De Quincey Thomas - Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: and Other Writings (Oxford World�s Classics)

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER

AND OTHER WRITINGS

THOMAS DE QUINCEY (17851859) was born in Manchester to a prosperous linen merchant. As a young boy he read widely and acquired a reputation as a brilliant classicist. At 17, he ran away from Manchester Grammar School and spent four harrowing months penniless and hungry on the streets of London. Reconciled with his family, he entered Oxford in 1803, but left five years later without taking his degree and moved to the English Lake District to be near his two literary idols, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1813 he became dependent on opium, a drug he began experimenting with during his days at Oxford, and over the next few years he slid deeper into debt and addiction. His most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, appeared in the London Magazine in 1821. It was the first detailed account of drug use and abuse in English, and initiated the tradition of the modern artist as exile and prophet. Thereafter De Quincey wrote in the London and other leading magazines of the day on a wide variety of topics, including politics, literature, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and economics. In 1827, he published in Blackwoods Magazine the first of his three brilliant essays On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, and in the 1830s he achieved further notoriety in Taits Magazine with his scandalously informative biographical assessments of Coleridge (18345) and Wordsworth (1839). De Quincey published a sequel to Confessions, Suspiria de Profundis, in Blackwoods in 1845, and four years later for the same magazine he produced The English Mail-Coach, an essay that he originally intended to form part of Suspiria. De Quincey spent much of his life battling poverty, debt, and addiction, but his work was widely admired, and British and American editions of his writings began to appear in the 1850s. He died in Edinburgh in 1859.

ROBERT MORRISON is Queens National Scholar at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. For Oxford Worlds Classics, he has edited Thomas De Quincey, On Murder, and (with Chris Baldick) The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre and Tales of Terror from Blackwoods Magazine.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

ROBERT MORRISON

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Editorial material Robert Morrison 2013

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Confessions of an English Opium-Eater first published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1985
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998, 2008
New edition 2013

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I would like to thank Judith Luna for inviting me to undertake this edition, and for her long-standing enthusiasm and support. For expertise and advice of all kinds, I am grateful to Jeff Cowton, James Crowden, Michael Cummings, Kory French, Anne Garner, Stephen Jacyna, Kaveh Khanverdi, Larry Krupp, Charles Mahoney, David Morrell, Christopher Ricks, Beert Verstraete, and Romira Worvill. Like all editors, I am indebted to those scholars who have produced previous editions of the texts in this volume, and I would especially like to acknowledge the work of Arthur Beatty, John Downie, Alethea Hayter, John E. Jordan, and Barry Milligan. For many years, Grevel Lindop, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Barry Symonds have been my best De Quinceyean guides. They have all had an enormous impact on my understanding of De Quincey, and I would like to thank them for their friendship, confidence, and encouragement. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has awarded me generous grants to pursue my research on De Quincey and the British periodical press. I am deeply grateful for the Councils continuing support.

For permission to publish manuscript material in their collections, I would like to thank the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the Rosenbach Museum and Library; and the National Library of Scotland.

My greatest debt is to Carole, Zachary, and Alastair.

This edition is dedicated to Ian Reed.

NOBODY who knows the nineteenth-century literature can fail to notice that there was a curious effort, under the surface, to make Asiatic drugs as normal as European drinks, G. K. Chesterton remarked in his essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1936). It is a sort of subterranean conspiracy that ranges from the Confessions of De Quincey to the Moonstone of Wilkie Collins. Chesterton is right to emphasize the link between Thomas De Quincey and Wilkie Collins, but their shared preoccupation with drugs was far more than a subterranean conspiracy. Asiatic drugsspecifically opiumare everywhere in nineteenth-century literature, not just under the surface but flowing openly through daily life, for De Quinceys