Confessions of an English opium eater- Thomas de Quincy

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

ALETHEA HAYTER

Charming and highly gifted, De Quincey was also something of a fugitive from respectable society

His thirty perilous years of drug addiction both eased his considerable social anxieties and created new, devastating mental and physical torments. Throughout this time he fought a constant and bitter struggle against the incapacity and torpor that opium - then as readily available as aspirin - incurred. This agonizing conflict is at the heart of the Confessions. They are a 'meditation on the mechanism of the imagination' and bring vividly to life the 'celestial' dreams and the terrifying nightmares which transport and destroy the addict. De Quincey's powerful evocation of his drug-induced experience gives a fearful insight into the degeneration of a brilliant mind.

This edition follows the first edition of 1821. An appendix includes the most valuable passages from the longer but inferior edition of 1856.