De Quincey, Coleridge, and the Literary Model of Habit

Abstract

This essay argues that Thomas De Quincey defines ‘authentic’ opium habituation as the effective management of one’s own personal slavery, and he uses Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a straw man to illustrate the perils of unmanaged, ‘illegitimate’ opium use. In essays from the 1820s, ’30s and ’40s and in the enlarged 1856 edition of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey re-imagines Coleridge (and his habits) as alternate versions of Marley’s Ghost from A Christmas Carol, as Caliban “fretting his very heart-strings against the rivets of his chain,” and as a squabbling “Transcendental Philosopher” engaged in farcical debate with boys at a druggist’s shop. De Quincey constructs what I term a literary model of habit – one that redeploys the supernatural, the exotic, and the comically absurd in texts from Shakespeare to Dickens to textualize ready-made images of cultural anxieties about habit. The literary model of habit constitutes a philological pre-history for addiction, one that underwrites Louise Foxcroft’s recent “Making” of addiction and Susan Zieger’s “Invention” of the addict during the nineteenth century.