1. Dream, Writing and Imagination in the 19th Century
Dr Richard Adelman
This lecture will focus on De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)
But it will contextualize this text by looking at early nineteenth-century understandings of the imagination, and of the orient.
I will also be showing you a key example of another closely related opium-induced dream vision from this period…
But we’ll begin with IMAGINATION
Dream, Writing and Imagination in the 19th Century

2. For Coleridge: A distinction between the faculties of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ is very important. Fancy is simply a ‘mechanical process’ (to use M. H. Abrams’ term) which receives ready-made images from the senses, and which reorders them slightly, but which does not fundamentally alter the materials it is given. It is thus, in Coleridge’s terms, ‘a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space’.
Imagination
Imagination (c ) = not simply the clichéd but vague complimentary term it is today…
Its connotations, rather, are best illustrated through Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817).
Bio Glit sums up these decades preoccupation with imagination, and is also highly influential on later thinking…
Such ideas shared by many figures at this period, even when Coleridge’s precise distinctions are not maintained.

3. Imagination, by contrast, doesn’t just receive and reorder
Imagination, by contrast, doesn’t just receive and reorder. It takes images, ideas, etc., and it ‘dissolves, diffuses’, [and] dissipates [them], in order to re-create’ and construct new wholes.
The imagination creates entirely new objects, therefore. It is an organic, creative process and thus like a living plant compared to the simple repetitive machine that is the fancy.
One should also note that imagination is also ‘divine’ for Coleridge (and others). To create in this way is to perform an act akin to God’s acts of creation. To use one’s imagination is to act as divinely as it is possible for man to act.
Imagination
This goes for all nineteenth-century imagination, not just STC…
It is clearly a positive theory of the imagination, and indeed one that we are still living with today.
This is the echo we get in our unthinking positivity about the imagination…

4. Thomas De Quincey b. 1785; d. 1859 Essayist & intellectual
Intimate and admirer of Coleridge & William Wordsworth (though later estranged from both)
Author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), The Logic of Political Economy (1844)
If we now turn to De Q we will see this set of ideas in action…
First, some details on De Q…
…who styles himself as Coleridge with the Confessions

5. Heightened Imagination in the Confessions
And this occupation is also intensely physical, as if imagination becomes both bodily and psychic reality in De Quincey’s narrative:
The waters now changed their character—from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans.  And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the winding up of my case.  Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting.  But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself.  Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this.  Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens—faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.
(De Quincey, Confessions, p. 72.)
Heightened Imagination in the Confessions
That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point—that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams, so that I feared to exercise this faculty; for, as Midas turned all things to gold that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and by a process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams into insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.
(T. De Quincey, Confessions of an English opium-Eater, ed. G. Lindop (OUP: 2008), p. 68.)
Opium thus renders everyday imaginings significantly more potent.
To imagine something is for it to occupy one’s thoughts incessantly.
Opium used for medicinal and recreational purposes widely in this period.
It comes from middle and far-eastern countries (the orient)
The effect of opium is to enhance the workings of the already powerful and transcendent imagination..
Note here FORM: verbose over-precise and over-expressive style of De Q (which makes him hard to quote) serves to cast opium-mind as over-powerful, over-active and extraordinarily intense.
To imagine something is for it to become real.
Then to experience that reality is to be mentally and physically controlled by it…
Powerful but very dangerous…

6. Heightened Imagination & Danger
It is also quite clear in these extracts that excesses of imagination like this are not experienced as entirely pleasant. There is in fact significant danger in these passages…
The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived: I could not be said to recollect them, for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience.  But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantaneously.  I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.  This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have indeed seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true; viz., that the dread book of account which the Scriptures speak of is in fact the mind itself of each individual.  Of this at least I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever, just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas in fact we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn (De Quincey, Confessions, pp )
Powerful but very dangerous…
Such imaginings (and advanced mental powers) stepping on to territory beyond the mortal ken.
Drawing back the veil of the mind’s workings to a shadow world of other possibilities
(Again formal verbosity linked to vast knowledge of human life’s intricacies and mysteries.) ≈

7. Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), The Nightmare (1781).
Let me show you this painting a bit more clearly, because it’s a famous and influential one from this period that captures this association ‘tween imag and nightmare…
For this is a connection that is to be found frequently across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries…
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), The Nightmare (1781).

8. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’ (comp. 1797; pub. 1816)
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton […].   In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto.  And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.’  
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper; instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found to his no small surprise and mortification that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast – but alas! without the after-restoration of the latter[.]
Here’s an important example of this connection that stands very close to De Quincey’s narrative.
De Quincey indeed patterns himself on Coleridge in the Confessions, and many of the resonances of that work are best understood by reference to STC.
Again, dread book of judgement: there are all kinds of things going on in the mind that we don’t have access to…
Confessions something like Kubla Khan in prose…

9. Kubla Khan Kublai Khan (1215-94) Medieval Mongol Conqueror
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately Pleasure-Dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers was girdled ’round, And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But, oh! That deep, romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill, athwart a cedarn cover: A savage place! As holy and enchanted As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her Demon Lover! And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this Earth in fast, thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced, Amid whose swift, half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail; And ’midst these dancing rocks at once and ever, It flung up momently the sacred river! Five miles meandering with ever a mazy motion, Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. And ’mid this tumult, Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the Dome of Pleasure Floated midway on the waves, Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device: A sunny Pleasure-Dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such deep delight ’twould win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome within the air! That sunny dome, those caves of ice, And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry: “Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle ’round him thrice, And close your eyes in holy dread: For he on honeydew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise!”
Medieval Mongol Conqueror
Created first paper currency system
United all of China under his rule
Decrees dome to celebrate the peace he achieved
This is the poem that STC writes.
Let me briefly point out some of its imagery and details, because they are connected to important ideas in the Confessions…
So this is a portrait of the orient, and a eventually dramatizes the poet imagining of the poet-speaker as oriental warrior.
It depicts an incense-laden exotic landscape…
…where even the very ground is alive and sentient.
It therefore associates opium with oriental exoticism and unleashed passions like the demon lover…
Kublai Khan ( )

10. Orientalism
Orient = East (Occident = West)
Nineteenth-century Orient = all the non-Christian civilizations east of Mediterranean
Orientalism = the ways in which the East is thought, imagined, understood.
Said (whose Orientalism was published in 1978) is not talking directly about the East in a physical sense, but about what the East means, represents, and connotes in the West.
In other words, to study British constructions of the Orient is to learn more about British culture than about Oriental culture...
American current Orientalism – Arabs are either oil barrens or terrorists; no complexity to their culture…
British nineteenth-century Orientalism – sexualized, martial, passionate, sinister other, a dark side to European mind…
Former ages had been Hellenists, arguably those living in these decades were Orientalists…
Napoleon invaded Egypt ( ) with a cultural investigation team!
By 1820, Imperial Britain ruled over 26% of the world’s population…
Anxiety of losing identity in such a colonial enterprise…
Said argued (1978) that Orient was a fantasy first, and only after an object of study
…and a way of dominating the east.
Nineteenth-Century Orient = sexual, martial, passionate, sinister, ancient, powerful…
Edward Said ( )
Palestinian-American Literary Theorist

11. Orientalism in De Quincey
I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons. [...] The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time [...]. It contributes much to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. [...] I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. (De Quincey, Confessions, pp )
Opium comes from orient of course…
So this passage gets to the heart of the intense consciousness opium-imagination generates.
It is, like in KK, contact with an ancient other, with that which is barely human but also more human than ourselves.
It is an encounter with timeless/non-civilized humanity – everything we’re not with our progress and individualism….
Hence antediluvian…
officina gentium = workshop of the world

12. Antediluvian (adj.): primitive; belonging to the world before the Flood.
[…] opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive, and with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health.
(De Quincey, Confessions, p. 41.)
To take opium is to be renewed in this sense.
But this is also an engagement with a world that is uncannily Other.
It is to voyage into a completely different world - with all the connotations of danger that carries…
‘The Noble Savage’

13. Summary
Two contexts necessary for reading De Quincey are contemporary conceptions of the imagination and contemporary Orientalism.
This is one of the primary ways academic discourse works: fleshing out a text by reconstructing its historical associations.
De Quincey’s text thus associates opium (and indeed the creative imagination) with the fraught imperial politics of the early nineteenth century.

14. Questions What else is going on in this text that I haven’t mentioned?
How does the imagination here fit with its role in the texts you’ll look at over the next few weeks?
How else does the Orient figure in De Quincey’s text?
How does ‘Kubla Khan’ compare?