The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey - Vol. 1 | Page 4

This editorship (1818-19) was of short duration, and pursued under hostile circumstances, such as distance from the Press, &c., which soon led to DE QUINCEY'S resignation. I had hoped to add some further specimens of the newspaper work, but have not, as yet, obtained access to a file of the period. In any future edition I may be able to add this in an Appendix.
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The Love-Charm.--In spite of the marvellous tenacity of DE QUINCEY'S memory, even as to the very words of a passage in an Author which he had, perhaps, only once read, there were blanks which confounded himself. One of these bore on his contributions to KNIGHT'S Quarterly Magazine. MR. FIELDS had been so generally careful in obtaining sufficient authority for what he published, in the original American edition, that DE QUINCEY good-humouredly gave the verdict against himself, and 'supposed he must be wrong' in thinking that some of these special papers were not from his pen. Still,--he demurred, and before including them in The Selections Grave and Gay, it was resolved to institute an inquiry. Accordingly, about 1852, I was deputed to interview MR. CHARLES KNIGHT, and request his aid. My mission was to obtain, if possible, a correct list of the various contributions to the Quarterly Magazine, including this Love-Charm.
MR. KNIGHT, MR. RAMSAY (his first lieutenant, as he called him), and myself all met at Fleet Street, where we had the archives of the old Quarterly Magazine turned up, and a list checked. I lately found this particular story also referred to circumstantially in the annexed paragraph contained in CHARLES KNIGHT'S Passages of a Working Life (THORNE'S re-issue, vol. I. chap. x. p. 339).
'DE QUINCEY had written to me in December 1824, in the belief that, as he expressed it, "many of your friends will rally about you, and urge you to some new undertaking of the same kind. If that should happen, I beg to say, that you may count upon me, as one of your men, for any extent of labour, to the best of my power, which you may choose to command." He wrote a translation of The Love-Charm of TIECK, with a notice of the Author. This is not reprinted in his Collected Works, though perhaps it is the most interesting of his translations from the German. In this spring and summer DE QUINCEY and I were in intimate companionship. It was a pleasant time of intellectual intercourse for me.'
There is no doubt The Love-Charm would have been reprinted had the Author lived to carry the Selections farther.
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The curious little Essay On Novels,--written in a Lady's Album, had passed out of MR. DAVEY'S hands before I became aware of its existence. The facsimile, however, taken for The Archivist, by an expert like MR. NETHERCLIFT, shows that it is, unquestionably, in the handwriting of DE QUINCEY. I have been unable to trace the 'FAIR INCOGNITA' to whom it was addressed.
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The compositions which were written for me when I edited Titan, and which I now place before the public in volume form, after the lapse of a whole generation (thirty-three years, to speak 'by the card'), demand some special comment, particularly in their relation to the Selections Grave and Gay.
Titan was a half-crown monthly Magazine, a continuation in an enlarged form of The Instructor. I had become the acting Editor of its predecessor, the New Series of The Instructor, working in concert with my Father, the proprietor. In this New Series there appeared from DE QUINCEY'S pen The Sphinx's Riddle, Judas Iscariot, the Series of Sketches from Childhood, and other notable papers.
At that time I was but a young editor--young and, perhaps, a little 'curly,' as LORD BEACONSFIELD put it. DE QUINCEY, with a truly paternal solicitude, gave me much good advice and valuable help, both in the selection of subjects for the Magazine and in the mode of handling them. The notes on The Lake Dialect, Shakspere's Text and Suetonius Unravelled, were written to me in the form of Letters, and published in Titan.
Storms in English History was a consideration of part of MR. FROUDE'S well-known book, which on its publication made a great stir in the literary world, and profoundly impressed DE QUINCEY.
How to write English was the first of a series projected for The Instructor. It never got beyond this 'Introduction,' but the fragment contains some matter well worthy of preservation.
The circumstances attending the composition of the four papers on The English in India and The English in China, I have explained at some length in the introductory notices attached to them.
And now for a confession! The 'gentle reader' may, perhaps, feel a momentary inclination to blame me when I reveal, that I rather stood in the way of