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EDITOR'S PREFACE

THE three preceding volumes contain those writings of De Quincey which collectively constitute his AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY REMINISCENCES. They carry us on, in a general way, to about the year 1825, when De Quincey had become famous as "The English Opium-Eater," a versatile contributor to London periodicals, but had returned to his home at Grasmere after unsatisfactory trials of residence in London, and had begun to think that, if ever he removed from Grasmere perinanently, it must be to Edinburgh. While the volumes make vivid for us, however, the main course of his life to the date indicated,—when he was in the fortieth year of his age, there are some particulars of his family history through the time traversed about which they have left us uninformed. It may be well, at the present point, to supply this defect, and at the same time to add such particulars of his later family history as may be required, by way of biographical accompaniment and elucidation, here and there, in the series of his writings generally.

Of De Quincey's father we have heard a good deal. We can recollect him as the Manchester merchant, much of an invalid, who died in 1793, at the age of forty, when De Quincey was but a child. Of De Quincey's brothers and sisters we have also heard a good deal. There have been immortalised for us especially those two child-sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, who had died before their father, so that De Quincey's memories of them survived but as mysterious gleams from his dreamy infancy. Nor are we likely to forget either his eldest and all-domineering brother, William,

VOL. IV

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whose energetic life was cut short when he had not completed his sixteenth year, or that younger brother, Richard, known as 66 Pink," whose romantic career of sailor-adventure, revealed to the family only in rare glimpses of him when he turned up ashore, was so interesting to De Quincey as running parallel with a considerable portion of his own manhood. There remain, however, two important persons of the Autobiography and the Confessions respecting whom the information has hardly been sufficient.

(1) De Quincey's Mother.-Respecting her it cannot be said that De Quincey has left us quite ignorant. He has even sketched for us her character, and the general tenor of her life to a certain point. We see her, the Elizabeth Penson who had become the wife of the Manchester merchant in 1778 or thereabouts,-left a widow in 1793, when she was about forty-one years of age, in clear possession of £1600 a year, and conjoint-guardian, with other trustees, under her husband's will, of six surviving children, each of whom had a separate and independent provision. We see her in her continued widowhood, a stately and accomplished English lady, of somewhat Roman severity,—especially after she had become acquainted with Hannah More, and had adopted the strict religious principles of the Clapham Evangelical School, -changing her residence from the Manchester neighbourhood to Bath, and thence to Chester, always the stately and accomplished lady and mixing in the best society, but perplexed not a little by the question of the proper education for her sons, and by the erratic tendencies of two of them. We see her more particularly in her antique residence at Chester, in that month of July 1802 when her brother, Colonel Penson, home from India on furlough, was domiciled with her, and when her son Thomas, then the eldest living, came in upon them imploringly as a fugitive from Manchester Grammar School. To her, with her grave notions of law and decorum, this apparition of her runaway boy, we are told, was like "the opening of the seventh seal in the Revelations"; but, Uncle Penson taking an easier and more soldierly view of the subject, the runaway was not sent back, as he dreaded he might be, but was allowed, after a while, to have as much of a ramble in North Wales, all by himself, as

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