 Section 1 of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Martin Giesen. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey. Section 1. From the London Magazine for September 1821 to the Reader. I here present to you Curtius Reader with the record of a remarkable period in my life. According to my application of it, I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it up, and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which for the most part restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing indeed is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that decent drapery which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them. Accordingly, the greater part of our confessions, that is spontaneous and extrajudicial confessions, proceed from demireps, adventurers or swindlers, and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to French literature or to that part of the German which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French. All this I feel so forcibly and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency that I have for many months hesitated about the propriety of allowing this or any part of my narrative to come before the public eye until after my death, when for many reasons the whole will be published, and it is not without an anxious review of the reasons for and against this step that I have at last concluded on taking it. Guilt and misery shrink by a natural instinct from public notice, they caught privacy and solitude, and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing in the affecting language of Mr. 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, nor in act or word do anything to weaken them. 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 heavier price might compensate by a vast overbalance for 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 shades of that dark alliance in proportion to the probable motives and prospects of the offender, and the palliations known or secret of the offence. In proportion as the temptations to it were potent from the first, and 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 fascinating enthrallment with a religious seal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man, have untwisted almost to its final links the accursed 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. The self-indulgence opened to doubts of casuistry, according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of positive 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 sorry 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 talents or of eminent station who were known to me directly or indirectly as opium-eaters, such for instance as the eloquent and benevolent, the late Dean of Ha, Lord Puff, Mr. the Philosopher, a late Under-Secretary of State, who described to me the sensation which first drove him to the use of opium in the very same words as the Dean of Viz, that he felt as though rats were gnawing and debraiding the coats of his stomach. Mr. and many others hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention. Now if one class comparatively so limited could furnish so many scores of cases, and that within the knowledge of one single inquirer, it was a natural inference that the entire population of England would furnish a proportionable number. 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. One, three respectable London druggists in widely remote quarters of London, from whom I happened lately 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 those 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 two, 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 medical writers who are its greatest enemies. Thus, for instance, Orsitta, 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. 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 with Turks themselves. The result of which knowledge, he adds, must provoke a general misfortune. In the necessity of this conclusion I do not altogether concur, but upon that point I shall have occasion to speak at the close of my confessions, where I shall present the reader with the moral of my narrative. End of section 1 Section 2 These preliminary confessions, or introductory narrative of the youthful adventures, which laid the foundation of the writer's habit of opium-eating in afterlife, it has been judged proper to premise for three several reasons. One, as for stalling that question and giving it a satisfactory answer, which else would painfully obtrude itself in the course of the opium confessions, how came any reasonable being to subject himself to such a yoke of misery, voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile and knowingly to fetter himself with such a sevenfold chain? A question which, if not somewhere plausibly resolved, could hardly fail by the indignation which it would be apt to raise as against an act of wanton folly to interfere with that degree of sympathy which is necessary in any case to an author's purposes. Two, as furnishing a key to some parts of that tremendous scenery which afterwards peopled the dreams of the opium eater. Three, as creating some previous interest of a personal sort in the confessing subject, apart from the matter of the confessions which cannot fail to render the confessions themselves more interesting. If a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium eater, the probability is that if he is not too dull to dream at all he will dream about oxen. Whereas in the case before him the reader will find that the opium eater boasted himself to be a philosopher and accordingly that the fantasmagoria of his dreams, waking or sleeping, daydreams or nightdreams is suitable to one who in that character, who mani nihilase alienum putat. Reader's translation considers nothing human to be alien to him. For amongst the conditions which he deems indispensable to the sustaining of any claim to the title of philosopher is not merely the possession of a superb intellect in its analytic functions. In which part of the pretensions, however, England can for some generations show but few claimants. At least he is not aware of any known candidate for this honour who can be styled emphatically a subtle thinker. With the exception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and in a narrower department of thought with the recent illustrious exception of David Ricardo. But also on such a constitution of the moral faculties I shall give him an inner eye and power of intuition for the vision and the mysteries of our human nature. That constitution of faculties in short, which amongst all the generations of men that from the beginning of time have deployed into life as it were upon this planet, our English poets have possessed in the highest degree and Scottish professors in the lowest. I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium eater and have suffered very unjustly in the opinion of my acquaintance from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case. True it is that for nearly ten years I did occasionally take opium for the sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave me. But so long as I took it with this view I was effectively protected from all material bad consequences by the necessity of interposing long intervals between the several acts of indulgence in order to renew the pleasurable sensations. It was not for the purpose of creating pleasure but of mitigating pain in the severest degree that I first began to use opium as an article of daily diet. In the twenty-eighth year of my age a most painful affection of the stomach which I had first experienced about ten years before attacked me in great strength. This affection had originally been caused by extremities of hunger suffered in my boyish days. During the season of hope and redundant happiness which succeeded that is from eighteen to twenty-four it had slumbered for the three following years it had revived at intervals and now under unfavorable circumstances from depression of spirits it attacked me with a violence that