Confessions of an English Opium Eater

　　Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is a central figure of English Romanticism. CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM EATER, his best-known work, is an account of his early life and opium addiction.

　　De Quincey lived his full three score years and ten. But few would have predicted it, for his father and numerous of his siblings were carried off by tuberculosis. He owed his survival to opium: its powers kept the disease at bay, but in trade it kept De Quincey its slave.

　　When the physical life hangs by a thread, nature often compensates with another gift. With De Quincey, it was his intellect, from which came this offering which lives to this day.