The addict has long been a familiar figure. The outlines may have shifted a bit over the years, but the core has remained much the same for at least a couple of centuries. Although there might at first seem to be little in common between an eighteenth-century English poem, the autobiography of a jazz musician and a glossy advertisement picturing a glowering, skinny youth, it is the deep similarities between these artifacts that reveal the advertisement as an example of 1990s ‘junky chic’ rather than a mere voyeuristic view of some undernourished teenager in designer jeans. And the guest on the daytime talk-show who says she was once unable to stop doing something – overeating, gambling, having dangerous sex – makes us pause for a moment before switching to another channel partly because she appeals to our notions of what an addict is, does and knows. But just what are those notions? What are addicts, and why are we convinced they have something compelling to say? What do supermodels have in common with Billie Holiday and Samuel Taylor Coleridge? And where did these associations come from in the first place?
Thomas De Quincey did not write about fashion models, jazz or daytime talk-shows, so it would be straining credulity to insist he has the answers to these questions. He did, however, establish many of the terms that make it possible to ask them in the first place. By cementing the connection between drug use and proto-psychedelic Oriental visions, he almost singlehandedly changed opium’s popular status from the respectability of a useful medicine to the exoticism of a mind-altering drug. He forged the link between self-revelation and addiction that is a staple of today’s booming self-help industry. He established the romantic figure of the drug addict as starving genius. He paved the way for the hippie rock concert experience by using drugs to enhance his enjoyment of live music. He was even a down-and-out junky in Edinburgh long before there was an Irvine Welsh. So even if his writings were not as engaging as they are, they would occupy a prominent position in the development of modern culture.
It is at least ironic, then, that this prominent position is an almost hidden one: his magnum opus, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is one of those books almost everyone has heard of but very few have read. This obscurity cannot be due to the quality of the writing, however. De Quincey’s prose offers a quirky wit to rival Charles Dickens’s and sensations equal to anything in a Wilkie Collins novel. If De Quincey has not enjoyed the enduring popularity of these contemporaries, it has more to do with the fact that he did not write novels (with the exception of a gothic potboiler even he regarded as a failure and a ‘translation’ of a hack German imitation of Walter Scott). His métier was the essay. Modern readers do not tend to ask one another whether they have read any good essays lately, nor do titles like ‘Studies in the Essay’ often appear in university course listings. But De Quincey’s essays were widely read during his lifetime and exerted a powerful influence on such significant and diverse cultural developments as professional medicine, British imperial politics, French Symbolism, European concert music and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of terror, not to mention their more obviously formative role in so-called drug culture.
To trade one set of questions for another, then, who was this man, what were these essays and how did they come to be?
De Quincey inherited a legacy of warts-and-all confessional literature that goes back at least as far as the fourth-century Confessions of St Augustine, which tells of the author’s early profligacy by way of contrast to his upright life after conversion to Christianity. A closer model for De Quincey, in both chronological and stylistic terms, came from one of the founders of the French Revolutionary sensibility, the Swiss writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His posthumously published Confessions (1781) similarly sought to explain his own philosophical development via brutally frank descriptions of his less commendable acts as well as his laudable ones. De Quincey’s use of the word ‘confessions’ in his title thus clearly hearkens to these familiar precedents. As is so often the case with De Quincey, however, he pursues conflicting agendas at once; his title ensures that readers will compare his work to others’, but he then insists in his first paragraph that no such comparison is warranted. His opening condemnation of the ‘acts of gratuitous self-humiliation’ characteristic of ‘the spurious and defective sensibility of the French’ is a not so subtle attempt to distance his autobiographical piece from Rousseau’s. But both the form of his Confessions and the title beg for the analogy. In fact the most notable similarities between De Quincey’s Confessions and Rousseau’s are extended through the two other essays included in this volume, the ‘sequels’ to the Confessions, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ and ‘The English Mail-Coach’. One clearly stated goal of all three essays is to illustrate how the most troubling experiences of early life are repeatedly revisited by the sleeping mind, a trajectory that closely matches Rousseau’s, developing an explanation of the author’s present consciousness by analysing key moments in the process of its development.
An even more immediate influence, however, was the culminating masterwork of De Quincey’s idol, the poet William Wordsworth. De Quincey was one of a small coterie with whom Wordsworth shared parts of the autobiographical poem first drafted in 1799 but published only after his death in 1850 as The Prelude. This sprawling work traces the author’s growth through key developmental incidents, and De Quincey’s many direct quotations of Wordsworth show that he always had the great poet’s example before him. In fact De Quincey called his discovery of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind’,1 and it ultimately drew him into the intimate circle of those poets in particular and a life of letters in general. De Quincey’s self-effacing reverence especially for Wordsworth’s poetry was surely a factor in his choice to concentrate on prose rather than verse – that and the fact that there was little money to be made from verse when he came to live by his pen.
