Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (top non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

It had been my intention originally to proceed to Westmoreland, both from the love I bore to that country and on other personal accounts.  Accident, however, gave a different direction to my wanderings, and I bent my steps towards North Wales.

After wandering about for some time in Denbighshire, Merionethshire, and Carnarvonshire, I took lodgings in a small neat house in B---.  Here I might have stayed with great comfort for many weeks, for provisions were cheap at B---, from the scarcity of other markets for the surplus produce of a wide agricultural district.  An accident, however, in which perhaps no offence was designed, drove me out to wander again.  I know not whether my reader may have remarked, but I have often remarked, that the proudest class of people in England (or at any rate the class whose pride is most apparent) are the families of bishops.  Noblemen and their children carry about with them, in their very titles, a sufficient notification of their rank.  Nay, their very names (and this applies also to the children of many untitled houses) are often, to the English ear, adequate exponents of high birth or descent.  Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, Paulet, Cavendish, and scores of others, tell their own tale.  Such persons, therefore, find everywhere a due sense of their claims already established, except among those who are ignorant of the world by virtue of their own obscurity: “Not to know them, argues one’s self unknown.”  Their manners take a suitable tone and colouring, and for once they find it necessary to impress a sense of their consequence upon others, they meet with a thousand occasions for moderating and tempering this sense by acts of courteous condescension.  With the families of bishops it is otherwise: with them, it is all uphill work to make known their pretensions; for the proportion of the episcopal bench taken from noble families is not at any time very large, and the succession to these dignities is so rapid that the public ear seldom has time to become familiar with them, unless where they are connected with some literary reputation.  Hence it is that the children of bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man from all contact with the οι πολλοι.  Doubtless, a powerful understanding, or unusual goodness of nature, will preserve a man from such weakness, but in general the truth of my representation will be acknowledged; pride, if not of deeper root in such families, appears at least more upon the surface of their manners.  This spirit of manners naturally communicates itself to their domestics and other dependants.  Now, my landlady had been a lady’s maid or a nurse in the family of the Bishop of ---, and had but lately married away and “settled” (as such people express it) for life.  In a little town like B---, merely to have lived in the bishop’s family conferred some distinction; and my good landlady had rather more than her share of the pride I have noticed on that score.  What “my lord” said and what “my lord” did, how useful he was in Parliament and how indispensable at Oxford, formed the daily burden of her talk.  All this I bore very well, for I was too good-natured to laugh in anybody’s face, and I could make an ample allowance for the garrulity of an old servant.  Of necessity, however, I must have appeared in her eyes very inadequately impressed with the bishop’s importance, and, perhaps to punish me for my indifference, or possibly by accident, she one day repeated to me a conversation in which I was indirectly a party concerned.  She had been to the palace to pay her respects to the family, and, dinner being over, was summoned into the dining-room.  In giving an account of her household economy she happened to mention that she had let her apartments.  Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed) had taken occasion to caution her as to her selection of inmates, “for,” said he, “you must recollect, Betty, that this place is in the high road to the Head; so that multitudes of Irish swindlers running away from their debts into England, and of English swindlers running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route.”  This advice certainly was not without reasonable grounds, but rather fitted to be stored up for Mrs. Betty’s private meditations than specially reported to me.  What followed, however, was somewhat worse.  “Oh, my lord,” answered my landlady (according to her own representation of the matter), “I really don’t think this young gentleman is a swindler, because ---”  “You don’t think me a swindler?” said I, interrupting her, in a tumult of indignation: “for the future I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it.”  And without delay I prepared for my departure.  Some concessions the good woman seemed disposed to make; but a harsh and contemptuous expression, which I fear that I applied to the learned dignitary himself, roused her indignation in turn, and reconciliation then became impossible.  I was indeed greatly irritated at the bishop’s having suggested any grounds of suspicion, however remotely, against a person whom he had never seen; and I thought of letting him know my mind in Greek, which, at the same time that it would furnish some presumption that I was no swindler, would also (I hoped) compel the bishop to reply in the same language; in which case I doubted not to make it appear that if I was not so rich as his lordship, I was a far better Grecian.  Calmer thoughts, however, drove this boyish design out of my mind; for I considered that the bishop was in the right to counsel an old servant; that he could not have designed that his advice should be reported to me; and that the same coarseness of mind which had led Mrs. Betty to repeat the advice at all, might have coloured it in a way more agreeable to her own style of thinking than to the actual expressions of the worthy bishop.

