Best known as the author of the Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), Thomas De Quincey was an innovative master of English prose style whose importance has been eclipsed by the modern tendency to consider poetry the major Romantic genre, as well as by the lack of a reliable collected edition of his works. Considered by his contemporaries as one of the best writers of his time, De Quincey wrote digressive and fragmented articles, stories, biographies, and autobiographies that are often reminiscent of prose poetry in their style and imaginative reach. His autobiography and the biographies he wrote of the Lake Poets share the psychological and narrative concerns of Romantic poetry and criticism and are successful examples of the transmutation of Romantic poetics into prose.

De Quincey was born Thomas Penson Quincey on 15 August 1785 in Manchester but lived "the whole of [his] childhood ... in a rural seclusion" just...