Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

About this book

Thomas De Quincey tells how, at seventeen, he ran away from school, wandered in Wales and lived homeless in London, where he was saved from collapse by a young street girl named Ann, whom he lost and never found again. Years later, a student at Oxford, he first took opium for pain, and he describes, with great honesty, its early pleasures and then its torments, above all the enormous dreams of architecture, oceans and the East.

Context and significance

First published in 1821, it was the first great memoir of addiction in English, and a warning as much as a confession. De Quincey (1785–1859) was a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge and one of the finest essayists of his time. Its long, musical sentences are a pleasure in themselves.

About the author