Opium-Eater

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 330, 19 October 1945, Page 8

Opium-Eater

‘THOMAS DE QUINCEY was the subject of the latest in the BBC’s "Have You Read?" series at 3YA. The presentation, however, was concerned more with his opium habits than his literary

position-though the material used came presumably from his "Confessions of an Opium-Eater." The dramatisation of an opium dream was highly effective and must have been entertaining and instructive for psycho-analysts; but I wonder how adequate this picture of de Quincey’s character really was. The mild and innocent scholar with the terrifying secret life-so that Carlyle was heard to say, with less than his usual Ecclefechan accent you-could-spin-a-bawbee-on "this child has been in hell-was movingly shown and is a historical reality; but what was not made clear was where we should fit into this: picture the de Quincey who wrote "Murder as One of the Fine Arts,’ with his grisly sense of humour so characteristic of that. midVictorian London of the last gallows and the first gaslighting, with its fogs and footpads and chimes and Chamber of Horrors-the scene of some of. the best bloodcurdlers in the language from Dickens to Conan Doyle. De Quincey nearly starved in that London and wrote finely about it; but the grim sardonic and yet childish delight in blood and gore, so very Cockney, perhaps a necessary protection against life in such a city -the humour of Sweeney Todd and

Sam Weller, of the policeman made into sausages and "has anyone seen the ser-geant?"-all this the de Quincey programme, not having world enough or time, left out of its account of him; so that the picture is not really complete.