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Guilty Thing : A Life of Thomas De Quincey by Frances Wilson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 397 pp

De Quincey : So Original, So Truly Weird Richard Holmes

Guilty Thing : A Life of Thomas De Quincey by Frances Wilson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 397 pp. 1.

If you saun­ter or dream your way along the narrow streets run­ning east of London’s Covent Garden, drif­ting like a ghost amid the late-summer tou­rists, you may even­tually come to the Café Murano at 36 Tavistock Street. Look care­fully upward, and you will notice on the wall above, half-hidden bet­ween two tall win­dows, a dis­creet blue com­me­mo­ra­tive plaque that makes a start­ling and pos­si­bly sinis­ter announ­ce­ment. It was in this buil­ding (actually in a set of rooms at the back) that Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) wrote his dis­tur­bing mas­ter­piece, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, in 1821. Thomas De Quincey ; pho­to­gra­vure after an 1855 chalk dra­wing by James Archer National Portrait Gallery, London Thomas De Quincey ; pho­to­gra­vure after an 1855 chalk dra­wing by James Archer

Today this ele­gant quar­ter of bars and res­tau­rants seems an unli­kely loca­tion for opium eating. Yet it was behind this solid London bri­ck­work that De Quincey first opened up his asto­ni­shing “apo­ca­lypse of the world within.” Here he exul­tantly des­cri­bed his first expe­rience of drug-taking :

Heavens !…what an uphea­ving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit !…Here was a pana­cea…for all human woes : here was the secret of hap­pi­ness, about which phi­lo­so­phers had dis­pu­ted for so many ages, at once dis­co­ve­red : hap­pi­ness might now be bought for a penny, and car­ried in the waist­coat pocket : por­ta­ble ecs­ta­sies might be corked up in a pint bottle : and peace of mind could be sent down in gal­lons by the mail coach.

The truth of De Quincey’s ecs­ta­tic dis­co­very of opium is far more com­pli­ca­ted than this ligh­thear­ted (and rather attrac­tive) account would imply. For a start, the drug was not espe­cially rare or exotic at the time, but easily obtai­na­ble from any phar­macy as a hou­se­hold medi­cine and mild pain­killer, even given in small doses to babies. It was De Quincey’s sheer excess and unli­kely endu­rance (he lived to be a ghost­like seventy-four) that, cou­pled with his kalei­do­sco­pic lite­rary powers, made him so ori­gi­nal and so truly weird. Nor did he eat opium, but drank it in an infu­sion with brandy as a glo­wing, tea-colo­red, slightly bitter liquid called lau­da­num, and as a result he became an alco­ho­lic as much as an addict, and what would now doubt­less be called a dys­func­tio­nal per­so­na­lity.

In the last deca­des of his life he was spen­ding £150 a year on the drug (from an income of £250), per­ma­nently in debt and pur­sued by cre­di­tors, conti­nually adop­ting false names and shif­ting lod­gings (he would simply aban­don his rooms when they over­flo­wed with his books and papers), often dres­sed in cas­toffs and wri­ting bare­foot (a friend obser­ved “an army coat four times too large for him and with nothing on beneath”), and l