Confessions of an English Opium-eater.

  • Romanticism
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Title
Confessions of an English Opium-eater.
Reference
WLMS A / De Quincey, Thomas / ADMS / 2
Date
September 1821
Author
De Quincey, Thomas
Physical Description
A notebook bound in half calf with some gold ruling, the spine stamped in gold 'CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM EATER:DE QUINCEY.-ORIG.MS.'. The front pastedown endpaper carries the bookplate of the fifth Earl of Rosebery, and the flyleaf is stamped 'BARNBOUGLE CASTLE CATALOGUE'. The text throughout is in De Quincey's hand, but there are a few pencilled revisions in the hand of John Taylor, editor of the London Magazine, where on leaf 4 he has scrawled 'Bourgeois as the rest', to indicate that the article was to be set in a small 'bourgeois' typeface. A number of printers' markings in black ink indicate the beginnings and ends of compositors' 'takes' and showing that the manuscript served as a printers copy. The material for the most part is a fair copy, save for leaf 19, a scribbled note, and it may not apply to leaves 4 and 18, which are retrospective insertions into material already copied. The manuscript consists of 27 leaves, of which leaves 1 and 2, 5 and 6, 7, and 8, 21 and 22 are germinate, all the others being single sheets. The leaves show a variety of papers and vary a little in size, ranging, with two exceptions, between 180 and 185mm in width and between 222 and 228mm in height. The exceptions are leaf 18, which measures 153mm in width and 187m in heigh, and leaf 19, which is a small irregular fragment approximately 105mm wide by 66mm high. The paper is white and written in black ink on both sides, with the exception of leaves 9 and 19, whose versos are blank. There are only two watermarks in the whole manuscript: leaf 17 has 'SS 1817' and leaf 26 is watermarked 'G & R TURNER'. Four of the sheets have stationers' embossed devices: leaves 1, 3 and 5 have a crown with 'BATH' below it, and leaf 4 has a circular stamp enclosing a fleur-de-lys and an inscription of which only S AND COMPANY LONDON can be made out.