Thomas De Quincey (1785 – 1859)


The Homepage of Thomas De Quincey is devoted to the study of the life and writings of the nineteenth-century English essayist and opium addict Thomas De Quincey. In addition to a biography, a chronology, and a series of links to other relevant material, the site contains an extensive bibliography that lists more than 200 titles by and about De Quincey.



2013 Oxford World's Classics Edition:

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

And Other Writings

Edited by Robert Morrison

'I took it:—and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths,
of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me!'


"Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) launched a fascination with drug use and abuse that has continued from his day to ours. In the Confessions De Quincey invents recreational drug taking, but he also details both the lurid nightmares that beset him in the
depths of his addiction as well as his humiliatingly futile attempts to
renounce the drug. Suspiria de Profundis centres on the deep afflictions of De Quincey's childhood, and examines the powerful and often
paradoxical relationship between drugs and human creativity. In
'The English Mail-Coach', the tragedies of De Quincey's past are played out with horrifying repetitiveness against a backdrop of Britain as a Protestant and an imperial power."

Robert Morrison's biography of De Quincey, dust jacket

Click image to order this book at Amazon.com

Or click here to order at Amazon.co.uk

Or click here to order at Amazon.ca


Click below to read more about Thomas De Quincey

Click below for Robert Morrison's interview with David Morrell


Designed and maintained by Carole Morrison and Robert Morrison
with the technical assistance of Scott-Morgan Straker and Matthew Roby.