Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Kindred Papers

About this book

Thomas De Quincey remembers walking hungry through London, finding unexpected kindness, and later entering the dangerous enchantment of opium. Pleasure gives way to immense dreams, distorted time and nightmares that grow more elaborate as sleep becomes less restful.

His confessional writing moves between autobiography, memory and psychological terror with remarkable intensity. The account of drug use sits beside childhood grief and the people who vanished from his life. Few nineteenth-century writers made the private landscape of dreams feel so large, or its aftermath so difficult to escape.