yielded to no remedies but opium. As the youthful sufferings which first produced this derangement of the stomach were interesting in themselves and in the circumstances that attended them I shall hear briefly retrace them. My father died when I was about seven years old and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent to various schools great and small and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease and at fifteen my command of that language was so great that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric meters but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times and which in my case was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish ex tempore. For the necessity of ransacking my memory and invention for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions as equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of things etc. gave me a compass of diction which would never have been called out by a dull translation of moral essays etc. That boy said one of my masters pointing the attention of a stranger to me. That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you and I could address an English one. He who honoured me with this eulogy was a scholar and a ripe and a good one and of all my tutors was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Unfortunately for me and as I afterwards learned to this worthy man's great indignation I was transferred to the care first of a blockhead who was in a perpetual panic lest I should expose his ignorance and finally to that of a respectable scholar at the head of a great school on an ancient foundation. This man had been appointed to his situation by College Oxford and was a sound well-built scholar but like most men whom I have known from that college course clumsy and inelegant. A miserable contrast he presented in my eyes to the Athenian brilliancy of my favourite master and beside he could not disguise from my hourly notice the poverty and meagerness of his understanding. It is a bad thing for a boy to be and to know himself far beyond his tutors whether in knowledge or in power of mind. This was the case so far as regarded knowledge at least not with myself only for the two boys who jointly with myself composed the first form were better Grecians than the headmaster though not more elegant scholars nor at all more accustomed to sacrifice to the graces. When I first entered I remember that we read Sophocles and it was a constant matter of triumph to us the learned triumvirate of the first form to see our Archedidaskelos as he loved to be called conning our lessons before we went up and laying a regular train with lexicon and grammar for blowing up and blasting as it were any difficulties he found in the choruses whilst we never condescended to open our books until the moment of going up and were generally employed in writing epigrams upon his wig or some such important matter. My two class fellows were poor and dependent for their future prospects at the university on the recommendation of the headmaster but I who had a small patrimonial property the income of which was sufficient to support me at college wished to be sent thither immediately. I made earnest representations on the subject to my guardians but all to no purpose one who was more reasonable and had more knowledge of the world than the rest lived at a distance two of the other three resigned all their authority into the hands of the fourth and this fourth with whom I had to negotiate was a worthy man in his way but haughty, obstinate and intolerant of all opposition to his will after a certain number of letters and personal interviews I found that I had nothing to hope for not even a compromise of the matter from my guardian unconditional submission was what he demanded and I prepared myself therefore for other measures Summer was now coming on with hasty steps and my seventeenth birthday was fast approaching after which day I had sworn within myself that I would no longer be numbered amongst schoolboys money being what I chiefly wanted I wrote to a woman of high rank who though young herself had known me from a child and had latterly treated me with great distinction requesting that she would lend me five guineas for upwards of a week no answer came and I was beginning to despond when at length a servant put into my hands a double letter with a coronet on the seal the letter was kind and obliging the fair writer was on the sea coast and in that way the delay had arisen she enclosed double of what I had asked and good-naturedly hinted that if I should never repay her it would not absolutely ruin her now then I was prepared for my scheme ten guineas added to about two which I had remaining from my pocket money seemed to me sufficient for an indefinite length of time and at that happy age if no definite boundary can be assigned to one's power the spirit of hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite it is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's and what cannot often be said of his remarks it is a very feeling one that we never do anything consciously for the last time of things that is which we have long been in the habit of doing without sadness of heart this truth I felt deeply when I came to leave a place which I did not love and where I had not been happy on the evening before I left forever I grieved when the ancient and lofty schoolroom resounded with the evening service performed for the last time in my hearing and at night when the muster-roll of names was called over and mine as usual was called first I stepped forward and passing the headmaster who was standing by I bowed to him and looked earnestly in his face thinking to myself he is old and infirm and in this world I shall not see him again I was right I never did see him again nor ever shall he looked at me complacently smiled good-naturedly returned my salutation or rather my valediction and we parted though he knew it not forever I could not reverence him intellectually but he had been uniformly kind to me and had allowed me many indulgences and I grieved at the thought of the mortification I should inflict upon him the morning came which was to launch me into the world and from which my whole succeeding life has in many important points taken its colouring I lodged in the headmaster's house and had been allowed from my first entrance the indulgence of a private room which I used both as a sleeping-room and as a study at half after three I rose and gazed with deep emotion at the ancient towers of dressed in earliest light and beginning to crimson with the radiant luster of a cloudless July morning I was firm and immovable in my purpose but yet agitated by anticipation of uncertain danger and troubles and if I could have foreseen the hurrican and perfect hailstorm of affliction which soon fell upon me well might I have been agitated to this agitation the deep peace of the morning presented an affecting contrast and in some degree a medicine the silence was more profound than that of midnight and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence because the light being broad and strong is that of noonday at other seasons of the year it seems to differ from perfect day chiefly because man is not yet abroad and thus the peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of God seems to be secure and deep only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity I dressed myself, took my hat and gloves and lingered a little in the room for the last year and a half this room had been my pensive citadel here I had read and studied through all the hours of night and though true it was that for the latter part of this time I, who was framed for love and gentle affections I had lost my gaiety and happiness during the strife and fever of contention with my guardian yet on the other hand as a boy so passionately fond of books and dedicated to intellectual pursuits I could not fail to have enjoyed many happy hours in the midst of general dejection I wept as I looked round on the chair hearth, writing-table