Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Table of Contents

Title Page

History of Collins

Life & Times

Part I

From the “London Magazine” for September 1821.

Preliminary Confessions

Part II

From the “London Magazine” for October 1821.

Appendix

From the “London Magazine” for December 1822.

Endnotes

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

Copyright

About the Publisher

History of Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

Opium and Addiction

Laudanum is a tincture of opium dissolved in alcohol. It was once widely used as a ‘cure-all’ because it contains high levels of morphine and codeine, which make it a very effective analgesic. It also has a very relaxing effect on the mind due to its narcotic content. In the early 19th century, many people suffered from chronic and ultimately fatal ailments, such as tuberculosis (consumption) and syphilis, for which there were no known cures. Laudanum became the medication of choice, as it alleviated the pain and soothed the mind, enabling people to continue functioning while their diseases gradually took away their lives.

In those days, laudanum contained raw opium, so that it was a cocktail of many compounds exuded by the opium poppy. It is still used in some countries for the treatment of people in severe pain due to terminal illnesses, such as cancer, but these days the drug is processed so that the solution does not contain undesirable chemicals. In its processed form, it is more commonly referred to as tincture of opium rather than laudanum. The term ‘laudanum’ is derived from the word ‘ladanum’ which is an aromatic resin obtained from the rock rose (Cistus ladanifer). As opium is the dried sap of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), pharmacists saw a similarity between the two. The species name of the opium poppy – somniferum – alludes to the sleep-inducing properties of the drug.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) is, as it suggests, a confessional on the effects that laudanum had on the author. This is because opium has the unfortunate quality of being highly addictive, both physiologically and psychologically. The result is that the patient becomes a user and craves higher and higher doses as their tolerance for the drug increases. Opium addiction, through the administration of laudanum, became quite a problem. People needed the drug to cope with their afflictions, but its use sent them into a spiraling dependency that, in turn, caused other problems due to the opium’s side effects. These included erratic and unreasonable behaviour, malnutrition due to vomiting and loss of appetite, and general self-neglect. Of course, the problem was also compounded by the fact that alcohol was the solvent, leading to alcoholism alongside the opium addiction.

Thomas de Quincey began taking laudanum to treat his neuralgia, a condition resulting in spasms of pain along nerves, typically in the head and face. It is caused by damaged or malfunctioning nerves that prompt the brain to feel phantom aches and pains, which can be quite debilitating. It may be that childhood illness or injury caused his nervous system to begin these intermittent bouts of pain, but de Quincey was probably also a hypochondriac in nature, thereby exaggerating the problem in his own mind and making the neuralgia partly psychosomatic.

De Quincey took laudanum for the first time at the age of 19. For the next eight years, he used laudanum as a recreational drug, whenever he decided that his condition warranted a dose. He then suffered a tragedy when his friend Catherine, the youngest daughter of William Wordsworth, died, closely followed by his son, Thomas, in the same year: 1812. This prompted de Quincey to use laudanum on a daily basis, and he soon entered into full-blown opium addiction, which would dog him for the rest of his life. He displayed all the classic behaviours associated with modern-day heroin addiction. He would go into binges of consumption and then try to rehabilitate himself by attempting to kick the habit, always without prolonged success.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is another famous opium addict of the same era as de Quincey. Coleridge was the elder of the two, by a dozen years, and had published The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798, which greatly inspired de Quincey. They met in 1807, and an acquaintance was begun rather than a proper friendship – both seeing a connection through their shared drug habit. When the de Quincey published Confessions of an English Opium Eater, a peculiar literary rivalry began. They each published magazine articles that were virtually interchangeable in theme, style and tone, almost as if they were binary stars, caught in one another’s gravitational field. They orbited one another in this way for a while, as if obsessed by the self-image they saw in the other.

Both Coleridge and de Quincey were among William Wordsworth’s circle of friends. Wordsworth was disapproving of their use of opium because of the decline in condition and mood that it brought about. Anxiety, depression and fatigue were very evident symptoms. Wordsworth was a vigorous man who made the most of life and enjoyed outdoor pursuits, such as trekking. Wordsworth believed that opium addiction brought out the worst in people. However, because of its benefits, it would be a long time before the use of opium would be outlawed, at a time before the evolution of more specific remedies. It was banned in the US in 1905. In Britain it was more complicated, due to the perception that opiate addictions were medical conditions rather than condemnable behaviour. In 1926 the Rolleston Act allowed general practitioners to prescribe opiates in Britain if they saw fit, so that addicts were able to continue with their habits.

