De Quincey's Cessio Bonorum

If De Quincey has more than once proclaimed his mastery of the pure theory of political economy, he has also admitted, as in the Confessions, his occasional incapacity for systematic “domestic economy.” The extent of that incapacity is indicated, however, less in what he wrote for publication than in his anxious letters to the publishers who were the sources of his earned income; and Professor Eaton's faithful and judiciously proportioned new biography amply attests the reality of the financial tribulations which perplex that correspondence. But, while Professor Eaton's account of individual actions for debt—protested bills of exchange, homings, arrests, flights into and out of sanctuary—is impressive, if not appalling, the official records of De Quincey's cessio bonorum in 1833, which seem to have been overlooked hitherto, provide a general summation of his desperate financial plight in one of his most difficult years. The story of that action, as I may now piece it together with the assistance of Mr. W. M. Parker of Edinburgh, will show that in 1832 De Quincey actually suffered imprisonment for debt, though very briefly; that, in taking the benefit of a kind of personal bankruptcy procedure peculiar to Scots law, he acknowledged in 1833 a total indebtedness of £617 16s. to some fifty-one creditors; and that in his desperation he was driven to list among the debts due him the “gift” of £300 made to Coleridge in 1807.