EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THIS VOLUME

THE present volume contains (1) De Quincey's own General Preface of 1853, as written for the first volume of the Collective Edition of his Writings then begun, and (2) the whole of that portion of his Autobiography which appeared in the same volume, with continuation in the next, under the title of "Autobiographic Sketches."

THE GENERAL PREFACE.-This was written when De Quincey was still somewhat in the dark as to what would ultimately be the entire contents of his collective edition, or what would be the order of their arrangement, and could only make a forecast on the subject from the twelve volumes of the collective American edition that had already been published (see ante, p. xiv), and from his own knowledge of the quantity of more matter that remained to be brought in. Hence the Preface is hardly what De Quincey would have written had he had the whole of his writings under exact survey. It gives no adequate conspectus of them in their complete variety, but only suggests a classification of them, and lights here and there, by way of illustration, on a selected example, not always the best that could have been chosen. The classification suggested, however, is valuable; and the whole of the Preface is interesting and characteristic.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.-When De Quincey had resolved that his collective edition should open with a revised collection of his expressly autobiographic papers, his most

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obvious store of material was in the series of articles he had begun in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine for February 1834, under the title "Sketches of Men and Manners from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater," and had continued through the rest of that year, and for some years more, in the pages of the same monthly, under the same title or modifications of it. But, as we saw (ante, pp. xii-xiii), he had quite recently, in the pages of Hogg's Instructor, begun, under the title of "A Sketch from Childhood," another series of autobiographic articles, filling a gap in the previous Tait series; and these supplementary articles, straggling at intervals through the numbers of the Edinburgh weekly for the years 1851 and 1852, had necessarily to be interwoven with their predecessors. Further, in certain numbers of Blackwood's Magazine for 1845, from March onwards, there were special articles of De Quincey's, of a peculiar autobiographic sort, under the title of "Suspiria de Profundis, being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," or titled independently; and these also had to be incorporated. One may guess, accordingly, how De Quincey proceeded in adapting the autobiographic material he had at hand for connected republication in 1853. He took the numbers of Tait's Magazine, Blackwood's Magazine, and Hogg's Instructor of the dates indicated, and cut and carved among his own articles in them, welding these together, with retrenchments here and enlargements and alterations there, till the result satisfied him. The "Autobiographic Sketches," which composed the first volume of the Collective Edition of his Writings in 1853, and a portion of the second volume, were, therefore, a coagulation of matter previously printed in 1834-5, 1845, and 1851-2, all in Edinburgh periodicals. In the present edition we keep to his example by beginning with the "Autobiographic Sketches," only changing that title into Autobiography," as less ragged,—a change for which there is ample justification in De Quincey's prior use of the word "Autobiography" in designating portions of the series, and in his subsequent frequent use of the same term as an optional alternative in referring to the completed series. What has to be chiefly remembered here is that the present volume does not include the whole of De Quincey's Autobiography,

as expressly so designated by himself, but only as much of it as he had managed to overtake in the revision of his writings for the Collective Edition of 1853-60. Some additional portions of his already printed Autobiography, which he doubtless meant to revise some time or other, never had the benefit of that intention, and remained in their unrevised shape as articles in some old numbers of Tait's Magazine. These will follow in the next volume of the present edition.

D. M.