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Synopsis

‘Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!’

Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the ‘Church of Opium’. Thomas De Quincey consumed large daily quantities of laudanum (at the time a legal painkiller), and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings though London, along with the nightmares, despair and paranoia to which he became prey. The result is a work in which the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory and imagination are seamlessly interwoven. Confessions forged a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, paving the way for later generations of literary drug-users from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipating psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious.

This edition is based on the original serial version of 1821, and reproduces the two ‘sequels’, ‘Suspiria De Profundis’ (1845) and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849). It also includes a critical introduction discussing the romantic figure of the addict and the tradition of confessional literature, and an appendix on opium in the nineteenth century.

Reviews

Customer Review: 28 August 2009

Reviewer: Amy Britton

'When the modern reader looks back on the Romantic Age, it is naturally the poetry which is first considered. This often leads Romantic prose to be unfairly forgotten, when in fact at the time the essays from the likes of Lamb and Hazlitt were extremly important. Arguably, however, the true master of Romantic prose was Thomas De Quincey, the man seen as link between Romanticism and the later Decadence movement. "Confessions of an Opium-Eater" is perhaps his best known work, a startlingly honest chronicle of his own,severe opium addiction. Considering the amount of opium that De Quincey is frank about taking, it is remarkable that he managed to write something so lucid, the pains and pleasures of his addiction equally documented in a range of styles from haunting and ddeadly serious to wryly amusing, such as the way he refers to more restrained opium users as "amateurs." The one thing which remains constant, however, is the surprisingly modern voice which De Quincey uses. He was in many ways a modern figure, commenting on all apsects of culture, and, in "On Murder" writing perhaps the first book on criminal psychology (which is now brilliant but dated in its rambling philosophy.) Drug confessionals are now everywhere; the best thing to do is ignore most of them and turn instead to this classic of the Romantic prose genre. '

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