Debt and addiction

I knew that I was onto a good thing with this book before the page numbers were even out of roman numerals. Describing the wealth of new material that has come to light in the three decades or so since the last biography of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison men- tions the areas in which it has enriched our understanding:

. . . his enduring sorrow over the loss of his sister Elizabeth, his masochistic desire for humiliation; his association with prostitutes; his pursuit of, and subsequent alienation from, Wordsworth and Coleridge; his struggle with drugs and alcohol . . . his horrendous battles with debt; his imprisonment in Edinburgh gaols . . .

This was a lively life, and this is a lively Life. Even as a child, when De Quincey was forced to play rather than read, he preferred to play with gunpowder. He was getting drunk by the age of seven. At the age of eight, his biographer reports, he got pocket money for the first time; ‘almost simultaneously, he now had debt’.

He obsessively spent money he didn’t have on books, and his bibliomania was the first great manifestation of his propensity to addiction — a hunger to consume that was ‘absolutely endless and inexorable as the grave’.

It led to debt, and debt led to more debt. As Morrison argues, debt and addiction were parallel drives: in both cases, the cure plunges the afflicted further into the disease. ‘He seems to have been both so inured to desperation that he could not see beyond it,’ writes Morrison, ‘and so in need of it that he did not want to.’