‘He has written a thing about Macbeth better than anything I could write,’ remarked Charles Lamb of ‘On the Knocking’; ‘—no—not better than anything I could write, but I could not write anything better’.41 The Gentleman’s Magazine thought the first essay ‘On Murder’ ran over ‘with a ripe and laughter-moving humour from the first page to the last’, while the Eclectic Review considered it ‘as perfect a piece of pure cynicism as any in our language; not savage, like some of Swift’s or Carlyle’s pieces, but playful and full of humour’.42 In ‘The Avenger’, notes L. W. Spring, ‘the plot darkens; the crisis gathers; loud and more tumultuous waxes the fiendish tumult, until all lesser passions are swallowed up, and the empire of a blank, rayless revenge is triumphant; we are spellbound amid the successive stages of the demoniac tragedy; we start up convulsively, as from the horrors of nightmare at its ghastly catastrophe’.43 The ‘Postscript’ drew equal praise. ‘I know of no writer but De Quincey who invests mysteries of this tragic order with their appropriate drapery’, wrote H. M. Alden, ‘so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the full measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.’44 The Eclectic Review observed that ‘anything more horribly interesting cannot be imagined, than his description of Williams, and the murder of the Marrs; it has a magnetic force of attraction, a fascination which the reader vainly endeavours to dispel’.45 The British Quarterly Review declared that ‘it is long since we read’ the ‘Postscript’, but ‘its bloody horrors are still fresh, and are, even to this day, sometimes tyrannous. It is simply terrible in its power; and for long after we read it, every night brought a renewal of the most real shuddering, the palsying dread, and the nightmare impotence with which its first perusal cursed us’.46 In 1874 Leslie Stephen asserted that De Quincey’s essays ‘On Murder’ were ‘probably the most popular of his writings’.47

The essays, satires, and fictions collected in this volume have had an enormous impact that can be felt across a wide-ranging series of works. Edgar Allan Poe seized on De Quinceyan precedents to fashion the first fictional detective, Auguste Dupin, and to produce a powerful series of tales that explore murder as a fine art.48 In ‘Proem at the Paris Station’ (1849), Dante Gabriel Rossetti sees a stabbed body pulled from the Seine and conjectures that

                                         he who did the job
Was standing among those who stood with us,
To look upon the corpse. You fancy him—
Smoking an early pipe, and watching, as
An artist, the effect of his last work.49

Charles Dickens encapsulates the humour and mobility of De Quincey’s aesthetic in Great Expectations (1860–1). ‘A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows’, writes Dickens. ‘He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for”, as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out”, as the murderer…. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable.’50 G. K. Chesterton declares that De Quincey is ‘the first and most powerful of the decadents’, and that ‘any one still smarting from the pinpricks’ of Oscar Wilde or James Whistler ‘will find most of what they said said better in Murder as One of the Fine Arts’.51 Similarly, Wyndham Lewis remarks that De Quincey’s ‘exaltation of the murderer’ puts him in a group of ‘distinguished diabolists’ that includes ‘Lord Byron, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Wilde, De Lautréamont. … It is a history of a century of diabolics’.52 In the twentieth century George Orwell’s ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946) is among the most famous tributes. ‘Before returning to this pitiful and sordid case’, writes Orwell, ‘… let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that “you never seem to get a good murder nowadays”.’53 Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) features the mescal-sodden Consul’s recollections of ‘Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock, knock, knock: who’s there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe’.54 In Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1966), the murderer states flatly, ‘any remorse on my part is absolutely out of the question: an artist feels no remorse, even when his work is not understood, not accepted’.55 Iain Sinclair opens his Lud Heat (1975) with a quotation from the ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder’, and observes that in the essay itself ‘De Quincey, at his speed and exhaustion of operation, fending off the monkey, digressing obsessively towards overlapping versions of the truth, couldn’t help getting in among the authentic substrata’.56 Peter Ackroyd is as fixated with the Ratcliffe murders as De Quincey, and in Hawksmoor (1985) he recalls how Williams ‘was transformed … according to De Quincey, into a “mighty murderer”’, and then buried at a crossroads, where ‘as far as Hawksmoor knew’, he lay buried still: ‘it was the spot where he had this morning seen the crowd pressing against the cordon set up by the police’.57 De Quincey’s work altered the ways in which murder was represented and recreated, taking us from Radcliffe novels to Ratcliffe highway, from Caleb Williams to John Williams, and from Edmund Burke to William Burke. His interpretations of murder frequently confound the reader between sympathy and voyeurism, but reveal the ways in which what would horrify us in life will entertain us in art. In his hands, violent crime became a subject which could be detached from social circumstances and then ironized, tamed, analysed, exploited, and avidly enjoyed by his burgeoning magazine audiences, and by generations of murder mystery connoisseurs and armchair detectives who enjoy the intellectual challenge, rapt exploration, and satiric safety of murder as a fine art.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

THE copy text for the four essays and one tale of terror reprinted in the main section of this volume is the first published version. Details of dates and the place of publication appear in the Explanatory Notes. All five texts have been standardized in a number of ways: double quotation marks have been changed to single, quotation marks have been removed from around indented quotations, full stops have been removed from terms of address (‘Mrs’, ‘Mr’, ‘Dr’, ‘St’), a standard format has been adopted for the headings, and square brackets have been changed to round. Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Inconsistencies in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling have been retained.

The three appendixes in this volume contain manuscript fragments intended by De Quincey to form part of the ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ series, though in each instance the fragment remained unpublished until well after his death. Head-notes to each appendix give details on manuscript location, date or probable date of composition, and any distinctive or anomalous features.

Throughout the volume, De Quincey’s footnotes are cued by superior figures and editorial endnotes are cued by asterisks.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliographies

Dendurent, H. O., Thomas De Quincey: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1978).

Morrison, Robert, ‘Essayists of the Romantic Period: De Quincey, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb’, in Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O’Neill (Oxford, 1998), 341–63.

Biographies

Eaton, H. A., Thomas De Quincey (New York, 1936).

Lindop, Grevel, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London, 1981).

Sackville-West, Edward, A Flame in Sunlight: The Life and Works of Thomas De Quincey (London, 1936; reprinted, ed. John Jordan, London, 1974).

Editions

The Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen.