I just finished reading Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) by Thomas De Quincey. This is a delightful little autobiographical book. A good chunk of it is a memoir of De Quincy’s youth, and includes an interesting description of his time living on the streets of London as a runaway. 

The remaining segments of the book deal more directly with his use of opium and subsequent descent into debilitating addiction. Some of the passages concerning his dreams and nightmares are particularly vivid. 

The text is peppered with Latin and Greek and frequent allusions to art and literature. The reader encounters interesting bits of history and glimpses of English society at the end of the Georgian era. This particular joy can be expanded by doing some research on the side and following the footnote breadcrumbs. 

“And now, reader, we have run through all the ten categories of my condition, as it stood about 1816-17: up to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to have been a happy man: and the elements of that happiness I have endeavoured to place before you, in the above sketch of the interior of a scholar’s library, in a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter evening.”