When he was editor of The Westmorland Gazette in 1818, De Quincey made a point to expand the paper's normal remit into covering trials for murder and sex crimes.
[1]: 229 Five years later, De Quincey used John Williams' massacre as a lens for viewing Macduff's arrival at a crime scene in "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth".
[3] In the same issue of Blackwood's Magazine, de Quincey also published "The Last Days of Kant", whose work he studied closely.
He wrote "Peter Anthony Fonk" in a reportorial style based on a German murderer recorded in the Conversations-Lexikon.
De Quincey submitted the Fonk manuscript with "To the Editor of Blackwood Magazine", a satirical cover letter written in the same vein as "On Murder".
In August 1838, they published de Quincey's short story "The Avenger", which features multiple household massacres like those on Ratcliff Highway.
[7] In November 1839, Blackwood's Magazine ran another sequel by the author: "Second Paper on Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts".
[2]: xxi James Hogg recalled that when de Quincey was frequently depressed, he could reliably cheer him up and prod him to write by inquiring after the doomed Baker in "On Murder".
"[10] When de Quincey and Hogg were anthologizing his work in 1854 as Selections Grave and Gay, he edited and expanded "On Murder".
It appears in the fourth volume of Selections along with a "Postscript" which doubles the size of the original essay and retells John Williams' killing spree in chilling prose.
[1]: 378 The essay is styled as a lecture to The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, a copy of which "fell into the hands" of a concerned citizen who has forwarded it to Blackwood's Magazine in an attempt to expose their perfidy.
He ends by saying the only murder he was ever able to commit was of a cat who was eating bread during a famine and laments that he is unfit for "the higher departments of the art".
Styled as a letter to "Mr. North" (the pseudonymous editor of Blackwood's), the second paper on murder is written by the author of the purloined speech in the first essay.
Toasts are given to Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (a Thug scholar), the Sicarii, the Club Committee which had written a report on murder weapons, "Burkism and Harism", and finally to "Thugdom in all its branches".
[18] Shadworth Hodgson pointed out the similarity of de Quincey's humor method to Charles Lamb, in that both writers "imagine the contrary, the contrast, of what he is describing, thinks what it might appear to spectators with different interests..." De Quincey imagines thieves intruded on by unsuspecting tourists, and the murderer considered by the aesthete.
[22] De Quincey's murder essays exerted a strong influence on literary representations of crime and were lauded by writers like Charles Lamb, G. K. Chesterton, and Wyndham Lewis.
They are parodied or cited by name in works by George Orwell ("Decline of the English Murder"), Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano), Vladimir Nabokov (Despair), Iain Sinclair (Lud Heat), Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor), and Philip Kerr (A Philosophical Investigation).
[2]: xvii, xxv–ii Edgar Allan Poe parodied De Quincey's essays in "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences".
[23] Often seen as the beginning of detective fiction, Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is inspired by de Quincey's essays.