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