Beschreibung:

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
Two autograph letters to Emily De Quincey, n.p., 29 September 1854 and 6 November [1856]
Ten pages total, 227 x 185mm and 157 x 95mm. Provenance: Sotheby's, 20 & 21 July 1981, lot 485.
Announcing the completion of the second edition of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. ‘Would you believe it – Not until yesterday, viz. Wednesday November 5, the clock then striking Four Pm., did I write the last correction on the last Proof, viz, the Prefatory Notice of the new Confessions ... All last night, and I presume all this day the Machine (so I believe they call the last new invention for throwing off copies rapidly) has been at work, and one single copy, wanting the Pref-Notice was sent off to London ... for the purpose of being what is technically called “subscribed” I shall await with some little anxiety the result ... inexplicable it seems that I can have spent so much time on the recast (for such it is, not simply a revision) of this little book’. De Quincky refers also to the ‘high delirium’ he has experienced recently owing to lack of exercise, and on the matter of a recent article in the Athenaeum regarding India ‘if we British, the present rulers of Hindostan should retire from it by choice or under compulsion, in that case no memorial would survive of our past rule except a large heap of empty Champagne bottles’. There is also a witty description of an incident at a neighbour’s house when the occupant, Miss Wilmot, burst a blood vessel, ruined the carpet, and later departed for Perthshire ‘whilst the Carpet. I grieve to say, has a very small chance of visiting the Highlands’, musing also on his neighbour’s recollection of Lady Byron which ‘surprises me greatly. Mrs W reports that she had no pretensions whatsoever to beauty, but she was, she says very amiable and high-principled’. The earlier letter of 1854 concerning the birth of Emily’s child and the merits of daughters over sons ‘I look upon boys as the true and dreadful nuisance of society’.
Emily De Quincey was one of Thomas’ daughters; they corresponded frequently.