ABSTRACT
‘Suspiria De Profundis’ appeared in four instalments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, (March, April, June, July 1845), vol. 57, pp. 269–85, 489–502, 739–51; vol. 58, 43–55. It was subsequently published in F, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; and Suspiria de Profundis (1851). Sections of ‘Suspiria’ were revised in SGG as part of Autobiographic Sketches (1853–4). In preparing the revisions, De Quincey used his personal copy of the second edition of F, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; and Suspira de Profundis (1852), in which he inserted his marginal corrections. This copy (=MS B) is now in the manuscript collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, PML 5097 (see Vol. 2, p. 1 of this edition). In preparing the text of Autobiographic Sketches for SGG, De Quincey removed pages for the sections subsequently reprinted as ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, ‘Dream-Echoes of these Infant Experiences’, and ‘Dream-Echoes Fifty Years Later’ in SGG (see Textual Notes for details of De Quincey’s alterations. ‘The Daughter of Lebanon’, originally written for ‘Suspiria’, was first published in SGG as a pendant to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1856). For that reason, it appears in Vol. 2 of the present edition together with the 1856 version of the Confessions. Among the transcripts in this volume are numerous drafts, notes, and fragments relating to Suspiria.