The first half of the nineteenth century was a lively time for the essay as a genre. A boom in magazine publication was sparked by developments in several areas: new print technology made it easier and more economical to print large runs, faster and cheaper transportation made wider distribution practical, and a rise in literacy meant there was a broader base of consumers to support the growing industry. There was also a lot to write and read about. The raging Napoleonic Wars fuelled the political debates started by the French Revolution, and authors and audiences flocked to join the fray. Several great English essayists were in their heyday, including William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb (a.k.a. ‘Elia’). The tone of all this debate was lively as well, given that British magazines were even more unapologetically biased in their politics then than they are now.
De Quincey served for a time as editor of a staunchly Tory newspaper, the Westmorland Gazette, and contributed several articles in that capacity. But he was out of his element as a political reporter and soon began publishing his own strange brand of conversational philosophizing. Such experiments were not ideally suited to the pages of a propaganda sheet but they were perfect for another arena. When De Quincey commenced his writing career in the late 1810s and early 1820s his good friend John Wilson was editing one of the most partisan and popular publications of the day, the Tory miscellany Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and it was with the contributions Wilson invited that De Quincey grew into his own unique voice. The bulk of his prose would first appear in Blackwood’s over the coming decades.
Another forum for De Quincey in the early days was the London Magazine, which first published Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821. Less overtly political than Blackwood’s, the London Magazine was an otherwise similar miscellany. In fact the two became arch-rivals, attacking one another in print. The fight was so bitter at one point that a representative of a Blackwood’s contributor killed the London’s editor in a duel. De Quincey initially sided with his friends at Blackwood’s, but when his lifelong habit of procrastination brought relations with them to a temporary crisis, he left Edinburgh for London, where he contacted a connection at the London Magazine. Struggling to recover from the death of their editor, the new managers were eager for De Quincey’s services and ready to pay handsomely for the ‘opium article’ he had begun for Blackwood’s. Progress was impeded by De Quincey’s chronic health problems and equally chronic financial ones, and periods of prostration were punctuated by sudden changes of lodgings to avoid arrest for debt (one hideout was in a building near Covent Garden that now bears a plaque celebrating the distinction). But De Quincey managed to stay just ahead of both deadlines and creditors, and the first instalment made the September issue (with no byline) as ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar’. It was such a commercial success that the second part had pride of place in the October issue. A book edition followed in 1822 and the Confessions remained more or less in print for the rest of the century.
De Quincey promised a third part of the Confessions and the London Magazine even conveyed the pledge to its readers, but true to his dilatory nature, he never delivered it. The closest he came were the aforementioned sequels included in this volume, both published decades later in Blackwood’s: ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ (‘Sighs from the Depths’, 1845) and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849). These essays fully deserve to be called sequels (as ‘Suspiria’ explicitly is in its subtitle), for they self-consciously mine the same quarry, extending the most sustained strands of the Confessions. Through all three pieces, De Quincey maintains that the formative experiences of his early life, catalysed by the effects of opium, determined the fantastic content of his dream visions. He thus followed closely in the footsteps of his beloved Wordsworth, who held that youth was a state of purity and receptivity whereas age was youth’s pale shadow. But De Quincey also anticipated some of the most influential insights of Sigmund Freud, who argued several generations later that recurrent patterns in dreams originate in unresolved conflicts from the individual’s early development. The relationship between these entities – the experiences of youth, the dreaming mind and opium – is the organizing framework of all three essays. To call it ‘organizing’ is perhaps misleading, however, for it is the unpredictable, even chaotic interaction between the three factors that charts the path, thus foreshadowing the stream-of-consciousness mode of narrative regarded as avantgarde nearly a century later. Thus emerges the gem-like paradox at the heart of this trilogy of essays: not only can digression serve as structure; it in fact does constitute the very structure of human consciousness.
The second member of the trilogy, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, seems the least organized, a trait determined as much by the circumstances of its publication as by its author’s design. Those circumstances are the stuff of a long and convoluted story, but in short, De Quincey and the staff of Blackwood’s disagreed about the form in which the piece would appear and how much space it would occupy. Consequently it was abridged, rearranged and concluded before the author regarded it as complete. De Quincey offered various and contradictory versions of what supposedly would have been the essay’s scheme had he been allowed to finish it properly, but when preparing his fourteen-volume collected works, Selections Grave and Gay, at the end of his life he did not grasp what would seem to have been a golden opportunity to realize that scheme, instead pillaging ‘Suspiria’ for autobiographical fragments to include in other selections. In sum, De Quincey seems to have intended a series of dream narratives prefaced by an account of the early experiences revisited in the dreams, and what remains appears to be essentially the preface without the main body.
Perhaps the key to understanding the whole lies in the ingenious metaphor that provides the title for one of the sections, the palimpsest. Although it has been erased and overwritten again and again, the ancient sheet of vellum retains traces of all the words ever inscribed upon its surface, much as the mind holds on to vestiges of each past experience. And just as the previous written layers of the palimpsest can be brought into clearer focus with the application of modern chemicals, so can opium vividly restore to the dreaming mind such painful experiences as those recounted in the essay’s first section, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’. But never is the dreamer able to re-engage or resolve the traumas thus relived; instead, his past stands before him as an intangible spectre, magnified in the manner of the mirage-like apparition of the Brocken, which provides another section title. Such repeated, impotent encounters with the past beget a chronic melancholy, but that state of mind in turn yields the kind of profound insight available only through intense suffering, leading the author to regard the fantastic ‘Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow’ as his characteristic muses.
