Thomas De Quincey, best known perhaps as the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, wrote most of the work in this volume for Tait's Magazine between 1834 and 1840. It is immensely readable and alive an anecdotal, conversational, contemporaneous portrait and account of Grasmere, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and so near the bone that Wordsworth and his family would have nothing further to do with De Quincey after it appeared. Within this first-hand biographical/critical discussion of the lives and works of these poets, De Quincey's life of Wordsworth may still be the best we have.
This edition contains the most complete collection of De Quincey's Lake papers to appear in a single volume and the text used here is that of the original articles.
The cover shows a detail of 'View from Rydal Park' by Francis Towne, in the City Art Gallery, Leeds
Well aged paperback

Condition: Fair