Dorothy Wordsworth describes to Thomas De Quincey how she and her brother William received a letter from him: "Yesterday morning my brother and I walked to Rydale, and he ... sate upon a stump at the foot of the hill while I went up to Ann Nicholson's, and there I found your letter ... I opened the letter in Ann's house just to see if all were well with you, and I then hastened with my prize to William, and sat down beside him to read the letter, and truly a feast it was for us ... "
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: William and Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Letter
Dorothy Wordsworth describes to Thomas De Quincey how John Wordsworth received a letter from him:
"When your Friend Johnny came from school last night, his mother said to him, 'Here is a letter from - .' 'From,' he replied, 'Mr. De Quincey?' ... he ... asked me to read [it]; which I did, with a few omissions and levelling the language to his capacity ... you would have thought yourself well repaid for the trouble of writing it if you could only have seen how feelingly he was interested."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Letter
William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, 6 April 1818: 'Had the Correspondence [between Henry Brougham and William Wilberforce, 1806] been published upon Mr B[rougham]'s first appearance in the Country, I think it might have done much service ... the sooner it sees the light the better. With Lord L[owther']'s approbation I have glanced at it, in a passage added to some able Comments on Mr B[rougham]'s first speech at Kendal, by a Friend of mine, which are about to appear.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth to Viscount Lowther, [c. 14 April 1818]: 'The notes upon [Henry] Brougham's Speech, I have not seen, unless they be those from the pen of Mr De Quincey of Grasmere, which ... you may have forgotten that we read together at Kendal, - and that a passage was interwoven by me, at that time.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth, Viscount Lowther
'the young poet began to wonder "who was this de Quincey, and what sort of a pen had he?'" From "The Confessions of an Opium Eater" he discovered Wordsworth'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield Print: Book
[List of books read during 1944]:
'The Specialist; All This and Heaven Too; Antony; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Roper's Row; Tom Brown's Schooldays; Life's a Circus; The Keys of the Kingdom; Two Survived; Hamlet; King's Nurse, Beggar's Nurse; The Snow Goose; Gerald; Early Stages; Cross Creek; Footnotes to the Ballet; The Great Ship; Hungry Hill; Hiawatha; Captain Blood; Scaramouche; Heartbreak House; Fortune's Fool; Fifth Form at St Dominic's; Cold Comfort Farm; The Lost King; The count of Monte Cristo; Diary of a Provincial Lady; Frenchman's Creek; Song of Bernadette; Romeo and Juliet; Rebecca; The Surgeon's Destiny; The Killer and the Slain; Anna; King Solomon's Mines; The Black Moth; Have His Carcase; Peacock Pie; Alice in Wonderland; The Citadel; Good Companions; Our Hearts were Young and Gay; Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man; The Healing Knife; First Year Out; Saint Joan; Stars Look Down; Bridge of San Luis Rey; Rogue Herries; Caesar and Cleopatra; Xmas at Cold Comfort Farm; Dark Lady of the Sonnets; The Velvet Deer; Leaves from a Surgeon's Case Book; A Christmas Carol; Craft of Comedy; As You Like It; Lottie Dundass; Plays of John Galsworthy; Provincial Lady in America; She Shanties; Peter Abelard; Actor, Soldier, Poet; The Best of Lamb; Some Essay of Elia; Poems, Plays etc; The White Cliffs; Three Men in a Boat; Confessions of an Opium Eater; In Search of England; Wuthering Heights; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Poems of Contemporary Women; Crime at the Club; Quality Street; Villette; Major Barbara; Pygmalion; You Never Can Tell; King John; Doctor's Dilemma'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
'When I had made a few visits to him, Mr De Quincey was so kind as to take some particular
notice of me; and afterwards when he wrote his Grasmere article about "George and Sarah
Green" (1839), he spoke to me of the subject, and read me a passage from the proof before it
appeared in "Tait".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas de Quincey Print: Serial / periodical, proofs
'I am going to begin Strauss, and see what I can make of him. - Have you seen the Opium-Eater's papers on the Lakers in Tait? They are very interesting , but, it seems to me, the most tremendous breach of confidence ever committed; - particularly the giving an account of the "most sublime passage" of Wordsworth's great posthumous work. I wonder what you think of Chorley's "Lion". I don't think it can live, but that there is good enough in it to make one hope he may do something that will'.
