He describes, in vivid detail, the visions and dreams he experiences, conjuring up a world of contrasts that was both a ‘paradise’ and a place of ‘incubus and nightmare’.ĭe Quincey wrote his Confessions while unknown and in debt, but the work caused such a sensation that his literary fame was secured, and his account of his addiction has become a central Romantic text. De Quincey began to take the drug as a student at Oxford, to relieve a severe bout of toothache, and remained dependent on it for the rest of his life. Oxford University Press is reissuing Thomas De Quinceys emblematic autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in their first 1821 edition. It is the sections that describe his opium addiction, however, that have become the most famous. It professes to tear away the ‘decent drapery’ of convention and present the reader with ‘the record of a remarkable period’ in the author’s life, beginning when he ran away from school at the age of 17 and spent several months as a vagrant. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was first published in 1821 in the London Magazine.
Above all, the extraordinary prose hymn to the joys of winter, a warm cottage, a good library and a pot of hot tea.I took it: - and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! The disquisition on music, which, in an 11-word parenthesis, gives as succinct a summary of Kantian aesthetics as can be imagined. The friendship with a young prostitute who saved his life and whom he lost among the thronging London crowds. This new edition displays the range of the author's learning, not only in classical and English literature, but in the Enlightenment philosophy that had been sweeping across Europe since his youth.Ĭertain moments of the narrative stand out with the kind of vividness De Quincey ascribes to an opium dream.
Until then, he had been living in Wordsworth's cottage at Grasmere, scratching a living from his translations of German writers and feeding a laudanum habit acquired at the age of 19. First published in 1821, Confessions of an English Opium Eater was the book that kick-started Thomas De Quincey's literary career and the one that would ultimately lead to his canonisation as the patron saint of the erudite addict and the bookish dipsomaniac.
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