The titular essay in this volume of work by Thomas De Quincey centers on the notorious career of the murderer John Williams, who in 1811 brutally killed seven people in London's East End. De Quincey's response to Williams's attacks turns morality on its head, celebrating and coolly dissecting the art of murder and its perfections. This volume also contains De Quincey's best-known piece of literary criticism, "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," and his finest tale of terror, "The Avenger," a disturbing exploration of violence, vigilantism, and religious persecution. Ranging from...

"I took it: - and in an hour, oh Heavens what a revulsion what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit what an apocalypse of the world within me "
This edition presents De Quincey's three finest essays in impassioned autobiography, edited by leading De Quincey scholar and biographer Robert Morrison.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater launched a fascination with drug use that has continued to our day. Here De Quincey invents recreational drug taking, but he also details both the lurid nightmares that beset him in the depths of his addiction as well as his...