Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Revised Text of 1856

---

Obviously, this is not for the general public at least today, although presumably more so when it was first published.

It is a slim volume, in this, its original published version, and, as others have pointed out, is not mainly a "confession" regarding substance abuse. The author gives a fair amount of background information on his life, which I found entertaining and informative and thought really served the author's purpose of allowing you to get to know him and put his opium dependence in context.

Kindle Feature Spotlight

Just note that reading the author's prose takes concentration, especially for the modern reader. By the time Thomas De Quincey wrote "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" the subject of narcotics was very much a taboo, thus the author was the founder of a new type of literature - addiction literature. When De Quincey was seven, his father died, living him in the care of four tutors.

After changing several esteemed boarding schools, the protagonist came to Eton, where he discovered his passion for Old Greek and Ancient literature. However, he wanted to drop out of school when he was seventeen but his guardians didn't approve, therefore he ran away from Eton. He traveled to Northern Wales where the villagers asked him to do small work as an exchange to food and a place to say. Unfortunately, he ran short of money and he was forced to move on, thus he found himself in London.

There he almost starved to death, but a fifteen-years-old prostitute - Ann -saved him and thus the two became friends. Her gesture and his sympathy for her followed him all his life, but he did not see her again because he had never asked for her last name. Being fed up with poverty, De Quincey asks an old school friend - Earl of D - to lend him some money to return home.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

He reconciles with his family and goes to Oxford University. From this point on, the narrator begins to tell his reader about his good and bad experiences with opium. As De Quincey confesses, the previous period of his life left deep marks on his health - severe stomachaches, intolerance to certain foods and psychic traumas.

The first time he used opium was after a friend suggested it as a pain-killer for toothache. Afterwards, he began consuming it regularly by counting the drops. Throughout the years he had to consume more because the doze didn't have the same pleasant effects. The obsessive counting of the drops may represent the fact that De Quincey wanted to keep his addiction under control, because he took it for medical reasons, not for pleasure.

My favorite part of the book is when De Quincey began to feel the bad effects of opium such as the hallucinations and nightmares, which usually took place in Orient and North Africa China, Turkey, and Egypt etc. The Malay, who has previously showed up at his door and to whom De Quincey offers a good amount of opium, he will also appear in the author's dreams.

The style of the Confessions is erudite, seasoned with Greek terms, references to Ancient literature and other domains. Even if the title suggests the idea of confessions regarding the author's life, here opium is the center piece of the book, with its positive and negative effects. There are also many digressions that might annoy the reader, but they have their purpose, such as the causes and the justification for De Quincey's use of opium. One person found this helpful. I loved the personal account of the main character - an observant and philosophical diarist - describing his life and descent into drug addiction during the age of reason.

There was an unexpected end as well. Not a long book, but one of unique insight and impact. First of all dont read the introduction as this will ruin your reading on the original, base work- "The Confessions..

Confessions Of an English Opium Eater

Just when I would grow tired of the work and would set it down for a time I would come back to it to find some beautiful, finely crafted passage. If you are reading this as I was for knowledge about drug addiction I also recommend highly, Aleister Crowleyy's- "Diary of a Drug Fiend. I decided to read this classic description of the effects of consuming opium because it was mentioned in The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Charles Dickens, and because opium use is such an important element in Dickens' last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Navigation menu

I am not fully sure how the use of opium in Dickens' time differs from the use of heroin today. I know, of course, that opium was smoked and is probably still smoked in Chinese opium dens, but that it was usually dissolved in alcohol, as "laudanum", in Europe. Heroin, on the other hand, is usually melted and injected directly into the blood stream. If the author, Thomas de Quincey, suffered terrible hallucinations from heavy use of laudanum, I can only guess at the severity of the effects of heroin injection.

I found this book, published about , quite dated, telling me much more about its author than about the positive and negative effects of opium use. That the use was quite widespread surprised me, although I learned that opium was neither taxed nor banned in England in the author's time period. De Quincey's description of the effects of opium during the first eight or nine years of his use is really more interesting that his description of the horrors he experienced after that time, when he tried to decrease and stop his usage -- to save his life.

I will cite just a couple of quotations to illustrate the different stages of the story. The effect of opium use upon the author's mind and his appreciation of music: Now, for the most part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have indeed seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true; viz. What happened to the author after the publication of this book, I do not know, but suspect that he never fully escaped the consequences of his long usage.

Interesting historical work that has transcended the centuries, unfortunately,i. See all reviews.

See all customer images. Most recent customer reviews. Published 1 month ago. Published 2 months ago. Published 4 months ago. Though De Quincey was later criticized for giving too much attention to the pleasure of opium and not enough to the harsh negatives of addiction, The Pains of Opium is in fact significantly longer than The Pleasures. However, even when trying to convey darker truths, De Quincey's language can seem seduced by the compelling nature of the opium experience:.

From its first appearance, the literary style of the Confessions attracted attention and comment. De Quincey was well-read in the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and assimilated influences and models from Sir Thomas Browne and other writers. Arguably the most famous and often-quoted passage in the Confessions is the apostrophe to opium in the final paragraph of The Pleasures:.

De Quincey modelled this passage on the apostrophe "O eloquent, just and mightie Death!

Confessions Of an English Opium Eater by De Quincey, Thomas

Earlier in The Pleasures of Opium , De Quincey describes the long walks he took through the London streets under the drug's influence:. The Confessions represents De Quincey's initial effort to write what he called "impassioned prose", an effort that he would later resume in Suspiria de Profundis and The English Mail-Coach In the early s, De Quincey prepared the first collected edition of his works for publisher James Hogg. For that edition, he undertook a large-scale revision of the Confessions , more than doubling the work's length.

Most notably, he expanded the opening section on his personal background, until it consumed more than two-thirds of the whole. Yet he gave the book "a much weaker beginning" and detracted from the impact of the original with digressions and inconsistencies; "the verdict of most critics is that the earlier version is artistically superior". The Confessions maintained a place of primacy in De Quincey's literary output, and his literary reputation, from its first publication; "it went through countless editions, with only occasional intervals of a few years, and was often translated.

Access Check

Since there was little systematic study of narcotics until long after his death, De Quincey's account assumed an authoritative status and actually dominated the scientific and public views of the effects of opium for several generations. Yet from the time of its publication, De Quincey's Confessions was criticized for presenting a picture of the opium experience that was too positive and too enticing to readers.

As early as , an anonymous response, Advice to Opium Eaters , was published "to warn others from copying De Quincey. One of the characters of the Sherlock Holmes story, The Man with the Twisted Lip , is an opium addict who began experimenting with the drug as a student after reading the Confessions. De Quincey attempted to address this type of criticism.

• Urban Flow: Bike Messengers and the City
• Second Chance Summer
• The Eagle Can Fly Higher
• Interactive Curve Modeling: With Applications to Computer Graphics, Vision and Image Processing
• Fascinating Ohio: A Year of Buckeye People, Places, Pop Culture and History
• One Night Changed My Life
• How Shelter Pets are Brokered for Experimentation: Understanding Pound Seizure