From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood’s and the London Magazine

Abstract

The publication of Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium- Eater’ in the London Magazine in the autumn of 1821 led to a flurry of confessional writing in the pages of the London and its chief rival, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. 1 De Quincey, in fact, had originally intended his ‘Opium article’ for the Scottish journal, but had quarrelled with William Blackwood and was now cementing his position as a London contributor. Ironically, less than a year earlier he had been hostile to the London and had encouraged Blackwood’s in the conflict between the two journals that was to lead to the death of the London’s editor, John Scott, following a mismanaged duel at Chalk Farm in February 1821. The guilt that imbues the ‘Confessions’ may have had something to do with this tragedy. Certainly, as critics have shown, the magazine context is significant to understanding De Quincey’s two-part article, the importance of which was recognized by Blackwood’s.2 Robert Morrison has argued that its publication of ‘Selections of Mr Coleridge’s Literary Correspondence with Friends, and Men of Letters’ in October 1821 was a response to De Quincey.3 And the ‘Opium Eater’ was to become a significant character in the series of Noctes Ambrosianae that began in March 1822. However, this essay uncovers the significance of a hitherto unexplored Blackwood’s parody of his ‘Confessions’: the anonymous ‘Confessions of an English Glutton’, published in January 1823.4 An analysis of this fascinating text, and its intertextual relations, reveals how confessional writing self-consciously addresses the authorial duplicity and multiple identities that characterized the magazines of the period, and uses addiction as a figure for the violence, rhetorical and real, of late Romantic literary culture.