Doctors continued to prescribe laudanum pills for much of the seventeenth century, until Thomas Sydenham produced his famous recipe for liquid laudanum, which contained two ounces of strained opium, one ounce of saffron, a dram each of cinnamon and cloves, and a pint of Canary wine. A Puritan who fought on Cromwell’s side in the Civil War, Sydenham is honoured as the ‘English Hippocrates’ and the ‘prince of English physicians’. Prescribing liquid laudanum for dysentery and many other conditions, Sydenham declared his gratitude that ‘Omnipotent GOD, the Giver of all good Things has not provided any other Remedy for the Relief of wretched Man, which is so able to quell more Disease, or more effectually to extirpate them, than Opiate Medicines taken from some Species of Poppies’. His tincture might not work any better than the pills sold in shops, but the drug was more convenient and easier to control, ‘for it may be dropp’d into Wine, or into any distilled Water, or into any other Liquor’.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opiates were freely available in a variety of liquid and solid preparations, with different recommended doses for men and women of varying strengths. There were then no recommended doses for juveniles, although soothing opiate tinctures for children were common in Victorian times, with comforting names such as Godfrey’s Cordial, McMunn’s Elixir, Batley’s Sedative Solution, and Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. Among the wonder drug’s most enthusiastic supporters was the slightly mad Dr John Jones, who published The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d in 1700. While perfectly aware of the dangers of over-indulgence, and of the distressing effects of trying to break the habit ‘after long and lavish use’, Jones waxed dangerously eloquent on the ‘heavenly Condition’ produced by a moderate dose of opium taken internally.
It causes a most agreeable, pleasant, and charming Sensation about the Region of the Stomach, which if one lies, or sits still, diffuses it self in a kind of indefinite manner, seizing one not unlike the gentle, sweet Deliquium that we find upon our entrance into a most agreeable Slumber, which, upon yielding to it, generally ends in Sleep.
If one kept active, by contrast, especially after a good night’s rest, ‘it seems . . . like a most delicious and extraordinary Refreshment of the Spirits upon very good News, or any other great cause of Joy, as the sight of a dearly beloved Person, &c. thought to have been lost at Sea’.
The pleasures and perils of opium consumption featured in travellers’ tales throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From his travels in Persia at the time of Shah ‘Abbas II and his son Suleiman I, the Frenchman Jean Chardin reported that opium-taking was near universal in Persia as an acceptable alternative to wine, especially popular among eminent personages wishing to escape the burdens of state. Turkey was similarly afflicted, according to Baron de Tott, who travelled through the Turkish Empire and the Crimea during one of its periodic wars with Russia and relayed the strange antics of the opium eaters in Constantinople, where – as in Persia – opium was taken in the form of pills. In a nightly ritual at a row of little shops by the market square, customers would seat themselves on sofas shaded by trees, swallowing their pills with water, then waiting for them to take effect. After an hour at most these ‘Automatons’ would become animated, throwing themselves ‘into a thousand different Postures, but always extravagant, and always merry. This is the moment when the Scene becomes most interesting; all the Actors are happy, and each returns home in a state of total Irrationality, but likewise in the entire and full enjoyment of Happiness not to be procured by Reason.’
However colourful their reports, travellers such as Chardin and Baron de Tott were mere spectators of the strange effects opium produced on others. In a growing corpus of drug literature, other authors offered insights into the experience itself, among them the strange impostor ‘George Psalmanazar’, who presented himself as the first native of Formosa (Taiwan) to visit Europe, although he was probably a French Catholic from Languedoc or Provence, describing in his posthumously published memoirs how he had successfully cut back his laudanum addiction to the lowest possible dose. But the classic story of opium addiction and withdrawal belongs to Thomas de Quincey, the English essayist and minor English Romantic figure, best known for his admiration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, serialized in the London Magazine in 1821, which became an immediate best-seller when it appeared in book form the following year.
