In a gesture of admiration, Charles Baudelaire devoted half of his Artificial Paradises to a translation of Thomas De Quincey’s memoirs. “The work on opium has been written,” he explained, “and in a manner so dazzling, medical and poetic all at once, that I would not dare add anything to it.” Would-be biographers have perhaps shared these reservations: of all the Romantics, De Quincey has received the least attention from the “life-writing” industry. He wrote so voluminously of his own experience, of the traumas of his past as well as the “shadowy world” of his opium dreams, that there is little room to speculate on his inner life. The biographer is largely consigned to rehashing De Quincey’s version of events in a saner, scientific manner, or to parodying him.



Robert Morrison’s biography somewhat daringly, then, takes its title from De Quincey’s most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. While he draws on De Quincey’s reminiscences and self-analysis, Morrison also shows what De Quincey’s life looked like from the outside. In an opening vignette, we meet not the introspective sybarite of the Confessions but a down-at-heel, elderly magazine writer, who has walked eight miles to hand in his copy. Indeed, De Quincey’s tendency to bring hardship upon himself (and others) permeates the rest of the book. Born in 1785 into a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions (hence the ‘De’), he ran away from Manchester Grammar School at 16, choosing to live alone and penniless in London. He began to dissipate his inheritance long before he was legally entitled to it by living determinedly beyond his means. He was, for most of his life, pursued by creditors, whom he eluded with gusto, although he was imprisoned for debt once and publicly humiliated on several occasions. His long-suffering daughter Florence described leaving the debtors’ sanctuary where they spent seven years as “one of the most lively foretastes of Paradise I have had in my life.”

By tracing De Quincey’s public persona as “The Opium Eater” through to old age, Morrison avoids reducing his subject to The Man Who Wrote The Confessions. Soon after he was identified as the author of the hugely successful (and originally anonymous) memoir, which was one of his first published works, he was able to trade on “the magic prefix ‘by the Opium Eater.’” It was the name under which he published his Gothic novel Klosterheim: or the Masque, the signature on many of his London Magazine articles, and the name used against him in gossip columns.

To some extent, the persona took on a life of its own, adding to the myths around the man, even when he was doing nothing at all. De Quincey never defended himself against accusations, for example, that the “stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense” in his Confessions had caused an increase in opium-related deaths, but such was his notoriety that he did appear in fictionalized form in a sketch in Blackwood’s Magazine, which broached the subject. Questioned on the “fifty unintentional suicides,” the caricature responds cagily: “I have read of six only, and they rested on no solid foundation.” Meanwhile, his celebrity as a profligate and a sage was laughable to the literary Lake District circle. Noting his indulgence in drugged solitude, Mary Wordsworth jibed, “The Seer continues in close retirement”.

If De Quincey scarcely reflected on the tribulations of his everyday life in print, it is because he believed that his opium-induced visions revealed deeper truths. The faculty for dreaming, he proposed, was impaired by a “too intense life of the social instincts.” But when properly nurtured “the dreaming organ … throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of that mysterious camera obscura—the sleeping mind.” However he tried to dodge charges of mysticism, he found symbols everywhere: the industrial city of Liverpool represented a world aloof from suffering; Coleridge was a risen phoenix condemned to feed on carrion; the unfinished stairs in Piranesi’s Dreams, which De Quincey had never actually seen, suggested the “power of endless growth and self-reproduction.”