In ‘The English Mail-Coach’ De Quincey’s digressive meditations have a more recognizable core, centring on his memorable experience of riding mail-coaches to and from Oxford when he was a student. The four parts of the piece were originally published by pairs in successive issues of Blackwood’s, but De Quincey prefaced the second instalment with a note insisting that ‘the reader is to understand this present paper… as connected with a previous paper on The English Mail-Coach’, and he subsumed all four sections under the current title in Selections Grave and Gay, where he also claimed that he had originally intended the essay as a section of ‘Suspiria’. (De Quincey’s revisions for Selections Grave and Gay were often fussy and of questionable merit, as detailed below in relation to the Confessions, and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ is another case in point. Along with the essay’s more defined centre comes a clearer organization. De Quincey claimed in ‘Suspiria’ that music exemplifies ‘the confluence of the mighty and terrific discords with the subtle concords’, the irresistible attraction between what appear to be opposing forces, and this conception becomes the backbone of ‘The English Mail-Coach’, surfacing most obviously in the concluding ‘Dream-Fugue’. There De Quincey draws a provocative parallel between a dream’s amalgamation of antagonistic images and the fugue’s braiding of contrasting themes, thus suggesting again the crystalline structures concealed within apparent chaos. Some of the motifs are newly introduced, such as the mail-coach itself, which was the state-of-the-art conveyance in De Quincey’s student days and the gold standard of speed. Riding atop the coach, according to De Quincey, one could not only experience the eponymous ‘Glory of Motion’ but also bask in the mail’s grand duty and privilege of announcing British victories during the Napoleonic Wars. These become the chief themes of the first two sections, ‘The English Mail-Coach’ and ‘Going Down with Victory’. The latter sections, ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’ and ‘Dream-Fugue’, deal with the darker side of the mail-coach’s sublime speed, recounting near-disastrous collisions and the nightmares in which they subsequently resurfaced.
Throughout the essay, dreams also incorporate motifs already familiar from the Confessions and ‘Suspiria’. Recalling the crocodiles with their ‘cancerous kisses’ that plagued the opiumeater’s dreams in the Confessions, for instance, the intimidating coachman re-emerges in the mail-coach passenger’s dreams ‘with the form of a crocodile’, exemplifying again ‘the horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures’ – the one from England, the other emerging from the vast Orient of the author’s imagination. The innocent young girl repeatedly menaced by the mail-coach throughout the ‘Dream-Fugue’ echoes the tragically lost Ann of the Confessions, the prematurely dead child-sister from the opening of ‘Suspiria’ and the young girl ‘under a cloud of affliction’ from its end. And opium’s pivotal role is clear throughout: it is ‘the taking of laudanum’, says the ‘Mail-Coach’ narrator, that ‘drew my attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster’, and likewise in ‘Suspiria’ ‘the grandeur of recovered life’ emerges ‘under the separate and the concurring inspirations of opium’.
De Quincey’s final contribution to the genre of addict autobiography he originated came in 1856 in the form of an extensive revision of the original Confessions for Selections Grave and Gay. Critics will always disagree regarding whether an author’s first or last words on a work are more authoritative, and the debate is all the more complicated in the arena of Romanticism, given that the patriarch of British Romanticism himself, Wordsworth, contradictorily prized both ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’.2 But even De Quincey was ambivalent towards the revision. His motivation in revising had more to do with quantity than quality: the publishers were determined that the Confessions would be a single volume of Selections Grave and Gay and sell for the same price as the others, and De Quincey felt the expensive book should at least be a thick one. That said, though, it is also true that he had never been satisfied with the piece’s patchwork construction. He also seems to have looked back as an old man at the essay he had written as a relatively young one and seen an opportunity to soften, extenuate and otherwise recast his earlier judgements as well as disburden himself of the load of self-justification and philosophical speculation that remained within him.
The 1856 alterations comprise extensive additions and fussy expansions of already existing material. The chief focus of the newly added prose is a fuller account of the author’s early life, which in 1856 fills nearly four times the space it did in 1821. Shadowy characters from the original are not only named in the revision but are often the subjects of mini-biographies, and many who had been summarily criticized in 1821 are lengthily excused in 1856. Many of the new additions, though, are questionably relevant. The charming tendency to digress apparent in the London Magazine becomes unnerving in Selections Grave and Gay, as the narrative repeatedly halts to make way for rambling disquisitions on subjects ranging from the opium use of contemporaries to the art of conversation. Sometimes De Quincey relegated these distracting musings to footnotes, but that was only when they were so wide of the subject at hand that he could not otherwise tie them in, and of these dozens of new notes several fill more than a page. Also, De Quincey’s prose style had become more baroque in the decades since his London Magazine days, and he stretched several existing passages into rococo ramblings. An especially illustrative pair of examples is pinpointed by Ian Jack in his article ‘De Quincey Revises his Confessions’.3 Here is the 1821 original:
I have often been asked, how I first came to be a regular opium-eater; and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintance, from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case.
