Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings by Thomas De Quincey
An interest in drug use was sparked by Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and has persisted to this day. De Quincey invents recreational drug use in this passage, but he also describes the horrifying nightmares he experienced while abusing the drug as well as his embarrassingly fruitless attempts to quit. Suspiria de Profundis focuses on the severe illnesses that plagued De Quincey as a youth and explores the potent and frequently paradoxical connection between medicines and creative expression. The English Mail-Coach portrays Britain as a Protestant empire and a setting against which the calamities of De Quincey’s history are played out in terrible repetition.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings by Thomas De Quincey
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Robert Morrison’s Introduction carefully examines the three works, the confessional genre, and opium use in the nineteenth century while highlighting how important De Quincey was to his own time and how relevant he still is now. A thorough chronology of De Quincey’s life, an exhaustive annotation, and the most recent and comprehensive bibliography on the autobiographical works are also included by Morrison.
The Confessions are more interesting as personal writing than for what they have to say about opium addiction, so if you’re expecting something raunchy, you run the danger of being let down. Since the selling and use of opium were both legal in Britain, without restrictions, and De Quincey was by no means the lone addict in the literary community, the novella, which was first published in magazine format, generated less controversy than one might have expected. In any case, The Confessions is a poetic work, and the author’s descriptions of opium’s benefits and drawbacks are more about examining the power of dreams and unbridled imagination than they are literal.
In a second, autobiographical component, De Quincey discusses his tribulations, his exodus from London as an impoverished student, as well as other subsequent events. While The Suspiria focus on De Quincey’s sadness over the death of his sister when she was a young child, they are fairly repetitious. And the Mail-Coach is a fantastical diversion that harkens back to the Confessions’ more fantastical drug hallucinations. De Quincey, who made his living primarily as an essayist and commentator, wanders aimlessly from one topic to another, ranging from classical Greek theatre to political economy, in the midst of it all. The writings’ reflections on Victorian life and poetic power make them more valuable than any possible commentary on drugs.
