Thomas de quincy biography of william

Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785 to a prosperous linen merchant. As a young boy he read widely and acquired a reputation as a brilliant classicist.

"That boy," said his headmaster at Bath Grammar School, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one."

At seventeen, De Quincey ran away from Manchester Grammar School and spent five harrowing months penniless and hungry on the streets of London, an episode recorded with great vividness in his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Reconciled with his family, he entered Oxford in 1804, but left four years later without taking his degree.

He moved to the English Lake District to be near his two literary idols, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

After an initial period of intimacy, he was gradually estranged from both men, and in 1813 he became dependent on opium, a drug he began experimenting with during his s