A review of De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" by W. Phillips, 1824.

 

 

It is the lot of men to suffer, as we have all read in the school books and elsewhere. The fine structure, which gives vivacity to the senses, and makes us capable of pleasurable sensations, renders us liable to a thousand annoyances. Great excitability, or a system naturally sluggish, may make the air and food we live upon, poisonous; and condemn us to ache under the processes of breathing and digestion. And then, the best physical organization is made to be worn out, and, what by use and abuse, misfortune and imprudence, too early becomes feeble and hardly able to maintain the unequal contest with the elements. The mind is thus incessantly harassed and pressed, like the garrison of a weak citadel besieged by a strong foe, to which it must finally surrender. Sympathy inflicts upon us the sufferings of others, and makes misery contagious. Or if nothing external to the mind gives it trouble, it may possess within itself sufficient materials of misery; its regrets of the past, or forebodings and despair of the future, may settle upon it like a cloud, through which it can look at the world only as an undesirable place. Or mere vacancy, the pain of not being excited, is in itself an evil, that puts nimble and impatient spirits upon the pursuit of sensation.

 

            Pain is, according to the doctrine of some wise men, the only motive to action; and in their opinion, therefore, all this throng of men that we see crowding and justling each other in the world, and crossing each others’ paths in all directions, is made up of so many patients, each in the eager search of some particular remedy for the evil he feels or fears. But of all the modes of assuaging present pain, or seeking present pleasure, the most preposterous is that of sacrificing the means of future comfort; and the habits least worthy of a thinking being, are those which make the mind depend for its solaces and enjoyments, on physical sensations and affections. The impulse of excited passion or appetite is allowed by the world to be some apology for many acts, that would not otherwise be excusable; but it should seem incredible, that any person would coolly, and with deliberate purpose, choose a substance to put into his stomach, which, though it may dispel anxiety, or call up a train of agreeable images and sensations, is yet certain to remain in his system a future poison, inducing pain, weakness, melancholy, and early decrepitude. This is however done, more or less frequently, by many persons, and most flagrantly of all, by those who resort to opium as a luxury. A case of this description makes the subject of the book, of which we are treating, and which the author professes to write to illustrate the moral and physical decay and destruction consequent upon such a practice. We believe that very few persons, if any, in this country, abandon themselves to the use of opium as luxury; nor does there appear to be any great danger of the introduction of this species of intemperance. The history of a case is, therefore, the less important, as an illustration of the fatal effects of this habit; and we accordingly notice this work, more as an object of taste and literary curiosity, than by way of warning persons against a pernicious practice.

 

            The book is made up, in part, of the dreams and fancies, pleasures and sufferings, whether real or supposed, of the writer. It abounds in fantastical and splendid images, and is interspersed with descriptions of great beauty and magnificence, and with detached thoughts and expressions of singular force and felicity – all strung together in a sort of biographical story, comprising but few incidents, and told in a manner not the most interesting. The writer makes too much display of his ‘superb intellect,’ as he seems to consider it; and though occasionally, and indeed, in many instances, he reaches a strain of original and philosophical thinking, at other times he sinks into an obscure sort of metaphysical and mystical prosing, and becomes very formally dull and dry, in the detail of trifling circumstances and common thoughts. These faults of the piece are owing, in a great measure, to the exceeding partiality and satisfaction with which he contemplates his own conceptions and speculations. On the other hand, the reader is conciliated and won, by the tone of philanthrophy prevailing through the work.

