Thomas De Quincey
One of the best-known works by Thomas De Quincey (Manchester,1785-1859), who was from a wealthy family, speaks of urban poverty.
Considering that the act of walking is an integral part of wandering, drifting and psychogeographic exploration, it is important to remember that De Quincey, when he was 16, developed a passion for walking, also prompted by his mother, who saw walking as a great exercise for Thomas' health.
This is a further paradox in the life of De Quincey, who went from a salutary strolling act to anything but a salutary act of strolling as an opium eater.
It can be said that "Confessions of an Opium Eater" is a forerunner of the theses introduced by situationist psychogeography and that De Quincey, as stated by Merlin Coverley, could be described as the first psychogeography practitioner, even before psychogeography was born.
The novel's protagonist wanders (adrift) around the city and lets his imagination go so that it builds the perception of the surrounding environment.
In this context, opium is not a drug but a catalyst.
It allows him to explore the extremes of his imagination and pushes him to nocturnal walks of pure perception.
"Thus I have shown that opium does not of necessity produce inactivity or torpor, but that, on the contrary, it often led me into markets and theatres. Yet, in candour, I will admit that markets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment. In that state, crowds become an oppression to him; music even, too sensual and gross."
(Howard, Bradley. Illustrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: (pp.57-58), Kindle Edition)
Coverley calls De Quincey an obsessive wanderer and, as such, the forerunner of the psychogeographic explorer.
"I could almost have believed at times that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terræ incognitæ, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities, moral and intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience."
(Howard, Bradley. Illustrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: (pp.57-58), Kindle Edition)
In Internationale Situationniste # 3, December 1959, in the article "Unitary Urbanism at the end of the 1950s", the author (defined as "unattributed"), refers to a passage from De Quincey's book and attributes the role of ".... precursor of the derive ......". (https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/unitary.html, accessed on 21/09/2022)
"Some of these rambles led me to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion 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 head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen."
(Howard, Bradley. Illustrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: (pp.57-58), Kindle Edition)
The north-west passage is a metaphor for the discovery of secret and unknown places in urban space (in this case London) and this quote will in turn be quoted by Debord in "Psycogeographical Venice, 1957: Debord also declares his admiration for De Quincey who, more than 100 years earlier, had performed acts as ".... undeniable precursor to psychogeographical derives ...."
(https://libcom.org/history/psychogeographical-venice, accessed on 21/09/2022)
Debord draws on the theme of the "north-west passage" to make some considerations:
"......Perhaps there exists a more irrational tendency, a tendency to expect the discovery of a kind of psychogeographical Great Passage, beyond which we will attain mastery of a new game: the adventures of our lives themselves......."
(https://libcom.org/history/psychogeographical-venice, accessed on 21/09/2022)
Here Debord reaffirms the centrality of an essential factor for the full exercise of geographical exploration: individualism.
This is a concept that emerges well before Debord's conceptualizations, for example with William Blake's epic wandering.