In the vivid and varied world of 19th-century British literature, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) endures as a striking footnote. He produced 250 essays published in 21 volumes, along with dabbling in fiction, yet is known today—to the extent he’s known at all—for one book, an 1822 memoir of addiction entitled Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It was a publishing sensation in its time, going through more than two-dozen editions by the end of the century. Nearly two centuries after publication, De Quincey’s masterwork remains in print.
Even so, the De Quincey scholar Barry Milligan has described Confessions as “one of those books almost everyone has heard of but very few have read.” Milligan suggests that De Quincey is little known today because he worked primarily as an essayist, a form not as celebrated now as the novel. Perhaps a more obvious explanation is that Thomas De Quincey was not a likable man, and his writing often isn’t very likable, either.
That reality rises to the surface of Frances Wilson’s appreciative, yet unflinching account of De Quincey’s life. She begins her perceptive biography in December 1811, when two London families (including a baby) were slaughtered in their homes in what came to be known as the Ratcliffe Highway murders. De Quincey was fascinated by the case and, ages before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, drew upon the killings as inspiration for a lengthy literary narrative, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Like Capote, De Quincey seemed to have more interest in the mechanics of crime than its victims and was keen to commodify real-life tragedy into a cultural event.
His deepest vein of dark material came from his own life, which was dogged by pain from the start. A native of Manchester, De Quincey was 6 years old when his 9-year-old sister died, and his father died soon afterward. In 1796, De Quincey’s mother changed the family’s name from “Quincey” to “De Quincey” because it sounded more aristocratic, suggesting that young Thomas came by his flair for self-drama honestly. By 1802, an unhappy De Quincey had run away from school to live as a vagabond in London, eventually enrolling at Oxford, then leaving without a degree. He recalled taking his first opium in 1804, establishing a habit that followed him to the grave. Milligan notes that De Quincey took massive daily doses of laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol, “and found it impossible to stop doing so until his death at 74, a ripe old age in the mid-nineteenth century.”
Lots of other literary figures of the century, in varying degrees, were getting high on opium, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charles Dickens. But De Quincey’s Confessions helped bring opium use out in the open—and as Milligan noted, the modifier “English” before “Opium-Eater” signaled that a drug widely regarded as a vice of the Orient had been domesticated for British consumption.
First published without a byline in London Magazine, Confessions came along when English journalism was especially hungry for copy. Boosted by improvements in printing technology, the periodical trade was booming, with essayists such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt enjoying a steady pipeline for their work.
Lamb, a friend of De Quincey who had nasty troubles of his own and figures prominently here, provides an interesting study in contrast with the author of Confessions. A bright young man forced to drop out of school because of his family’s financial problems, Charles Lamb took a clerical job at 14, writing his wry and witty essays on the side. When Lamb was 20, his older sister Mary stabbed their mother to death during a mental breakdown and was remanded to Lamb’s custody. It was the stuff of blockbuster memoir—the kind of story that today might be optioned to Hollywood—but Lamb didn’t publicly write about the ordeal. Instead, he focused on finely wrought musings about such topics as roast pig, whist, chimney sweepers, and Valentine’s Day.
Lamb and De Quincey underscored the essay’s divergent paths in the period, which might be oversimplified as a choice between Lamb’s genteel, Johnsonian disquisitions on the one hand and De Quincey’s spill-your-guts school of personal confession on the other. But of course, true genius defies easy category. What the reader notices in Lamb’s essays, despite their air of safe charm, is how much of their author’s poignant personal challenges subtly color the current of the commentary. In beautifully rendered compositions such as “New Year’s Eve” and “A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People,” the bittersweet loneliness of Lamb and his quietly heroic resilience come through.
But what often seems missing from De Quincey, despite his promise of candor, is a sense of true intimacy with his audience. He uses salutations such as “courteous reader” throughout the text of Confessions; but his prevailing attitude is that of a man who neither cherishes his readers nor especially cares if he has any. In one passage, he absolves himself of any blame for narrative jumbles and confusing chronology, admitting that
It’s an approach that recruits the reader as therapist, as if we’re responsible for helping to clarify the author’s mind, not the other way around.
By their nature, addicts are a self-absorbed bunch, and De Quincey, in Frances Wilson’s rendering, seems a classic specimen of the form. She notes De Quincey’s deft use of flattery to secure a first meeting with Lamb, during which Lamb soon discovered that his ostensible admirer’s professed interest was strictly tactical. De Quincey wanted to use Lamb to meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a poetry groupie who essentially stalked his idol, William Wordsworth. Virginia Woolf shrewdly suggested that De Quincey was, at base, a frustrated poet, never fully at home in the plainer particulars prose demanded: “His enemy, the hard fact, became cloudlike and supple under his hands,” she wrote.
“The English Mail-Coach,” perhaps De Quincey’s best essay, hints at the greatness he might have achieved if he had been able to conquer his demons. A meditation on the mail coach as instrument of his century’s increasing speed, the essay also expresses one of De Quincey’s defining themes: the mutability of perception. Remarking on the placement of a small screen to divide different classes of passengers from each other, he invites us to consider how we can render unpleasantness invisible simply by choosing not to look at it. He also plays with our notions of hierarchy by arguing that a coach’s outside seats, which are cheaper, are actually better than the socially coveted ones inside the carriage. Along with such lucid arguments, however, De Quincey indulges in stream-of-consciousness paragraphs that read like William Blake by way of William S. Burroughs.
Wilson argues for De Quincey’s continuing relevance, mentioning that, in addition to Burroughs, he paved the way for such diverse writers as Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges. One does see hints of De Quincey in Woolf’s essays; his telescoping from eye-level detail to cosmic speculation sometimes rhymes thematically with Woolf’s “Street Haunting” and “The Death of the Moth.” But De Quincey’s work presents a model to be refined, not directly emulated. His most prominent admirers over the years, including Woolf, learned best from De Quincey’s mistakes, including the limits of his moral vision. “With immense powers of language at his command,” wrote Woolf, “he was incapable of a sustained and passionate interest in the affairs of other people.”
Thomas De Quincey was a small man, physically and, perhaps, spiritually, who nevertheless casts a shadow across modern culture. His tabloid sensibility chimes with the hyperbole of our headlines. His career, which catered to an ever-expanding media culture increasingly willing to indulge content without context and disclosure without discernment, has obvious parallels with our age. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater has many successors among the bestselling tell-alls about addiction, abuse, and anxiety—a literary cottage industry that sometimes seems less interested in transcending personal dysfunction than promoting it.
“We are all De Quinceyan now,” Wilson concludes. She might not mean that sentence as an indictment, but it is one.
Danny Heitman is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
