Combining intellectual enthusiasm with analytical bite, David Masson's biography of the self-confessed opium eater provides readers with valuable insights into an author whose life oscillated between respectability, vagrancy and infamy. Published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1881, only two decades after the death of Thomas de Quincey (1785 1859), and written by a man who, like his subject in his more prosperous years, was a journalist and editor in the heart of literary London, Masson's account describes a man and a nation at the peak of their cultural influence. Covering...