Confessions of an English Opium Eater: By Thomas De Quincey - Illustrated

Author: Thomas De Quincey

Paperback:
Publisher: Independently published
ISBN 10: 1521178054
ISBN 13: 978-1521178058

Hardcover:
Publisher: Macmillan Collector's Library
ISBN 10: 1509899790
ISBN 13: 978-1509899791

How is this book unique?

1. Font adjustments & biography included
2. Unabridged (100% Original content)
3. Illustrated

About Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey

"In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through London—and the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became prey—under the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious. Although he was an acute literary critic, a voluminous contributor to Blackwood's and other journals, and a perceptive writer on history, biography, and economics, Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) is best known for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. First published in installments in the London Magazine in 1821, the work recounts De Quincey's early years as a precocious student of Greek, his flight from grammar school and subsequent adventures among the outcasts and prostitutes of London, studies at Oxford University and his introduction to opium in 1804 (he hoped that taking the drug would relieve a severe headache). It was the beginning of a long-term addiction to opium, whose effects on his mind are revealed in remarkably vivid descriptions of the dreams and visions he experienced while under its influence. Describing the general style of the Confessions, an English critic of the period wrote in the London Monthly Review: ""They have an air of reality and life; and they exhibit such strong graphic powers as to throw an interest and even a dignity round a subject which in less able hands might have been rendered a tissue of trifles and absurdities."" "