De Quincey ran away from school at seventeen, spent a destitute winter on the London streets, and took his first laudanum for toothache - and then wrote the book that told Europe what opium does to a mind. The confession is half autobiography, half prose-poem: the pains, the pleasures, and the architecture of dreams that Piranesi could have drawn. It is the ancestor of every addiction memoir written since. Sixty plates from Doré to Redon follow the dream-architecture of the confession through portraits, London interiors and mountain landscapes of 1840 to 1905.