ABSTRACT
In spite of its nominal kinship with biography, autobiography always drifted away from that model as genre in order to plunder its own unique subjective recesses. In his explorations of childhood memories and their emergence in the adult dreams and nightmares of his opium addiction, Thomas De Quincey drifted further than most autobiographers from recognizable landmarks of experiences in day-to-day life. For this reason his biographers have had to rely extensively on his letters and other documents in order to construct a stable chronological scaffolding to frame and hold together his reveries and recollections (Stull 7–9). The most influential models for his autobiographical writings were Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and William Wordsworth’s Prelude, both of which narrated the Growth of the Mind. De Quincey referred often to the passages from the Prelude in which Wordsworth told of the “fair seed-time” of childhood, schoolboy and student years, and the vicissitudes of the city. 1
