Literature lovers! Join a talk exploring how, in opposition to his highly romanticised accounts of drug use and abuse in Confessions of English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey, in his letters, tells a sadder, grittier, and far more unnerving story of opiate addiction.

Professor Robert Morrison has spent much of the last five years in Bath, where he is British Academy Global Professor at Bath Spa University. The primary focus of his research during this time has been finding hitherto unknown letters written by Thomas De Quincey (including two in the Bath Record Office), and then travelling to the archives (or to the location of private collections) to transcribe them. To date he has found almost 300 De Quincey letters that he knew nothing about when the project began. Once collected and thoroughly annotated, The Letters of Thomas De Quincey will be published in two volumes by Oxford University Press.