8 - A change in physical economy: Thomas De Quincey's confession

Summary

Whether desperate or not, however, the issue of the struggle in 1813 was what I have mentioned; and from this date, the reader is to consider me as a regular and confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask whether on any particular day he had or had not taken opium, would be to ask whether his lungs had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions.

In his singular account of addiction, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey – journalist, essayist, contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, budding political economist, friend of the Lake Poets, and opium user par excellence – indicates that 1813 is the year that marks his descent into opium addiction, and the ensuing physical change that takes place within his body. The condition suggested is one wherein opium consumption seems to become as essential, even as natural, to him as respiration and circulation. Apart from the fact that it heralds De Quincey's daily dependence on the drug and the hallucinatory mania that dominates the final sections of the text, 1813 seems to be a rather strange year to choose to announce his addiction; in fact De Quincey suggests that it was his ‘happiest year’. Nonetheless, as the writer indicates, this year provides the basis for an apprehension of physical transformation, where opium becomes apparently as intrinsic to the user's sense of self as bodily functions. This state of being is later defined by De Quincey as a change in ‘physical economy’, the main symptom of which is ‘the re-awakening of a state of eye generally incident to childhood or exalted states of irritability’.