Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, credited to Thomas de Quincey, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas de Quincey. Read by Martin Geeson. “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!” Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memories, temporal digressions and random anecdotes, the Confessions is a work of immense sophistication and certainly one of the most impressive and influential of all autobiographies. The work is of great appeal to the contemporary reader, displaying a nervous (postmodern?) self-awareness, a spiralling obsession with the enigmas of its own composition and significance. De Quincey may be said to scrutinise his life, somewhat feverishly, in an effort to fix his own identity. The title seems to promise a graphic exposure of horrors; these passages do not make up a large part of the whole. The circumstances of its hasty composition sets up the work as a lucrative piece of sensational journalism, albeit published in a more intellectually respectable organ – the London Magazine – than are today’s tawdry exercises in tabloid self-exposure. What makes the book technically remarkable is its use of a majestic neoclassical style applied to a very romantic species of confessional writing - self-reflexive but always reaching out to the Reader. (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
• Author credits: Thomas de Quincey
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 16
• Listed recording duration: 5:21:43

Catalogue topics

• memoir
• autobiography
• confessional

Track guide

1. 01 - To the Reader — 12:55
2. 02 - 'These preliminary confessions...' — 20:49
3. 03 - 'So blended and intertwisted...' — 21:05
4. 04 - 'Soon after this I contrived...' — 27:20
5. 05 - 'Soon after the period of the last...' — 22:35
6. 06 - 'I dally with my subject...' — 16:04
7. 07 - 'So then, Oxford Street...' — 19:44
8. 08 - 'And therefore, worthy doctors...' — 15:30
9. 09 - 'The late Duke of --- used to...' — 20:35
10. 10 - 'Courteous, and I hope indulgent...' — 18:03
11. 11 - 'If any man, poor or rich...' — 26:38
12. 12 - 'As when some great painter...' — 17:30
13. 13 - 'I have thus described and illustrated...' — 15:48
14. 14 - 'Many years ago when I was...' — 17:37
15. 15 - June 1819 — 20:29
16. 16 - Appendix: December 1822 — 29:04

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.