and other familiar objects knowing too certainly that I looked upon them for the last time whilst I write this it is eighteen years ago and yet at this moment I see distinctly as if it were yesterday the lineaments and expression of the object on which I fixed my parting gaze it was a picture of the lovely which hung over the mantelpiece the eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful and the whole countenance so radiant with benignity and divine tranquility that I had a thousand times laid down my pen or my book to gather consolation from it as a devotee from his patron saint whilst I was yet gazing upon it the deep tones of clock proclaimed that it was four o'clock I went up to the picture, kissed it and then gently walked out and closed the door for ever End of Section 2 Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere Surrey Section 3 of Confessions of an English Opium Eater This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Martin Giesen Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey Section 3 So blended and intertwisted in this life are occasions of laughter and of tears that I cannot yet recall without smiling an incident which occurred at that time and which had nearly put a stop to the immediate execution of my plan I had a trunk of immense weight for besides my clothes it contained nearly all my library The difficulty was to get this removed to a carrier's My room was at an ireal elevation in the house and what was worse the staircase which communicated with this angle of the building was accessible only by a gallery which passed the headmaster's chamber door I was a favourite with all the servants and knowing that any of them would screen me and act confidentially I communicated my embarrassment to a groom of the headmaster's The groom swore he would do anything I wished and when the time arrived went upstairs to bring the trunk down This I feared was beyond the strength of any one man However, the groom was a man of Atlantean shoulders fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies and had a back as spacious as Salisbury plain Accordingly he persisted in bringing down the trunk alone whilst I stood waiting at the foot of the last flight in anxiety for the event For some time I heard him descending with slow and firm steps but unfortunately from his trepidation as he drew near the dangerous quarter within a few steps of the gallery his foot slipped and the mighty burden falling from his shoulders gained such increase of impetus at each step of the descent that on reaching the bottom it trundled or rather leaped right across with the noise of twenty devils against the very bedroom door of the Archedidascalus My first thought was that all was lost and that my only chance for executing a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage However, on reflection I determined to abide the issue The groom was in the utmost alarm both on his own account and on mine but in spite of this so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous in this unhappy contra-tan taken possession of his fancy that he sang out a long, loud and cannerous peal of laughter that might have wakened the seven sleepers At the sound of this resonant merriment within the very ears of insulted authority I could not myself forbear joining in it subdued to this not so much by the unhappy eturgery of the trunk as by the effect it had upon the groom We both expected as a matter of course that Doctor would sally out of his room for in general if but a mouse stirred he sprang out like a mastiff from his kennel Strange to say however on this occasion when the noise of laughter had ceased no sound or rustling even was to be heard in the bedroom Doctor had a painful complaint which sometimes keeping him awake made his sleep perhaps when it did come the deeper Gathering courage from the silence the groom hoisted his burden again and accomplished the remainder of his descent without accident I waited until I saw the trunk placed on a wheelbarrow and on its road to the carriers Then with Providence my guide I set off on foot carrying a small parcel with some articles of dress under my arm a favourite English poet in one pocket and a small duodecimo volume containing about nine plays of Euripides in the other It had been my intention originally to proceed to Westmoreland both from the love I bore to that country and on other personal accounts Accident however gave a different direction to my wanderings and I bent my steps towards North Wales After wandering about for some time in Denbyshire, Merionyshire and Carnarvonshire I took lodgings in a small neat house in B Here I might have stayed with great comfort for many weeks for provisions were cheap at B from the scarcity of other markets for the surplus produce of a wide agricultural district An accident however in which perhaps no offence was designed drove me out to wander again I know not whether the reader may have remarked but I have often remarked that the proudest class of people in England or at any rate the class whose pride is most apparent are the families of bishops Noblemen and their children carry about with them in their very titles a sufficient notification of their rank Nay, their very names and this applies also to the children of many untitled houses are often to the English ear adequate exponents of high birth or descent Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, Paulit, Cavendish and scores of others tell their own tale Such persons therefore find everywhere a due sense of their claims already established except among those who are ignorant of the world by virtue of their own obscurity Not to know them argues one self unknown Their Manners take a suitable tone and colouring and for once that they find it necessary to impress a sense of their consequence upon others they meet with a thousand occasions for moderating and tempering this sense by acts of courteous condescension With the families of bishops it is otherwise with them it is all uphill work to make known their pretensions but the proportion of the Episcopal bench taken from noble families is not at any time very large and the succession to these dignities is so rapid that the public ear seldom has time to become familiar with them unless where they are connected with some literary reputation Hence it is that the children of bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air indicative of claims not generally acknowledged a sort of nolly metangere manner nervously apprehensive of too familiar approach and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man from all contact with the hoi poloi Doubtless, a powerful understanding or unusual goodness of nature will preserve a man from such weakness but in general the truth of my representation will be acknowledged Pride, if not of deeper root in such families appears at least more upon the surface of their manners This spirit of manners naturally communicates itself to their domestics and other dependents Now, my landlady had been a lady's maid or a nurse in the family of the bishop of Han and had but lately married away and settled as such people express it for life In a little town like Bee merely to have lived in the bishop's family conferred some distinction and my good landlady had rather more than her share of the pride I have noticed on that score What my lord said and what my lord did how useful he was in parliament and how indispensable at Oxford formed the daily burden of her talk All this I bore very well but I was too good natured to laugh in anybody's face and I could make an ample allowance for the garulity of an old servant Of necessity however I must have appeared in her eyes very inadequately impressed with the bishop's importance and perhaps to punish me for my indifference or possibly by accident she one day repeated to me a conversation in which I was indirectly a party concerned She had been to the palace to pay her respect to the family and dinner being over was summoned into the dining room In giving an account of her household