GUILTY THING

Thomas De Quincey - opium-eater, celebrity journalist, and professional doppelgänger - is embedded in our culture. Modelling his cha racter on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the poet's former cottage in Grasmere and turned it into an opium den. Here, increasingly detached from the world, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and his obsession with murder as one of the fine arts.De Quincey may never have felt the equal of the giants of the Romantic Literature he so worshipped b ut the w...[Read more]