Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

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With an Introduction and Notes by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury. In the first part of this famous work, published in 1821 but then revised and expanded in 1856, De Quincey vividly describes a number of experiences during his boyhood which he implies laid the foundations for his later life of helpless drug addiction. The second part consists of his remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of opium, ostensibly offered as a muted apology for the course his life had taken but often reading like a celebration of it. 'The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' is thus both a classic of English autobiographical writing - the prose equivalent, in its own time, of Wordsworth's 'The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind '- and at the same time a crucial text in the long history of the Western World's ambivalent relationship with hard drugs. Full of psychological insight and colourful descriptive writing, it surprised and fascinated De Quincey's contemporaries and has continued to exert its powerful and eccentric appeal ever since. AUTHOR: Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) was an English essayist remembered for his book 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'. Taking opium for the first time in 1804, to relieve a toothache, he continued to consume it for the rest of his life. Highly regarded during his lifetime, and into the twentieth century, subsequently his popularity declined until his tales of drug-induced visions found a new audience in the 1960s.