Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Census confirmed. The Confessions first appeared anonymously in serial form in The London Magazine, September and October 1821; the anonymous Taylor and Hessey book of 1822 is the first edition in book form and is the collected first. There is no UK-versus-US precedence contest for the first edition — it is a London book, and American printings follow. The 1856 revision is a genuine 'first thus' trap and a distinct text: preparing the first collected edition of his works for Edinburgh publisher James Hogg, De Quincey undertook a large-scale revision that more than doubled the length of the Confessions, and that revised text first appeared in Volume V of 'Selections Grave and Gay, from Writings Published and Unpublished, of Thomas De Quincey' (Edinburgh: James Hogg; London: R. Groombridge & Sons, 1856). Most critics hold the 1822 original artistically superior to the digressive 1856 expansion. A copy of the 1856 revised text is the first edition of that text only, never of the work.