And the parallel passage as it appeared in 1856:
I have often been asked – how it was, and through what series of steps, that I became an opium-eater. Was it gradually, tentatively, mistrustingly, as one goes down a shelving beach into a deepening sea, and with a knowledge from the first of the dangers lying on that path; half-courting those dangers, in fact, whilst seeming to defy them? Or was it, secondly, in pure ignorance of such dangers, under the misleadings of mercenary fraud? Since oftentimes lozenges, for the relief of pulmonary affections, found their efficacy upon the opium which they contain, upon this, and this only, though clamorously disavowing so suspicious an alliance: and under such treacherous disguises, multitudes are seduced into a dependency which they had not foreseen upon a drug which they had not known; not known even by name, or by sight: and thus the case is not rare – that the chain of abject slavery is first detected when it has inextricably wound itself about the constitutional system. Thirdly, and lastly, was it [Yes, by passionate anticipation, I answer, before the question is finished] – was it on a sudden, overmastering impulse derived from bodily anguish? Loudly I repeat, Yes; loudly and indignantly – as in answer to a wilful calumny.
It is not difficult to see, then, how the revision stretched to twice the length of the original. Readers have almost unanimously agreed that the 1856 alterations clog the narrative flow and obscure what coherence the original had to offer.
Critical reception of the Confessions and its sequels has varied over the ages. When it first appeared in the London Magazine, the strange piece caused a considerable buzz. Although some balked at the author’s apparent egotism and immorality, there was consensus that both the style and subject matter were remarkably original. Following the publication of the first book edition, the Confessions attracted even more notice from both critics and copycats (an anonymous Advice to Opium-Eaters, for instance, followed closely in 1823). An unsigned notice in the Eclectic Review, another literary miscellany, impugned De Quincey’s credibility because he used opium excessively. At least one doctor expressed concern that readers would be tempted to follow the opium-eater’s potentially dangerous example. (The medical profession’s response to De Quincey is a subject unto itself, about which more in a moment.) After his initial fifteen minutes of fame, however, De Quincey receded from the limelight into the subcultural shadows for a whole generation. Although the opium-eater remained something of an idol for would-be Romantic visionaries, the fifth edition of the Confessions (1845) was not published until nearly two decades after the fourth (1826). And despite the reams of essays De Quincey produced during those years for Blackwood’s and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (a miscellany in the mould of Blackwood’s) and a small but devoted following in the United States, he attracted almost no critical attention in print.
Following the appearance of both the fifth edition and the two sequels to the Confessions, however, De Quincey’s popular fortunes climbed and he never strayed beyond the corner of the public eye until after the First World War. The 1850s saw the publication of two separate multivolume collected works in both Britain and the United States and a concomitant burst of literary criticism. The watershed separating those who loved De Quincey’s prose style from those who hated it was the radically subjective point of view inherent in De Quincey’s brand of confessional autobiography. Some respondents revered ‘each personal pronoun [as] an algebraic symbol of great and general truths’ while others scorned his prose as ‘steeped in egotism’ or ‘haunted by the fiend of subjectivity’.4 Previous misgivings that the opium-eater’s example might spur others to adopt his habit were transmuted into vague fears of a more comprehensive contamination: a reviewer for the Dublin University Magazine both embraced and shunned De Quincey’s style as a ‘figured Babylonian robe… possibly plague-tainted’.
Twentieth-century literary critics typically treated De Quincey’s essays as specimens of late Romanticism, emphasizing their similarities to the poetry of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, for instance. But since De Quincey’s works are in prose rather than verse, they rarely rose above a second-class citizenship in the predominantly poetic canon of Romantic literature until the late twentieth century, when critics began to look beyond ‘the Six’ (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats) and pay long-delayed attention to less enduringly famous but still important writers of the period.
Unlike many of these ‘minor’ figures, however, De Quincey had long enjoyed a sort of cult status as one of the fathers of ‘drug literature’. Although his huge output ultimately included essays in literary criticism (‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ is often anthologized), satire (‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ remains one of the most engaging and ironic critiques of popular sensationalism), philosophy, economics and political commentary as well as several works of fiction, De Quincey’s claim to fame has always rested most heavily upon his three related essays about his opium experiences, with the Confessions standing consistently at the head of the list. Apart from its literary status, the Confessions led a parallel life as supposed evidence in various ongoing debates. During the nineteenth century, it was marshalled as authoritative testimony in court cases regarding the impact of regular opium use upon longevity, cited as reliable data regarding opium consumption among Midland labourers and offered in medical literature as a compilation of clinical observations. It is ironic that the Confessions should have enjoyed such a robust life as representative testimony, given that the most recurrent negative criticisms indicted the author as a self-involved eccentric. Whatever one’s ultimate critical judgement of these works, however, there can be little doubt that the author was indeed idiosyncratic as well as somewhat narcissistic. Certainly he himself would have agreed with that assessment, as it was his own innermost consciousness he explicitly sought to present and analyse.
