Beyond Opium: De Quincey's Range of Reveries

Opium for De Quincey was a means to an end. The end he wanted to achieve was 'reverie', a state of liberated imagination and expanded subjectivity that he claims to have enjoyed as a child, and that he sees as threatened in industrialising nineteenth-century British society. This essay draws attention to the opium-laced and opium-free reveries lavishly presented in De Quincey's autobiographical writings, exploring the scope of significance he invested in reverie as a configuration of intense, unrestrained interiority that might save dreamers from the forces of modernity.