Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Thomas De Quincey · 1821
The first great addiction narrative in English, and a formal experiment: gothic, dream-saturated, willing to go to the darkest places. Influenced Poe, Baudelaire, and the entire confessional essay tradition.
The case against
De Quincey delays the drug for half the book while he tours his schooldays and his London destitution, and once it arrives the Pleasures get loving rhetoric while the Pains get organ-toned dream prose and no honest accounting. The Latinate style is a fog bank. He revised it in 1856 and made it longer, which tells you his governing instinct.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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