READERS HAVE LONG BEEN PERPLEXED BY THE QUESTION OF DE QUINCEY'S place in literary history. A writer whose works traverse five decades, from some juvenilia and an early diary written in 1803, to his death in 1859, he is most often taken to be a minor, late Romantic, out of step with the times, an ineffectual dreamer, whose preoccupations and voice betray an allegiance with the older generation of Lakeland writers. (1) Alina Clej, on the other hand, pushes him the other way, and across the Channel: for her, De Quincey is a pre-emptive modernist, a precursor to a European tradition of avant gardistes. (2) He is rarely read, or indeed taught, as a Victorian writer, despite the fact that his work overlaps with the major writers of the Victorian canon. (3) Moreover, unlike other writers of such longevity, little critical attention has been paid to stages in his own development. His erratic publishing tactics, his notorious habits of revision and recycling, have thwarted attempts to identify changes across the body of work, and even the most historicist of his critics tends to respond by reading him synchronically, as though all his writings are of the same moment. (4) We have accrued little sense of 'late' or 'early' De Quincey. It is as though De Quincey is always late, or belated, and sometimes even early. Grevel Lindop's fine new edition, which organizes the works on chronological principles, provides much scope for revisiting these questions and understanding the writer's specific relation to his times. As the works are laid out in terms of publication dates, and where unpublished, composition dates, we can now read across De Quincey's works, from early to late, see patterns of repetition and revision, the clustering of thematic interests, and plot the work against a broad historical framework. The sheer expanse of his disciplinary interests is eclectic: from astronomy to ancient history, from religion to economics, from poetry to parliamentary politics. But striking too is his modishness, his marked responsiveness to the latest ideas and intellectual trends, evident especially because many of his essays take the form of reviews of recently published works. The new edition allows us to see De Quincey's works as an idiosyncratic, but nonetheless capacious record of the intellectual preoccupations of mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
