Among the earliest artistic descriptions of the hallucinogenic experience in European literature, the four pieces in this volume document Gautier’s and Baudelaire’s own involvement in the Club of Assassins, who met under the auspices of Dr Moreau to investigate the mind-enhancing effects of hashish, wine and opium.

As well as providing an absorbing account of nineteenth-century drug use, Hashish, Wine, Opium captures the spirit of French Romanticism in its struggle to free the mind from the shackles of the humdrum and the conventional, and serves as a fascinating prologue to the psychedelic literature of the following century.

Contains: The Opium Pipe, The Club of Assassins and Hashish by Théophile Gautier and Wine and Hashish by Charles Baudelaire

Also available The Flowers of Evil, presented here in a dual-language edition, with extra material, notes and bibliography and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey