Confessions of an English Opium Eater The Secret Life of Books

In 1821, a sensational piece of writing was published anonymously,

charting a previously unmapped inner world.

It was a stylistic tour-de-force -

the first depiction of recreational drug use.

But it was also the first autobiographical account

of drug addiction.

The book was Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

Its author was Thomas De Quincey,

aka the world's first self-confessed literary dope fiend.

"I took it and in an hour,

"oh, heavens, what a revulsion.

"What an upheaving from its lowest depths of the inner spirit.

"What an apocalypse of the world within me."

It seduced and titillated contemporary society

with its descriptions of its author's

somnambulatory adventures whilst dosed up on opium.

He wrote that he wanted others to benefit from the experience

he had purchased at so heavy a price.

My name is John Cooper Clarke -

Professional poet, writer and erstwhile resident

of the nebulous world of consensual slavery described herein.

De Quincey may have called his book Confessions,

but this is far from a straightforward memoir.

I want to find out what inspired De Quincey

to write this dark, romantic classic

and get behind the persona of the Opium Eater.

"Thou hast the keys of paradise,

"oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!"

We've become so used to reading depictions of drug use today

that it's become difficult to say anything new about the subject.

However, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire,

William Burroughs, Lou Reed

have all, to some extent, been influenced by Thomas De Quincey.

Confessions Of An English Opium Eater was first published

as two magazine articles in the London Magazine in 1821.

It was such an instant success

that it was hastily reprinted in book form the following year...

..garnering critical praise, public intrigue

and becoming a bestseller.

Its author was a slightly-built 36-year-old Oxford dropout.

De Quincey had been a literary wannabe from his earliest years.

And with his Confessions, he certainly stuck to that old adage of

Write about what you know.

At the time of writing, he'd been using opium for almost 20 years.

"This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium.

"Of which church, I acknowledge myself to be the only member.

"The alpha and the omega.

"But, then, it is to be recollected that I speak from the ground

"of a large and profound personal experience."

Confessions was broken into three main chapter headings.

The Preliminary Confessions,

recounting the formative experiences of the addict as a young man,

The Pleasures of Opium, celebrating his sublime highs,

and The Pains of Opium, detailing the Gothic terrors

which the drug reaps on his body and mind.

But it was far from being a purely factual account of drug dependency.

The very title of the book was carefully chosen for maximum effect

and shows that De Quincey was not afraid to sacrifice

a modicum of truth in pursuit of greater sensationalism.

For one thing, De Quincey didn't eat opium.

He drank laudanum, a potent tincture of opium dissolved in alcohol.

Admittedly, laudanum quaffer

doesn't have quite the same ring as opium eater.

To the contemporary reader, the phrase opium eater

would have evoked images of the exotic

and the perceived decadence of the East.

But the English were no strangers to the drug either.

For most of the 19th century, laudanum was everywhere.

An extract of the poppy, it was cheap,

it was legal and was as ubiquitous as aspirin is today.

Often, it cost less than ale or spirits.

But despite its ubiquity, laudanum was highly addictive.

It came under a variety of brand names.

McMunn's Elixir,

Kendal Black Drop,

Dalby's Carminative,

Battley's Sedative Solution,

Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup.

They gave it to babies.

Since the 20th century, opium has perhaps become more famous

in the form of one of its cheap derivatives -

diamorphine, aka heroin.

And me and it have history.

As a tubercular child,

I was first introduced to morphine as a cough suppressant.

So when I, er... many years later, er...

was reintroduced to it in a non-therapeutic situation,

it was - more than anything - it was...familiar.

In the book, De Quincey talks about his own first time buying the drug

at the age of 19 in religious terms,

describing the druggist as an

"unconscious minister of celestial pleasures.

"And when I asked for the tincture of opium,

"he gave it to me as any other man might do.

"Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of humanity,

"he has ever since existed in my mind

"as the beatific vision of an immortal druggist

"sent down to earth on a special mission to myself."

De Quincey gave several reasons for his initial acquaintance with opium.

Among them, neuralgia, toothache and nervous irritation.

Although De Quincey first administered opium

for legitimate medical reasons,

he quickly became enamoured of the drug's side effects.

He describes how he would often take a debouch of opium

and head off to the opera,

or stroll the labyrinthine streets of London,

shmying around amongst his fellow nightwalkers.

Here was the happiness about which philosophers had disputed

for so many ages.

But once discovered, happiness might now be bought for a penny

and carried in the waistcoat pocket.

Taking laudanum might have been socially acceptable back then,

but De Quincey's outspoken celebration of it

also attracted moral outrage.

