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 22

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The Dutch Dickensian | 1991 | | pagina 23