Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Year:
1821
Author:
Thomas de Quincey
Contry:
UK
Language:
English
Publisher:
The London Magazine
Genre:
Classics, Biography, Nonfiction
Other websites:
Summary
Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the 'Church of Opium'. Thomas De Quincey consumed daily large quantities of laudanum (at the time a legal painkiller), and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings through London, along with the nightmares, despair and paranoia to which he became prey. The result is a work in which the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory and imagination are seamlessly interwoven, describing in intimate detail the mind-altering pleasures and pains unique to opium. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater forged a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, paving the way for later generations of literary addicts from Baudelaire to James Frey, and anticipating psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious. (Goodreads)
Egyptomania narratives or motifs
Confessions of an English Opium Eater is an autobiographical account relating the author’s addiction to laudanum. Among the hallucinations De Quincey reports in May 1818 is one episode in which his nightmare takes him to Egypt:
De Quincey’s hallucinated Egypt is a Gothicised one, contributing to the broader Orientalising identification of ancient Egypt as a morbid culture, with the pyramids functioning as gargantuan tombs that suggest a monumental permanence. The Nile crocodile is a figure of particular horror for De Quincey, who imagines bodily contact with crocodiles on the banks of the Nile as communicating disease. The trope of burial alive as punishment (in this case for some unnamed transgression), meanwhile, is one that has a considerable afterlife beyond De Quincey, in examples such as H. Rider Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889) and Karl Freund’s film The Mummy (1932).
I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
De Quincey’s hallucinated Egypt is a Gothicised one, contributing to the broader Orientalising identification of ancient Egypt as a morbid culture, with the pyramids functioning as gargantuan tombs that suggest a monumental permanence. The Nile crocodile is a figure of particular horror for De Quincey, who imagines bodily contact with crocodiles on the banks of the Nile as communicating disease. The trope of burial alive as punishment (in this case for some unnamed transgression), meanwhile, is one that has a considerable afterlife beyond De Quincey, in examples such as H. Rider Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889) and Karl Freund’s film The Mummy (1932).
Author: Eleanor Dobson
Other information
Barrell, J. (1991), The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Not available
Fay, E. (2010), “Hallucinogenesis: Thomas De Quincey’s Mind Trips”. In Studies in Romanticism, 49.2, pp. 293-312
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Lindop, G. (1995), “De Quincey and the Cursed Crocodile”. In Essays in Criticism, 45.2, pp. 121-40
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Roberts, D. S. (2008), “‘Mix(ing) a Little with Alien Natures’: Biblical Orientalism in De Quincey”. In Morrison, R., Roberts, D. S., Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions. New York: Routledge, pp. 19-44.
Not available
Saglia, D. (2002), “Consuming Egypt: Appropriation and the Cultural Modalities of Romantic Luxury”. In Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24.3, pp. 317-32
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