CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER AND OTHER WRITINGS
THOMAS DE QUINCEY was born in 1785 at Manchester. As a boy he was a brilliant Latin and Greek scholar, although he was unhappy both at home and at school. He ran away from Manchester Grammar School and went wandering through Wales, after which he went to London, where for several months he led an impoverished life. This period is vividly described in the Confessions. In 1804 he went to Worcester College, Oxford, but he failed to take his degree. It was there that he first began his correspondence with Wordsworth and also his opium addiction. From his early youth De Quincey had been a reverent admirer of Wordsworth and, to a lesser degree, Coleridge, and between 1809 and 1821 he rented Dove Cottage in Grasmere. His publication of the Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets precipitated the end of his connection with the Wordsworths. In 1817 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson. He endeavoured to support their large family by writing for literary miscellanies but spent most of his adult life evading arrest for debt. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which ran through more than two dozen book editions by the end of the century, was first published in the London Magazine in 1821. But the majority of De Quincey’s writing appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which published two sequels to the Confessions: ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ in 1845 and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ in 1849. At the end of his life, De Quincey enjoyed a brief period as an eminent man of letters, receiving visits from international admirers and overseeing the first volumes of his collected works. He died in Edinburgh in 1859.
BARRY MILLIGAN is the author of Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. He has also published several essays on Romantic and Victorian literature and history and is co-editor, with Ghislaine McDayter and Guinn Batten, of Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Gleckner. His research awards have included a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities and several visiting research fellowships at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London. He has taught at Duke and Cornell Universities and currently teaches at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.