Confessions
of an Opium-Eater
( By Thomas De Quincey )
This
hypertext version of Thomas DeQuincey's's Confessions of an Opium-Eater
is copyright © 1995 by Dave Gross.
From the
Author to the Reader
I here present you, courteous reader, with the
record of a remarkable period of 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 honorable 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 the choice
of grave, will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population
of the church-yard, 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 over-balance,
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, the 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 in my school-boy
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 recorded 
[1]
of any other man, it is no less ture, 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 or degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist that, in my case,
the self-conquest was unquestionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts
of casuistry, according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at
the bare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement
of positive pleasure.
Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and, if
I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the present act of
confession, in consideration of the service which I may thereby render
to the whole class of opium-eaters. But who are they? Reader, I am sorry
to say, a very numerous class indeed. Of this I became convinced, some
years ago, by computing, at that time, the number of those in one small
class of English society (the class of men distinguished for talent, or
of eminent station) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters;
such, for instance, as the eloquent and benevolent ----; the late Dean
of ----; Lord ----; Mr. ----, the philosopher; a late undersecretary of
state (who described to me the sensation which first drove him to the use
of opium, in the very same words as the Dean of ----, namely, "that he
felt as though rats were gnawing and abrading the coats of his stomach");
Mr. ----; and many others, hardly less known, whom it would be tedious
to mention. Now, if one class, comparatively so limited, could furnish
so many scores of cases (and that within the knowledge of one single inquirer),
it was a natural inference
that the entire population of England would furnish a proportional
number. The soundness of this inference, however, I doubted, until some
facts became known to me, which satisfied me that it was not incorrect.
I will mention two: 1. Three respectable London druggists, in widely remote
quarters of London, from whom I happened lately to be purchasing small
quantities of opium, assured me that the number of amateur opium-eaters
(as I may term them) was, at this time, immense; and that the difficulty
of distinguishing these persons, to whom habit had rendered opium necessary,
from such as were purchasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned them
daily trouble and disputes. This evidence respected London only. But, 2
(which will possibly surprise the reader more), some years ago, on passing
through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton manufacturers, that
their work-people were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating;
so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists
were
stewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for
the known demand of the evening. The immediate occasion of this practice
was the lowness of wages, which, at that time, would not allow them to
indulge in ale or spirits; and, wages rising, it may be thought that this
practice would cease: but, as I do not readily believe that any man, having
once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the
gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted
That those eat now who never ate before;
And those who always ate now eat the more.
Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are admitted,
even by medical writers who are its greatest enemies: thus, for instance,
Awsiter, apothecary to Greenwich Hospital, in his "Essay on the Effects
of Opium" (published in the year 1763), when attempting to explain why
Mead had not been sufficiently explicit on the properties, counter-agents,
etc., of this drug, expresses himself in the following mysterious terms
(): "Perhaps he thought the subject of too delicate a nature to be made
common; and as many people might then indiscrinately use it, it would take
from that necessary fear and caution, which should prevent their experiencing
the extensive power of this drug; for there are many properties in it,
if universally known, that would habituate the use, and make it more in
request with us than the Turks themselves; the result of which knowledge,"
he adds, "must prove a general misfortune." In the necessity of this conclusion
I do not altogether concur; but upon that point I shall have occasion to
speak at the close of my Confessions, where I shall present the reader
with the moral of my narrative.
Footnotes:
1. "Not yet recorded," I say: for there is one celebrated man of the
present day, who if all be true which is reported of him, has greatly
exceeded me in quantity.
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