Repugnance toward opium as well as the gothic nature of De Quincey’s prose style had obscured the reputation of Confessions of an English Opium Eater in the century after it was published. It has since been recognized as one of the most remarkable pieces of writing of the English Romantic period and as a major work of English literature. To many early readers, Confessions of an English Opium Eater represents the most garish aspects of English romanticism. The topic, opium eating, is sensationalist and unappealing. De Quincey’s prose seems feverish and overwrought. The persona of the narrator is at times self-absorbed, sentimental, erudite, digressive, and prone to Latin and literary quotations.

Modern scholars have resuscitated De Quincey’s reputation. In its genre of confessional literature, Confessions of an English Opium Eater follows in the course of such important works as the confessions of Saint Augustine and the confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although De Quincey is clearly an imaginative author, Confessions of an English Opium Eater is painfully realistic when it discusses his opium addiction. In this sense it prefigures both the psychological literature of the twentieth century and the psychedelic journalism of the 1960’s, including works by authors such as Ken Kesey and William S. Burroughs.

De Quincey’s book remains the most arresting and touchingly human account in English literature of the widespread phenomenon of opium addiction in the early nineteenth century. Laudanam, or tincture of opium, was readily available at pharmacies in De Quincey’s time, and it was considered an effective cure for extreme headaches and depression. Writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge also took laudanam for his neuralgia, and most readers of Romantic literature are familiar with the exotic fragment “Kubla Khan,” which is purported to be the result of an interrupted attempt to capture the elusive memories of an opium dream.

In his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey refrains from trying to construct art, even in fragments, from his opium reveries. Instead, he is a kind of impressionistic reporter, a writer who shares, in a descriptive and evenhanded way, his visions and their sources in the experiences of his life. The result is a curious taming of the marvelous, a domestication of the horrific. Although to many readers the book may seem prolix, it is compellingly constructed. When readers first encounter the gentle and simple Ann, a child prostitute, De Quincey knows that readers will recognize her at the end of his book in the terrifying dream of “female forms” crying “everlasting farewells.” This dream, one of the “Pains of Opium,” recalls the agonizing inability of De Quincey to find Ann again after their separation in London. The opium dream becomes a final farewell to this pathetic adolescent experience. As terrifying as it is, the dream is also cathartic and humanizing. In a sense, the dream finally “finds” Ann.

Opium dreams might revivify haunting memories; they also might immortalize trivial moments. The chance visit of the traveling Malay sailor at De Quincey’s cottage becomes the source of a series of opium dreams on Asian themes. These dreams become increasingly terrifying and fantastic; they reveal De Quincey’s deep fears of the unknown and his subconscious racial prejudices. The influence of these dreamlike sequences is evident in the works of later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Charles Dickens. Writers who explore the interior spaces of the mind, such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges, have acknowledged their debt to De Quincey. The critic Patrick Bridgwater has demonstrated at length that De Quincey is a precursor of Franz Kafka...