SOURCE: "A Sort of Previous Lubrication: DeQuincey's Preface to 'Confessions of An English Opium-Eater'," in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 71, No. 4, November, 1985, pp. 457-69.

In the following essay, Dingwaney and Needham examine the "rhetorical strategies" of Thomas de Quincey's preface to his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

We shall endeavour to bring up our reader to the fence, and persuade him, if possible, to take a leap which still remains to be taken in this field of style. But, as we have reason to fear that he will "refuse" it, we shall wheel him round and bring him up to it from another quarter. A gentle touch of the spur may then perhaps carry him over. Let not the reader take it to heart that we here represent him under the figure of a horse, and ourselves in a nobler character as riding him, and that we even...