OPIUM AND THE VICTORIANS
Nineteenth-Century Opiate Use and Class-Consciousness
As a rule, nineteenth-century authors
did not write about opiate use as
frequently as about the consumption
of alcohol. Yet opium was an every
day cure-all for all classes. The
negative attitude towards working-
class opiate use was a reaction to the
altered structure of society.
Josee Koning
Rereading Edwin Drood made me curious
about the use of opium in nineteenth-
century England. Because of the evil
atmosphere in Princess Puffer's opium
den and John Jasper's furtive behaviour,
I assumed that opiate use was a vice one
would do well to carefully keep secret.
But, once again, reality turned out to be
more amazing than fiction. The Victorian
use of opium was wide-spread and, at
least initially, generally accepted. Opium
was fairly cheap and could be sold and
bought by anybody who wanted to. Until
the 1868 Pharmacy Act there were no
restrictions on wholesailing and retailing
opium, and even after the Act had been
passed restrictions were still quite
minimal. Opium was so much part of
Victorian life that even Charles Palliser,
in his much-applauded Victorian' novel
The Quincunx (1990), saw fit to have John
Huffam's mother become dependent on
laudanum (a mixture of opium and
alcohol). She starts using it when they
stay at the former governess Miss
Quilliam's room. "They call it the poor
man's friend," Miss Quilliam tells John,
"for it brings sweet solace when either the
body or the mind is in pain. It has saved
me often. I take only three or four grains
now." The Quincunx, 341)
One of Dickens's most intimate friends,
Wilkie Collins, used laudanum originally
against rheumatic pains and continued to
take it for the rest of his life. Miss Gwilt,
the evil force in Collins's Sensation novel
Armadale (1866), is is addicted to
laudanum. The Moonstone (1868),
published serially in All the Year Round
and edited by Dickens, was written under
the influence of opium and features an
opium addict, Ezra Jennings. Dickens
thought the construction of The
Moonstone "wearisome beyond
endurance", as he told Wills, his sub
editor, but this opinion is largely to be
contributed to the estrangement between
Dickens and Collins for family reasons.
Dickens occasionally took laudanum
himself. Fleeing cholera-stricken
Boulogne in August 1856, the Channel
crossing did not agree with Dickens. "It
was Dickens's habit to take a dose of
laudanum on such occasions, to steady his
stomach and no doubt his nerves, and it
seems in later years that laudanum...
became for him something of a necessary
palliative" (Ackroyd, 772). During and
after his last reading tour in America, he
took laudanum occasionally against
sleeplessness, and in order to reduce
stresses and mitigate neuralgic pains,
"but we do not need to presume that he
was an 'addict' (all the evidence works
against such a presumption)" (Ackroyd,
1052.) Sailing on the 'Cuba' to the United
States, he was "not entirely sanguine
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