economy she happened to mention that she had let her apartments Thereupon the good bishop it seemed had taken occasion to caution her as to her selection of inmates For, said he, you must recollect, Betty that this place is in the high road to the head so that multitudes of Irish swindlers running away from their debts into England and of English swindlers running away from their debts to the Isle of Man are likely to take this place in their route This advice certainly was not without reasonable grounds but rather fitted to be stored up for Mistress Betty's private meditations than specially reported to me What followed, however, was somewhat worse Oh, my lord! answered my landlady according to her own representation of the matter I really don't think this young gentleman is a swindler because you don't think me a swindler said am I interrupting her in a tumult of indignation For the future I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it and without delay I prepared for my departure Some concessions the good woman seemed disposed to make but a harsh and contemptuous expression which I fear that I applied to the learned dignitary himself roused her indignation in turn and reconciliation then became impossible I was indeed greatly irritated at the bishops having suggested any grounds of suspicion however remotely against a person whom he had never seen and I thought of letting him know my mind in Greek which at the same time that it would furnish some presumption that I was no swindler would also, I hoped compel the bishop to reply in the same language in which case I doubted not to make it appear that if I was not so rich as his lordship I was a far better Grecian Karma thoughts, however, drove this boyish design out of my mind for I considered that the bishop was in the right to counsel an old servant but he could not have designed that his advice should be reported to me and that the same coarseness of mind which had led Mistress Betty to repeat the advice at all might have coloured it in a way more agreeable to her own style of thinking and the actual expressions of the worthy bishop I left the lodgings the very same hour and this turned out a very unfortunate occurrence for me because living henceforward at Inns I was drained of my money very rapidly in a fortnight I was reduced to short allowance that is I could allow myself only one meal a day from the keen appetite produced by constant exercise and mountain air acting on a useful stomach I soon began to suffer greatly on this slender regimen for the single meal which I could venture to order was coffee or tea even this however was at length withdrawn and afterwards so long as I remained in Wales I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, horse, etc or on the casual hospitalities which I now and then received in return for such little services as I had an opportunity of rendering sometimes I wrote letters of business for cottages who happen to have relatives in Liverpool or in London more often I wrote love letters to their sweethearts for young women who had lived as servants at Shrewsbury or other towns on the English border on all such occasions I gave great satisfaction to my humble friends and was generally treated with hospitality and once in particular near the village of Llanestundu or some such name in a sequestered part of Merionyshire I was entertained for upwards of three days by a family of young people with an affectionate and fraternal kindness that left an impression upon my heart not yet impaired the family consisted at that time of four sisters and three brothers all grown up and all remarkable for elegance and delicacy of manners so much beauty and so much native good-breeding and refinement I do not remember to have seen before or since in any cottage except once or twice in Westmoreland and Devonshire they spoke English an accomplishment not often met with so many members of one family especially in villages remote from the High Road here I wrote on my first introduction a letter about prize money for one of the brothers who had served on board an English man of war and more privately two love letters for two of the sisters they were both interesting looking girls and one of uncommon loveliness in the midst of their confusion and blushes whilst dictating or rather giving me general instructions it did not require any great penetration to discover that what they wished was that their letters should be as kind as was consistent with proper maidenly pride I contrived so to temper my expressions as to reconcile the gratification of both feelings and they were as much pleased with the way in which I had expressed their thoughts as in their simplicity they were astonished at my having so readily discovered them the reception one meets with from the women of a family generally determines the tenor of one's whole entertainment in this case I had discharged my confidential duties as secretary so much to the general satisfaction perhaps also amusing them with my conversation that I was pressed to stay with a cordiality which I had little inclination to resist I slept with the brothers the only unoccupied bed standing in the apartment of the young women but in all other points they treated me with a respect not usually paid to purses as light as mine as if my scholarship were sufficient evidence that I was of gentle blood thus I lived with them for three days and a great part of a fourth and from the undiminished kindness which they continued to show me I believe I might have stayed with them up to this time if their power had corresponded with their wishes on the last morning however I perceived upon their countenances as they said at breakfast the expression of some unpleasant communication which was at hand and soon after one of the brothers explained to me that their parents had gone the day before my arrival to an annual meeting of Methodists held at Carnarvon and with that day expected to return he begged on the part of all the young people that I would not take it amiss the parents returned with churlish faces and dim say-snake nor English in answer to all my addresses I saw how matters stood and so taking an affectionate leave of my kind and interesting young hosts I went my way for though they spoke warmly to their parents in my behalf and often excused the manner of the old people by saying it was only their way yet I easily understood that my talent for writing love letters would do as little to recommend me with two grave sexogenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek sapphics or alcheics and what had been hospitality when offered to me with the gracious courtesy of my young friends would become charity when connected with the harsh demeanour of these old people certainly Mr. Shelley is right in his notions about old age unless powerfully counteracted by all sorts of opposite agencies it is a miserable corrupter and blighter to the genial charities of the human heart End of Section 3 Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere Surrey Section 4 of Confessions of an English Opium Eater This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Martin Giesen Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey Section 4 Soon after this I contrived by means which I must omit for want of room to transfer myself to London and now began the latter and fiercer stage of my long sufferings without using a disproportionate expression I might say of my agony for I now suffered for upwards of sixteen weeks the physical anguish of hunger in various degrees of intensity but as bitter perhaps as ever any human being can have suffered who has survived it I would not needlessly harass my reader's feelings by a detail of all that I endured for extremities such as these under any circumstances of heaviest misconduct or guilt cannot be contemplated even in description without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness of the human heart let it suffice at least on this occasion to say that a few fragments of bread from the breakfast table of one