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'Walking a Stick back home' - BBC Radio 4 - Friday 23 May 2008
Thomas de Quincey 1785-1859 was a 19th century writer and essayist best known for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He also wrote many other books, essays and works of literary merit including Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, 1827, The House hold Wreck 1838. Suspiria de Profundis 845, and various important essays on Coleridge and Wordsworth. De Quincey’s collected works run to a over 20 volumes. The radio programme visits de Quincey’s haunts in Edinburgh and the Lake District using the slender but wiry blackthorn walking stick which was inherited by James Crowden. The walking stick was given to his great, great uncle Samuel Crowden by Thomas’s redoubtable landlady Miss Jane Stark in the 1870s. James is accompanied on this journey by Grevel Lindop, de Quincey's biographer and editor of his collected works.
Listen again at Speechification by clicking here.. 'Walking a Stick back home.' is a Loftus production presented and researched by James Crowden and produced by Matt Thompson. See www.loftusproductions.co.uk.
For more information about Thomas de Quincey see The Opium Eater by Grevel Lindop OUP 1985 as well as visiting www.grevel.co.uk.
A new biography of Thomas de Quincey written by Dr Robert Morrison is due out in Dec 2009 published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. See: www.queensu.ca/english/tdq.
And of course visit Dove Cottage, Grasmere, where you can see Thomas De Quincey's walking stick. Visit www.wordsworth.org.uk for more information.
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Radio & Television 
