Politics and Political Economy

Thomas De Quincey began writing extensively in order to support his family. Autobiography served as a basis for such famous works as Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Suspiria de Profundis, both of which addressed many of the hardships of his life. De Quincey began using opium and laudanum as painkillers while he was at Oxford, developing an addiction which stayed with him, at varying levels of severity, for years. A friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, De Quincey wrote criticism of the former's poetry, and lived with both poets in England's Lake District for several years.