An author’s biography is always potentially interesting to readers, but it is even more than that in the case of De Quincey, for autobiography is at the heart of his best-remembered writings. He was born on 15 August 1785, the fourth child and second son of a prosperous Manchester textile merchant, and christened Thomas Penson Quincey. His mother added the ‘De’ later and Thomas kept it even after she had dropped it, claiming it made the name sound more aristocratic. A sickly and pampered child, he never exceeded five feet in height, and his unusual smallness was the first thing most observers noted about him. He spent his childhood on the family estate outside Manchester, enjoying all the cultural advantages of the rising middle class. The privileges of his boyhood included an abundance of what was an even greater luxury then than now, books, and young Thomas devoured them with astonishing speed and comprehension. In later life he was at least as addicted to books as he was to opium, often going hungry in order to buy more and ultimately collecting so many that they overflowed his cottage in Grasmere.
For most of Thomas’s youth, his father was away in warmer climes nursing the tuberculosis that finally killed him, and Thomas, left with only a cold and stern mother, attached himself all the more tenaciously to his sisters and nursemaids. The death of his eldest sister when he was seven years old was the first great calamity of his life. His vivid memories of her death chamber form the core of ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, and traumatic separation from a nurturing female companion is a recurrent motif in his autobiographical essays (his account in the Confessions of the lasting pain he suffered after inadvertently losing track of his friend Ann is another notable case in point). Less traumatic was the death in the following year of the father he had barely known. Prosperous and prudent to the end, the elder Thomas Quincey made ample provision for the family he left behind and appointed his wife and four of his most trusted associates as official guardians to the Quincey children. After several years of private tutoring, young Thomas commenced a first-rate institutional education at Bath Grammar School when the family moved to the fashionable spa in 1796. Here Thomas manifested two traits that were to define him henceforth: his superior scholarship, especially a precocious facility with languages, and his disarming charm and tact. Almost everyone who commented on De Quincey in later years remarked upon his extreme politeness (immediately after noting his diminutive size; his intellect was, of course, the reason they bothered to comment on him in the first place). Although it was an asset in several obvious respects, De Quincey’s exceptional intelligence also proved a liability in his early years. It ultimately earned the respect of his peers, but only after a period of alienation. These circumstances contributed to Thomas’s sense of distance from those around him, which was initially discomfiting but which he grew to treasure as the lot of the ‘pariah’. As a disgruntled seventeen-year-old at Manchester Grammar School, De Quincey discovered the cornerstone of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads, initially published in 1798 as the joint effort of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge but associated more and more exclusively in subsequent editions with Wordsworth. De Quincey’s passionate conversion to the Romantic sensibility rendered the factory-blackened atmosphere of Manchester even more oppressive and the pragmatic counsel of his evangelical mother and his guardians more irksome. He begged to be allowed to leave Manchester, either to attempt admission to a university or to study independently at home until he was eighteen. When his guardians persistently refused, he impetuously ran away to ramble through Wales.
In these solitary wanderings, De Quincey exercised his newfound Romantic sensibility and solidified his sense of himself as an outcast. Although he was not initially as estranged from family and friends as he suggests in the original Confessions (he was caught before leaving England and given grudging parental consent and a meagre allowance), he ultimately chose to cut off communication, forgo his allowance and truncate his planned sojourn in Wales to hide out in London. His reasons for this decision are obscure to say the least; he seems to have reached an agreement with his guardians, so there was no clear need to avoid them, and he would have been financially worse off in London than in Wales even with his slim allowance, let alone without it. This latter fact at least was clear to him: his first act upon reaching the metropolis was to seek out a moneylender, which promptly sank him into seemingly endless negotiations via a shady lawyer in Soho who went by the probably assumed name of Brunell (he resurfaces in both the Confessions and ‘Suspiria’). When the protracted process consumed the last of Thomas’s already strained resources, Brunell allowed him to stay in his dilapidated house in Greek Street in Soho, where Thomas befriended a mysterious waif who seemed to live there, possibly Brunell’s illegitimate daughter.
The suffering associated with this period in the Confessions was probably quite real, despite De Quincey’s penchant for heightened drama; the plight of a nearly penniless adolescent in London of 1802 would have been a dire one. It clearly was so in the case of De Quincey’s most fondly remembered friend of this period, the teenaged Ann, who fended off starvation as a prostitute in Oxford Street. De Quincey claimed to have hovered so near starvation himself during this period as to do permanent damage to his digestive system, which he frequently offered as the reason he took to regular use of opium years later. The real mystery is why he chose to endure such hardship for so long when he could easily have ended it with a word to his guardians. But De Quincey often evinced a perversely self-destructive streak, a paradoxical drive to demonstrate his will by voluntarily submitting to miserable circumstances if not actively courting them.
