 The degree of candour that De Quincey brought to his portraits of people who were then still living or recently dead was extremely rare, if not unprecedented, in contemporaneous literature and journalism, and it provoked strong negative reactions.In the mid-1830s, when the essays were first being published, Southey called De Quincey "a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth," and "one of the greatest scoundrels living!