"Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," Thomas de Quincey

There are two versions of this book; I read the first edition, which is the comparatively straightforward tale of a boy, his adventures roughing it in early 1800s London, and his addiction to opium. The second edition was greatly expanded because de Quincey was not the type to pay his bills and he needed something to hook the readers in a second time, I suppose. Therefore there are long sections about the grandeur of the Whispering Gallery and so on.

De Quincey is a "philosopher," which means that he will go off on his favorite subjects (David Ricardo, how exactly he got a friend to help him raise money with a Jewish moneylender, why doctors are wrong about the effects of opium) at any time. Reading this style of memoir was a pleasant break from the modern addiction memoir, where the addict is generally so horribly enslaved that you never hear about anything else other than their sufferings. Maybe de Quincey was boring to his contemporaries, though, and I just find him interesting because he's quaint to me. I'm sure that Coleridge and Wordsworth flipped through the pages til they got to the good parts, where he freaks out and sees crocodiles trying to eat his walls.