In common with many of his contemporaries, de Quincey began taking laudanum for a physical condition, in his case excruciating rheumatic pain experienced in 1804. Unlike Coleridge, whose gentler, laudanum-fuelled visions resulted in a tantalizing fragment of just fifty-four lines, depicting Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure-dome in Xanadu, de Quincey succeeded in turning his opium habit into the central narrative of his life. Focusing on opium’s ‘fascinating power’, he explains in his meandering Confessions how he fell prey to the drug and how he brought his habit under control, aiming ‘to display the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or pain’.
For many readers now, the chief pleasures of de Quincey’s Confessions lie in their opium-induced visions and dreams – at first confusingly architectural in their cities and palaces as if designed by Piranesi, crowded with dancing ladies, and later ‘unimaginable’ in their horror as the scenes shift to Egypt, India and China, where
I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets [sic], by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
While laudanum gave Coleridge the desire to float like the Indian god Vishnu ‘along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus’, opium provoked in de Quincey a nightmare of sensations and dislocated experiences that struck a particular chord with the French. There are echoes of de Quincey in the prose poems written by the iconoclastic French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who renounced poetry at the age of nineteen and became a gunrunner in Abyssinia. Two other French poets translated de Quincey’s Confessions: Alfred de Musset in 1828 and, more memorably, Charles Baudelaire in Les Paradis Artificiels of 1860, three years after the first edition of his Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal). Opium features among Baudelaire’s poems, too, in the guise of a poison rather than a flower, while the dramatist Jean Cocteau would later write his own account of recovering from opium addiction. ‘To lecture an opium addict,’ he wrote, ‘is like saying to Tristan: “Kill Isolde. You will feel much better afterwards.”’
Of all French artists, de Quincey’s most direct influence was on the Romantic composer Hector Berlioz, who composed his Symphonie Fantastique in a six-week frenzy of creativity in early spring, 1830. Like his English counterpart, Berlioz knew laudanum’s dream-inducing euphoria at first hand, having experienced its alternating bouts of exhilaration and depression for a year or more. Then the deadlock broke and he found a way to formalize the delirium of his brain. After the unrequited love portrayed in the first three movements, Berlioz mirrors de Quincey in having his protagonist take opium, achieving not the death he had intended but a horrific vision in which he believes he has murdered his beloved and witnessed his own execution. In the final movement, his beloved returns as a vulgar courtesan to take part in her victim’s funeral in a swirling witches’ Sabbath that might have stepped out of Goethe’s Faust. A succès de scandale after its first performance at the Paris Conservatoire, the symphony soon fed back into the world of literature, celebrated particularly by the Club des Haschischins whose members includ
ed French literati such as Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire, all dedicated to the study of drug-induced experiences.
By now the French were more taken with hashish than opium, but in Britain and North America, opium and especially laudanum remained the drug of choice to soothe society’s sorrows and pains, and to inspire the visions of its artistic elite, as it had since the eighteenth century. Even if the reasons for taking it were medicinal in origin, patterns of addiction or near addiction were established that often continued through life. Those known to have taken opium or its derivatives included Clive of India (for a painful bowel condition); Lady Stafford, a contemporary of Horace Walpole (to fire her wit); the anti-slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce (initially for a serious gastro-intestinal illness); George III and George IV (the latter to curb the irritation provoked by his excessive drinking); Elizabeth Barrett Browning (her frail health is often attributed to the repeated use of opiates from an early age); Edgar Allan Poe (disputed); Florence Nightingale (on her return from the Crimea); Wilkie Collins (in almost constant pain from rheumatic fever, he built laudanum into the plot of The Moonstone); the Virginian planter and congressman, John Randolph; the actress Sarah Bernhardt (to counter the exhaustion of long performances); and Louisa May Alcott, the fêted author of Little Women. Most of the Romantic poets are on record as experimenting with opium except William Wordsworth, although his sister Dorothy took laudanum intermittently. ‘W[illia]m and I walked up Loughrigg Fell by the waterside,’ she wrote in her journal for Thursday 15 October 1801. ‘I held my head under a spout. Very sick and ill when I got home – went to bed in the sitting room – took laudanum.’
