The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

In an examination of his laudanum addiction and the dreams and visions the drug engendered, Thomas De Quincey lays bare the celestial pleasures and infernal lows of an existence dependent on subtle and mighty opium . At once moving and rhapsodic, and suffused with a poetic and lyrical beauty, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater hauntingly evokes frightful scenes and phantasmagorical night-time wanderings, while reality, dream and memory blur and intertwine in a nebulous and protean haze. Published anonymously in The London Magazine, the Confessions were an immediate success, and soon speculation was rife as to the identity of the mysterious Opium-Eater. The work, which introduced the literary world to De Quincey s unique impassioned prose , is now widely deemed to be De Quincey s masterpiece. This edition also includes the classic `Suspiria de Profundis' and `The English Mail-Coach', both continuing De Quincey's exploration of the drug and its relationship with dreams and the events of childhood, and inspiring Virginia Woolf to declare that De Quincey's writing has 'the effect of rings of sound which break into each other and widen out and out till the brain can hardly expand far enough to realize the last remote vibrations' . . . . . . .