About the Author

De Quincey had an unusual start in life. His father died when he was young and his mother had a peculiar idea of the best way to school him. Instead of sending him to the best school, she did the opposite. She actually removed him from one school, where he was doing too well, and sent him to an inferior school to encourage him to work harder and develop a sense of self-reliance – an approach that many modern parents might do well to follow, as it worked in that regard. De Quincey became a free-spirited and self-educated character, if a little eccentric in nature, with a clear mission in mind to follow Wordsworth and Coleridge into the world of poetry and literature. It would be fair to say that he possessed an ‘artistic temperament’: naturally compelled towards self-expression, with an accompanying disregard for his own well-being.

It is true that he was something of a self-imagined pariah, but that too was common in the creative type, due to the acute awareness of being different and having heightened sensibilities about the difficulty with conforming and becoming marginalized by society. This probably added to de Quincey’s inclination to take opium, as a means of escaping his inner demons as much as anything else. He effectively lived the entirety of his adult life with laudanum as his faithful companion, always there to dull his senses.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater was heavily coloured by a period in which de Quincey was homeless and living on the streets of London, which he viewed as the seminal moment in his life, following his uncertain childhood. It was this episode that led to his opium eating, which, in turn, opened his mind to his literary potential. As such, he was equally cursed and blessed, as he saw it, and this is really the central theme of the book – the pros and cons of opium addiction. The key sections of the tome are entitled The Pleasures of Opium and The Pains of Opium, in which he tries to address a balanced and fair view.

In this work, de Quincey attempts to be objective by the admittance of his gains and losses. It was this stark honesty that made the book immediately popular, although de Quincey chose to publish the book anonymously, as he wasn’t at all certain of what the reaction to the book would be. The truth is that he had inadvertently tapped into the humanity of the British public. Like so many since, he found that people were willing to accept and embrace him for the candour with which he detailed his flaws as a person. People like to see qualities in celebrities that they can identify with because, as any evolutionary psychologist will tell you, we evolved as social apes and we like to identify moral and ethical allies. Thus, de Quincey set a precedent that opened the way for the introspective autobiography by demonstrating the people do want to know about the insalubrious and sordid truths of the lives of others.

FROM THE “LONDON MAGAZINE” FOR SEPTEMBER 1821.

To The Reader

I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life: according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it up; and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers: and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to French literature, or to that part of the German which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French. All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have for many months hesitated about the propriety of allowing this or any part of my narrative to come before the public eye until after my death (when, for many reasons, the whole will be published); and it is not without an anxious review of the reasons for and against this step that I have at last concluded on taking it.

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)

Humbly to express

A penitential loneliness.

It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that it should be so: nor would I willingly in my own person manifest a disregard of such salutary feelings, nor in act or word do anything to weaken them; but, on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting to others from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price might compensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do not of necessity imply guilt. They approach or recede from shades of that dark alliance, in proportion to the probable motives and prospects of the offender, and the palliations, known or secret, of the offence; in proportion as the temptations to it were potent from the first, and the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest to the last. For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet recorded1 of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man—have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist that in my case the self-conquest was unquestionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry, according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of positive pleasure.

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and if I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the present act of confession in consideration of the service which I may thereby render to the whole class of opium-eaters. But who are they? Reader, I am sorry to say a very numerous class indeed. Of this I became convinced some years ago by computing at that time the number of those in one small class of English society (the class of men distinguished for talents, or of eminent station) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters; such, for instance, as the eloquent and benevolent —, the late Dean of —, Lord —, Mr. — the philosopher, a late Under-Secretary of State (who described to me the sensation which first drove him to the use of opium in the very same words as the Dean of —, viz., “that he felt as though rats were gnawing and abrading the coats of his stomach”), Mr. —, and many others hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention. Now, if one class, comparatively so limited, could furnish so many scores of cases (and that within the knowledge of one single inquirer), it was a natural inference that the entire population of England would furnish a proportionable number. The soundness of this inference, however, I doubted, until some facts became known to me which satisfied me that it was not incorrect. I will mention two. (1) Three respectable London druggists, in widely remote quarters of London, from whom I happened lately to be purchasing small quantities of opium, assured me that the number of amateur opium-eaters (as I may term them) was at this time immense; and that the difficulty of distinguishing those persons to whom habit had rendered opium necessary from such as were purchasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned them daily trouble and disputes. This evidence respected London only. But (2)—which will possibly surprise the reader more—some years ago, on passing through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton manufacturers that their workpeople were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating; so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening. The immediate occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which at that time would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits, and wages rising, it may be thought that this practice would cease; but as I do not readily believe that any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted

That those eat now who never ate before;

And those who always ate, now eat the more.

Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are admitted even by medical writers, who are its greatest enemies. Thus, for instance, Awsiter, apothecary to Greenwich Hospital, in his “Essay on the Effects of Opium” (published in the year 1763), when attempting to explain why Mead had not been sufficiently explicit on the properties, counteragents, &c., of this drug, expresses himself in the following mysterious terms (