1. Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and Lake Poets, ed. David Wright (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 33.
2. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800)’, in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1965), p. 460.
3. Ian Jack, ‘De Quincey Revises His Confessions’, PMLA 72 (1957), 134–5.
4. Respectively, Eclectic Review (1854), Athenaeum (1859), London Quarterly Review (1857) (quoted in Julian North, De Quincey Reviewed: Thomas De Quincey’s Critical Reception, 1821–1994 (Camden House: Columbia, S. Carolina, 1997, pp. 21–3). As North points out, the critics who scorned De Quincey’s ‘egotism’ were in powerful company during the 1850s and thereafter, falling in line with the rising tide of anti-subjective aesthetics prominently represented by Matthew Arnold’s preface to his Poems (1853).
5. Writing in the Morning Chronicle (22 May 1823), a doctor claimed to know of at least four imitators nearly poisoning themselves, and he damned the Confessions as ‘of universal ill tendency’ (quoted in Grevel Lindop’s The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Dent: London; Taplinger: New York, 1981), p. 248).
6. From an anonymous untitled article in Medical Times and Gazette 12 (1845), 128.
7. Patrick Hehir, Opium: Its Physical, Moral, and Social Effects (Baillière, Tindall & Cox: London, 1894), pp. 8–9, 264–6.
8. H. H. Kane, Drugs That Enslave: The Opium, Morphine, Chloral and Hashisch Habits (Presley, Blakiston: Philadelphia, 1881), pp. 22, 33.
9. Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England (Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn., 1987), p. 163. Ironically, Kane also made a name for himself in another vein of the De Quinceyan tradition as a first-hand reporter on drug experiences; his ‘A Hashish-House in New York: The Curious Adventures of an Individual Who Indulged in a Few Pipefuls of the Narcotic Hemp’ (Harper’s Monthly 67 (1883)), pp. 944–9, has become a cult classic.
10. William S. Burroughs, Junky (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 5, 58, 111–12.
11. Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (Random House: New York, 1946), p. 97.
12. John Densmore, Riders on the Storm: My Life With Jim Morrison and the Doors (Doubleday: New York, 1990), pp. 108–9.
13. This scenario is elaborated by M. H. Abrams in The Milk of Paradise: The Effects of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson and Coleridge (Harvard: Cambridge, Mass., 1934) and Alethea Hayter in Opium and the Romantic Imagination (University of California: Berkeley, 1968).
14. Anaïs Nin, ‘from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955’, in The Drug User: Documents, 1840–1960, ed. John Strausbaugh and Donald Blaise (Blast Books: New York, 1991), p. 143.
15. Albert Hofmann, ‘from LSD: My Problem Child’, in The Drug User, ed. Strausbaugh and Blaise, p. 80.