individual who supposed me to be ill but did not know of my being in utter want and these at uncertain intervals constituted my whole support during the former part of my sufferings that is generally in Wales and always for the first two months in London I was houseless and very seldom slept under a roof to this constant exposure to the open air I ascribe it mainly that I did not sink under my torments latterly however when colder and more inclement weather came on and when from the length of my sufferings I had begun to sink into a more languishing condition it was no doubt fortunate for me that the same person to whose breakfast table I had access allowed me to sleep in a large unoccupied house of which he was tenant unoccupied I call it for there was no household or establishment in it nor any furniture indeed except a table and a few chairs but I found on taking possession of my new quarters that the house already contained one single inmate a poor friendless child apparently ten years old but she seemed hunger bitten and sufferings of that sort often make children look older than they are from this forlorn child I learned that she had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came and great joy the poor creature expressed when she found that I was in future to be her companion through the hours of darkness the house was large and from the want of furniture the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the spacious staircase and hall and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and I fear hunger the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more it appeared from the self-created one of ghosts I promised her protection from all ghosts whatsoever but alas I could offer her no other assistance we lay upon the floor with a bundle of cursed law papers for a pillow but with no other covering than a sort of large horseman's cloak afterwards however I discovered in a garret an old sofa cover a small piece of rug and some fragments of other articles which added a little to our warmth the poor child crept close to me for warmth and for security against her ghostly enemies when I was not more than usually ill I took her into my arms so that in general she was tolerably warm and often slept when I could not for during the last two months of my sufferings I slept much in daytime and was apt to fall into transient dozing at all hours but my sleep distressed me more than my watching or beside the tumultuousness of my dreams which were only not so awful as those which I shall have to describe hereafter as produced by opium my sleep was never more than what is called dog sleep so that I could hear myself moaning and was often, as it seemed to me, awakened suddenly by my own voice and about this time a hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as I fell into a slumber which has since returned upon me at different periods of my life this a sort of twitching I know not where but apparently about the region of the stomach which compelled me violently to throw out my feet for the sake of relieving it this sensation coming on as soon as I began to sleep and the effort to relieve it constantly awaking me at length I slept only from exhaustion and from increasing weakness as I said before I was constantly falling asleep and constantly awaking meantime the master of the house sometimes came in upon us suddenly and very early sometimes not till ten o'clock sometimes not at all he was in constant fear of bailiffs improving on the plan of Cromwell every night he slept in a different quarter of London and I observed that he never failed to examine through a private window the appearance of those who knocked at the door before he would allow it to be opened he breakfasted alone indeed his tea equipage would hardly have admitted of his hazarding an invitation to a second person any more than the quantity of escalant materiel which for the most part was little more than a roll or a few biscuits which he had bought on his road from the place where he had slept or if he had asked a party as I once learnededly and facetiously observed to him the several members of it must have stood in the relation to each other not sat in any relation whatever of succession as the meta-visitions have it and not of a coexistence in the relation of the parts of time and not of the parts of space during his breakfast I generally contrived a reason for lounging in and with an air of as much indifference as I could assume took up such fragments as he had left sometimes indeed there were none at all in doing this I committed no robbery except upon the man himself who was thus obliged I believe now and then to set out at noon for an extra biscuit for as to the poor child she was never admitted into his study if I may give that name to his chief depository of parchment's law writings etc that room was to her the blue beard room of the house being regularly locked on his departure to dinner about six o'clock which usually was his final departure for the night whether this child were an illegitimate daughter of Mr or only a servant I could not ascertain she did not herself know but certainly she was treated altogether as a menial servant no sooner did Mr make his appearance than she went below stairs brushed his shoes coat etc and except when she was summoned to run an errand she never emerged from the dismal tartarus of the kitchen etc to the upper air until my welcome knock at night called up her little trembling footsteps to the front door of her life during the daytime however I knew little but what I gathered from her own account at night for as soon as the hours of business commenced I saw that my absence would be acceptable and in general therefore I went off and stayed in the parks or elsewhere until nightfall but who and what meantime was the master of the house himself reader he was one of those anomalous practitioners in lower departments of the law who, what shall I say, who on prudential reasons or from necessity deny themselves all indulgence in the luxury of too delicate a conscience a periferous which might be abridged considerably but that I leave to the reader's taste in many walks of life a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage and just as people talk of laying down their carriages so I suppose my friend Mr. had laid down his conscience for a time meaning doubtless to resume it as soon as he could afford it the inner economy of such a man's daily life would present a most strange picture if I could allow myself to amuse the reader at his expense even with my limited opportunities for observing what went on I saw many scenes of London intrigues and complex chicaneery cycle and epicycle orb in orb at which I sometimes smile to this day and at which I smiled then in spite of my misery my situation however at that time gave me little experience in my own person of any qualities in Mr. Hmm's character but such as did him honour and of his whole strange composition I must forget everything but that towards me he was obliging and to the extent of his power generous that power was not indeed very extensive however in common with the rats I say it rent free and as Dr. Johnson has recorded that he never but once in his life had as much wall fruit as he could eat so let me be grateful that on that single occasion I had as large a choice of apartments in a London mansion as I could possibly desire except the blue beard room which the poor child believed to be haunted all others from the attics to the cellars were at our service the world was all before us and we pitched our tent for the night in any spot we chose this house I have already described as a large one it stands in a conspicuous situation in a well-known part of London many of my readers will have passed it I doubt not within a few hours of reading this for myself I never fail to visit it when business draws me to London about 10 o'clock this very night August 15th 1821 being my birthday I turned aside for my evening walk down Oxford Street purposely to take a glance at it it is now