But readers such as Jorge Luis Borges and D. H. Lawrence have found themselves addicted to the rhythmic, labyrinthine prose that strings together books, personal experience, and dreams to produce powerful narratives. The complexities of De Quincey's work tend to call into question simplistic ideas about Romanticism; and his career, stretching from the 1820s to the 1850s, reminds us that scholarly divisions between Romantic and Victorian are often arbitrary. While De Quincey does provide twentiethcentury readers with insights into the characters of other first-generation Romantic writers, the world of nineteenth-century journalism, and the anxieties and concerns of the nineteenth-century reading public, he is most important for his mastery of style, which paved the way for other experimenters and pioneers as it tested the limits of prose.
Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester in the summer of 1785, the fourth of eight children born to the prosperous Quinceys. Shortly after Thomas's birth, the family moved outside the city boundaries to The Farm, Moss Side. There, De Quincey's mother, Elizabeth Penson Quincey, a woman of strong evangelical principles and an associate of Hannah More, sought to instill moral principles and religious fervor in her growing family. Her husband, Thomas Quincey, was a successful textile merchant, whose ill health and prolonged absences from the household made him a shadowy figure in his son's early childhood.
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