ABSTRACT
De Quincey’s contributions to Tait’s continued to mention Wordsworth. In July and August 1839 he published two further sets of ‘Lake Reminiscences’, on ‘William Wordsworth and Robert Southey’ and ‘Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge’ (the first of these includes the famous story of Wordsworth, no bibliophile, cutting the pages of a new book with a greasy butter-knife). And when he returned thereafter to the series of ‘Sketches of Life and Manners: from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater’, the setting was the Lake District. Several of the articles between September 1839 and August 1840 contain anecdotal reference to Wordsworth; and the August 1840 essay describes De Quincey’s grief-stricken illness following the death of his much-loved favourite, the four-year-old Kate Wordsworth. In October 1840 he returned to the subject of his estrangement from the poet. He did so in an article the first half of which comprises recollections of the eccentric peripatetic writer John Stewart (‘Walking Stewart’) and of the Reverend Edward Irving.
