The 1856 revision has much to recommend it, especially in how it fills in the details of De Quincey’s childhood motives and methods (and, most significantly, his early struggles with health), but rather than standing as an autonomous and completed masterpiece, the revised version works more as a lengthy and often tedious explication of the more lively and imperfect 1821 version. De Quincey was working from a severely corrupted printing of the text during his revision (it was the only copy he could get his hands on), and he both cleans up some of its mistakes and enriches certain sections and passages, but mostly he just adds enormous chunks of material to the beginning and sews it all together into a kind of lopsided Frankenstein’s monster.
It’s often fascinating to read the intricate details of how his early life worked, but the digressions are now often intolerably dull and pointless and in fact make De Quincey much less of a sympathetic character than before. The passage of time has allowed him to name many names that were left out of the original version, and this occasionally affords De Quincey the chance to draw richer portraits and to make more complete connections for the reader, but it also causes him to aim torrents of abuse at people who he feels have wronged him, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was also an opium addict and who criticized De Quincey after the first edition of the Confessions appeared—a criticism that results in astonishingly frequent, involved, and vitriolic reprisals in the revised Confessions. Conversely, De Quincey’s adoring passages about Wordsworth’s world and works paint an incomparable portrait of the Lake District and provide some of the book’s richest and most rewarding passages.
