Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
Thomas De Quincey
Philadelphia, 1823
 
First American edition. Exceptionally rarer than the first UK edition of the previous year; only 4 copies appear in the sales records over the last 40 years. Original publisher’s boards that retain the spine label, to add another layer of rarity. Uncut and complete with half-title leaf. Some chips along spine and joints, dark streaks on upper cover. Largely clean text with some sporadic light spotting. A Very Good copy housed in chemise and slipcase.
 
De Quincey experienced an amazingly tragic life filled with death, loneliness, and the full panoply of suffering but unlike many others, it ultimately led him to great empathy.
 
“For a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor limitary creature calling himself a man of the world, and filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and education, but should look upon himself as a catholic creature, and as standing in equal relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated, to the guilty and the innocent.”(Confessions of an English Opium Eater)
 
His iconic text would go on to influence the likes of Poe, Dickens, and the Beat Generation.
 
‘…he transformed our perception of drugs. De Quincey invented recreational drug-taking, not because he was the first to swallow opiates for non-medical reasons(he was hardly that), but because he was the first to commemorate his drug experience in a compelling narrative that was consciously aimed at — and consumed by — a broad commercial audience. Further, in knitting together intellectualism, unconventionality, drugs, and the city, De Quincey mapped in the counter-cultural figure of the bohemian. He was also the first flaneur, high and anonymous, graceful and detached, strolling through crowded urban sprawls trying to decipher the spectacles, faces, and memories that reside there. Most strikingly, as the self-proclaimed “Pope” of “the true church on the subject of opium,” he initiated the tradition of the literature of intoxication with his portrait of the addict as a young man. De Quincey is the first modern artist, at once prophet and exile, riven by a drug that both inspired and eviscerated him.’(Robert Morrison)