After more complex negotiations with both moneylenders and his guardians, Thomas was uneasily reconciled with his family and settled down enough to enter Worcester College, Oxford, late in 1803. But ultimately more important to the course of his future life, he also made contact in that year with William Wordsworth by means of a worshipful but impressive letter begging for the honour of the poet’s friendship. Wordsworth replied, inviting De Quincey to visit him at his Lake District home at Grasmere. Although Thomas could not immediately accept the offer, one of the great dreams of his youth had been realized: he had laid the groundwork for friendly relations with his idol and thus was born a relationship that was to exercise a powerful force upon the course of his life. De Quincey was reluctant for several years to meet the object of his reverence face to face, but he finally journeyed to Grasmere late in 1807, where he soon became a fixture in the Wordsworth household and assisted the great poet in his work. He was so woven into the family circle for a time that he was even entrusted with the education of the Wordsworths’ daughter Kate, a somewhat awkward toddler of whom De Quincey was passionately fond. Her death before her fourth birthday in 1812 was another of the crushing blows of De Quincey’s life, as he recounts in both the Confessions and ‘Suspiria’.
In 1809, he moved into the Wordsworths’ former home, the cottage at Town End (later known as Dove Cottage), and lived there for more than a decade. It was during this time that De Quincey met and courted a young local woman, Margaret Simpson. There was much scandal in Grasmere when she bore him a son in 1816 and most of De Quincey’s friends regarded him as ruined when he married her the following year, though the marriage ultimately proved a happy one. De Quincey’s personal relationship with the Wordsworth circle gradually soured for many reasons, including their disapproval of his opium habit, but he never lost his admiration for Wordsworth’s poetry, even if he eventually came to find some fault with the man himself.
Besides his friendship with Wordsworth, the other profoundly influential relationship De Quincey formed during his Oxford days was with opium, whose psychoactive properties he first noted and began to enjoy when he took it on the recommendation of a fellow Worcester student for pain in his face. While at Oxford, De Quincey managed to spend a good deal of time elsewhere, including London, where he discovered the joys of listening to opera and wandering the streets while under the influence of laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol; see the Appendix for more detailed information about opiates). De Quincey’s eventual habituation to the drug has been blamed upon as many of his misfortunes as it has been blamed for. It is true that, like his fellow opium-addicted writer and sometime friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, De Quincey never quite fulfilled the extraordinary promise of his youth – at least not to his own satisfaction or that of his family and friends. Although he always dreamed of being a significant philosopher in the mould of Immanuel Kant, whose works deeply influenced his thought, he dragged out most of his adult life as a short-deadline magazine contributor on the run from creditors. But given that our understanding of the phenomena subsumed under the rubric of ‘addiction’ is still far from perfect, it is difficult to say what in this whole drama was cause, what was effect, and what was neither.
There are only a few things we can say for certain about how De Quincey’s opium habit fitted into his life. First, he took massive daily doses of laudanum and found it impossible to stop doing so until his death at seventy-four, a ripe old age in the mid-nineteenth century. Second, opium was both the subject and the inspiration for his most enduring works. De Quincey wrote an enormous number of prose pieces during his life, but the ones for which he is most remembered, and those that made the biggest splash in his own time, are the ones that most conspicuously address the consciousness-altering properties of opium. In order to understand opium’s role in De Quincey’s life and work, though, one must first understand its role in the culture of his day, a role that was in turn shaped significantly by De Quincey’s work and its reception. The changing status of opium in nineteenth-century Britain is outlined in the Appendix. And one of the most telling examples of De Quincey’s particular impact on that changing status is his vexed relationship with the medical professions.
With their increasing investment in the control of opium (see the Appendix), medical professionals began in the latter third of the century to perceive competing voices from outside the profession that had previously gone all but unnoticed. One of the most significant of these was that of De Quincey himself. Already the recognized popular authority on opium use since the early 1820s, De Quincey published his revision of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1856, just as medical professionals were grasping for more control of opium. Even though De Quincey’s experience was of what he dubbed ‘opium-eating’ rather than hypodermic injection of morphine (more precisely, his particular habit was opium-drinking, as he tippled laudanum), his growth in popularity and authority chronologically paralleled the evolution of hypodermic morphine injection, smoothing the public’s intuitive transfer of his expertise from opium ingestion to opiate injection.
The Confessions appeared initially in 1821, just as morphine was making its way into mainstream medical practice, and the ‘Opium-Eater’, as the anonymous author styled himself in subsequent bylines, became both a cult idol for would-be visionaries and the de facto popular authority on all matters related to opium. Such reverence for the sage-like Opium-Eater was by no means confined to the lay public, either. Although at least one doctor spoke out early against the dangerous example the Opium-Eater set for potential imitators,5 his regular appearances in medical discussions of opium during the first two-thirds of the century were more frequently as an authority on all imaginable aspects of the subject – from the highest endurable dose to affective responses under different circumstances to the rate of usage among Midland labourers. As one doctor attested in 1845, ‘the law of his self-experience is paramount in the profession’ and his ‘is the only modern instance… of a non-medical writer submitting, upon a medical subject, an opinion which the whole profession has acknowledged as orthodox testimony’.6
Such veneration was not common among doctors late in the century, however, as a constellation of circumstances in addition to professional medicine’s increased investment in the control of opium had rendered De Quincey a significant threat to medical authority. When he had claimed in 1821 that everything doctors had written about opium was ‘lies! lies! lies!’ because ‘their experimental knowledge of its action is none at all’, he was firing scattershot at a diffuse population of practitioners who did not have a particularly high stake in being right about the issue. But thirty-five years later, when he claimed in his revision not only that he alone pronounced ‘the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium’ but also that he was that church’s ‘Pope (consequently infallible), and self-appointed legate a latere to all degrees of latitude and longitude’, he was throwing down a gauntlet before a powerful and nearly unified profession with far more at stake than mere one-upmanship.
