THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER

Addiction Helped Fuel Thomas De Quincey's Rise As A Man Of Letters,
Plunging Into The Shadowy Realms Of The Unconscious

It all started with a toothache.

In 1804, when he was 19, Thomas De Quincey went through three weeks of
excruciating pain over a tooth, when a friend recommended opium to
cure what ailed him. It did.

De Quincey could hardly have guessed that the remedy - in time, an
addiction - would propel him to overnight fame when he published
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821. One of the scriptures
of the '60s counter-culture, Confessions also inspired a long line of
writers, from Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire and Gogol to Jean Cocteau
and Jorge Luis Borges.

No less authority than the old arch-junkie himself, William S.
Burroughs, called Confessions the first, and still the best, book
about drug addiction. Others, like Virginia Woolf, saw that De Quincey
was pushing the envelope as a writer, heightening prose into poetry by
plunging into the shadowy realms of the unconscious. "What a poet that
man is!" declared de Quincey's fellow opium addict, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning (she of the Sonnets from the Portuguese fame), when he
published a sequel to Confessions, Suspiria de Profundis, in 1845. De
Quincey was on to the influence of childhood traumas in our dreams
long before Freud.

De Quincey was a small man with delicate features, impeccable manners
and prodigious intellectual gifts, whose interests ranged from
classical Greek to political economy. He was also a runaway teen and a
high school and college dropout who was relentlessly broke in later
life, constantly on the lam from bailiffs while trying to support a
family of eight children as a deadline-driven hack. He wrote articles
for the Encyclopedia Britannica when its publisher happened to see him
being frog-marched off to prison and offered him a contract on the
spot, springing him from custody. Another time, De Quincey, fearing
arrest for debt, had to miss the funeral of his 3-year-old son.

It's all vividly and affectingly told in The English Opium Eater: A
Biography of Thomas De Quincey, the first new life of the man in about 25
years, by Robert Morrison, an English professor of English at Queen's
University. A noted De Quincey scholar, Morrison has edited three volumes of
the new 14-volume edition of De Quincey's complete works, as well as
editions for the Oxford World's Classics paperbacks. Most of all, Morrison
is a fine writer of biography, and The English Opium Eater is one you just
won't be able to put down. It may even make you run out and read some De
Quincey, which is about the highest praise you can bestow on any literary
biography.

De Quincey was born into a mercantile family in Manchester in 1785.
His father died when the boy was 7. His mother - of whom he wrote
(perhaps unfairly, but wittily), "she delighted not in infancy, nor
infancy in her" - was a hard-nosed Evangelical. Things went downhill
from there.

The death of his favourite sister, Elizabeth, when he was 6 and she
was 9, haunted him and shaped his inner life. That (and the opium)
probably gave him the feeling for the horror stories he wrote. On a
more facetiously macabre note, he also wrote "On Murder, Considered as
One of the Fine Arts" (1827), a classic gem that had a decisive
influence on later fin-de-siecle decadence and detective fiction.

The other great life event was meeting the objects of his teenage hero
worship, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (also an opium addict) and William
Wordsworth. De Quincey's close association with them resulted in
another standard of English literature, the essays collected as
Recollections of the Lake Poets. By then, he'd discovered that his
idols had feet of clay. Wordsworth, the great poet of the humble, got
quite snooty when De Quincey married a "humble" farmer's daughter,
Margaret Simpson.

Against all odds, the marriage was a success. Margaret was a loving
and long-suffering wife, holding the family together while being run
ragged by creditors in her husband's many absences, enforced or
otherwise. She died of typhus in 1837, aged 41. De Quincey, floored
with grief, wrote his finest tale of terror, "The Household Wreck."

He was a fascinating mass of contradictions. Even though his essay on
liberal economist David Ricardo, gets a favourable mention by Karl
Marx in Das Kapital, De Quincey was a reactionary High Tory with a
messianic faith in British imperialism and the white race. When the
Opium Wars broke out in 1840, he went to bat for Britain's god-given
right to smuggle opium into China, and lost his oldest son in the war.

These days, when we think of opium, we're likely to think of its 20th
century derivative, heroin. In De Quincey's day, opium was a cheap
over-the-counter drug, and he took it in an alcohol mixture, called
laudanum. When his doctor advised him to lay off, De Quincey opined
that a life on nothing but healthy beef-tea was hardly worth the
effort. The (mostly) Edinburgh-based writer gave up the effort in
1859. He was 74.

Hans Werner is a frequent contributor to these pages.

THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER:

A Biography of Thomas De Quincy

by Robert Morrison

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 462 pages, $37.99