Opium and its derivatives were not the exclusive preserve of social or cultural elites either, and in Britain they kept much of the population under sedation. Mrs Loudon tells us that opium was first successfully extracted from poppies cultivated in Britain by a Mr John Bull of Williton, who had obtained a reward from the Society of Arts in 1796 for harvesting opium that was ‘in no respect inferior to the best Eastern opium’. Some years later a surgeon from Edinburgh had also succeeded in procuring opium of excellent quality and in consider able quantities. Cheaper than beer or gin, opium was in particular demand in the cotton-spinning districts of Lancashire, while in the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, cottage gardens were so awash with opium poppies ‘that for several months of the year the Fenland people were largely drugged with opium, a fact to which their stunted physique was commonly attributed’.
ARTIST, TOO, HAD recourse to opium’s narcotic properties, and incorporated the flower symbolically into their art. Because of its sinister associations, the poppy seldom appeared in Christian art of the late Middle Ages or Renaissance, except in a devilish context. Blood-red poppies sprout by the devil’s clawed feet in Bartolomé Bermejo’s St Michael Triumphant Over the Devil (c.1468), for instance, while the great Flemish illuminator Lieven van Lathem added the opium poppy’s pale mauve flowers and languid seed-heads to the illuminated borders of The Romance of Gillion de Trazegnies. Framing a gruesome battle scene, these plants would have brought blessed relief to those with severed limbs.
Taddeo Zuccari, the Italian mannerist fresco painter, drew on the poppy’s reputation to provoke erotic and demonic fantasies in his sixteenth-century drawing, The Nightmare or Allegory of Dreams. A dreaming young maiden lies on her back beneath a swirl of demonic apparitions and erotic images, clasping in her hand a magic staff and a spray of opium poppies, while a toad-devil lurks behind her pillow, inciting her to dream. Henry Fuseli must surely have known of it – or dreamed of it – for his own version of The Nightmare, painted in 1781.
A British artist closely linked to opium was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose work at times bore the trace of an opium trance. In Beata Beatrix he paid tribute to his dead muse and wife Lizzie Siddal, who had killed herself with an overdose of laudanum in 1862, just as William Hogarth’s countess had committed suicide in the final engraving of Marriage A-La-Mode more than a century earlier. Although Rossetti had started work before Lizzie’s suicide, the painting became a prophetic reconstruction of Lizzie as Beatrice, whose death held such mythic significance for Dante. (In later renderings, Rossetti would add a subtle overlay of Jane Morris, another of his great loves, to Lizzie’s features.) Eyes closed in a beatific trance, she sits on the balcony of her father’s palace overlooking the Arno, her hands lying open in her lap like those of a communicant about to receive the white poppy flower dropped by the red dove of the Annunciation. Behind her, the shadowy poet looks towards the figure of Love who holds a flaming heart.
WHILE ARTISTS WERE happy to draw poppies into their personal symbolism, polite society took a little longer to admit the poppy to its discourse. You will look in vain for poppies in the earliest guides to the language of flowers, the charming nineteenth-century conceit in which men and women exchanged gallantries in their floral bouquets, or at least read of the messages they might want to exchange. ‘Charlotte de Latour’, an early French exponent of the genre, omitted all trace of poppies from the first edition of her anonymous little floral ‘dictionary’ published in 1819. By the much enlarged edition of 1854, her bouquets still contained no poppies, but a white poppy appeared in her dictionary of plants and their emblems, signifying ‘sleep of the heart’ (‘sommeil du coeur’), and a corn poppy in her dictionary of feelings, signifying ‘consolation’.
