[2][3] Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West.

[7] He was sent to Manchester Grammar School, in order that after three years' stay he might obtain a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, but he took flight after 19 months.

[3]: 25, 46–62 His first plan had been to reach Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) had consoled him in fits of depression and had awakened in him a deep reverence for the poet.

But for that De Quincey was too timid, so he made his way to Chester, where his mother dwelt, in the hope of seeing a sister; he was caught by the older members of the family, but through the efforts of his uncle, Colonel Penson, he received the promise of a guinea (equivalent to £101 in 2023) a week to carry out his later project of a solitary tramp through Wales.

[2] While on his journey around Wales and Snowdon, he avoided sleeping in inns to save what little money he had and instead lodged with cottagers or slept in a tent he had made himself.

[2]: 57–87 Discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home and finally allowed to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced income.

Moreover, he held reactionary views on the Peterloo massacre and the Sepoy rebellion, on Catholic Emancipation, and on the enfranchisement of the common people.

[14] Despite his ideological commitment to personal identity and freedom that derived from his addiction to and struggles with opium,[15] and in spite of his opposition to the notion of slavery,[13] De Quincey aligned himself against the abolitionist movement in Britain.

[16] In his articles for The Edinburgh Post, on the issue in 1827 and 1828, he accused anti-slavery campaigners of running "schemes of personal aggrandizement", and worried that abolition would undermine the basis of the British Empire and cause uprisings like the Haitian Revolution against colonial rule.

Thomas Hood found the shrinking author "at home in a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the tables and the chairs—billows of books..."[3]: 259f  De Quincey was a famed conversationalist.

Richard Woodhouse wrote, "His conversation appeared like the elaboration of a mine of results..."[2]: 280 From this time on, De Quincey maintained himself by contributing to various magazines.

He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh,[20] the nearby village of Polton, and Glasgow, and he spent the remainder of his life in Scotland.

After leaving Oxford without a degree, he made an attempt to study law, but desultorily and unsuccessfully; he had no steady income and spent large sums on books (he was a lifelong collector).

[26] From 1842 until 1859 he spent long periods in a cottage near Midfield House south of Lasswade, assembling his writings in the peace of the countryside.

[30] Ticknor and Fields, a Boston publishing house, first proposed such a collection and solicited De Quincey's approval and co-operation.

It was only when De Quincey, a chronic procrastinator, failed to answer repeated letters from James Thomas Fields[2]: 472  that the American publisher proceeded independently, reprinting the author's works from their original magazine appearances.

Scholar and editor David Masson attempted a more definitive collection: The Works of Thomas De Quincey appeared in fourteen volumes in 1889 and 1890.

Berlioz also loosely based his Symphonie fantastique on Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, drawing on the theme of the internal struggle with one's self.

Shelby Hughes created Jynxies Natural Habitat, an online archive of stamp art on glassine heroin bags, under the pseudonym "Dequincey Jinxey", in reference to De Quincey.

Treadwell Walden, Episcopal priest and sometime rector of St. Paul's Church, Boston, quotes a letter from De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches in support of his 1881 treatise about the mistranslation of the word metanoia into "repent" by most English translations of the Bible.