Thomas de Quincey and the Malay from an Antique Land

Sometime in the year 1816, the essayist Thomas de Quincey found himself travelling across the northern English countryside in a vain attempt to kick his drug habit, a self-induced malady that had grown increasingly debilitating over the past decade.

During this sojourn in the country, de Quincey tried to free himself from his addiction to laudanum that had gripped him since he began taking the drug in 1804, initially for medicinal purposes, but later for recreational ones. His stay in the country proved to be taxing, as by then he had been chasing the dragon for too long and opium's grip on him was fast and strong. The result of this mortal combat against his wasting addiction proved to be more lasting, and it came in the form of his most famous work, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater that was published anonymously in 1821 in the London Magazine and was released in book form in 1822.

Though critics of the book were severe on its author as well as its contents, it ought to be noted that the Confessions of de Quincey was, and remains, an extraordinary piece of writing – no mere junkie was the man. Written as western Europe was slowly recovering from the trauma of the Napoleonic Wars, there was a timeliness to de Quincey's writing as well, for it spoke to a generation of jaded men who lived through the clash of empires and who had witnessed the transition from revolution to terror to dictatorship. Notwithstanding the repetitive bouts of extreme depression that he suffered, and the tendency for his pen to wander into the realm of the surreal, in his Confessions de Quincey recorded an encounter that would otherwise be consigned to the domain of the extraordinary and out-of-this-world had it not been true: It took place in one of the inns that he had holed up in, in the Lake District of northern England, and he recorded the event thus: ‘One day a Malay knocked on my door.