Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum (opium and alcohol) addiction and its effect on his life. The Confessions was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one which won him fame almost overnight.

Determined to counter the lies about opium that had been told by travellers to the Orient and the medical profession, De Quincey describes his addiction, the consciousness altering properties of the drugs, its pleasures and its pains.

Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) is one of the most important English prose writers of the early 19th century. This 21-volume edition comprises the bulk of De Quincey's writing, as well as previously unpublished works.

The original drug memoir--a true 19th-century account of the pleasures and pains of addiction
Once upon a time, opium, the main ingredient in heroin, was easily available over the chemist's counter. The secret of happiness, about which philosophers have disputed for so many ages, could be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket--portable ecstasies could be corked up in a pint bottle.""Paradise? So thought Thomas de Quincey, but he soon discovered that "nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium."

In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through London and the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became prey under the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessionsseamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis...