. When the writer Maria Edgeworth read Milton’s lines about Hell (“And in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide”), she objected: How could the lowest deep open into a lower deep? De Quincey answered, “In carpentry it is clear to my mind that it could not.” But in cases of “deep imaginative feeling” it was natural to behold the “never-ending growth of one colossal grandeur chasing and surmounting another, or of abysses that swallowed up abysses.”

Wordsworth’s work often shows us how to achieve, for ourselves, the rapturous perception that feeds some of his greatest effects. There are sections in “The Prelude” that tell us how to see things close up, from afar, from above and below. A celebrated passage describes the process by which a person can hang “down-bending from the side of a boat” and witness, in palimpsest, the “weeds, fishes, flowers, / Grots, pebbles, roots of trees” mingled with reflections of the “rocks and sky, / Mountains and clouds.” He also showed, in an exercise crucial before the invention of photography, how to experience time as a “spot” that could be revisited on demand. We all do this: in my case, I think of being inside a woodshed at the back of our property in Vermont, with an orange fibreglass roof that made the entire space glow eerily. There I am five years old.

What Wordsworth is to the world of perception, De Quincey is to the dream world, giving us concrete structures in place of mental static, structures impossible to describe except in the sentences he built to accommodate their labyrinthine organization. Reading about his visions, we’re experiencing them; his prose is their conveyable form. His imagination thrived on poison. But his sentences transmute all that pain into beauty. ♦