This study argues that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the rise of a modern market economy in which the text became commodified into a material object---the book---writers fought against a perceived loss of authority by developing a theory of the rhetorical Sublime. Like the sacramental presence in the Christian church, the realm of the Sublime allowed the reader an opportunity for incorporation in a spiritual communion with an immaterial text offered by a disembodied authorial presence.The book offers both a psychobiography of De Quincey and a fresh study of the evolution of his ideas from early childhood up to the publication of his masterwork, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.