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Serial / periodical
Harriet Martineau on inspirations and research for her story 'Settlers at Hoime': 'Tait's Magazine of last year had an article of De Quincy's which made me think of snow-storms for a story: -- then it occurred to me that floods were less hackneyed [...] Floods suggested Lincolnshire for the scene, and Lauder's book (Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's "Floods in Morayshire," read many years before) for the material. For Lincolnshire I looked into the Penny Cyclopedia, and there found references to other articles'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Serial / periodical
Sir John Hammerton looking back on his early days in Glasgow when he left school and became a correspondence clerk, he said of Cassell's Library "What anAladdin's cave it proved to me! Addison, Goldsmith, Bacon, Steele, DeQuincey ..., Charles Lamb. Macaulay and many scores of others whom old Professor Morley introduced to me -- what a joy of life I obtained from these, and how greatly they made lifeworth living!"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir John Hammerton Print: Book
'Tuesday 7th September
?English Opium Eater? (De Quincey)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
'Thursday 11th November.
?Opium-eater? again.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
'15th March 1929
Miss M?ndel and I inspect my little library. We read some Brooks, Kipling, Holmes, Artemus Ward, de Quincey -- in short, a browse. We looked at ?Phiz? illustrations to ?Sketches by Boz? and she talked of Wilhelm Busch as the greatest of German pencil artists.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
'...I'm sitting in an old silk petticoat at the moment with a hole in it, and the top part of another dress with a hole in it, and the wind is blowing through me, and I'm reading de Quincey, and Richardson, and again de Quincey- again de Quincey because I'm in the middle of writing about him, and my God Vita, if you happen to know do wire what's the essential difference between prose and poetry - It cracks my poor brain to consider.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'Is there any decent review of Meister? I have seen only one, in the London Magazine, it did not make me angry- I should have grieved to see you well treated in the same page where Goethe was handled so unworthily.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Baillie Welsh Print: Serial / periodicalManuscript: Letter
Elizabeth Barrett to Thomas Westwood, c.13 March 1845: 'Do you read Blackwood? & in that case, have you had deep delight in an exquisite paper by the Opium-eater, which my heart trembled through from end to end? What a poet that man is! how he vivifies words, & deepens them, & gives them profound significance'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Serial / periodical
'I think that if you can get hold of a portable 'Excursion' it is a capital book to have with you; also that vol (1st second, [italics] or [end italics] third, I forget whh) of de Quincey's Miscellanies that relates to the Lakes, - places & people as they were in his day. Try for this last, if you don't get it elsewhere at Mrs Nicholson's circulating library at Ambleside'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
'I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers. They were imitations of anything I happened to be reading at the time: Sir Thomas Brown, de Quincey, Henry Newbolt, the Ballads, Blake, Baroness Orczy, Marlowe, Chums, the Imagists, the Bible, Poe, Keats, Lawrence, Anon., and Shakespeare. A mixed lot as you see, and randomly remembered'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Dylan Thomas Print: Book
'The Edinr Review is out some time ago; and the 'State of German Literature' has been received with considerable surprise and approbation by the Universe. Thus for instance, de Quinc[e]y praises it in his Saturday Post. Sir W. Hamilton tells me that it is 'cap'tal'; and Wilson informs John Gordon that it has 'done me a deal o'good'.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: Serial / periodicalManuscript: Letter
'R.H. Robson opened the subject of Joan of Arc by giving a historical sketch of her life & then attempting to "Put her in her Place" which latter process involved a general & interesting discussion the substantial result being that she refused to be so put. Mrs Evans read a fervid passage from De Quincey & H.R. Smith & C.I. Evans gave some estimate of the Lives by Mark Twain & Andrew Lang & read short passages from these works. After supper Mr Graham Mr Pollard Mr Robson & Miss M.B. Smith read in parts most spiritually the first scene from Shaw's St Joan; Mr Evans read from the Epilogue, & another general discussion brought a most fascinating evening to a conclusion.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Evans Print: Book
'Last week end was busily employed in reading through De Quincey's "Confessions" as a
whole,
for the first time, from which I derived great satisfaction. How much of it is true? The whole
thing reads so like a novel that I am rather incredulous. Anyway it is certainly a splendid piece
of
English prose, especially in the rhetorical passages where he shows such a happy knack of
getting pleasantly off the point.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Clive Staples Lewis Print: Book
