Lit Med. 2020;38(1):1-25. doi: 10.1353/lm.2020.0001.
What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in De Quincey's Confessions as a crucial bridge between Romantic sublimity, in which it purportedly acted as a mysterious technology for self-strengthening, and Victorian consumerism, when the drug became both a popular commodity among national and global users.
《英国鸦片吸食者的自白》（1821 年）能在多大程度上说明德昆西对第一次鸦片战争的后期支持？德昆西和其他同时代的英国人对鸦片使用的描述在多大程度上影响了 19 世纪 30 年代和 40 年代之间将身体能量和国家力量进行隐喻性联系的方式？本文将《自白》与约翰·布朗（John Brown）1780 年的论文《医学要素》（Elements of Medicine）并列，认为德昆西通过将英国浪漫主义中的精神特殊性转化为医学身体与来自中国和“东方”的内部能量和外部刺激的联系，将鸦片吸食“国家化”。本文的结论是，在德昆西的《自白》中，鸦片是浪漫主义崇高的重要桥梁，在其中它据称是一种神秘的自我强化技术，而在维多利亚时代，这种药物成为了国家和全球使用者的一种流行商品。
