The Opium Eaters – A Work in Progress

If anyone was wondering, this is what I'm currently writing. This project grew out of a panel I spoke on at The Bradford Literature Festival in 2019... THE OPIUM EATERS: High Literature and the Art of Addiction (Morton Books) When the brilliant Oxford drop-out and freelance journalist Thomas De Quincey published his seminal article ‘Confessions of…

Drugs and Addiction in Romantic Literature

That drugs might be used to aid the creative process remains a contentious issue to this day, but during the period under consideration social attitudes towards narcotics were quite different. In 1790, for example, the clergyman and poet George Crabbe was plagued by vertigo and fearful of apoplexy; his physician prescribed opium, which the author…