READERS HAVE LONG BEEN PERPLEXED BY THE QUESTION OF DE QUINCEY'S place in literary history. A writer whose works traverse five decades, from some juvenilia and an early diary written in 1803, to his death in 1859, he is most often taken to be a minor, late Romantic, out of step with the times, an ineffectual dreamer, whose preoccupations and voice betray an allegiance with the older generation of Lakeland writers. 1 Alina Clej, on the other hand, pushes him the other way, and across the Channel: for her, De Quincey is a pre-emptive modernist, a precursor to a European tradi tion of avant gardistes. 2 He is rarely read, or indeed taught, as a Victorian writer, despite the fact that his work overlaps with the major writers of the Victorian canon. 3 Moreover, unlike other writers of such longevity, little critical attention has been paid to stages in his own development. His er ratic publishing tactics, his notorious habits of revision and recycling, have thwarted attempts to identify changes across the body of work, and even the most historicist of his critics tends to respond by reading him synchronically, as though all his writings are of the same moment. 4 We have accrued little sense of'late'or'early'De Quincey. It is as though De Quincey is always late, or belated, and sometimes even early.