Audiobook · read by volunteers
Miscellaneous Essays of Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859)
Read by Richard Grove, ML Cohen, Cori Samuel, Robin Cotter, Tim Makarios, Hugh McGuire, Robert Scott · 17 chapters · 8 h 12
About the book
Thomas de Quincey is best remembered for his confessions as an opium eater, but his essays reveal an even more restless and original mind. This selection opens with a famous piece of literary detective work, on why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth produces such a powerful effect. It then moves to his darkly comic masterpiece, a lecture on murder considered as one of the fine arts, which treats crime with the connoisseurship of an art critic and then adds a sequel. Elsewhere you will find a long, digressive prose that wanders, doubles back and surprises. Seventeen chapters and more than eight hours of material offer a rich anthology of nineteenth-century prose at its most inventive, read by LibriVox volunteers. Expect wit, learning, flights of fancy and a narrator who is never quite where you expect him to be.
Introduction
Thomas de Quincey (1785 to 1859) was an English essayist whose life was as unusual as his writing. He is most famous for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which appeared in 1821 and made him a literary figure, and he continued to write prolifically for magazines for the rest of his career. His collected essays, which fill many volumes, range over literature, history, philosophy, economics and autobiography, and they were gathered in book form in the middle of the nineteenth century.
What makes him so enjoyable to hear is his voice. De Quincey loves to digress, and then to digress from the digression, yet he almost always returns to his point with a flourish. His essay on the knocking at the gate in Macbeth is a model of close attention to a single moment in a play. The pieces on murder as a fine art are a piece of mock-serious humor, and they are also a sharp and imaginative reflection on the public's fascination with crime.
This recording gathers seventeen tracks, several of them parts of a single essay, for a total of just over eight hours, read by several LibriVox volunteers. It suits listeners who enjoy long, ornate sentences and a writer who plays with the reader. If you know Poe or Baudelaire, you will hear where some of their dark, ironic imagination came from. If you do not, this is a very good way to meet a writer who has inspired many others. Chapter titles such as those on murder and on the Macbeth passage are a good guide to what you will hear, and you can choose where to start according to your taste. Those who wish to meet de Quincey the stylist, rather than the confessor, will find the whole range of his talents on display in these hours.
Public domain
Thomas de Quincey died in 1859: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text