Thomas De Quincey spent much of his life addicted to the powerful drug opium. This book, first published anonymously in the London Magazine, is the autobiographical account of his addiction. De Quincey's compelling language and frankness give the reader a window in to both the strange pleasures and the horrible pains of that famous drug.

As the science of addiction was an unheard of thing at the time, De Quincey's account became a sort of authoritative reference for decades, with people going so far as to denounce the book for presenting too pleasurable a picture of opium use. His work stands as a fascinating window into the life of a Georgian-era addict in one of the busiest cities in the world.

Raw, lyrical, and unflinchingly honest, Thomas De Quincey's landmark confession helped invent an entire genre of addiction literature-a vivid, often hallucinatory journey through the pleasures and torments of 19th-century London.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)