Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Front cover of the second edition of the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (London, 1823)
Author	Thomas De Quincey
Country	England
Language	English
Genre	autobiography
Published	1821 (London Magazine)
Media type	Print

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. The Confessions was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one which won him fame almost overnight..."

First published anonymously in September and October 1821 in the London Magazine, the Confessions was released in book form in 1822, and again in 1856, in an edition revised by De Quincey.

As originally published, De Quincey's account was organized into two parts:

Though De Quincey was later criticized for giving too much attention to the pleasure of opium and not enough to the harsh negatives of addiction, The Pains of Opium is in fact significantly longer than The Pleasures. However, even when trying to convey darker truths, De Quincey's language can seem seduced by the compelling nature of the opium experience:

From its first appearance, the literary style of the Confessions attracted attention and comment. De Quincey was well-read in the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and assimilated influences and models from Sir Thomas Browne and other writers. Arguably the most famous and often-quoted passage in the Confessions is the apostrophe to opium in the final paragraph of The Pleasures:

De Quincey modelled this passage on the apostrophe "O eloquent, just and mightie Death!" in Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World.

Earlier in The Pleasures of Opium, De Quincey describes the long walks he took through the London streets under the drug's influence:

The Confessions represents De Quincey's initial effort to write what he called "impassioned prose", an effort that he would later resume in Suspiria de Profundis (1845) and The English Mail-Coach (1849).

In the early 1850s, De Quincey prepared the first collected edition of his works for publisher James Hogg. For that edition, he undertook a large-scale revision of the Confessions, more than doubling the work's length. Most notably, he expanded the opening section on his personal background, until it consumed more than two-thirds of the whole. Yet he gave the book "a much weaker beginning" and detracted from the impact of the original with digressions and inconsistencies; "the verdict of most critics is that the earlier version is artistically superior".