The opium wars
of his friends to see them. After he had
started writing Edwin Drood, he went
back to them.
Attention had been drawn to the growing
Chinese community in England when, in
the 1860s, the Prince of Wales visited the
London East End and an opium den in
that locality. Conflicting descriptions of
opium dens were subsequently published.
Dickens was the first to emphasize the
links with mystery and evil, the
degrading and demoralizing effect the
drug had on the smokers, both Chinese
and English.
What was Dickens's attitude towards
opiate use? It is not possible, I think, to
deduce anything from these few
references to opium. The mysterious
emphasis may be ascribed to the
popularity of socalled 'Sensational' fiction,
a fair amount of which was published in
All The Year Round. Or it might be
significant that Dickens started writing
Edwin Drood after the 1868 Pharmacy
Act had been passed; opium was now
officially one of fifteen poisons selected for
control. Then again, the impression of
decay and corruption we get from
Dickens's description of the opium den
may have had private reasons.
Between 1780 and 1860 only a handful of
Chinese lived in England and East-End
opium dens must have been practically
non-existent when Dickens was young,
but the association of opiate use per se
with human misery and degradation may
come from childhood memories of the
blacking warehouse and/or the
Marshalsea. However, it is just as
possibly that Dickens, having used
laudanum for about twelve years,
concurred with the words he had Princess
Puffer say to Dick Datchery:
"It's opium, deary. Neither more
nor less. And it's like a human creetur so
far, that you always hear what can be
said against it, but seldom what can be
said in its praise." {ED, 254)
In any case, the fact that in the three
above-mentioned novels he has connected
opiate use with members of middle-class
society, unpolled electors (passively), a
military officer and a choir-master, was
not in accordance with the Zeitgeist:
middle-class opiate use and addiction
went generally unremarked and was
tolerated, even for socalled 'stimulant'
purposes. It was working-class opiate use
that, from the 1830s onwards, received a
lot of negative attention. But before I go
into that, I shall give some factual
information on the use of and attitude
towards opium in Victorian England.
Before Columbus landed in America,
Europe was an alcohol-only culture, but
within two centuries after that it had
been converted into a multi-drug culture:
Wherever the European explorers set
their sails, they found mind-affecting
drugs and brought them home. Tobacco
was discovered on Columbus's first
voyage; cocaine was found in South
America; caffeine and LSD-like drugs
were scattered all over the world. During
the next two hundred years, the
Europeans not only started using caffeine
and nicotine, they also spread them
everywhere.
Opium was the cause of two Anglo-
Chinese wars: In the seventeenth century
the British East India Trading Company
had secured trading rights from the
Mogul emperor. The emperor's contractor
was willing to sell opium for export. The
Company shipped it to Canton, where it
had come to be used as a non-medical
drug in the late seventeenth century. It
was banned by Peking, however, in 1729
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