De Quincey was well read in the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and assimilated influences and models from Sir Thomas Browne and other writers.

that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood....De Quincey modelled this passage on the apostrophe "O eloquent, just and mightie Death!"

[6] Earlier, in The Pleasures of Opium, De Quincey describes the long walks he took through the London streets under the influence of the drug: Some of these rambles led me to great distances; for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motions of time.

And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen.

Since there was little systematic study of narcotics until long after his death, De Quincey's account assumed an authoritative status and actually dominated the scientific and public views of the effects of opium for several generations.

"[11] The fear of reckless imitation was not groundless: several English writers—Francis Thompson, James Thomson, William Blair, and perhaps Branwell Brontë—were led to opium use and addiction by De Quincey's literary example.

When the 1821 original was printed in book form the following year, he added an appendix on the withdrawal process; and he inserted significant material on the medical aspects of opium into his 1856 revision.