Miscellaneous Essays

by Thomas de Quincey

"Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone."
-Thomas de Quincey Miscellaneous Essays (1851) is a collection of essays by Thomas De Quincey, who has been called "...one of the greatest prose stylists of the English Romantic era." It has also been said of the author that he "was a pioneer in sensationalism," and it is that quality which characterizes this volume by expanding his writings on murder and death.
The 8 titles it includes are, "On the Knocking at the Gate," "In Macbeth," "Joan of Arc," "The English Mail-Coach," "The Vision of Sudden Death," "Dinner, Real and Reputed," "Orthographic Mutineers," "Murder, Considered As One of the Fine Arts," and "Second Paper on Murder," of which the last two essays are also available as individual releases from Cosimo Classics.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

274 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Thomas de Quincey was an English author and intellectual, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_d...

Reviews

[Stuart · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this mainly for the essay Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts, but the opening Macbeth essay got me to commit to the whole thing; it was funny and a bit dark. The murder essay was also funny and dark, although much more long-winded. But oh boy, from there we just got long-winded, not funny except on rare occasion. Meandering trains of thought, an overwhelming amount of untranslated Latin, and your period-typical misogyny, racism, and imperialism round this out as not one to recommend on the whole.

[zunggg · Rating 3 out of 5]

"On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" is a one-inch punch of psychological criticism in which de Q's absurdly excessive self-insight finds its finest expression in a single scene from Shakespeare. "The English Mail-Coach" is a phantasmagoric Wild Hunt of an essay, jouncing through the national character, empire, the author's fancy-free youth, and detouring into slow-motion opium nightmares and a delirious symbolical dream-sequence that reminded me of the hurtling, headlong dreams I'm prone to on planes. But "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" doesn't live up to its tantalising title, and the interminable piece on Roman eating habits is extremely pointless. There's also an essay on Joan of Arc, who I've never been too excited about, which is described in a 1981 NYT article as a "necrophiliac paean", an assessment I think I agree with. Still and all, there's really no medicine like de Quincey's patent tonic, a bona fide strange brew.

[Leni Iversen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Remarkably longwinded and dull for a satirist.

[Carrie Laben · Rating 4 out of 5]

What on earth was this guy on?!?! [Checks notes] Oh.

[Marley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knew de Quincey was so funny! Much in these essays sound contemporary (be forwarned that he likes to use Latin--a lot of Latin--with usually no translation), but other than that,I really enjoyed this collection. He writes delightfully about murder, the history of dinner, and thoughtfully Joan of Arc.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read English Mail Coach/Sudden Death/Dream Fugue previously, in a penguin edition containing Confessions and Suspiria. That essay was more endearing in that context. The notes and annotations in the penguin edition are quite nice.