Born in Manchester in 1785, De Quincey was a sensitive child and had an unhappy childhood. His two sisters had died very young, and he was only seven years old when his father was also brought home to die. Left in the guardianship of his mother and four friends of the family, he was sent to school at Bath and later to Wiltshire and Manchester. At age seventeen, he ran away and spent four months penniless and hungry on the streets of London. Later, he reconciled with his mother and tutors and, at eighteen, entered Worcester College, Oxford in 1803. All along, he was a voracious reader and passionate admirer of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

De Quincey gained fame for his biographical work on his addiction to opium. Seized while at Oxford by an excruciating toothache in 1804, he met a colleague who suggested he should try opium. This agent was at the time freely available over the counter as laudanum, a tincture of opium mixed with alcohol. It instantly relieved De Quincey’s pain and also filled him with “divine enjoyment” and gave him vivid dreams of extraordinary grandeur. Clearly, this was a secret to happiness that could be bought for as little as a penny and carried in one’s waistcoat pocket.

De Quincey became addicted to opium in 1813 and, in time, suffered from its side effects. He had mood disturbances cycling from euphoria to melancholy, irritability, impaired concentration, and memory loss. But his 1821 autobiographical work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater established his literary fame. It is regarded as a seminal text in the history of addiction literature, illustrating both the therapeutic and destructive capacities of the drug.

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In 1902, the editor of a pocket-size anthology of De Quincey’s works selected his essay on Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow as the finest specimen of his peculiar prose-poetry and one of the most magnificent pieces of writing in the English language. It is how, at Oxford, three sisters would frequently appear in his dreams. Of these, the eldest was named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears:

She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She wears a diadem around her head… By the power of the keys, it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, and sleepless children from the Ganges to the Nile, from the Nile to Mississippi.

The second sister was called Mater Suspirarum, Our Lady of Sighs:

She never scales the clouds nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be filled with perishing dreams and wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals… Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless…

The third sister was the youngest, Mater Tenenbrarum, the Lady of Darkness:¹

Her kingdom is not large…but within that kingdom, all power is hers… She is the defier of God…the mother of lunatics, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom central convulsions have upheaved a profound nature; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within…

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In 1821, De Quincey wrote The Flight of a Tartar Tribe, the revolt of the Kalmuck Tartars who, in 1761, fled eastward “across the boundless steppes of Asia” pursued by the Russian army.² These Tartars were the descendants of the Mongols who had ruled Russia for centuries but were incorporated into the empire of Catherine the Great. Like the Crimean Tartars, who were oppressed during the days of the Soviet Union, the Kalmuck Tartars had become second-rate citizens in the Russian Empire. They revolted against discrimination and injustices even though they had served with distinction on the Russian side in the war against the Ottoman Empire, an effort for which they had received scant recognition:

The Kalmucks hated the Russian yoke, their galling assumption of authority, the marked air of disdain towards a nation of ugly, stupid, and filthy barbarians, which too generally marked the Russian bearing and language, but, above all, the insolent contempt or even outrages, which the Russian governors or great military commandants tolerated in their followers towards the barbarous religion and superstitious mummeries of the Kalmuck priest.³

The essay is a historical essay dramatizing the 1771 exodus of nearly 600,000 men and women misled by a demagogue pretender to the Tartar leadership to leave their homes from the banks of the Volga River and migrate across thousands of miles of barren, hostile terrain towards China. Their journey was marked by starvation, disease, betrayal, and warfare as they were pursued not only by the Russian army but also by “a vast horde of semi-civilized tribes who had for the unfortunate fugitives a fierce, hereditary hatred.”² The Tartars began their exodus with a 300-mile march of seven days at a speed of about 43 miles per day. “The cattle suffered; milk began to fail even for the children; the sheep perished by wholesale; and the children themselves were saved only by the innumerable camels.”² The Tartars now collided with the Cossacks into whose territory they had penetrated.

Then the snow began to fall, the cold became intense, and many living creatures perished other than the camels, whose “power of endurance seemed equally adapted to cold and heat”; “The cows and oxen had perished in such vast numbers on the previous marches that an order was now issued to turn what remained to account by slaughtering the whole, and salting whatever part should be found to exceed the immediate consumption. This measure led to a scene of general banqueting.”²

Battle followed upon battle, and other tribes, such as Bashkirs and the Kirghises, both hereditary enemies of the Tartars, joined the fray. Then, the Russian army came upon them in large numbers and with their heavy artillery. Only small numbers survived, and the emperor of China gave the fugitives asylum. Thus, De Quincey offers a compelling account of the sufferings of innocent civilian populations caught in the conflict between ambitious powers and unscrupulous, self-serving politicians, leading to disaster and testing the endurance of the human spirit, as it continues to do today in several parts of the world.

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By 1816, De Quincy had managed by a vigorous effort to gradually regain self-control, and, by 1820, had become a successful professional writer, but he was never completely free of the opium habit. He became a contributor to several prestigious magazines and a well-respected author in his own right. In 1837, his wife died, and although he was left as the guardian of six children, it appears that he was not too effective in caring for them. He grew increasingly feeble and died in 1859, remembered as one of his century’s great stylists and as the “English opium eater.”

Further reading

1. Thomas DeQuincey. Little Masterpieces. Edited by Bliss Perry, 1902.
2. De Quincey’s Flight of a Tartar Tribe. Scott, Foresman, & Co, 1898.
3. Vincent A De Luca. Satanic Fall and Hebraic Exodus: an interpretation of De Quincey’s “Revolt of the Tartars”. Studies in Romanticism, vol. 8, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 95-108.