Robert Morrison’s The English Opium Eater, the first major biography of Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) in more than 25 years, draws on previously unknown letters from de Quincey’s daughters and his 21-volume collected works published in 2000–03. Clearly, such material is a scholar’s paradise, and Morrison, a Queen’s National Scholar in the English department at Queen’s University, has crafted a thoroughly compelling and eminently readable portrait of de Quincey underscored by serious scholarly work.

Morrison avoids the trap of celebrating de Quincey’s life as an opium addict. That life, as captured in de Quincey’s autobiographical 1821 volume Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, has come to form the archetype for every drug-addled, visionary artist of the last century and a half. Morrison doesn’t ignore the material, but he contextualizes it within an account of a life characterized by melancholy, ill health, debt, bad decisions, sexual compulsion, parental estrangement, and, perhaps most significantly, the lingering effect of his sister’s death when de Quincey was very young. 

The portrait of de Quincey that emerges is at once sympathetic and realistic. Morrison is to be credited for engaging with the writer’s enigmatic life and refusing to take anything at face value, emphasizing the “often stark difference between the highly crafted accounts of his experience that he produced for public consumption, and the heated outbursts of anger and disgust that he confided to his private letters and diaries.” His account of de Quincey’s fraught friendship with William Wordsworth, for example, details de Quincey’s manipulative and carefully crafted overture to the poet in a letter in which obsequiousness is balanced with half-truths and appeals to what he perceived as Wordsworth’s sensibilities.    

A 400-page biography of a 19th-century writer and drug addict might seem daunting (especially when one considers the additional 50 pages of scholarly end materials), but The English Opium Eater is nothing of the sort. It is not only scholarly but thought-provoking; thorough, but also scintillating, and a genuine pleasure to read.