Julian North, De Quincey Reviewed: Thomas De Quincey's Critical Reception, 1821-1994. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997. ISBN: 1-57113-072-1 (hardback) Price: $55.

'Have you had deep delight in an exquisite paper by the Opium-eater, which my heart trembled through from end to end?', Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote excitedly to a correspondent in March 1845 after having read the first instalment of Thomas De Quincey's 'Suspiria de Profundis.' Barrett Browning's response, like so many who read De Quincey, was immediate and passionate, though of course not everyone shared her enthusiasm. In De Quincey Reviewed, Julian North charts the crests and troughs of De Quincey's 'critical reception' from the first appearance of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821 until the publication of Josephine McDonagh's De Quincey's Disciplines in 1994. North's book - the latest instalment in the Camden House Literary Criticism in Perspective series - contains a good deal of information usefully summarized, and makes a series of striking connections between apparently very different critical assumptions about De Quincey. The book, however, is occasionally marred by cursoriness and omission. North's study contains a fascinating series of critical reactions to De Quincey that range from the rapturous to the scornful. When Confessions first appeared, some praised it as 'the most original, if not the most powerful, piece of self-biography extant' (8) while others damned it as 'the autobiography of a lunatic' (12) and 'without any intelligible drift or design' (11). In the 1850s several commentators spoke with awed reverence of the 'impassioned prose' of 'Suspiria' and 'The English Mail-Coach': De Quincey 'is familiar with the colossal scenery of the spiritual world', wrote one critic; 'looks down with clear and steady eye into bottomless starry gulfs; and walks unscathed amid solar systems and burning planets' (29). But for others, of course, this kind of rhetorical flight - in both De Quincey and his admirers - was nothing more than 'word-painting' and represented a series of failed attempts 'to render artistic and set forth in "passionate prose" what is essentially matter of fact' (28). In this century De Quincey as prose stylist has been praised by Virginia Woolf and disparaged by George Saintsbury; praised as critic by John Jordan and condemned by René Wellek; praised as existentialist autobiographer by Miller and condemned as a narrow-minded Tory by McDonagh. What De Quincey achieved, and to what end, has always been hotly contested. Throughout De Quincey Reviewed North is generous and admirably objective, and does a good job of suggesting how even the finest De Quincey critics have inevitably shaped De Quincey in their own image. 'For David Masson, the scholar and polyhistor', North writes, 'De Quincey is first and foremost a scholar and polyhistor; for Virginia Woolf, De Quincey is an embryonic Virginia Woolf; for J. Hillis Miller, suffering from the disappearance of the author, De Quincey is a writer suffering from the disappearance of God...for the deconstructionists of the late 1970s, De Quincey anticipates the insights of Derrida' (145). North makes a similar point from the opposite direction when he quotes John Carey's review of Barrell's book, in which Carey argues that Barrell has 'invented an incestuous imperialist, De Quincey, to serve as the opposite of himself, a right-thinking intellectual' (111). De Quincey Reviewed also demonstrates the ways in which, from markedly different perspectives, critics have often arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. The purple-patched appreciations of De Quincey in the 1850s are repeated by 'critics of consciousness' in the 1960s like Robert Adams, who observes that De Quincey, in his struggle against the void, 'unleashes a flood of hidden waters...the toppling, jerrybuilt structure of his thought collapses, there is a gush of redemptive emotions from beneath' (81). Deconstructionist readings of De Quincey by critics such …