Commerce, Genius, and De Quincey’s Literary Identity

In his magazine essays in the 1820s, Thomas De Quincey offers himself as a genius whose status is assured by his distance from the commercial market. Such cultural maneuvering is representative of a strain in Romanticism that has been stridently critiqued in New Historicist criticism in the last twenty-five years. The very insistence with which De Quincey made such claims tended to characterize him as a magazine “personality,” providing a legible, and hence saleable, commercial product. The effort was paradoxical from the first. By insisting on his separation from the print market, De Quincey integrated himself into it.