Thomas de Quincey

I've been reading de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and a couple of sequels lately. It's rather an odd book. He appears to have been the first writer to clearly describe the pattern of addiction and, in particular, of withdrawal. It's interesting to learn of the role that opium played in early 19th century Britain, as a cheap over-the-counter analgesic, and how this changed; the professionalization of the apothecary's trade, the emergence of superior methods of purification, and the general trends of Victorianism all played a role. But much of the book is devoted, not to this, but to de Quincey's delicate sensibilities, and to various traumas, both emotional and physical, that led him to his addiction. Opium first eased, then intensified, the memories of these troubles, and de Quincey repeatedly tried to break the addiction. (At the time of the first publication of the Confessions, he thought that he had done so.)

It's hard not to imagine de Quincey as a character in a novel. In the hands of Jane Austen, he would have been amusing and somewhat pitiable; Dickens would have sentimentalized him into a miserable wretch; George Eliot would have presented him sternly, as one who fell short of his great promise through moral weakness. His own self-portrait is rather cloying and vain. He was undoubtedly intelligent, but he did very little with his gifts, diffusing his energies in grandiose projects that never really went anywhere. His repeated rewriting and revising of the Confessions is perhaps typical of this. His creation of the Ladies of Sorrow, in Suspiria de Profundis, is a fine piece of myth-making, and may be an indicator of what he could have done, had things been otherwise.