WRITERS UNDER THE INFLUENCE: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey & Opium (Ch 4)
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey are connected by two things: William Wordsworth and opium. Sam met Wordsworth first and together they published The Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which kicked off the Romantic movement and attracted legions of fans. Among them was Thomas De Quincey. He famously tracked down his two idols and insinuated himself into their Lake District clique. Wordsworth was impressed by the much younger Tom, but Sam Coleridge was wary. Perhaps Sam recognised a little too much of himself in Tom. Later, Sam would go on to publish Kubla Khan and Tom would publish Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Both works are considered the earliest instances of drug literature. But while Tom wrote candidly about his experiences with addiction, Sam only ever alluded to drug use, using metaphors instead of specific references. He preferred to keep the matter of his laudanum dependence private, so he didn't exactly appreciate it when Tom, on the very first page of Confessions, publicly outed him as one of the biggest dope fiends of all.
CREDITS -
This episode was written and narrated by Key Whiskey. Special thanks to Jarryd Doyle for editing the audio and voicing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and other voices featured throughout.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834
Thomas De Quincey 1785-1859
READ -
Now you know the writers, get to know the writing…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Eolian Harp (1795), This Lime Tree Bower My Prison (1797); Frost at Midnight (1798); Fears in Solitude (1798); The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Lyrical Ballads (1798); Dejection: An Ode (1802); Kubla Khan (1816); Christabel (1816); Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (1817).
Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821); On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827); Recollections of the Lake Poets (1839); Suspiria de Profundis (1845); Joan of Arc (1847); The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion (1849).
WATCH -
Too lazy to read? Here are the film adaptations.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Ancient Mariner (1925) - starring Clara Bow.
Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) - starring Vincent Price; Suspiria (1977) - starring Jessica Harper.
SOURCES -
Opium
Castelow, Ellen. ‘Opium in Victorian Britain’. Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Opium-in-Victorian-Britain/.
Larsen, Staci. ‘Morphine’s Modest Origin’. The Hospitalist, Oct. 2006, https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/123203/morphines-modest-origin.
’Laudanum Addiction’. The Recovery Village, https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/laudanum-addiction/#gref.
’Opium’. Alcohol and Drug Foundation, 20 Mar. 2020, https://adf.org.au/drug-facts/opium/.
Pomeroy, Luke. ‘The Addictive History of Medicine: Opium, the Ancient Drug of Choice’. Science Museum, 29 Mar. 2012, https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-medicine-opium-the-ancient-drug-of-choice/.
’Portraits of the Past: Selling snake oil as “patent medicine”’. The Fort Morgan Times, 24 Jan. 2016, https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2016/01/24/portraits-of-the-past-selling-snake-oil-as-patent-medicine/.
Ray, R. & Kattimani, S., et al. ‘Opium Abuse and Its Management: Global Scenario’. World Health Organisation, https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/activities/opium_abuse_and_its_management.pdf.
Ross, Monique & Quince, Annabelle. ‘Modern China and the legacy of the Opium Wars’. ABC News, 3 Sep. 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-02/modern-china-and-the-legacy-of-the-opium-wars/10172386.
Trickey, Erick. ‘Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction’. Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Jan. 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inside-story-americas-19th-century-opiate-addiction-180967673/.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ashton, Rosemary. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1996.
Burwick, Frederick. The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.
Court, Simon. ‘Coleridge and the Pantisocratic pipe-dream’. Wordsworth Grasmere, 2 Sep. 2015, https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2015/09/02/coleridge-and-the-pantisocratic-pipe-dream/.
Curran, Stuart, et. al., editor. ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. Frankenstein: The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition, University of Pennsylvania, http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Coleridg/bio.html.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1989.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, Harper Collins, London, 1996.
Kelley, Stephanie, interviewer. ‘Seamus Perry on The Best Samuel Taylor Coleridge Books’. Five Books, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/samuel-taylor-coleridge-seamus-perry/.
’Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment’. The Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/stc/kktext.html.
Lloyd, Jacob. ‘Who was Samuel Taylor Coleridge?’. National Trust, https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/who-was-samuel-taylor-coleridge.
McNearney, Allison. ‘Did Opium Make Coleridge Forget the Rest of “Kubla Khan”?’. Daily Beast, 14 Apr. 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-opium-make-coleridge-forget-the-rest-of-kubla-khan.
Moulin, Joanny. ‘Reflections on the Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. Études Anglaises, vol. 63, Jan. 2010, pp. 34-48, https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-anglaises-2010-1-page-34.htm?contenu=article.
Murphy, Michael. ‘Coleridge and Atheism in the 1790s’. The Coleridge Bulletin, no. 11, Spring 1998, pp. 48-60, http://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/MembersOnly/Murphy.html.
’Coleridge: One of the Greatest Biographies of the Century - Darker Reflections’. YouTube, uploaded by Remember This, 26. Sep 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdHu-4u6Lb4&t=2341s.
Parker, Reeve. Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, The Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011.
Ruston, Sharon. ‘Representations of drugs in 19th century literature’. British Library, 15 May 2014, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/representations-of-drugs-in-19th-century-literature.
’Richard Holmes: Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Bristol and Beyond’. YouTube, uploaded by Bristol Festival of Ideas, 5 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKr-anv1SII.
’Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. NNDB, https://www.nndb.com/people/852/000024780/.
’Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biography’. Encyclopedia of World Biography, https://www.notablebiographies.com/Co-Da/Coleridge-Samuel-Taylor.html.
Taylor, Anya. ‘Coleridge and Alcohol’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 33, no. 3, 1991, pp. 355–372. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40754957.
’Three extraordinary years’. National Trust, https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/coleridge-cottage/features/three-extraordinary-years.
Townsend, Mark. ‘Drugs uncovered: A brief history of drugs in literature’. The Guardian, 16 Nov. 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/nov/16/drugs-history-literature.
Ware, J. Garth. ‘Coleridge's Great Poems Reflecting the Mother Imago’. American Imago, vol. 18, no. 4, 1961, pp. 331–352. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26301884.
William Wordsworth 1770-1850, friend to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey
Thomas De Quincey
Black, Joseph, editor, et. al. ‘Thomas De Quincey’. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism, Broadview Press, Ontario, pp. 570-571, 2010.
Burwick, Frederick. Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, Penn State Press, University Park, PA, 1996.
Chiasson, Dan. ‘The Man Who Invented the Drug Memoir’. The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-man-who-invented-the-drug-memoir.
Cooke, Michael G. “De Quincey, Coleridge, and the Formal Uses of Intoxication.” Yale French Studies, no. 50, 1974, pp. 26–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2929463.
Cummings, Edward. ‘Thomas De Quincey’. Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Thomas-De-Quincey/.
Dickey, Colin. ‘The Addicted Life of Thomas De Quincey’. Lapham’s Quarterly, 19 Mar. 2013, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/addicted-life-thomas-de-quincey.
Ectric, Bill. ‘Thomas de Quincey: Victorian Confidential’. Literary Kicks, 20 Sep. 2005, https://www.litkicks.com/DeQuincey.
France, Peter & Haynes, Kenneth, editors. ‘The Translators: Biographical Sketches’. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English Volume 4 1790-1900, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 520, 2006.
Koch, Daniel. Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe: Class, Race and Revolution in the Making of an American Thinker, I.B. Tauris, 2012.
Lanchester, John. ‘High Style’. The New Yorker, 30 Dec. 2002, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/06/high-style-3.
Masson, David. De Quincey, Macmillan, London, 1881.
McConnell, Frank D. ‘William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction’. The Massachusetts Review, vol. 8, no. 4, 1967, pp. 665–680. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25087654.
