Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

A schoolboy runs away from Manchester Grammar School, walks in Wales on a guinea a week, and comes to London to starve quietly in an empty house in Soho with a frightened child for company — and with Ann, the young streetwalker of Oxford Street who once saved his life with a glass of spiced wine and whom he then lost, looking for her at the same corner for years afterwards. Reconciled to his family and sent up to Oxford, he buys laudanum for a toothache in 1804, and the book turns to what follows: the pleasures first, opera and Saturday nights and the opium-eater's happiness, and then the pains — the collapse of the will, a Malay at the cottage door who reappears nightly, and dreams that build and rebuild themselves like Piranesi's endless staircases.

Thomas De Quincey published the Confessions anonymously in the London Magazine in September and October 1821, and as a book the following year. It is the first modern drug memoir, and the prose — deliberately ornate, and organised around dreaming rather than around plot — became a model for the Victorian essayists who came after him.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the 1821 text complete.