Klosterheim: or, The Masque.

Edinburgh and London William Blackwood, 1832. FIRST EDITION. 8vo, 176 x 105 mms., pp. 305 [306 blank, 307 - 308 adverts], including half-title, edges uncut, early 20th century binding of half chocolate morocco, linen boards, title and author in gilt on spine; rear hinge a little opened at adverts leaf, but a very good copy, with the autograph "Archibald Megget, M D/ 1835" on the title-page. This was De Quincey's only original novel, and a Gothic novel at that. Coleridge asserted that "in purity of style and idiom it reaches an excellence to which Sir Walter Scott seems never to have aspired." Henry Crabb Robinson in 1836 took a rather more jaundiced view: "the book made no noise – perhaps because of its lumbering style and forming one small volume only..." ; and in 1845 George Gilfillan asserted that it was "a complete failure." His daughter Margaret said of the work, "He simply lived in the romances of his youth. He cared nothing for delineations of character, and I do not think he cared much for pictures of modern life, or even for fun or humour – at all events of the later type, in novels. Dark-lanterns, and Spanish cloaks, and three knights riding through a wood, and a mysterious villain with dagger or stiletto were the sine-quâ-nons in the novels of his youth; and he seemed to favour this kind of work to the end. 'Klosterheim,' indeed, is conceived much in this vein.�" Robert J. Morrison, Klosterheim; or, The Masque 1832. Online.