The notion that this drug was not to take away pain,

it was to enhance your enjoyment of books,

music, crowds, solitude,

that was... That caused a sensation.

Because people hadn't thought of the drug in that way before.

We don't get notions of addiction until later down the 19th century.

It's a habit. Habit, yeah.

And you've got a very, very bad habit.

And De Quincey's going to come out

and he's going to give you a confession

to sort of educate you about drugs.

So, he's out there so we don't have to be?

He says, "I've written this because

"I want the opium eater, or the potential opium eater...

"I've written it to make him fear and tremble.

"And if I've accomplished that,

"if I've sort of educated him in that way,

"then I've done what I set out to do."

I think that is nonsense.

He, er...makes people very, very interested in opium.

And, in fact, De Quincey writes a letter

after the Confessions comes out and he says,

"I think that I made the pains of opium a little too glamorous.

"That is to say that they gave me these tremendous nightmares,

"these terrifying sort of Gothic nightmares

"of incarceration and anxiety and pursuit."

And people went, "Oh, cool!"

JOHN LAUGHS "That's cool, right?"

So what happens very often with the Gothic is that, you know,

if you can stand back and say, "I'm going to experiment with the drug

"and I'm going to get those fantastic nightmares,

"but I'm not going to become an addict,"

well, that, I think, is a fairly familiar narrative today.

"I can leave it alone any time I like."

And that sense in which the drug is tricking you all the while

and sucking you under all the while.

The very term autobiography

was still relatively new in De Quincey's age,

and he stressed that his confession would be different to what he called

the gratuitous self-humiliation of French literature.

A man of letters stepping forward and saying,

"Here's what's been happening in my life,"

that was, um...not done.

And Rousseau's confessions sit before De Quincey,

but in the first paragraph of De Quincey's Confessions,

he sort of steps forward and says,

"This is not going to be like a French confession.

"This is a very English confession."

And so he takes that tradition

and, um...and sort of reinvents it.

In the chapter entitled The Preliminary Confessions,

De Quincey recounts his early life.

De Quincey was born in Manchester.

His father died when he was young,

leaving him a modest fortune.

He describes how, in 1800,

his mother packed him off to Manchester Grammar School.

But the precocious Thomas, who aspired to be a poet,

became so miserable he ran away,

ending up destitute in London at the age of 17.

He would also describe these early London experiences

as a seminal influence upon the rest of his life.

Though he had yet to experience opium,

De Quincey believed that the damage inflicted on his body and spirit

would, in large part, lead to his later dependency.

He tells of his friendship with Ann,

a 15-year-old prostitute

with whom De Quincey would walk up and down Oxford Street,

enduring the poverty and hunger together.

De Quincey left London for a few days and, upon his return,

failed to find her at their agreed rendezvous point.

"To this hour, I have never heard a syllable about her.

"This, amongst such troubles as most men meet within this life,

"has been my heaviest affliction."

According to Confessions, she would haunt

his opium-induced dreams for decades to come.

But some of the most famous passages of Confessions

are set not on the lonely, unforgiving streets of London...

..but amongst the damp and austere hills

of Grasmere in the Lake District.

De Quincey fast-forwards his narrative to 1812,

and of his experience in London, he declares,

"I'm 250 miles away from it

"and buried in the depth of mountains.

"And what am I doing amongst the mountains?

"Taking opium. Yes, but what else?"

No wonder De Quincey was on dope.

This is the first time I've seen this place in Technicolor.

In fact, it has long been my contention

that to live in the Lake District is to opt for the indoor life.

Here's a couple of first impressions

I've scribbled down since I got here.

"This morbid crater,

"this monochrome font of fathomless misery.

"Book early."

Of course, slightly more celebratory verses were written

about this place by William Wordsworth,

who, along with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

helped to kick-start the romantic age in English literature.

De Quincey hero-worshipped them both.

He later described reading their poetry as,

"The greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind."

He did everything he could to make their acquaintance,

even travelling for days just to catch a glimpse

of Wordsworth at home, here in Dove Cottage.

Coleridge was also an aficionado of laudanum

and recognised a kindred soul in De Quincey,

warning his young admirer about the dangers of the drug.

Not that De Quincey took any notice.

De Quincey became a regular visitor to Dove Cottage,

spending so much time with the Wordsworths that, for a while,

he was considered almost a member of the family.

When they moved to another house nearby,

he decided to rent the place for himself.

Confessions was actually written over a short period back in London,

where De Quincey was trying to pay off his growing debts

by writing for the periodical press.

But a section of the manuscript is kept at Dove Cottage library

and curator Jeff Cowton is going to help me explore it.

