The original drug memoir - a true nineteenth century account of the pleasures and pains of addiction
Thomas De Quincey was born on 15 August 1789 in Manchester, the son of an affluent cloth merchant. He ran away from the Manchester Grammar school aged 17 and travelled in poverty in Wales and London before being reconciled with his family. He then attended Oxford University, where he first began to take opium. Despite excelling at his studies, De Quincey left university without completing his degree and married Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a local farmer. Having exhausted his inheritance, partly due to his addiction to opium, De Quincey found work as a journalist and wrote prolifically on various subjects for numerous publications. Confessions of a English Opium-Eater was published in the London Magazine in 1821 and found instant success. He went on to write several novels and biographies, and his unusual autobiographical style made his work extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. When De Quincey's wife Margaret died in 1837, his opium addiction worsened and he moved away from London to Scotland to relieve his straitened finances. He died in Edinburgh on 8 December 1859.
Among the best essayists of the romantic era… De Quincey may be
viewed as a proto-Burroughs, as well as a British cousin to Edgar
Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, he might with a stretch even be
seen as an ancestor of the J.G. Ballard...turn immediately to this
excellent, detailed and often harrowing biography
*Washington Post*
Thomas de Quincey was the original cosmonaut of inner space, his
Confessions of an English Opium Eater predating the wave of drug
buddy literature from William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh by half a
century or more
*Glasgow Herald*
A stimulating cocktail: exotic dream-sequences conjured up in
baroque prosepoetry, camp Gothic effects worthy of Hammer Horror,
classical quotations, London street-slang and sprawling footnotes
on German philosophy. De Quincey served up this heady concoction of
high-culture and low-life in all of his finest writings... At his
best, however, he is one of the finest English prose stylists for
sheer variety and opiumtinted vividness
*Mail on Sunday*
The first - and still is the finest - literary dope fiend
*Guardian*
It is one of the classics of 19th-century life writing and its
influence is still felt
*Observer*
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