occupied by a respectable family and by the lights in the front drawing room I observed a domestic party assembled perhaps at tea and apparently cheerful and gay marvellous contrast in my eyes to the darkness cold silence and desolation of that same house 18 years ago when it's nightly occupants were one famishing scholar and a neglected child her by the by in after years I vainly endeavored to trace apart from her situation she was not what would be called an interesting child she was neither pretty nor quick in understanding nor remarkably pleasing in manners but thank God even in those years I needed not the embellishments of novel accessories to conciliate my affections plain human nature in its humblest and most homely apparel was enough for me and I loved the child because she was my partner in wretchedness if she is now living she is probably a mother with children of her own but as I have said I could never trace her this I regret but another person there was at that time whom I have since sought to trace with far deeper earnestness and with far deeper sorrow at my failure this person was a young woman and one of that unhappy class who subsist on the wages of prostitution I feel no shame nor have any reason to feel it in avowing that I was then on familiar and friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate condition the reader needs neither smile at this avowal nor frown for not to remind my classical readers of the old Latin proverb Sine querere et ketera it may well be supposed that in the existing state of my purse my connection with such women could not have been an impure one but the truth is that at no time of my life have I been a person to hold myself polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a human shape on the contrary, from my very earliest youth it has been my pride to converse familiarly more socratico reader's translation in the manner of Socrates with all human beings man woman and child that chance might fling in my way a practice which is friendly to the knowledge of human nature to good feelings and to that frankness of address which becomes a man who would be thought a philosopher for a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor limitery creature calling himself a man of the world and filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and education but should look upon himself as a Catholic creature and as standing in equal relation to high and low to educated and uneducated to the guilty and the innocent being myself at that time of necessity a peripatetic or a walker of the streets I naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are technically called street walkers many of these women had occasionally taken my part against watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps of houses where I was sitting but one amongst them the one on whose account I have at all introduced this subject yet no let me not class the oh noble minded Anne with that order of women let me find if it be possible a gentler name to designate the condition of her to whose bounty and compassion ministering to my necessities when all the world had forsaken me I owe it that I am at this time alive for many weeks I had walked at nights with this poor friendless girl up and down Oxford Street or had rested with her on steps to the shelter of Portico's she could not be so old as myself she told me indeed that she had not completed her sixteenth year by such questions as my interest about her prompted I had gradually drawn forth her simple history hers was a case of ordinary occurrence as I have since had reason to think and one in which if London beneficence had better adapted its arrangements to meet it the power of the law might often be interposed to protect and to avenge but the stream of London charity flows in a channel which though deep and mighty is yet noiseless and underground not obvious or readily accessible to poor houseless wanderers and it cannot be denied that the outside air and framework of London society is harsh, cruel and repulsive in any case however I saw that part of her injuries might easily have been redressed and I urged her often and earnestly to lay her complaint before a magistrate friendless as she was I assured her that she would meet with immediate attention and that English justice which was no respecter of persons would speedily and amply avenge her on the brutal Ruffian who had plundered her little property she promised me often that she would but she delayed taking the steps I pointed out from time to time for she was timid and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young heart and perhaps she thought justly that the most upright judge and the most righteous tribunals could do nothing to repair her heaviest wrongs something however would perhaps have been done for it had been settled between us at length but unhappily on the very last time but one that I was ever to see her that in a day or two we should go together before a magistrate and that I should speak on her behalf this little service it was destined however that I should never realize meantime that which she rendered to me and which was greater than I could ever have repaid her was this one night when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street and after a day when I had felt more than usually ill and faint I requested her to turn off with me into Soho Square thither we went and we sat down on the steps of a house which to this hour I never pass without a pang of grief and an inner act of homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl in memory of the noble action which she there performed suddenly as we say it I grew much worse I had been leaning my head against her bosom and all at once I sank from her arms and fell backwards on the steps from the sensations I then had I felt an inner conviction of the lifeliest kind that without some powerful and reviving stimulus I should either have died on the spot or should at least have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all reassent under my friendless circumstances would soon have become hopeless then it was at this crisis of my fate that my poor orphan companion who had herself met with little but injuries in this world stretched out a saving hand to me uttering a cry of terror but without a moment's delay she ran off into Oxford Street and in less time than could be imagined returned to me with a glass of port wine and spices that acted upon my empty stomach which at that time would have rejected all solid food with an instantaneous power of restoration and for this glass the generous girl without a murmur paid out of her humble purse at a time, be it remembered when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare necessaries of life and when she could have no reason to expect that I should ever be able to reimburse her O youthful benefactress how often in succeeding years standing in solitary places and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect love how often have I wished that as in ancient times the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfillment even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a like prerogative might have power given to it from above to chase, to haunt, to wailay to overtake to pursue thee into the central darkness of a London brothel or if it were possible into the darkness of the grave to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness and of final reconciliation I do not often weep for not only do my thoughts on subjects connected with the chief interests of man daily, nay, hourly descend a thousand fathoms too deep for tears not only does the sternness of my habits of thought present an antagonism to the feelings which prompt tears wanting of necessity to those who being protected usually by their levity from any tendency to meditative sorrow would by that same levity be made incapable of resisting it on any casual access of such feelings but also I believe that all minds which have contemplated such objects as deeply as I have done must for