Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1856]
Quincey, Thomas de
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1856]
Thomas de Quincey
Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater
[Revised Text of 1856]
Original Preface to »The Confessions«
(As Revised in 1856)
I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period of my life; and according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, instructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it up; and that must be my apology for breaking through those restraints of delicate reserve, which, for the most part, intercept the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.
Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude; and, even in the choice of a grave, will sometimes voluntarily sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Wordsworth).
»Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.«
It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that it should be so; nor would I willingly, in my own person, manifest a disregard of such salutary feelings. But, on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting to others, from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price of suffering and of self-conquest, might compensate, by a vast overbalance, any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply guilt. They approach, or recede from, the shades of that dark alliance, in proportion to the probable motives and prospects of the offender, and to the palliations, known or secret, of the offence; in proportion as the temptations to it were potent from the first, and as the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest to the last. For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth, I was made an intellectual creature; and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascination with a fervent zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man, having untwisted, almost to its final links, the chain which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist that, in my case, the self-conquest was unquestionable, but the self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry, according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at the hare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of superfluous pleasure.
Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and, if I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the present act of confession, in consideration of the service which I may thereby render to the whole class of opium-eaters. But who are they? Reader, I am bound to say, a very numerous class indeed. Of this I became convinced, some years ago, by computing, at that time, the number of those in one small class of English society (the class of men distinguished for talent and notoriety) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters; such, for instance, as the eloquent and benevolent William Wilberforce; the late Dean of Carlisle, Dr. Isaac Milner;1 the first Lord Erskine; Mr. ––,2 the philosopher; a late undersecretary of state (viz., Mr. Addington, brother to the first Lord Sidmouth, who described to me the sensation which first drove him to the use of opium in the very same words as the Dean of Carlisle – viz., »that he felt as though rats were gnawing at the coats of his stomach«); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others hardly less celebrated. Now, if one class, comparatively so limited, could furnish so many scores of cases (and those within the instant reach of one sudden and brief inquiry), it was a natural inference, that the entire population of England would furnish a number that, on first starting in such an inquiry, would have seemed incredible. The soundness of this inference, however, I doubted, until some facts became known to me, which satisfied me that it was not incorrect. I will mention two. First, three respectable London druggists, in widely remote quarters of London, from whom I happened to be purchasing small quantities of opium, assured me that the number of amateur opium-eaters (as I may term them) was at this time immense; and that the difficulty of distinguishing these persons, to whom habit had rendered opium necessary, from such as were purchasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned them daily trouble and disputes. This evidence respected London only. But, secondly (which will possibly surprise the reader more), some years ago, on passing through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton manufacturers, that their work-people were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating; so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening. The immediate occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which at that time would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits; and, wages rising, it may be thought that this practice would cease: but, as I do not readily believe that any man, having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted
»That those eat now who never ate before;
And those who always ate, now eat the more.«
Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are admitted even by those medical writers who are its greatest enemies; thus, for instance, Awsiter, apothecary to Greenwich Hospital, in his »Essay on the Effects of Opium« (published in the year 1763), when attempting to explain why Mead had not been sufficiently explicit on the properties, counter-agents, etc., of this drug, expresses himself in the following mysterious terms (perfectly intelligible, however, to those who are in the secret): – »Perhaps he thought the subject of too delicate a nature to be made common; and, as many people might then indiscriminately use it, it would take from that necessary fear and caution which should prevent their experiencing the extensive power of this drug; for there are many properties in it, if universally known, that would habituate the use, and make it more in request with us than the Turks themselves; the result of which knowledge,« he adds, »must prove a general misfortune.« In the necessity of this conclusion I do not at all concur; but upon that point I shall have occasion to speak more freely in the body of the work itself. And at this point I shall say no more than that opium, as the one sole catholic anodyne which hitherto has been revealed to man; secondly, as the one sole anodyne which in a vast majority of cases is irresistible; thirdly, as by many degrees the most potent of all known counter-agents to nervous irritation, and to the formidable curse of tædium vitæ: fourthly, as by possibility, under an argument undeniably plausible, alleged by myself, the sole known agent – not for curing when formed, but for intercepting whilst likely to be formed – the great English scourge of pulmonary consumption; – I say that opium, as wearing these, or any of these, four beneficent characteristics – I say that any agent whatever making good such pretensions, no matter what its name, is entitled haughtily to refuse the ordinary classification and treatment which opium receives in books. I say that opium, or any agent of equal power, is entitled to assume that it was revealed to man for some higher object than that it should furnish a target for moral denunciations, ignorant where they are not hypocritical, childish where not dishonest; that it should be set up as a theatrical scarecrow for superstitious terrors, of which the result is oftentimes to defraud human suffering of its readiest alleviation, and of which the purpose is, »Ut pueris placeant et declamatio fiant.«3
In one sense, and remotely, all medicines and modes of medical treatment offer themselves as anodynes – that is, so far as they promise ultimately to relieve the suffering connected with physical maladies or infirmities. But we do not, in the special and ordinary sense, designate as ›anodynes‹ those remedies which obtain the relief from pain only as a secondary and distant effect following out from the cure of the ailment; but those only we call anodynes which obtain this relief, and pursue it as the primary and immediate object. If, by giving tonics to a child suffering periodic pains in the stomach, we were ultimately to banish those pains, this would not warrant us in calling such tonics by the name of anodynes: for the neutralisation of the pains would be a circuitous process of nature, and might probably require weeks for its evolution. But a true anodyne (as, for instance, half-a-dozen drops of laudanum, or a dessert-spoonful of some warm carminative mixed with brandy) will often banish the misery suffered by a child in five or six minutes. Amongst the most potent anodynes, we may rank hemlock, henbane, chloroform, and opium. But unquestionably the three first have a most narrow field of action, by comparison with opium. This, beyond all other agents made known to man, is the mightiest for its command, and for the extent of its command, over pain; and so much mightier than any other, that I should think, in a Pagan land, supposing it to have been adequately made known4 through experimental acquaintance with its revolutionary magic, opium would have had altars and priests consecrated to its benign and tutelary powers. But this is not my own object in the present little work.
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