Emerging from Darkness and Dreams in De Quincey Anonymous College

De Quincey’s dreams and visions as described in his work function as a different world, which exists in places of temporary darkness, and his attempts to capture them must function outside of that world, in a well-lit space of recollection and translation onto paper. This hindsight is comparable to the manner in which he acted as his own editor, revising sections as he later considered fit, and is met in the text by a dwelling on the moment of ‘waking’ and shifting from one state into the other. Tambling describes his 1856 revisions as ‘not only trying to fix the text, as Wordsworth had tried to do, but also attempting to demonstrate a unity within its digressions’: quoting De Quincey’s idea of a ‘veil’ between current consciousness and complete memories, Tambling interprets this attempt to demonstrate unity as inherently flawed, as finding meaning or knowing yourself in half-remembered dreams is futile. As Virginia Woolf noted, however, hindsight is the only way to make sense of the past or your dreams: ‘it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience.’

The English Mail-coach describes the twin effects of opium and nostalgia as De Quincey travels...