THE REAL OPIUM EATER

Compelling Biography Explores Thomas De Quincey's Fixations

The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey

By Robert Morrison

Orion, $37.99

"It was available everywhere," Robert Morrison reminds us, "chemists
and pharmacists sold it, as did bakers, grocers, publicans, tailors,
rent collectors and street vendors." Serious users debated the merits
of their favourite proprietary brands: Batley's Sedative Solution,
Godfey's Cordial, Mother Bailey's Quieting Spirit, McMunn's Elixir,
Dalby's Carminative and the potent Kendal Black Drop, craved by Coleridge.

For centuries it had been the most effective painkiller known to man,
derived from the milky sap of the unripe seedpod of the poppy. Opium.
Romance is still attached to the name: dens of indulgence, mysterious
Chinese dealers, dreams of Kubla Khan.

By the end of the 19th century, morphine, its principal active agent,
had been isolated. The invention of the hypodermic syringe had eased
delivery and we were on the road to Sherlock Holmes's heroin addiction.

But Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,
published in 1821, did more than any other book to create the romance
of the drug, relied on a tincture. The opium was dissolved in alcohol,
usually brandy.

Like his revered Samuel Taylor Coleridge, De Quincey was strictly
speaking, a laudanum drinker rather than an opium eater, in all
probability a double addict, alcoholic as well as junkie.

A very good biography of De Quincey was published by the poet Grevel
Lindop nearly 30 years ago. Since then, there has been a definitive
edition of his complete works and a wealth of letters have been
unearthed. The time was ripe for a new biography and Morrison, in the
The English Opium Eater, has done his man proud.

This is an exceptionally well-balanced account. The Confessions are
centre-stage, as they have to be, but they are not allowed to
overwhelm the range of De Quincey's other writings: his memoirs of
Wordsworth and Coleridge, which did so much to establish the cult of
the Lake Poets, his ingenious essays on such subjects as the English
Mail Coach (De Quincey loved speed) and the decline of the art of the
English Murder, even his now forgotten writings on economics.

Morrison manages to share with the reader his admiration and affection
for his subject, while at the same time showing that he was a bit, how
shall we say, odd. And very selfish -- even before he became a drug
addict.

De Quincey was one of the first great autobiographers. The telling of
one's own life story is a notoriously unreliable literary genre. In
order to turn your life into something resembling a novel, you have to
dramatize it, to alight on certain key moments that will give a
shaping structure to your story. For De Quincey, these involved death
and salvation. When he was six, his beloved sister Elizabeth died and
he was traumatized for life. It was like the loss of his own "second
self." But, as Morrison points out, we don't really know how
traumatized he was at the time. He may have invested the event with
high significance in the act of remembering and writing about it.

So too with his next big drama. De Quincey dropped out of Oxford and
became a rough sleeper in London. He tells of how he collapsed in the
street and was on the point of death, only to be rescued by a
kind-hearted prostitute called Ann. They shack up together for a
while, orphans in the storm. Then he goes out of town in pursuit of
some possible work. They agree to meet on the corner of Great
Titchfield Street upon his return. Needless to say, she isn't there at
the appointed time. He asks all the other prostitutes where she might
be. He makes inquiries wherever he can, although it's difficult since
he never bothered to ask Ann her surname. It is as if she has vanished
off the face of the Earth.

Thus she becomes another of his lost girls, just like sister
Elizabeth. But we can't be sure that she ever really existed. Morrison
wonders whether "Ann" might be a composite of various different
prostitutes, since there is no doubt that De Quincey did consort with
their kind during his years on the streets.

The discovery of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads provided
him with as great an epiphany as that of opium. Wordsworth's We are
Seven, a poem about a dead sibling, had particular resonance.

De Quincey did nothing by halves. It wasn't enough to send a fan
letter. He moved to Grasmere, fell half in love with Wordsworth's
sister Dorothy and became obsessed with his infant daughter Catherine,
lying night after night on her grave after she died and broke all
their hearts. He moved into Dove Cottage when the Wordsworths upgraded
to the more commodious Rydal Mount. For a poet of the common people,
Wordsworth was a bit of a snob: he more or less disowned De Quincey on
account of his marrying a local farmer's daughter.

De Quincey lived on well into the Victorian era, but in the public
imagination he always remained the opium eater. We can't blame him for
every aspect of the scourge of drugs today -- it was only with
criminalization that the real problems began. But the words of the
1824 Family Oracle of Health remain salutary: "Use of opium has been
recently much increased by a wild, absurd, and romancing production
called the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

"We observe that at some late inquests this wicked book has been
severely censured, as the source of misery and torment, and even of
suicide itself, to those who have been seduced to take opium by its
lying stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense."