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This etext was prepared by David Price, email
[email protected]
from the 1886 George Routledge and Sons edition. This being a reprint
of the 1821 London Magazine edition.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey. The
first edition (London Magazine) text. 1886 George Routledge and Sons
edition.
CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER: BEING AN
EXTRACT FROM THE LIFE OF A SCHOLAR. From the "London
Magazine" for September 1821.
TO THE READER
I here present you, courteous 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 extra-judicial 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
court 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:
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