Confessions of an English opium eater

Thomas De Quincey brought out Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in book form in 1822, having first printed it anonymously in two instalments of The London Magazine in September and October 1821. It was the first substantial thing he published, and it made him famous almost at once; a revised edition followed in 1856. It remains the work on which his reputation rests.

As it first appeared the book had two parts. The first, Preliminary Confessions, deals with his childhood and youth and concentrates on the experiences that lay behind his later drug use, above all the months he spent as a runaway living rough in London, in Oxford Street, during 1802 and 1803.

The second part turns to the opium itself, and it is divided between the pleasures and the pains. The Pleasures of Opium covers the years from 1804 to 1812, when the drug was still doing its work for him, and there follows an introduction to the pains that came afterwards, in which his dreams and his health give way.