Abstract
The publication of Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium- Eater’ in the London Magazine in the autumn of 1821 led to a flurry of confessional writing in the pages of the London and its chief rival, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. 1 De Quincey, in fact, had originally intended his ‘Opium article’ for the Scottish journal, but had quarrelled with William Blackwood and was now cementing his position as a London contributor. Ironically, less than a year earlier he had been hostile to the London and had encouraged Blackwood’s in the conflict between the two journals that was to lead to the death of the London’s editor, John Scott, following a mismanaged duel at Chalk Farm in February 1821. The guilt that imbues the ‘Confessions’ may have had something to do with this tragedy. Certainly, as critics have shown, the magazine context is significant to understanding De Quincey’s two-part article, the importance of which was recognized by Blackwood’s.2 Robert Morrison has argued that its publication of ‘Selections of Mr Coleridge’s Literary Correspondence with Friends, and Men of Letters’ in October 1821 was a response to De Quincey.3 And the ‘Opium Eater’ was to become a significant character in the series of Noctes Ambrosianae that began in March 1822. However, this essay uncovers the significance of a hitherto unexplored Blackwood’s parody of his ‘Confessions’: the anonymous ‘Confessions of an English Glutton’, published in January 1823.4 An analysis of this fascinating text, and its intertextual relations, reveals how confessional writing self-consciously addresses the authorial duplicity and multiple identities that characterized the magazines of the period, and uses addiction as a figure for the violence, rhetorical and real, of late Romantic literary culture.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Henry Thomson, ‘Confessions of a Footman’, BEM, 14 (November 1823), 590–600.
Francis Bacon, ‘The Confessions of a Cantab’, BEM, 16 (October and November 1824), 459–467.
Robert Macnish, ‘Colonel O’Shaughnessy in India’, BEM, 21 (June 1827), 653–664.
Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Robert Morrison, ‘Opium-Eaters and Magazine Wars’, Victorian Periodical Review, 30 (1997), 27–40.
G. C. Boase, ‘Grattan, Thomas Colley (1791–1864)’, rev. Norman Vance, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Thomas Colley Grattan, ‘The Confessions of an English Glutton’, BEM, 13 (January 1823), 86–93.
Bonnie Woodberry, ‘Charles Lamb’s “Confessions of a Drunkard”: Constructing Subjectivity Through Context’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 22 (2000), 357–390.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), pp. 26–27.
Charles Lamb, ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’, London Magazine, 6 (September 1822), 245–248.
Thomas De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Part II’, London Magazine, 4 (October 1821), 353–379.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 Version), 2nd ed., ed. by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), p. 82.
Jan Bondeson, Freaks: The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square and Other Medical Marvels (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), pp. 75–81.
Peter T. Murphy, ‘Impersonation and Authorship in Romantic Britain’, ELH, 59 (1992), 625–649.
John Wilson, ‘The Entail’, BEM, 13 (January 1823), 77–86.
John Wilson, ‘The Candid. No. I’, BEM, 13 (January 1823), 108–124.
David Groves, ‘“Confessions of an English Glutton”: A (Probable) Source for James Hogg’s Confessions’, Notes and Queries, 40 (March 1993), 47–48.
James Hogg, ‘Marion’s Jock’, in Altrive Tales, ed. by Gillian Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 172–186.
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. by P. D. Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 165–169.
Bryan Waller Procter, ‘The Memoir of a Hypochondriac’, London Magazine, 6 (September 1822), 249–261
Frank P. Riga and Claude A. Prance, Index to the London Magazine (New York and London: Garland, 1978), p. 63.
Grevel Lindop, ‘De Quincey and the Cursed Crocodile’, Essays in Criticism, 45 (1995), 121–140.
Karen Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), p. 66.
John Scott, ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, London Magazine, 2 (November 1820), 509–521.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 David Higgins
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Higgins, D. (2013). From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood’s and the London Magazine . In: Morrison, R., Roberts, D.S. (eds) Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33853-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30385-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)