Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Thomas de Quincey, in the 1800s, wrote “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.”

Consider Thomas de Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” which was published in the eighteen-twenties, and which frames a tell-all account as an instructive, morally edifying story.

In her exemplary study of De Quincey, the 18th-century writer perhaps best known for his “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” Wilson looks beyond the fumes.

English poets romanticized the recreational use of the drug, and by the time Thomas De Quincey published “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” in 1821, the British were importing tens of thousands of pounds of it per year.

There are a couple of volumes of an incomplete 19th-century set of DeQuincey’s essays, notably “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” which I felt like rereading.