And so the poppy took root as the floral sign for consolation, largely because – some said – it was created by Ceres to soothe her grief as she searched for her daughter. In America, too, the poppy played its part as the language of flowers became necessarily more nuanced. Now different poppies assumed very different meanings: the corn poppy, consolation; the variegated poppy, flirtation; while the opium poppy clearly signified death. It was left to the French to puncture the growing silliness of the genre in Taxile Delord’s Les Fleurs Animées, illustrated by J. J. Grandville. In its short entry on the poppy, a flower-girl in doleful pinks, greens and greys shakes her capsules over a heap of comatose bugs, declaring perspicaciously that ‘sleep is no longer enough for the man who wishes to forget his sorrows. Man does not want to sleep any more, he wants to dream. I was oblivion and am now become illusion.’
THE DATE OF Taxile Delord’s gentle satire is significant: 1847, midway between the two Opium Wars of 1839–42 and the late 1850s promulgated primarily by Britain against China in support of the (illegal) trade in opium from British India into China. Drawing rooms might be wearying of floral conceits, but never had a flower wielded so much military power. It is a sorry irony that Britain should have gone to war to force Indian opium on the Chinese in the face of opposition from a Chinese government alarmed by the spread of opium addiction among all ranks of society. Even at the time, principled witnesses castigated Britain’s opium policy as ‘the greatest blot on the history and character of their country’, but at stake for Britain were the twin gods of market dominance and profit.
India had long cultivated the opium poppy, reputedly introduced by Arab traders as Islam pushed outwards from its Arabian heartlands, and supported by India’s Mughal rulers, who sold the monopoly for producing opium just as the British East India Company would later do. After Arab influence waned, the trade in Indian opium was taken over by the Venetians and then by the Portuguese, who established a permanent trading settlement at Macau on the mouth of the Pearl River, close to Canton (Guangzhou) in south-eastern China.
In Portuguese times, two sorts of opium were available on India’s Malabar coast to the west: the most expensive, black and hard, came from Aden; slightly cheaper was the opium from Malwa in west-central India, described as soft and yellowish. India’s other opium-producing area was Bengal in the east, centred around Patna and Ghazipur on the Ganges. As a Portuguese apothecary and diplomat informed his king early in the sixteenth century, opium in India was ‘a great article of merchandize in these parts . . . kings and lords eat of it, and even the common people, though not so m
uch because it costs dear’.
Although the poppy is not indigenous to China, small amounts had been grown in Yunnan province before the Arab trade, largely for medicinal purposes. Consumption began to increase as the Chinese took to smoking opium, a habit that reached China via the Dutch in the East Indies, where opium was smoked in combination with tobacco and local plants; by the mid-eighteenth century smoking was established as the Chinese way to consume opium. The Portuguese were then still dominant in the Chinese trade, importing Malwa opium from Portuguese Goa and attempting, unsuccessfully, to establish a monopoly on shipments to Macau.
Late entrants to the opium trade, the British began to expand their power base in India, initially through the East India Company, which came to rule large areas of the country until the British Crown assumed direct control halfway through the next century. By 1780, the Company had successfully ventured small shipments of opium to China and established a depot south of Macau for British-imported opium. But trading opium with China was problematic. Not only were the Chinese habitually distrustful of foreigners, restricting foreign traders to a small strip of land on Canton’s Pearl River, but the opium trade was actually illegal, outlawed by a string of edicts from China’s Manchu rulers, banning first the sale of opium (1729), then its consumption (1780), and finally its importation (1796).
Professing to keep its hands clean while pocketing the profits from its illegal sales, the East India Company established a triangular commerce with parallels to the slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. As the monopoly buyer of all the opium produced by Bengal’s farmers, the Company sold it at auction to licensed ‘country traders’ who shipped the opium to Chinese waters, where it was transferred to fast, flat-bottomed Chinese boats for smuggling into the country. Funds derived from the trade were paid to the Company treasury at Canton in return for bills of exchange on London, thereby helping to balance the trade gap between Britain and China – a gap heavily weighted in China’s favour, as China wanted little in return for the shiploads of tea, silk and porcelain coveted by European markets.
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