So this isn't De Quincey creating his work,

this is De Quincey preparing it to go to the printer.

So what you're going to see should be neat and it should be readable

and it should be very easy for the printer to understand.

But you can see... He's made a mess of that.

Look at that. Oh, my God!

And these stains are...?

When we bought the manuscript,

there was a suggestion that they might be opium stains.

And it wasn't opium at all, of course,

it was just plain old coffee.

Because he was pursued by debt collectors,

he had to flee his house for a time,

so he wrote some of it in the coffee houses.

And remember the pressure he was under, you know?

So while he's writing this, he's got the boy from the printer

who's coming around and saying, "Have you done the next bit yet?"

So the publisher starts to get a bit anxious when,

after having received several of these batches,

he still hasn't got to the subject of opium.

So he instructs De Quincey to write a page

to explain why all this early stuff is here

and what it's got to do with this topic.

So you can see here that there's an extra page

that De Quincey has added and inserted earlier on

to explain why he's talking about his childhood so much.

It's so that when De Quincey later on talks about his dreams

and about how he has dreams of his earlier life...

So the resonance of the earlier pages comes into play.

Absolutely so, yeah.

So that's what a manuscript can tell you, really.

You can see inside the story.

So this is how it was published in the magazine

and then it appears as a published book.

And it doesn't have his name on there, does it?

It's anonymously published. Yes, that's right.

But what we did note is that De Quincey

was privy to Wordsworth's manuscript.

And he read the great poem of Wordsworth - he read The Prelude

while it was still a manuscript, long before it was published.

And that was a great influence on De Quincey himself.

Wordsworth was a great believer in the... As he said, "The child is father of the man."

It's how your childhood shapes the way you become.

And so, too, with De Quincey.

And the opium that he takes gives him that brilliance of thought

to see it more clearly.

So for De Quincey, the pleasures of opium is the sharpening

and the brilliance of the mind as a result.

And of the recollective powers of, er...dreams. Yeah.

I know it's highly disrespectful - here we are, sat in his gaff,

but De Quincey, yes. Wordsworth, no, pour moi.

Why? To be honest, I never bought that whole mythology

of the Lake District thing.

No offence, Jeff, you know.

So I can only think that it is the very climate

that induces severe misery

in any ordinary person is a positive bonus to the bookish type.

THEY LAUGH

I first read Thomas De Quincey 40 years ago.

So to see those lines in his own hand is...quite a connection.

And, yeah, I mean, it's an amazing piece.

And quite a privilege to be allowed to...browse around it.

It is heavy, having said that.

You know, touching the very paper on that.

Oh, yeah. I can feel half a dozen works of art are coming on already.

During his early years here,

it seemed that De Quincey had found happiness.

And there were still the pleasures of opium to be had.

"Paint me, then, a room.

"Make it populous with books.

"And furthermore, paint me a good fire.

"And furniture plain and modest,

"befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar.

"As for the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that.

"And you may as well paint the real receptacle,

"which was not of gold, but of glass,

"and as much like a wine decanter as possible.

"Into this, you may pour a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum.

"That and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side

"will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood."

But De Quincey's happiness would not last very long.

The drug was tightening its grip on him all the time.

For the first eight years, he had been an occasional drug user.

But by 1813, De Quincey wrote

that he had become a regular and confirmed opium eater.

He claimed the immediate cause was illness brought about by grief

at the death of Wordsworth's

three-year-old favourite daughter, Catherine.

De Quincey was so affected

that he apparently slept on her grave every night for eight weeks.

Sad.

Morbid.

Strange.

De Quincey's dependency escalated,

and he claims in the book to have been taking

8,000 drops of laudanum a day.

That's 80 teaspoons. Count them.

He suffered nausea, pain and depression

whenever he tried to wean himself off.

But his physical sufferings seemed slight

compared to the tortures of his mind.

Especially his vivid, drug-induced dreams.

The chapter on The Pains of Opium

contains some of De Quincey's most memorable writing.

"I was stared at, hooted at,

"grunted at, chattered at by monkeys.

"I had done a deed, they said,

"which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at.

"I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins

"with mummies and sphinxes,

"in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids.

"I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles

"and laid confounded with all unutterable slimy things

"amongst reeds and Nilotic mud."

He leaves the impression of a man who, although deranged,

is in possession of some particular esoteric learning.

The repetitious use of "I was, I was, I was"...

..you know, lending it a poetical musicality

that prose does not usually possess.

It predates notions of automatic writing,

riffing and surrealism.

He was trying to achieve what he would later call

a style of impassioned prose.

Confessions was an immediate success.

