Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

New Edition

Thomas De Quincey
Edited by Robert Morrison

Oxford World's Classics

A new edition by De Quincey scholar and biographer Robert Morrison of De Quincey's finest autobiographical essays, which describe his early life and opium addiction.
Extensive chronology of De Quincey's life and the most up-to-date and and thorough bibliography on his autobiographical works.
Introduction considers opium use in the nineteenth century, the confession genre, and the three works in detail, focusing on De Quincey's centrality to his own age and enduring relevance to our own.

New to this Edition:

The only paperback edition to include manuscript material related to the three main texts as well as other material, including letters and prefaces, in appendices.
Detailed and comprehensive annotation, including new information and identifications previously unnoticed.
Three appendices containing manuscript material related to the three texts, never before published in paperback.
All new editorial material by new editor Robert Morrison: introduction, note on the text, chronology, bibliography, explanatory notes

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

New Edition

Thomas De Quincey
Edited by Robert Morrison

Description

"I took it: - and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me!"

This edition presents De Quincey's three finest essays in impassioned autobiography, edited by leading De Quincey scholar and biographer Robert Morrison.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater launched a fascination with drug use that has continued to our day. Here De Quincey invents recreational drug taking, but he also details both the lurid nightmares that beset him in the depths of his addiction as well as his humiliatingly futile attempts to renounce the drug. Suspiria de Profundis centers on the profound afflictions of De Quincey's childhood, and examines the powerful and often paradoxical relationship between drugs and human creativity. In The English Mail-Coach, the tragedies of De Quincey's past are played out with horrifying repetitiveness against a backdrop of Britain as a Protestant and an imperial power.

Robert Morrison's Introduction considers opium use in the nineteenth century, the confession genre, and the three works in detail, focusing on De Quincey's centrality to his own age and enduring relevance to our own. Morrison also provides detailed and comprehensive annotation, an extensive chronology of De Quincey's life, and the most up-to-date and thorough bibliography on the autobiographical works. Finally, the book features three appendices containing manuscript material related to the three texts, never before available in paperback.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

New Edition

Thomas De Quincey
Edited by Robert Morrison

Oxford World's Classics

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Suspiria de Profundis
The English Mail-Coach
Appendix A. Manuscript and Other Material relating to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Appendix B. Manuscript Material relating to Suspiria de Profundis
Appendix C: Manuscript and Other Material relating to 'The English Mail-Coach'
Explanatory Notes

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

New Edition

Thomas De Quincey
Edited by Robert Morrison

Oxford World's Classics

Author Information

Robert Morrison is the author of a critically acclaimed biography of De Quincey, The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009). He has edited volumes of De Quincey's complete Works for Pickering and Chatto, and he is the editor of On Murder, a collection of De Quincey's essays 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' and other writings for OWC. He has also co-edited with Chris Baldick Polidori's The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre for OWC.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

New Edition

Thomas De Quincey
Edited by Robert Morrison

Oxford World's Classics

From Our Blog

The Magic Fix: De Quincey's portrait of the artist as addict

Thomas De Quincey produced two versions of his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He launched himself to fame with the first version, which appeared in two instalments in the London Magazine for September and October 1821, and which created such a sensation that the London's editors issued it again the following year in book form.

Posted on October 30, 2015

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Gimme Shelter: De Quincey on Drugs

By Robert Morrison According to Gerard Manley Hopkins, when Thomas De Quincey was living in Glasgow in the mid-1840s he 'would wake blue and trembling in the morning and languidly ask the servant 'Would you pour out some of that black mixture from the bottle there.' The servant would give it him, generally not knowing what it was. After this he would revive.' What 'it' was, of course, was opium, the drug that De Quincey became addicted to in 1813 -- two hundred years ago this year.

Posted on March 21, 2013

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De Quincey's wicked book

By Robert Morrison In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Immanuel Kant gives the standard eighteenth-century line on opium. Its "dreamy euphoria," he declares, makes one "taciturn, withdrawn, and uncommunicative," and it is "therefore'¦permitted only as a medicine." Eighty-five years later, in The Gay Science (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche too discusses drugs, but he has a very different story to tell.

Posted on February 21, 2013

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