[Every Night Book]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 1 September 1827, p. 134. Never reprinted. This is one of only two reviews about London to appear in the Saturday Post. In subject-matter and perspective, the review is thoroughly English. Even the excerpt from the book under review concerns London’s politics, newspapers, theatre and opera, all of which interested De Quincey, but were of less interest to the Scottish critics for the Post. The phrase ‘heap of resuscitated old rags’ finds many echoes in De Quincey’s later writings for the Post, where he writes of a ‘heap of stupidities’, ‘a bushel of … odious dramas’, ‘a boat-load of ignorance’, or ‘a century of dulness’ (see below, pp. 296, 57,114 and 149). In his review of Gillies’s German Stories, De Quincey has phrases like ‘mass of rubbish’ and ‘heaps of flesh’ (Vol. 6, pp. 7, 10). A similar phrase, ‘bundle of old rags’, occurs in the article on Phrenology in the Post (below, p. 324), while ‘heap of old lumber and rags’ is in De Quincey’s second essay ‘On Murder’ (Vol. 11). Many other ‘heaps’, and other dismissive phrases, might be cited. Other conversational turns, like ‘many a better book’, and ‘dip into … at random’, establish a relaxed, confident, colloquial tone that is common in De Quincey’s reviews. The dash in the first sentence, and ‘&c. &c.’, seem equally unlike the formality of most of the Post critics. De Quincey appears to have been the only writer for the Post to use sentence-fragments, like the one here on ‘The taverns, theatres, operas, ‘&c. &c’.