their own protection from utter despondency have early encouraged and cherished some tranquilizing belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings on these accounts I am cheerful to this hour and as I have said I do not often weep yet some feelings though not deeper or more passionate are more tender than others and often when I walk at this time in Oxford Street by dreamy lamp light and hear those airs played on a barrel organ which years ago solaced me and my dear companion as I must always call her I shed tears and muse with myself at the mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and so critically separated us forever how it happened the reader will understand from what remains of this introductory narration End of Section 4 Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere Surrey Section 5 of Confessions of an English Opium Eater This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Martin Giesen Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey Section 5 Soon after the period of the last incident I have recorded I met in Albemarle Street a gentleman of his late majesty's household this gentleman had received hospitalities on different occasions from my family and he challenged me upon the strength of my family likeness I did not attempt any disguise I answered his questions ingenuously and on his pledging his word of honour that he would not betray me to my guardians I gave him an address to my friend the attorneys the next day I received from him a ten pounds bank note the letter enclosing it was delivered with other letters of business to the attorney but though his look and manner informed me that he suspected its contents he gave it up to me honourably and without demure this present from the particular service to which it was applied leads me naturally to speak of the purpose which had allured me up to London and which I had been to use a forensic word soliciting from the first day of my arrival in London to that of my final departure in so mighty a world as London it will surprise my readers that I should not have found some means of staving off the last extremities of penury and it will strike them that two resources at least must have been open to me is either to seek assistance from the friends of my family or to turn my youthful talents and attainments into some channel of pecuniary emolument as to the first course I may observe generally that what I dreaded beyond all other evils was the chance of being reclaimed by my guardians not doubting that whatever power the law gave them would have been enforced against me to the utmost that is to the extremity of forcibly restoring me to the school which I had quitted a restoration which as it would in my eyes have been a dishonour even if submitted too voluntarily I could not fail when extorted from the incontemptant defiance of my own wishes and efforts to have been a humiliation worse to me than death and which would indeed have terminated in death I was therefore shy enough of applying for assistance even in those quarters where I was sure of receiving it at the risk of furnishing my guardians with any clue of recovering me but as to London in particular though doubtless my father had in his lifetime had many friends there yet as ten years had passed since his death I remembered few of them even by name and never having seen London before except once for a few hours I knew not the address of even those few to this mode of gaining help therefore in part the difficulty but much more the paramount fear which I have mentioned habitually indisposed me in regard to the other mode I now feel half inclined to join my reader in wondering that I should have overlooked it as a corrector of Greek proofs if in no other way I might doubtless have gained enough for my slender wants such an office as this I could have discharged with an exemplary and punctual accuracy that would soon have gained me the confidence of my employers but it must not be forgotten that even for such an office as this it was necessary that I should first of all have an introduction to some respectable publisher and this I had no means of obtaining to say the truth however it had never once occurred to me to think of literary labours as a source of profit no mode sufficiently speedy of obtaining money had ever occurred to me but that of borrowing it on the strength of my future claims and expectations this mode I sought by every avenue to compass and amongst other persons I applied to a Jew named D to this Jew and to other advertising moneylenders some of whom where I believe also Jews I had introduced myself with an account of my expectations which account on examining my father's will at doctors commons they had us attained to be correct the person there mentioned as the second son of was found to have all the claims or more than all that I had stated but one question still remained which the faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested was I that person this doubt had never occurred to me as a possible one I had rather feared whenever my Jewish friends scrutinized me keenly that I might be too well known to be that person and that some scheme might be passing in their minds for entrapping me and selling me to my guardians it was strange to me to find my own self materialitair considered so I expressed it for I doted on logical accuracy of distinctions accused or at least suspected of counterfeiting my own self for malitair considered however to satisfy their scruples I took the only course in my power whilst I was in Wales I had received various letters from young friends these I produced for I carried them constantly in my pocket being indeed by this time almost the only relics of my personal encumbrances accepting the clothes I wore which I had not in one way or other disposed of most of these letters were from the Earl of hmm who was at that time my chief or rather only confidential friend these letters were dated from Eaton I had also some from the Marquis of hmm his father who though absorbed in agricultural pursuits yet having been an Eatonian himself and as good a scholar as a nobleman needs to be still retained an affection for classical studies and for youthful scholars he had accordingly from the time that I was fifteen corresponded with me sometimes upon the great improvements which he had made or was meditating in the counties of hmm and since I had been there sometimes upon the merits of a Latin poet and at other times suggesting subjects to me on which he wished me to write verses on reading the letters one of my Jewish friends agreed to furnish me with two or three hundred pounds on my personal security provided I could persuade the young Earl hmm who was by the way not older than myself to guarantee the payment on our coming of age the Jews final object being as I now suppose not the trifling profit he could expect to make by me but the prospect of establishing a connection with my noble friend whose immense expectations were well known to him in pursuance of this proposal on the part of the Jew about eight or nine days after I had received the ten pounds I prepared to go down to Eaton nearly three pounds of the money I had given to my moneylending friend on his alleging that the stamps must be bought in order that the writings might be preparing whilst I was away from London I thought in my heart that he was lying but I did not wish to give him any excuse for charging his own delays upon me a smaller sum I had given to my friend the attorney who was connected with the moneylenders as their lawyer to which indeed he was entitled for his unfurnished lodgings about fifteen shillings I had employed in re-establishing though in a very humble way my dress of the remainder I gave one quarter to Anne meaning on my return to have divided with her whatever might remain these arrangements made soon after six o'clock on a dark winter evening I set off accompanied by Anne towards Piccadilly for it was my intention to go down as far as Salt Hill on the Bath or Bristol Mail our course lay