The consequent late-century medical opposition to De Quincey is well represented by physician Patrick Hehir’s declaration in Opium: Its Physical, Moral, and Social Effects (1894) that ‘the opinion of one man is not likely to be of much use in settling a question connected with a habit practised by millions of people’ and that the ‘language of the opium-eater must… be read with that amount of allowance which we naturally concede to poetical writers, who aim at effect in the language they select, and are not afraid of the startling and uncommon’.7 But even as doctors lined up to declare De Quincey wrong, they also tried to claim the authority so long granted him by the general public. This paradoxical agenda is especially well illustrated in the career of the American physician H. H. Kane: in 1881 he accused De Quincey of ‘hand[ing] down to succeeding generations a mass of ingenious lies’ and warned that ‘such a book as [the Confessions] would create a longing and open the way to a road that has a certain ending in a life’s bondage’,8 but these reservations did not deter him less than two decades later from calling his own programme for curing opiate addiction the ‘De Quincey Home Method’.9
Prior to the rise of the public health movement in the 1830s, there was little or no institutionalized distinction between medical use and what might now be called recreational use of opium. Before the Confessions’ publication, recreational use had been represented mainly in terms of exotic opium-eating and opium-smoking Orientals. In fact De Quincey’s insistence on the adjective ‘English’ was probably meant in part to pre-empt the ‘Oriental’ that would otherwise have been automatically attached to ‘Opium-Eater’ (see the Appendix for discussion of the association between opium and the Orient). But the 1830s saw rising concern over opium poisonings, the practice of ‘infant doping’ and the supposed recreational use of opium among the working classes. The predominantly middle-class public health movement was most vocal about these supposed abuses, which were typically tagged as working-class evils. Concern seems to have been motivated largely by increasing class tensions in a recently industrialized society ever more apparently splitting into Disraeli’s ‘two nations’. This is not to say, however, that any of these condemned uses of opium was in fact confined to the working classes. Under any of the available criteria, De Quincey’s practice of taking a dose of laudanum on Saturday nights to enhance his enjoyment of the opera, for instance, should have conspicuously qualified as recreational use.
The tendency to find the same behaviours fascinating in De Quincey and disgusting in the labourer may be due to a belief that De Quincey’s opium use enhanced his literary talents and was therefore justified in a way that ostensibly did not apply to uneducated workers. But this only betrays once again a fairly transparent prejudice that De Quincey himself often shared. He famously proclaimed that ‘if a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium-eater, the probability is that (if he is not too dull to dream at all) he will dream of oxen’, and he associated working-class opium use with already well-established negative stereotypes about drunkenness. ‘The immediate occasion of [the prevalence of opium-eating among the working classes],’ he says in the Confessions, ‘was the lowness of wages, which, at that time, would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits.’ But he was inconsistent in his attitude, blurring class distinctions when he was justifying his own habit on the basis of its wide practice, in which case both he and the ‘work-people’ of Manchester belonged to the ‘class of opium-eaters’.
There is plenty of reason to believe that such blurring was warranted, that habitual opium use was also common further up the socio-economic ladder. For verification, one need only scan the list of middle-class celebrities who were lifelong users: the parliamentarian and abolitionist William Wilberforce; the pioneer photographer and scion of a famous pottery dynasty, Tom Wedgwood; the novelist Wilkie Collins; and poets George Crabbe and Francis Thompson. Known frequent users who may or may not have been dependent at one time or another include Keats, Shelley, Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Welsh Carlyle (wife of Thomas Carlyle) and Dickens. Robert Clive, Indian imperialist extraordinaire, and Lizzie Siddal, artist and model of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, both died of opium poisoning and it was widely presumed they committed suicide. The supposedly working-class evil of infant-doping was also a frequent if less publicized resort of more affluent parents; numerous opium-based preparations such as Godfrey’s Cordial and Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup were staples of middle-class medicine chests throughout the century.
It was also in the nineteenth century that opium became a mainstay of the bohemian image. The drug had cropped up now and then in artistic circles before De Quincey, but it was not generally considered the exotic agent of fantastic dreams until Coleridge published his famous preface to ‘Kubla Khan’ in 1816. There he claimed that several hundred lines of startling Oriental imagery had sprung fully formed into his mind upon his taking ‘an anodyne’ (rightly understood by all readers as a dose of opium) but had faded again when business interrupted his reverie. In the same volume, Coleridge also published ‘The Pains of Sleep’, a less glamorous portrayal of opium withdrawal as a state of frenzied paranoia. De Quincey more explicitly merged Oriental exotica and persecution mania in his Confessions, warning that the pleasures and pains of opium were inextricable from one another. But regardless of his ostensible intentions, his cautionary depictions of opium’s pains usually failed to counterbalance his alluring representations of its pleasures, and the drug-induced sublime became a pillar of the post-Romantic aesthetic.