 

            He begins with an account of his life, previously to the time of his addicting himself to opium, for the purpose, as he says, of ‘creating some interest of a personal sort, in the confessing subject.’ While he was a boy at school, he acquired the art of conversing fluently in Greek, by the practice of making extempore translations of newspaper paragraphs, into that language. He at length, and as his guardians thought prematurely, entertained a desire to be entered at college, which they were firmly resolved not to gratify, and this inspired him with the counter resolution of quitting his school, without leave or ceremony, and being no longer a school boy. Accordingly, having one evening heard the service in the school room for the last time, and sorrowingly taken the last look at his venerable schoolmaster, with tears in his eyes he decamped in the night, taking a place in the stage-coach for Wales, with ten guineas in his pocket, and the world all before him where to choose his place of rest or action. Being arrived in Wales, he soon found his finances exhausted, and was reduced to live upon ‘blackberries, hips, and haws, &c.’ His only means of gaining a better subsistence was by writing love letters for the Welsh peasants. His practice in this vocation, together with his Greek Sapphics and Alcaics, procured him comfortable quarters in the family of a Welsh Methodist, where he was a great favorite with the young people, whose parents were absent at a quarterly meeting. But the good man and his wife, holding in much less admiration, than did the young folks, both love letters and Greek, on their return, greeted their visitor with a cold welcome; whereupon he says ‘Mr. Shelly is right in his notions about old age, that, unless counteracted by opposite tendencies, it is a miserable corrupter and blighter of the genial charities of the human heart;’ and as he observed no sign of any such opposite tendencies in this instance, he could do no other than take leave of his young friends and temporary comforts.

 

            He proceeded to London, where for two months he passed his days and nights in the streets, in extremity of hunger and wretchedness; and then bettered his condition very little by taking, but not hiring, lodgings, in a large desolate mansion, in or near Oxford Street, the only other tenants of which were a starved attorney, and a female child, who dusted his apartment, and did such other offices of house keeping, as his style of living required. The forlorn little girl seemed to shift for subsistence as she could, and lived, the new tenant knew not how. The said attorney seems to have carried on a knavish kind of business, whatever it was, which compelled him ‘to lay down his conscience for the time,’ and through ‘the confessing subject’ had but limited opportunities of observing what went on, ‘he saw scenes of intrigue and complex chicanery, cycle and epicycle;’ of which, however, no distinct notion is given; and the whole story of the little girl, the attorney, and the desolate house, is rather a meagre affair, from which the writer brings himself off not very happily. He ‘generally contrived to lounge into the attorney’s apartment during his breakfast, and with an air of as much indifference as could assume, took such fragments as the attorney left.’ And he does the main of law the justice to say, that, whatever may have been his professional practice, towards himself he was obliging, and, to the extent of his power, generous.

 

            After some time spent in this place of hard and cold lodging by night, and in rambling about the streets during the day, without employment, or other object than the gratification of an idle curiosity and the finding of sufficient food to be not quite starved to death upon, he at length met with an acquaintance, was reclaimed to the regular course, and soon found himself at Eton college, by the side of a good breakfast, in company with a friend. After so long an abstinence, a comfortable breakfast should seem to be the signal for cheerfulness and hearty feeing, but his organs had contracted an inveterate habit of starvation, and seemed to have lost the power of appetite; and the having a good meal within his reach, seemed to be hardly a less evil now, than the want of it had been before. His organs, however, gradually recovered their tone, and proceeded to the university without further adventures or misfortunes, but with an injured constitution, and many unpleasant recollections. The rest of the book is occupied with the effects of taking opium.

 

            Being at London for the first time after his entrance at college, at the suggestion of an acquaintance, he took a quantity of opium, which put him into ecstacy. Thereafter – as the Duke of ---- used to say, ‘Next friday, by the blessing of Heaven, I purpose to be drunk,’ – he was accustomed to fix beforehand how often he would commit an excess in opium, he gives a dissertation upon the effects of opium, and maintains, that the exhilaration produced by it, is not at all like intoxication by brandy. He used to go to the opera in a state of exhilaration from opium, and maintains, that he could enjoy the music much more exquisitely by the help of this excitement; and accounts of this by saying, that,

 

            ‘Opium, by increasing the activity of the mind, increases of necessity that particular mode of its activity, by which we are able to construct, out of the raw material of organic harmony, displayed before me, as a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life, not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon; but the detail of its incidents removed or blended in some hazy abstraction and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed.’

 

 

 

            In this state of exhilaration, he could find excellent matter of delight in the conversation of the people about the market, and in the streets, on saturday night, when they were receiving their wages, and making their plans of amusement for sunday.

 

            The most remarkable effect of this drug was, to enable him to study with good success the German metaphysics, in Kant, Fitche, Schelling, and others.

 

            But at length he began to suffer in bodily health, and to be oppressed with melancholy. His remedy was to diminish the quantity of his doses. When he reduced it to one eighth part of what he had usually taken, he says, ‘instantaneously, and if by magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy, which rest upon my brain, like those black vapors that I have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one day; passes off with its murky banners, as simultaneously as a ship that has been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide,

                        That moveth altogether if it move at all.

 

My brain performed its functions as healthily as ever before; I read Kant again, and again I understood him, or fancied I did.’

 

            He was at this time residing in a cottage among the mountains; where one day a Malay, in an Asiastic dress, entered his mansion. He describes the group, of which this visitor made a part, as it presented itself to him in the kitchen, when he came down from his study at the summons of his housekeeper.

 

            ‘In a cottage kitchen, but paneled on the wall with dark wood, that from age and rubbing, resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay, his turban and loose trowsers of dingy white, relieved upon the dark paneling; he had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish; though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended with the feeling of simple awe, which her countenance expressed as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking figure could not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of the girl, together with her erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enameled or veneered with mahogany, by marine air; his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures and adorations. Half hidden by the ferocious looking Malay, was a little child from a neighboring cottage, who had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head, and gazing upwards at the turban and fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand she caught at the dress of the young woman for protection.’

 

            The Malay addressed him in Malay, which he repaid in Greek, neither understanding the other; whereupon, by the way of entertaining his visitor more intelligibly and agreeably, the host offered his guest a ball of opium, which the Malay accepted very cordially, and swallowed with great avidity, and thereupon departed on his journey is good spirits. The dose was so large, that he doubted whether he had poisoned his guest, or done him a kindness; but he congratulates himself on not hearing of the dead body of the Malay being afterwards found on the roadside.

 

            For a time he employed himself in his mountain cottage in reading the ‘grand lamentations of Sampson Agonistes, the great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained,’ Spinosa de Emendatione Humani Intellectus, and Ricardo’s Politcal Economy. But at length his habit of intemperance had made such inroads upon his constitution, that he says, ‘My studies have now been long interrupted. I cannot read with any pleasure, hardly with a moment’s endurance.’ He describes himself as being in a state of intellectual torpor.

 

            ‘But for the misery and suffering, I might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state. I could seldom prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words, to any that I received, was the utmost that I could accomplish; and often that, not until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on my writing table. The opium eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations; he wishes and longs, as earnestly as ever, to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible, infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even to attempt. He lies under a weight of incubus and night mare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love; he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life, if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.’

 

            He began to have the power, when awake, of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms.

 

            ‘At night,’ he says, ‘when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn, as if they were stories drawn from the times before Oedipus –before Tyre – before Memphis. A corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendor. My dreams were accompanied by deep seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed to descend into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had reascended. Buildings, landscapes, &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.

 

            ‘In the early stages of my malady, the splendors of my dreams were chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces, as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of water. But subsequently the waters changed their character; from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. Now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself; now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries; my imagination was infinite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean.’

 

            Then came the Malay, and with him a train of oriental imagery and mythology.

 

            ‘Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Hindostan. I brought Egypt and her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkies, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas; and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia; Vishna hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers, in the heart of eternal pyramids. The cursed crocodile become to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c. soon became instinct with life; the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way; I heard gentle voices speaking to me; and I awoke and it was broad noon; and my children were standing at my bed side, come to shew me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. So awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and other unutterable monsters of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and infancy, that in the sudden revulsion of my mind, I wept and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.’

 

            By diminishing his doses he gradually recovered the use of his faculties, and alleviated his nightly sufferings. But at the conclusion of his first edition, he says, ‘One memorial of my former condition still remains; my dreams are not yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing off, but not all departed; my sleep is still tumultuous, and like the gates of Paradise to our first parents, when looking back from afar, it is still

                        With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.’

 

            This second edition has an appendix, which does not add at all to the literary merit of the production, but is rather a bulletin of the state of the patient’s health, showing his constitution to be exhausted and shattered, and that, for the future, he had to expect only penance for his former habits.

 

 

          

 

Notes on the Text

 

Definitions 

 

1) Opium: a bitter, yellowish-brown, strongly addictive narcotic drug prepared from the dried juice of unripe pods of the poppy Papaver somniferum and containing alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, and papaverine.

 

2) Extempore: without notes, improptu.

 

3) Hips: The aggregate fruit of the rose plant, consisting of several dry fruitlets enclosed by the enlarged, fleshy, usually red floral cup that is used for jelly or tea.

 

4) Haws: the fruit of the hawthorn

 

5) Alcaic: a verse form used in Greek and Latin poetry, consisting of strophes having four tetrametric lines.

 

6) Chicanery: trickery or deception by quibbling or sophistry; a quibble or subterfuge used to trick, deceive, or evade.

 

7) Arras: a rich tapestry

 

8) Malay:a member of a people inhabiting the northern Malay Peninsula and Malaysia and parts of the western Malay Archipelago; a racially intermixed, generally short-statured people who are the dominant population of the Malay Peninsula and adjacent islands.

 

9) Torpor: sluggish inactivity or inertia; lethargic indifference; apathy.

 

10) Incubus: an imaginary demon or evil spirit supposed to descend upon sleeping persons; something that weighs upon or oppresses one like a nightmare.

 

11) Paraquet: variant of "parakeet"

 

12) Shew: variant of "show"

 

Other Notes

 

1) "Few persons..." - It is obviously the belief of Phillips that opium use was almost non-existant in America when we wrote this review. However, in 1875, the San Francisco, California Opium Den Ordinance was enacted, which banned dens for public smoking; other laws followed with harsher penalties regarding opium and its use, and in 1909 the importation of opium was banned altogether. While he may not have personally known any opium abusers, it is obvious that they existed.

 

2) The "Mr. Shelly" that De Quincey references is Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the major English Romantic poets and considered one of the best lyric poets of the English language. Among other things, he wrote Ozymandias and Ode to the West Wind.

 

3) Oxford Street is a major throroughfare in London.

 

4) Eton College, or the King's College of Our Lady of Eton beside Windsor, was founded by King Henry VI in 1440.

 

5) As with the "Duke of ----," De Quincey often neglected to reveal the names of people in his autobiography.

 

6) With "saturday" as the first example, Phillips does not capitalize the names of the days as we now do, and I have therefore left them as they were originally presented.

 

7) Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher of the eighteenth century and is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment.

 

8) Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher credited as a founding father of the philosophical movement known as German Idealism and was greatly interested in the subject of self-consciousness or self-awareness.

 

9) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was another German philosopher of the German Idealism movement, although not as widely-read in the English-speaking world.

 

10) Here ("that moveth..."), De Quincey quotes from Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence."

 

11) "Sampson Agonistes" and "Paradise Regained" are both works by John Milton.

 

12) Baruch Spinoza was a philosopher and ethicist of the seventeenth century, and is considered one of the great rationalists.

 

13) David Ricardo was an English economist who is credited with systematizing economics. His Principles of Political Economy and Taxation is his most famous work.

 

14) "Hindostan" refers to what is now known as India.

 

15) Brama, Vishna, and Seeva together form the Trimurti, or Great  Hindu Trinity. They are perceived as the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer, respectively.

 

16) Here (With dreadful faces...), De Quincey quotes John Milton's "Paradise Lost."

 

 

 

Commentary on the Text

 

 

    I thought long and hard about what I wanted to research for this wiki project. At the same time, I began reading Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. As I read further, I became very interested in the character of John Barton, the protagonist's father, who becomes addicted to opium. I wondered how realistic Gaskell's rendering of an opium-addict was, and also how rampant the use of opium was in ninteenth-century England; after all, Mary Barton is supposed to give us a peek at the lifestyle of the working class at that time. So, I tried to find any interesting information on the subject. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there was a famous autobiography about the exact subject I was looking for: Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," a chronicle of the author's addictions with opium and alcohol. It was of course written at a time when speaking publically about addiction was considered taboo, and was therefore quite controversial; however, it also brought into light the negative effects of the drug, and for that reason gained remarkable popularity over the years.

 

    Even though De Quincey's text seemed like the perfect topic for my wiki, it didn't quite work: although it was written in the 1800s, De Quincey's text is still easy to find today. Therefore, it was suggested that I find a contemporary review of the autobiography to document instead, and eventually I found a suitable one in W. Phillips' 1824 review. Not only did it give an opinionated analysis of the quality of De Quincey's text, but it also offered a small sampling of the autobiography itself, as Phillips summarized much of the novel and quoted De Quincey often. I realized that the summaries and quotes were useful to those who had not read or had maybe not even heard of "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," and that hopefully having them included might result in others looking up this extremely interesting chronicle. Also, I found that the writing style used by Phillips is so interesting; it seems so different from the book reviews of today. The first two paragraphs, which merely act as an opening before Phillips really even gets to the text in question, hold literary merit themselves in my opinion, as they are beautifully worded and smartly written.

 

As for the review itself, I do find myself disagreeing with Phillips on the qualities of De Quincey's writings. While he finds the tales "not the most interesting" I think they are highly remarkable. De Quincey may not be the most eloquent of writers, but the topic of which he is relaying is so fascinating that it more than makes up for any ineptitudes that De Quincey may have as an author. Regardless of differering opinions, the summary and review that Phillips provides is a thoughtful one, and does put the primary text into a certain perspective. It's important to understand a text in regards to the time it was written, and that's why this review is so helpful: it gives us an insight as to how De Quincey's autogioraphy - and perhaps even the man himself - was viewed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Commentary

In addition to notes on particular words/phrases in a text, you may be asked to provide some analysis or commentary on the text as a whole, or to comment on other collaborator's comments.  Your instructor will give you specific directions about what might be required/included here.  Please format comments as the example below indicates:

 

Jeff B. (3/17/08)

 

    This article definitely sheds some light on the negative effects of drug addiction (as the editor, Ryan Pavlica) notes.  We get to read real accounts of experiences strictly bound by the power of narcotics.  Reading this in the 21st century, it is easy to make connections to the harm of opium (and other drugs); but opium was a heavily used and readily accessible drug during the Victorian period.  Opium use and symbolism is prevelant throughout Victorian literature.  Through this article in relation to the time period, I find three points very interesting:  opium and morality, opium and pain, and opium and colonialism. 

 

    In the article, the "opium eater" claims that "the opium eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations."  This is an obviously debatable statement.  Thinking in terms of religion, any sort of intemperance could be coined as amoral.  Is it amoral to not face reality, to not deal with life, and to live life in a constant haze?  In addition, to make this a universal statement, we would have to look at the social class of a user and to what lengths a user takes to get his or her hands on the drug.  In present times, drug use is definitely looked down upon--especially because of stealing, prostitution, and negation of responsibilities that often come with its use.  The author states, "But of all the modes of assuaging present pain, or seeking present pleasure, the most preposterous is that of sacrificing the means of future comfort; and the habits least worthy of a thinking being, are those which make the mind depend for its solaces and enjoyments, on physical sensations and affections."  In other words, drug dependency is harm by means of self-infliction.  The selfishness it takes for one to rely on the false gods of addiction is certainly amoral; and one's personal aspirations definitely change from the state of them at a time of innocence.

    Yes, pain is an experience that afflicts everybody at some point or another.  Though I am not going to argue for or against any justification for easing pain with the use of drugs, I do want to make a point that pain is a purely personal experience.  It is arguably the only sensation that a person shares with nobody else.  Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain mentions how no language can describe the pain that one feels to another.  By easing pain with drugs, a person (in a sense) is not only sacrificing the means of future comfort (as the author of this article states), but the person is also sacrificing part of one's identity.  And by constant drug dependency, it is fair to say that the drug, in this case opium, is replacing itself and its effects with the former identity of the human being. 

    Because opium is a product of East Asia (primarily India and China), we can view opium as a symbol of colonialism--for better or for worse--in Victorian literature.  As means for getting drugs may be amoral, imperialism may also be viewed as amoral.  In a broader, yet deeper sense, if drugs take over one's identity, what can be said about the national identity of a country (such as England) colonizing another country (such as India)?  Justifications, whether right or wrong, can be made in both cases.  Drug dependency is a very solipsistic practice as is imperialism; the thoughts and feelings of others do not matter.  In novels such as Mary Barton (Gaskell) and The Moonstone (Collins), we are able to see negative effects of colonialism through the symbol of opium.

 

Sean E. (3/18/08)

 

Phillips' review of De Quincey's notorious work is interesting to me for one main reason: Phillips complete inability to approach De Quincey's work without falling back on a moral framework that cannot help but view De Quincey's experience with contempt.  Phillips' attention to De Quincey's work takes a back seat to his personal attitudes to opium use, which is something that the previous commentator, Jeff B., has pointed out in his comments on opium and morality.  I would add to Jeff's comments an illustration of Phillips' blindness (if not outright hypocrisy) toward De Quncy's work: Phillips claims to approach De Quincey with nothing other than healthy skepticism--he writes, “we accordingly notice this work, more as an object of taste and literary curiosity, than by way of warning persons against a pernicious practice”—when in fact Phillips has clearly spelled out his objections to opium in the preceding sentences. 

 

De Quincey himself hardly needed a lecture on the morality of opium consumption from Phillips.  In fact, De Quincey's personal attitudes toward opium consumption were complicated.  For example, the scholar Peter Melville Logan, in "Nerves and Narratives," has described how De Quincey's attitude toward opium usage shifted in later editions of "Confessions."  In the 1856 edition of "Confessions," published over 30 years following Phillips' review, De Quincey revised certain passages to reflect a shifting attitude toward the morality of opium consumption.  Logan argues that these revisions mark an attempt on De Quincey's part to characterize himself in a more masculine way than the earlier volume had allowed.  To paraphrase Logan, De Quincey's insisted in the later edition on minimizing the mastery that the drug held over him, and in turn emphasizing his strength of character to overcome his drug dependency.  I believe that the revision possibly reveals an anxiety on De Quincey's part in relation to the drug's power over him. 

 

More recently, Paul Youngquist, in an article titled "De Quincey's Crazy Body" published in "PMLA", looks at the relationship between De Quincey's opium confessions and morality in a completely different light from Phillips' more mainstream views; Youngquist looks at De Quincey in the light posed by German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that morality is an aspect of reason.  In that light De Quincey's experiement is deeply moral; he merely investigated an aspect of human experience, in this case opium dependency, for the sake of making an account.  It is the drive to be experiemental with the self that makes De Quincey a true disciple of Kant's.  From Youngquist's perspective, De Quincey may have been too much the skeptic to be fully understood by someone like Phillips.

 

Perhaps I'm being hard on Phillips; I imagine in many circles that even Phillips review was considered far too permissive to be in good taste.  And so I might suggest another direction in the editor's scholarship; a broader accounting of 19th century attitudes toward opium.

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

 *Note: all defintions were found by using dictionary.com and all of the information found under the "Other Notes" header was located by searching for part of or the full highlighted word/phrase with wikipedia.org, except for the following works used:

 

Luxon, Thomas H., ed. The Milton Reading Room. 2008. 25 Feb. 2008 http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/samson/title/index.shtml

 

 

Self, Cameron. "Paradise Lost." Poets' Graves: Serious About Poets and Poetry. 2006. 25 Feb. 2008 http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Milton/paradise_lost.htm

 

 

 

 

For Additional Reading

 

Full Text for "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" at Project Gutenburg

 

 

 

 

 

                Project Group Members

 

Member Name	University	Course
Ryan Pavlica	Eastern Michigan University	Lit 565

 

 

             

 

 

     Project Completed: WI '08