Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

"To be honest, if I could go back and give my younger self some books to pass the time in rehab, this wouldn’t be among them. Published in 1821, Confessions of an English Opium Eater tells the tale of De Quincey’s unhappy childhood, his years spent destitute in Wales and London, and his growing dependency on opium. It’s a strange, flawed book, but for anyone curious to understand how the addiction memoir form came to exist, it’s essential—because it’s unquestionably the prototype. Although in 1821 there were no other books of quite this kind, it’s interesting to note how many later conventions of the addiction memoir are already here in embryo. Present here are all the main ones I identified earlier, as well as several other tropes and common features of what we now call addiction memoirs. For instance, De Quincey invents—and defines—the form’s quintessential protagonist: “the hero of the piece or (if you choose) the criminal at the bar”. And he will not be the last writer whose warnings about drugs’ evil are somewhat offset by gorgeous descriptions of their effects elsewhere. Finally, De Quincey began a long and remarkably durable tradition among memoirists: upstaging their books’ hopeful conclusions with later drug use. “These troubles are past”, he declared of his addiction, “and thou wilt read these records… as the records of some hideous dream that can return no more.” In fact, although he lived another 37 industrious years after the Confessions were published—revising and expanding it several times, and writing two sequels among other works—one thing he never succeeded in doing was quitting opium. Although his case was extreme—he died at 74, still an addict—it was far from unusual. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Despite these striking similarities between the Confessions and later addiction memoirs, readers today are likely to be struck by one major difference in De Quincey: his concept of addiction, insofar as he had one. In a sense, this is hardly surprising: although there have always been addicts, it was long after the Confessions that addiction began to be conceptualised as a condition or illness, and only in recent decades has scientific research led to a satisfactory (if still incomplete) account of its aetiology. As a result, most educated readers now think of addicts as having a psychological condition whereby they compulsively numb emotional pain, often with origins in past trauma. From this perspective De Quincey’s tale makes perfect sense. Orphaned as a young child and raised by uncaring strangers, he was so miserable as a teenager that he fled his situation, considering homelessness an escape. In other words, he was primed for addiction long before he encountered his “celestial drug”. But he doesn’t make this connection, and his various explanations (or, as we might say, rationalisations) for his difficulties can seem bizarre: he seems to trace his adolescent unhappiness to being mistaught Classics at school—and, later, he blames his abuse of opium on stomach pain and tooth ache. Only occasionally does he show flashes of deeper insight: “What was it that did in reality make me an opium eater? Misery, blank desolation, abiding darkness.” In summary, the Confessions is an oddity, both uncannily familiar and bewilderingly alien. But at just 100 pages in its original edition—I would avoid De Quincey’s increasingly verbose revisions—it’s well worth reading for anyone interested in the development of the addiction memoir form. Or, indeed, memoir in general: although De Quincey didn’t invent autobiography in English, he greatly elevated our sense of its artistic potential. The baroque, rhapsodic passages on his opium-induced dreams show him as a master of English prose, and are worth the cover price alone."

"Thomas De Quincey tends to get overshadowed by his contemporaries: the great Romantic poets and novelists. Yes, he was on the sidelines, although he knew William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge intimately, and was a great journalist and reporter on their activities. De Quincey tried to make the Gothic very contemporary. He used Gothic motifs, and was interested in architecture and in the elements of the sublime that Burke described, such as music. But he didn’t write about the supernatural. Rather, he portrayed the Gothic as a symbol for opium: a medicine to people who aren’t sick, a leisure activity, a food that doesn’t provide any sustenance. As De Quincey writes about it, the Gothic is a gateway into sublime experiences, to the infinite capacities and possibilities of one’s own mind, memories, and imagination. Like Dacre, he was fascinated by dreams. He tried to come up with an architecture or a theory of dreaming, which he then expressed through Gothic language. He was interested in inner space, and how this could illuminate one’s personality. People say that he anticipates Sigmund Freud but it’s the other way around: Freud is influenced by De Quincey. De Quincey sees the mind as a palimpsest, as a writing tablet that one writes over and over again but which carries the traces of earlier experiences and memories. He talks about dreams being ‘involutes’, by which he means a collection of apparently random and unconnected elements, like a heraldic shield, that can then be decoded to lay bare the elements of one’s personality. He sees dreams as offering a glimpse of the infinite and the sublime. He describes going down into the abyss—the feeling you might get at the bottom of an ocean—or climbing up the infinite number of stairs of some Gothic tower. While Radcliffe had described labyrinthine passages under castles, De Quincey makes psychological use of this motif. In the Confessions of an English Opium Eater , you can’t always distinguish the dreaming passages from the more mundane accounts of his life. This is what makes the book so enticing, I think—it evokes the sort of feelings that Freud later calls ‘uncanny’. You go back to a house of which you have a very strong memory, and it turns out that it is no longer there. Is this because it has disappeared through some sort of strange science, or is it because your memory is faulty? None of us like to admit to having a faulty memory, so it becomes very troubling when one’s memory doesn’t fit with one’s later experience. De Quincey is very alert to those disturbances. Our identity isn’t as cohesive as we would like it to be: it contains all sorts of gaps and dislocations. Yes, he influenced later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and H.P. Lovecraft . He was also notable for his Gothicization of the city. He was one of the first Gothic writers to think less about castles and more about the winding streets of the city. This is the beginning of the idea that you can make a story by drifting anonymously through a city, and looking at people as if they were objects or spectacles to be consumed. The Gothic city has secrets: it’s a place that isn’t just a commercial centre, but is sinister, frightening, and full of crime. You can see that Gothicization taken up by Charles Dickens , but also by Bram Stoker in Dracula , and Richard Marsh in The Beetle ."