Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

Description

First published in 1821 in the London Magazine, the Confessions did something no book had done before: it described the pleasure of an opium habit with unsparing honesty and then described its terrors, in prose of sublime originality. De Quincey charts his wandering youth, his poverty in London, the night he first tasted the drug ‘kitchen physic’, his professed control of the habit, and finally its full dominion over his mind and sleep.

The book’s last chapters — the ‘Pains of Opium’ and the dream visions of the Malay, the Levana, and the tragic grandeur of the Brocken — belong to the permanent literature of the uncanny. The Confessions gave English a prose-poem of the first rank, an anatomy of addiction, and one of the great interiors of Romanticism.

Why readers still come back to it

• The single most influential account of consciousness and addiction in English.
• Prose of genuine magnificence in the great dream chapters.
• A founding text of autobiography, confession, and the literature of the mind.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition respects the book’s essayistic flow: clean readable type, a working table of contents, and chapter structure matched to the famous movements of the work. The dreams in the file begin the moment your purchase is complete.