And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

Thomas De Quincey’s “The English Mail-Coach,” an essay that begins as a jaunty paean to the English postal sys- tem and ends in drug-fueled nightmare, appeared, in 1849, in Blackwood’s Magazine. That is to say, a reader picking up the general-interest journal would have plunged into what appeared to be a winking disquisition on mail-coaches only to come, many pages later, to a subheading titled “Dream-Fugue: Founded on the Preceding Theme of Sudden Death,” at which point he would be firmly planted in an opium addict’s waking fever. The mail-coaches of his youth warranted lengthy description, wrote De Quincey, because they “had so large a share in developing the anarchies” of his dreams. Some familiarity with his lived world, in other words, will be necessary for the reader to understand the dream logic that followed. The dream, the journey to the edge of consciousness, was very much the point.