Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

The title promises confession, and the narrator keeps circling it instead, apologizing for whatever he declines to share; one reader calls the result “not intimate as the title would lead one to believe.” Structure compounds the problem: a critic notes plainly that “you have to wait until you’re about three-quarters of the way through” before the actual Pains of Opium material arrives, after long stretches of schoolboy memoir and Latin tags. A reviewer wraps up the narrator in four words: “This man was very impressed with himself.” The prose habit that grates most is a single word repeated past reason; one reviewer counts that “he uses a word ‘viz.’ about 10,000 times.” Companion pieces bundled into fuller editions fare worse still, with The English Mail-Coach dismissed by more than one reader as barely readable.