McCrum, Robert. ‘100 best nonfiction books: No 72 - Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey’. The Guardian, 19 Jun. 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/19/100-best-nonfiction-books-confessions-of-an-english-opium-eater-thomas-de-quincey.
Metcalf, John Calvin. ‘De Quincey’s Critical Years’. Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 1940, https://www.vqronline.org/essay/de-quinceys-critical-years.
Morrison, Robert. ‘De Quincey’s Addiction’. Romanticism, vol. 17, no. 3, Nov. 2011, pp. 270-277. Edinburgh University Press, https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/rom.2011.0040.
Morrison, Robert. ‘A Chronology of Thomas De Quincey’. Thomas De Quincey, https://robertjhmorrison.com/thomas-de-quincey/chron.html.
Robson, Catherine. ‘Of Prisons and Ungrown Girls: Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Constructions of the Lost Self of Childhood’. Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001, pp. 16-45.
Self, Will. ‘Take me back to where De Quincey met his hero - and I tried to shake off the devil’. New Statesman, 15 Apr. 2016, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/04/take-me-back-where-de-quincey-met-his-hero-and-i-tried-shake-devil.
Sutherland, John & Fender, Stephen, editors. ‘13 May: De Quincey writes to Wordsworth’. Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales From a Year in Literature, Icon Books, London, 2010, p. 99.
Sutherland, John. ‘He Loved Opium, Murder and Wordsworth’. The New York TImes, 28 Oct. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/books/review/he-loved-opium-murder-and-wordsworth.html.
’The Secret Life of Books Series 2 (2015) Part 4: Confessions of an English Opium Eater’'. YouTube, uploaded by Documentary CDMA, 6 Feb. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNc3tP52lKI.
’Thomas De Quincey’. Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-De-Quincey.
’Thomas De Quincey’. National Records of Scotland, https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/learning/hall-of-fame/hall-of-fame-a-z/quincey-thomas-de.
Thron, E. Michael. ‘The Significance of Catherine Wordsworth's Death to Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth’. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 28, no. 4, 1988, pp. 559–567. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/450660.
Wilson, Frances. Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, Bloomsbury Publishing, Oxford, 2016.
MUSIC -
The music used in this episode, with the exception of the intro and outro, was sourced from royalty-free music libraries such as the Free Music Archive and YouTube’s Audio Library. The intro features an excerpt from Margaret Fielding’s ‘I Could Write a Book’. The outro includes an excerpt from Artie Shaw and His Orchestra’s ‘I Could Write a Book’.
Discography
“The Trail” by Unheard Music Concepts
“Oriental Sunset” by Kindread
”Metaphysik” by Kevin Macleod
“Ghost Dance” by Kevin MacLeod
“Triton” by Dee Yan-Kay
”Peace” by HOVATOFF
“Introitus” by Dee Yan-Kay
“Allegra amobile” by Dee Yan-Kay
”Anton” by Dan Bodan
“La tapa del lunes” by Circus Marcus
“Handel” by Dee Yan-Kay
”Allegro” by Emmit Fenn
”No.8 Requiem” by Esther Abrami
“Petite pièce minime No 2 - Batifol” by Circus Marcus
“Lost in Love - Stringset Hall (ID 524)” by Lobo Loco
“III. Scherzo - Last Waltz of Autumn (Allegretto rubato)” by Dee Yan-Kay
”I’ll Remember You” by Jeremy Blake
“Le réveil” by Circus Marcus
“Cognitive Disturbance” by Unheard Music Concepts
“Disconnected” by Unheard Music Concepts
“Prelude No. 14” by Chris Zabriskie
“La Traviata, Brindisi (Verdi)” by MIT Symphony Orchestra
”Great Expectations” by Kai Engel
“Equilibrium I (Cello version)” by David Holowitz
“Three Kinds of Suns” by Norma Rockwell
”Lands Unknown” by Futuremono
“Erik Satie: Gymnopedie No 3” by Kevin MacLeod
An opium den in San Francisco, California. Circa 1890.