through a part of the town which has now all disappeared so that I can no longer retrace its ancient boundaries Swallow Street I think it was called having time enough before us however we bore away to the left until we came into Golden Square there near the corner of Sherrod Street we sat down not wishing to part in the tumult and blaze of Piccadilly I had told her of my plans some time before and I now assured her again that she should share in my good fortune if I met with any and that I would never forsake her as soon as I had power to protect her this I fully intended as much from inclination as from a sense of duty for setting aside gratitude which in any case must have made me her debtor for life I loved her as affectionately as if she had been my sister and at this moment with sevenfold tenderness from pity at witnessing her extreme dejection I had apparently most reason for dejection because I was leaving the saviour of my life yet I considering the shock my health had received was cheerful and full of hope she on the contrary who was parting with one who had little means of serving her except by kindness and brotherly treatment was overcome by sorrow so that when I kissed her at our final farewell she put her arms about my neck and wept without speaking a word I hoped to return in a week at farthest and I agreed with her that on the fifth night from that and every night afterwards she would wait for me at six o'clock near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street which had been our customary haven as it were of rendezvous to prevent our missing each other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street this and other measures of precaution I took one only I forgot she had either never told me or as a matter of no great interest I had forgotten her surname it is a general practice indeed with girls of humble rank in her unhappy condition not as novel reading women of higher pretensions to style themselves Miss Douglas, Miss Montague etc but simply by their Christian names Mary, Jane, Francis etc her surname as the surest means of tracing her hereafter I ought now to have inquired but the truth is having no reason to think that our meeting could in consequence of a short interruption be more difficult or uncertain than it had been for so many weeks I had scarcely for a moment averted to it as necessary or placed it amongst my memoranda against this parting interview and my final anxieties being spent in comforting her with hopes and impressing upon her the necessity of getting some medicines for a violent cough and hoarseness with which she was troubled I wholly forgot it until it was too late to recall her it was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester coffee-house and the Bristol mail being on the point of going off I mounted on the outside the fine, fluent motion of this mail soon laid me asleep it is somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months was on the outside of a mail-coach a bed which at this day I find rather an uneasy one connected with this sleep was a little incident which served as hundreds of others did at that time to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great distress may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least anything of the possible goodness of the human heart or as I must add with a sigh of its possible vileness so thick a curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men's natures that to the ordinary observer the two extremities and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them are all confounded the vast and multitudinous compass of their several harmonies reduced to the meagre outline of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds the case was this for the first four or five miles from London I annoyed my fellow passenger on the roof he was occasionally falling against him when the coach gave a lurch to his side and indeed if the road had been less smooth and level than it is I should have fallen off from weakness of this annoyance he complained heavily as perhaps in the same circumstances most people would he expressed his complaint however more morosely than the occasion seemed to warrant and if I had parted with him at that moment I should have thought of him if I had considered it worthwhile to think of him at all as a surly and almost brutal fellow however I was conscious that I had given him some cause for complaint and therefore I apologized to him and assured him I would do what I could to avoid falling asleep for the future and at the same time in as few words as possible I explained to him that I was ill and in a weak state from long suffering and that I could not afford at that time to take an inside place this man's manner changed upon hearing this explanation in an instant and when I next woke for a minute from the noise and lights of Houndslow for in spite of my wishes and efforts I had fallen asleep again within two minutes from the time I had spoken to him I found that he had put his arm round me to protect me from falling off and for the rest of my journey he behaved to me with the gentleness of a woman so that at length I almost lay in his arms and this was the more kind as he could not have known that I was not going the whole way to Bath or Bristol unfortunately indeed I did go rather farther than I intended so genial and so refreshing was my sleep that the next time after leaving Houndslow that I fully awoke was upon the sudden pulling up of the mail possibly at a post office and on inquiry I found that we had reached Maidenhead six or seven miles I think ahead of Salt Hill here I alighted and for the half minute that the mail stopped being treated by my friendly companion who from the transient glimpse I had had of him in Piccadilly seemed to me to be a gentleman's butler or person of that rank to go to bed without delay this I promised though with no intention of doing so and in fact I immediately set forward or rather backward on foot it must then have been nearly midnight but so slowly did I creep along that I heard a clock in a cottage strike four before I had turned down the lane from Slough to Eaton the air and the sleep had both refreshed me but I was weary nevertheless I remember a thought obvious enough and which has been pretty expressed by a Roman poet which gave me some consolation at that moment under my poverty there had been some time before a murder committed on or near Houndslow Heath I think I cannot be mistaken when I say that the name of the murdered person was Steel and that he was the owner of a lavender plantation in that neighborhood every step of my progress was bringing me nearer to the Heath and it naturally occurred to me that I and the accused murderer if he were that night abroad might at every instant be unconsciously approaching each other through the darkness in which case said I supposing I instead of being as indeed I am little better than an outcast Lord of my learning and no land beside where like my friend Lord air by general repute to seventy thousand pounds per annum what a panic should I be under at this moment about my throat indeed it was not likely that Lord should ever be in my situation but nevertheless the spirit of the remark remains true that vast power and possessions make a man shamefully afraid of dying and I am convinced that many of the most intrepid adventurous who by fortunately being poor enjoy the full use of their natural courage would if at the very instant of going into action news were brought to them that they had unexpectedly succeeded to in his state in England of fifty thousand pounds a year feel their dislike to bullets considerably sharpened and their efforts at perfect equanimity and self-possession proportionably difficult so true it is in the language of a wise man whose own experience had made him acquainted with both fortunes that riches are better fitted to slacken virtue and abate her edge than tempter to do ought may merit praise paradise regained end of section five recording by Martin Geeson in Hazelmere Surrey