Reviewers praised its powerful style.

However, others were somewhat less impressed.

According to the authors of the Family Oracle of Health,

"The use of opium has been recently much increased

"by a wild, absurd and romancing production

"called The Confessions Of An English Opium Eater."

He might have been criticised for enticing readers

to abuse the drug for themselves,

but at the end of the book, De Quincey boasted

that he himself had finally defeated his own dependency on laudanum.

In reality, this was far from the truth.

De Quincey would remain almost constantly broke

and plagued by his addiction. An all-too-familiar tale.

I took it for 15 years. And for most of that time,

I was concocting elaborate and extravagant plans to clean up...

..which involved moving to other countries.

What they call a geographical.

But the trouble with moving to another country is

you've got to take yourself with you.

De Quincey's problems would also follow him wherever he went.

In 1830, his financial troubles

forced him to move from Grasmere

to the publishing powerhouse of the Scottish capital,

becoming a regular contributor to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

The next 30 years were spent ducking and diving from one lodging house

to another with angry Scottish creditors in hot pursuit,

often without much food, or even clothes.

It is not unknown for writers to suffer financially.

Tell me about it.

But De Quincey, he got a really bad time.

He would go on to write other celebrated essays,

but De Quincey would often cash in on the success of Confessions

by using the by-line, The Opium Eater.

He was also not quite done with his most famous work.

De Quincey always considered the original Confessions

to be too rushed and not quite long enough.

He knew he had much more to say upon the subject

and in 1856, he published a revised edition,

almost tripling the size of the original.

One edition was a lengthy attack on his former hero

and fellow opium addict, Coleridge,

who had been critical of De Quincey's glorification

of the drug in the original Confessions.

De Quincey wrote of Coleridge,

"There never was a distinction more groundless and visionary

"than that which it has pleased him to draw

"between my motives and his own."

De Quincey's revised edition would form a good argument

for not rewriting your old work.

One of the reasons, I think,

De Quincey's reputation has been held back a little bit is we knew Confessions

in what I would regard as the inferior form for a long time.

It's lost its concision, for sure. It's lost its compression. Yeah.

De Quincey said it's like, you know, a spontaneous solo.

You know, "It just burst from me

"under the pressure of having to get it done in 1821

"and now I'm sort of sitting back, surveying my career

"and this is my great work

"and so I'm going to make my final claims for why I took opium,

"make my final claims for what my relationship was like with Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

He and De Quincey had been sort of scrapping and squabbling about opium

and who took what and who took it when and why they took it.

And Coleridge only took it for medical reasons

and De Quincey says that's nonsense.

So did he have any extravagant plans for leading the sober life?

De Quincey often says, "I've kicked it."

Even at the end of the... JOHN LAUGHS

..at the end of the 1821... That's my boy!

Yeah? THEY LAUGH

He says, you know, "I've almost... I've unwound the cursed chain

"almost to its final link."

And he tells his wife, he tells his friends,

he tells his publishers, he tells his children that he has kicked it.

I think one reason he keeps telling the story over and over

is because he wants to write a version of it in which

he's in control of the drug and the drug isn't in control of him.

De Quincey doesn't come out and denounce the drug,

and he doesn't come out and just blindly celebrate it.

He comes out and says, "Let me tell you all-round what this is like."

And that sense in which he gives us a multi-sided perspective

on that experience means that other writers who come after him

take him as a starting point.

WS Burroughs says,

"The first and best book on drug addiction is De Quincey."

And I think that's broadly recognised in literary circles.

For many years, De Quincey's book would influence

public opinion towards opium addiction.

It would also serve as a handbook

for generations of narcoticised writers.

As for De Quincey himself, he died in Edinburgh in 1859,

at 74 years of age.

Whatever else opium had done for him,

it had not much shortened his life.

De Quincey used opium to explore his dramatic inner world.

To my mind, he was a visionary in a utilitarian age.

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution,

the qualities of vigour, productivity and strength

were valued over opiated idleness.

And then there's De Quincey, living like a secular monk

in the tainted monastery of his own mind.

Opium had opened the gates to his mind,

both as paradise and perdition.

It rendered him to a poetic radiance,

these strange and spectral visions of his accumulated memories.

"The subject was to display the marvellous agency of opium,

"whether for pleasure or for pain.

"If that is done, the action of the piece is closed."

If you want to dig deeper into Thomas De Quincey's

Confessions Of An English Opium Eater,

or any of the other books in this series, go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University.

For nearly 100 years, the BBC has been informing, educating

and entertaining audiences across the UK,

and every ten years

there's a government review to consider the future of the BBC.