about the pitching and rolling of these
cross-Atlantic ships, and so he carried
with him a medicine chest filled with
laudanum, ether, and sal volatile. In the
event, however, he found that baked
apples were the best precaution against
sea-sickness." (Ackroyd, 1009)
In only three of Dickens's novels I have
found allusions to opium/laudanum. What
struck me is that these references are all
non-medical except for one, perhaps, and
have rather negative or even sinister
connotations.
In the Pickwick Papers there are two
references to laudanum as a sleeping-
draught, once in connection with election
fraud in Eatanswill:
The night afore the last day o'
the last election here, the opposition party
bribed the barmaid at the Town Arms to
hocus the brandy-and-water of fourteen
unpolled electors as was stoppin' in the
house.'
'What do you mean by hocussing brandy-
and water?" inquired Mr Pickwick.
'Putting laud'num in it.' replied Sam.
'Blessed if she didn't send 'em all to sleep
till twelve hours after the election was
over. They took one man up to the booth
in a truck, fast asleep, by way of
experiment, but it was no go - they
wouldn't poll him; so they brought him
back and put him to bed again.'"
(PP, 84)
Some twenty pages later Sam Weller
brings up the subject of laudanum again:
There's nothin' so refreshin' as sleep, sir,
as the servant-girl said afore she drank
the egg-cup-full o' laudanum." (PP, 106)
Then there is Captain Hawdom aka
'Nemo' in Bleak House, the one-time lover
of Lady Dedlock and the father of Esther
Summerson. He works as a law-writer for
Mr Snagsby, a law-stationer. Nemo copies
a few affidavits for Mr Tulkinghorn, Sir
Dedlock's sollicitor. Lady Dedlock
recognizes the hand
writing and asks questions about the law-
writer, so Mr Tulkinghorn, somehow
having vague suspicions about Mylady,
goes looking for him. Mr Snagsby leads
Tulkinghorn to Nemo's lodgings, the
house of Krook, a marine-store dealer.
Tulkinghorn walks up into a dismal room
and finds Nemo a dead man. He sends for
a doctor. "Here's poison by the bed," says
Krook in ch. 11. Allan Woodcourt, a
doctor, who will eventually marry Esther,
comes in and explains that the poison is
opium: "He has purchased opium from me
for the last year and a half... He has died
from an overdose of opium, there is no
doubt. The room is strongly flavoured
with it. There is enough here now to kill a
dozen people." "Do you think he did it on
purpose?" Krooks asks.... "I can't say. I
should think it unlikely as he has been in
the habit of taking so much. But nobody
can tell." And that is that, no further
reference throughout the book. A simple
way to introduce a character whose sole
importance lies in the past and whose sole
function is as a body in the graveyard.
But why opium, where consumption or
cholera would have done?
In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, opium
features rather more explicitly: John
Jasper, Edwin's uncle, is an opium
smoker and also an opium eater. "I have
been taking opium for a pain - an agony
that sometimes overcomes me," he
explains to Edwin in ch. 2. (In this article
I shall not discuss the possibility of
Jasper's being a thug, because I find this
a doubtful theory and have nothing to add
to it.) The book starts with a description
of a London opium den, where Jasper
wakes from his stupor. The opium dens in
Ratcliffe Highway were a favourite
excursion of Dickens's and he took several
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