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“Libellous Attack” on De Quincey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Kenneth Forward*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska

Extract

For a voluminously autobiographical writer, De Quincey on occasion can be surprisingly reticent. His most frankly reminiscent narratives are sometimes colored by circumstances which he elaborately hints at rather than reveals. Peculiarly disconcerting to the student on this account is an article in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine for February, 1841, reprinted by Masson under the title “Story of a Libel, with Thoughts on Duelling,” which tells of his helplessness in the face of a downright insult to his wife perpetrated in 1824 by an anonymous slanderer. His account is both incomplete and ambiguous. He hesitates to be explicit on so ticklish a subject, and yet he cannot let the story alone. For all his suppressions, however, and though Masson has not identified it, the libel is recoverable to-day. With practical certainty we may also name its author. In other essays, once we have the key, we may find allusions to the libel and its author, even answers to some of its charges; in particular, we may see that De Quincey's painful recollection of it shaped some of his alterations in the revised Confessions of 1856.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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