I left the lodgings the very same hour, and this turned out a very unfortunate occurrence for me, because, living henceforward at inns, I was drained of my money very rapidly.  In a fortnight I was reduced to short allowance; that is, I could allow myself only one meal a day.  From the keen appetite produced by constant exercise and mountain air, acting on a youthful stomach, I soon began to suffer greatly on this slender regimen, for the single meal which I could venture to order was coffee or tea.  Even this, however, was at length withdrawn; and afterwards, so long as I remained in Wales, I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, &c., or on the casual hospitalities which I now and then received in return for such little services as I had an opportunity of rendering.  Sometimes I wrote letters of business for cottagers who happened to have relatives in Liverpool or in London; more often I wrote love-letters to their sweethearts for young women who had lived as servants at Shrewsbury or other towns on the English border.  On all such occasions I gave great satisfaction to my humble friends, and was generally treated with hospitality; and once in particular, near the village of Llan-y-styndw (or some such name), in a sequestered part of Merionethshire, I was entertained for upwards of three days by a family of young people with an affectionate and fraternal kindness that left an impression upon my heart not yet impaired.  The family consisted at that time of four sisters and three brothers, all grown up, and all remarkable for elegance and delicacy of manners.  So much beauty, and so much native good breeding and refinement, I do not remember to have seen before or since in any cottage, except once or twice in Westmoreland and Devonshire.  They spoke English, an accomplishment not often met with in so many members of one family, especially in villages remote from the high road.  Here I wrote, on my first introduction, a letter about prize-money, for one of the brothers, who had served on board an English man-of-war; and, more privately, two love-letters for two of the sisters.  They were both interesting-looking girls, and one of uncommon loveliness.  In the midst of their confusion and blushes, whilst dictating, or rather giving me general instructions, it did not require any great penetration to discover that what they wished was that their letters should be as kind as was consistent with proper maidenly pride.  I contrived so to temper my expressions as to reconcile the gratification of both feelings; and they were as much pleased with the way in which I had expressed their thoughts as (in their simplicity) they were astonished at my having so readily discovered them.  The reception one meets with from the women of a family generally determines the tenor of one’s whole entertainment.  In this case I had discharged my confidential duties as secretary so much to the general satisfaction, perhaps also amusing them with my conversation, that I was pressed to stay with a cordiality which I had little inclination to resist.  I slept with the brothers, the only unoccupied bed standing in the apartment of the young women; but in all other points they treated me with a respect not usually paid to purses as light as mine—as if my scholarship were sufficient evidence that I was of “gentle blood.”  Thus I lived with them for three days and great part of a fourth; and, from the undiminished kindness which they continued to show me, I believe I might have stayed with them up to this time, if their power had corresponded with their wishes.  On the last morning, however, I perceived upon their countenances, as they sate at breakfast, the expression of some unpleasant communication which was at hand; and soon after, one of the brothers explained to me that their parents had gone, the day before my arrival, to an annual meeting of Methodists, held at Carnarvon, and were that day expected to return; “and if they should not be so civil as they ought to be,” he begged, on the part of all the young people, that I would not take it amiss.  The parents returned with churlish faces, and “Dym Sassenach” (no English) in answer to all my addresses.  I saw how matters stood; and so, taking an affectionate leave of my kind and interesting young hosts, I went my way; for, though they spoke warmly to their parents in my behalf, and often excused the manner of the old people by saying it was “only their way,” yet I easily understood that my talent for writing love-letters would do as little to recommend me with two grave sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek sapphics or alcaics; and what had been hospitality when offered to me with the gracious courtesy of my young friends, would become charity when connected with the harsh demeanour of these old people.  Certainly, Mr. Shelley is right in his notions about old age: unless powerfully counteracted by all sorts of opposite agencies, it is a miserable corrupter and blighter to the genial charities of the human heart.

Soon after this I contrived, by means which I must omit for want of room, to transfer myself to London.  And now began the latter and fiercer stage of my long sufferings; without using a disproportionate expression I might say, of my agony.  For I now suffered, for upwards of sixteen weeks, the physical anguish of hunger in.  I various degrees of intensity, but as bitter perhaps as ever any human being can have suffered who has survived it would not needlessly harass my reader’s feelings by a detail of all that I endured; for extremities such as these, under any circumstances of heaviest misconduct or guilt, cannot be contemplated, even in description, without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness of the human heart.  Let it suffice, at least on this occasion, to say that a few fragments of bread from the breakfast-table of one individual (who supposed me to be ill, but did not know of my being in utter want), and these at uncertain intervals, constituted my whole support.  During the former part of my sufferings (that is, generally in Wales, and always for the first two months in London) I was houseless, and very seldom slept under a roof.   To this constant exposure to the open air I ascribe it mainly that I did not sink under my torments.  Latterly, however, when colder and more inclement weather came on, and when, from the length of my sufferings, I had begun to sink into a more languishing condition, it was no doubt fortunate for me that the same person to whose breakfast-table I