De Quincey’s disciples were many and far-flung. In the United States, Edgar Allan Poe was the most successful of his admirers, clearly manifesting De Quinceyan style and content in phantasmagoric tales spun by confessional first-person narrators who often declare their opium use. Of less lasting fame were more slavish imitations such as William Blair’s ‘An Opium Eater in America’ (1842) and Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hashish Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean (1857). The latter, as the title suggests, extends the De Quinceyan mode into the realm of the second most famous Oriental drug to make its mark on the West. On the Continent, the first knock-off of the Confessions to achieve lasting renown was not a literary but a musical composition: Hector Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ (1830) takes as its programme the laudanum-tippling composer’s obsessive pursuit of his beloved through a series of fantastic dreamscapes, arguably rendering Berlioz the prototype of the visionary musician-addict who pervaded the twentieth-century jazz scene. De Quincey’s more familiar legacy across the Channel, though, was French Symbolism. Born in the year of the Confessions’ initial publication and first feeling its influence via the works of Poe, Charles Baudelaire borrowed liberally from De Quincey in Les Paradis artificiels (Artificial Paradises, 1860), which in turn influenced the next generation of French poets including Verlaine and Rimbaud.
Although De Quincey’s influence was increasingly mediated through such channels as Poe and the French Symbolists, it can be clearly discerned throughout the culture of the twentieth century as well. The ‘Beats’, who emerged in the United States after the Second World War, evinced the Opium-Eater’s influence in several ways, from Jack Kerouac’s benzedrine-driven first-person narratives to William S. Burroughs’s memoirs of the quasi-Oriental Manhattan subculture of ‘junk’. The apartment of one of Burroughs’s typical junkies ‘looks like a chop suey joint’, sporting ‘a china Buddha with a votive candle in front of it’; groups of addicts swarm around a dealer ‘like a crowd of Asiatic beggars’; and their archetype has a figurative ‘place of origin [in] the Near East, probably Egypt’.10 The colourful narrative of Burroughs’s Junky (1953) gives way to the surreal heroin-drenched visions of his Naked Lunch (1959), recognizable descendants of De Quincey’s dream encounters with Malays running amok, cancerous crocodiles and chattering parakeets.
Popular musicians have returned again and again to both De Quinceyan Orientalism and the idea – inspired though not endorsed by De Quincey – that artistic capacity is expanded by psychoactive drugs. The role of marijuana and opium in the creative process of jazz’s early days is clearly documented by ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow, who compares a 1920s opium-smoking party to ‘a scene straight out of the Arabian Nights, with the thieves and princes disguised in pinchback sports jackets’,11 and the rampancy of heroin addiction among the postwar bepop pioneers is a byword. In the 1960s those drugs were joined by LSD as major forces behind experimental rock, which spawned a subculture pervaded by a De Quinceyan conglomeration of Oriental imagery capable of transforming a San Francisco ballroom into ‘a dope den with marijuana smoke swirling in the air’ and peopled by dancers ‘entranced by the Oriental tuning’ of psychedelic rock anthems.12
The persistence of these ideas and images has led some readers to conclude that there is an essential property of opium itself that begets the patterns De Quincey described.13 But the same patterns have also been associated with other very different drugs such as LSD and marijuana in the examples cited above, at least diluting the force of such an argument. Other similar examples abound. Experimenting with LSD, for instance, the critic and novelist Anaïs Nin saw ‘the most delicate Persian designs’ and ‘murals which… were Oriental, fragile, and complete, but then… became actual Oriental cities, with pagodas, temples, rich Chinese gold and red altars, and Balinese music’.14 One might attempt to extend the argument about chemical essences to account for this, to hypothesize that opium and LSD act similarly upon the brain and thus breed similar constellations of imagery and ideas. But other examples militate against such a hypothesis. The chemist who first synthesized LSD, for instance, gathered several colleagues at a Swiss castle to experiment with the new substance and found one dressed in ‘a long, broad, dark blue striped kaftan-like garment… from Egypt’ and another in ‘a highly embroidered mandarin gown’.15 The Oriental ambiance here clearly had nothing to do with the effects of LSD as neither man had yet experienced the drug, and it could have even less to do with the effects of opium.
The persistence of the patterns without regard to the specific chemical stimuli in question strongly suggests that much of what is commonly attributed to the effects of the drugs themselves has more to do with the cultural heritage surrounding them, a tradition that began with the essays in this volume. Writing at a particular moment in the evolution of medical therapy, the British Empire and confessional narrative, one highly imaginative and educated individual planted a seed of association between a psychoactive Oriental commodity and its geographic origin. That seed has taken root, blossomed and spawned new seedlings in the culture ever since. Thus Thomas De Quincey has been and continues to be a significant influence upon artists and audiences who might not even know his name.