London: George Redway, 1884

16mo, pp. 114, 6pp. advertisements bound in at rear. Original printed wrappers, lettered in red and black to front panel. In a folding cloth chemise and morocco-backed slipcase. Ownership signature dated 1920 to front wrapper. Binding shaken, spine darkened, and with a little staining and chipping to extremities.

First edition. One of the publisher’s Redway’s Shilling Series.

Anonymously published, Confessions of an English Hachish Eater is now thought to be the work of the journalist William Laird Clowes [1856-1905]. In 1877 Clowes published an article entitled An Amateur Assassin in Belgravia magazine in which he discusses his experience of taking hashish; many of that article’s phrases and formulations reappear in this book.

Clowes worked as a journalist for the Army and Navy Gazette, specialising in naval matters: for some years he edited the Naval Pocket Book, and published several works of naval history. But the navy was not his only area of interest: in the 1890s he wrote several articles for The Times about racial tension in the southern states of the US.

Confessions of an English Hachish Eater attracted some critical attention on publication, but quickly fell into obscurity. Divided into five sections, it details the history, preparation and consumption of hashish before moving on to ‘dream-stories’, in which the author recounts his own experiences with the drug.

As Gregory Stephenson notes in his essay ‘Curious and Not Un-Poetical Imaginings’: A Forgotten Specimen of Victorian Cannabis Writing: ‘The booklet has never been reprinted, nor has it ever been excerpted or cited in any of the various anthologies of cannabis or drug writings. Copies (even in library collections) are exceedingly rare.’