Thomas De Quincey hid from debt collectors in a sanctuary where arrests stopped
The author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was so chronically broke that he repeatedly took refuge in Holyrood, a debtors' sanctuary in Edinburgh where creditors could not have him arrested. Residents could safely leave only on Sundays. De Quincey still managed to run up fresh debts inside.
He was born Thomas Penson Quincey in Manchester on 15 August 1785, a merchant's son; his widowed mother added the De in 1796. She was strict and inspired more awe than affection, even pulling him out of one school for fear he would grow conceited. He was so precocious that a teacher at Bath said the boy could sway an Athenian crowd better than the masters could address an English one. At 17 he ran away from Manchester Grammar School, having hoped to reach his hero Wordsworth but proving too shy. Instead he tramped around Wales, living on blackberries and rose hips and sleeping in a homemade tent, then drifted to London and nearly starved rather than go home.
At Oxford he was seen as a strange loner and left without a degree. There, in 1804, he first took opium to ease trigeminal neuralgia, a savage facial pain. Use stayed occasional until 1813, when sickness, and mourning for Catherine, the poet's little daughter who died aged three, pushed him to daily doses. He had by then befriended Wordsworth and Coleridge and settled in 1809 at Grasmere, living in Dove Cottage, the poet's former home, for ten years.
Visiting London in 1821 to sell translations, he was talked into writing up his opium experiences instead. The Confessions ran in the London Magazine, eclipsed Charles Lamb's essays appearing alongside, and are often credited with founding Western addiction literature. His opium habit swung between extremes; in 1848 he went 61 days without any, and those sober stretches proved unproductive.
Money slipped through his fingers. He inherited 2,000 pounds at 21, lent 300 to Coleridge and bought books obsessively. Politically he was a reactionary who opposed abolition despite disliking slavery. A procrastinator to the end, he ignored letters from the Boston publisher James Thomas Fields so long that Fields issued twenty-two volumes without him. He died in Edinburgh in 1859.
Source: Thomas De Quincey
