ABSTRACT
The works of Thomas De Quincey were relatively marginal throughout the Victorian period, in contrast with the great Romantic poets, or even the more popular Romantic essayists such as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The attempt to catalogue and collect De Quincey's bewildering corpus then dovetails with the development of Decadence in England. De Quincey was certainly not the most prominent Romantic writer in Decadence the 'big six' Romantic poets were all topics of important Decadent essays. De Quincey wrote before the days of Macaulay, the Saturday Review, and Mr. Matthew Arnold. As Vincent Sherry has recently argued, De Quincey is a central figure in the development of a literary challenge to modernity's logic of progress and novelty, a mode of critique that Decadence would inherit and dramatically develop. Oscar Wilde's debt to De Quincey is arguably minor compared to his liberal borrowing from Keats, or the surprising regularity of references, if often condescending, to the poetry of Wordsworth.
