by Martin Booth
In addition to dealing with the pleasures and pains of opium-eating, De Quincey intended to write a third part to his book to counteract his critics who rightly claimed the first edition was loaded in favour of the pleasurable side of drug taking. Ironically, he was too wracked by the pain of trying to break his addiction to write it. He succeeded in reducing his daily consumption by 85 per cent but he could not completely eradicate the habit. Opium was, he stated, the only means he had of being truly happy.
De Quincey’s controlled addiction does not seem to have made his life unduly miserable for he was contentedly married, kept his addiction manageable and, although he frequently locked himself away for weeks on end with his laudanum and books, he was always a keen and erudite conversationalist. Yet, had he completed his writing, he might have produced a valuable cautionary text: instead, he brought the subject into the open.
De Quincey was not unique. There was a substantial number of creative artists – most but not all of them writers – who were also addicted and who, through their addiction, changed the direction of Western literature.
One of these was George Crabbe. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary and, three years later, to a surgeon: such training familiarised him with opium. In 1775, he returned to his birthplace of Aldeburgh in Suffolk to work as a warehouseman before setting up in medical practice. At the same time, he began to publish poetry and, in 1781, took holy orders. For the rest of his life he lived as a priest and writer.
His addiction began around 1795 when he started to take opium to cure migraine attacks. At about the same time, his third son tragically died and his wife began to develop into a manic-depressive. Whether or not the migraine was brought on by the stress or, as his doctor suggested, by an intestinal illness (perhaps a duodenal ulcer similarly prompted), or whether in fact Crabbe took opium as a release from his private anguish, is immaterial. The fact remains he became quickly habituated and continued to be so until he died, although he managed to keep his habit secret from his parishioners. His son, who was also his biographer, wrote that his father took a constant but only slightly increasing dose to which he attributed his long and generally healthy life: Crabbe died in 1832, aged seventy-seven.
Crabbe’s earlier poetry had been skilful but unexciting. It was after his addiction was established that he wrote his best, most searching work. Much of Crabbe’s later writing shows an influence of opium: one poem in particular, perhaps his most famous and enduring, is rich in drug imagery. It is one of a long sequence of poems collectively entitled The Borough, written between 1804 and 1810: it is called ‘Peter Grimes’.
The story, set in the dismal estuarine creeks of the Suffolk coast which Crabbe knew so well, is the harrowing tale of a cruel fisherman who murders his father, then abuses and negligently kills two apprentice boys. Grimes gets away with the crimes but he is made a social outcast, forbidden by the magistrates to employ another apprentice. He is forced to live a solitary life in a bleak landscape of swamps, mud-banks and ditches where he grows insular and, stung by guilt, mad. Spectres of his father and the apprentices wait for him in the marshes and inlets, standing mute as he rails at them and tries to justify his sins. At last, on his deathbed, Grimes recounts the agonies he has had to endure from the ghosts.
And when they saw me fainting and oppress’d,
He, with his hand, the old man, scoop’d the flood,
And there came flame about him mix’d with blood;
He bade me stoop and look upon the place,
Then flung the red-hot liquor in my face;
Burning it blazed, and then I roar’d for pain,
I thought the demons would have turn’d my brain.
Still there they stood, and forced me to behold
A place of horrors – they cannot be told –
Where the flood open’d, there I heard the shriek
Of tortured guilt – no earthly tongue can speak:
‘All days alike! for ever!’ did they say,
‘And unremitting torments every day.’
The haunted, guilt-ridden imagery is opium-inspired, likewise the descriptions of the never-ending mud-flats where time passed with the sluggishness of an opium dream, the tides ebbing and flowing with an excruciating slowness. Grimes’s death might even be that of an opium addict:
And still he tried to speak, and look’s in dread
Of frighten’d females gathering round his bed;
Then dropp’d exhausted and appear’d at rest,
Till the strong foe the vital powers possess’d;
Then with an inward, broken voice he cried,
‘Again they come,’ and mutter’d as he died.
The poem is not that of a newly acquired addiction: it is the stuff of the well-habituated user, long past the stage of the splendours of Babylon and Hekatompylos.
Another of Crabbe’s contemporaries whose life and work were in debt to opium was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Born in Devonshire in 1772, Coleridge was introduced to opium at an early age. He was probably given laudanum at eight when he suffered from a severe fever or later, as a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital, when he contracted jaundice and rheumatic fever. What is certain is his being prescribed laudanum for rheumatism when an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1791. He was by then well acquainted with it, for he wrote to his brother in November 1791: ‘Opium never used to have any disagreeable effects on me.’ He took it again as a tranquilliser in March 1796, in November and December of the same year to treat neuralgia, the following year for dysentery, and in 1798 to kill toothache. It was at this time that he wrote again to his brother, saying: ‘Laudanum gave me repose, not sleep; but you, I believe, know how divine that repose is, what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains and flowers and trees in the very heart of a waste of sands.’
It was not until the winter of 1800, when Coleridge started taking laudanum and brandy to conquer acute back pain and swellings in his joints, that he became unequivocally addicted. By early 1802, he was taking over 100 drops of laudanum a day, a dosage he reduced by the following winter to 12–20 per day to combat nightmares and severe diarrhoea which, unbeknownst to him, were caused by his withdrawal. In April 1804, aware he was addicted, Coleridge took a voyage to Malta to break his habit. He failed.
Like most addicts, Coleridge moved in drug-taking circles, one of the characters he was familiar with being Dr Thomas Beddoes, who was at the centre of a group of drug experimentalists. Beddoes, who lived in Bristol, was a physician for whom drugs were not only a professional interest but a hedonistic one. His ‘study’ of drugs was not restricted to opiates: he was, in modern terminology, into the whole scene. In his Pneumatic Institution, a clinic he ran for pulmonary diseases, Beddoes toyed with opiates, cannabis and a wide range of other substances. It was here Sir Humphrey Davy first discovered nitrous oxide, or ‘laughing gas’, which he and others – Coleridge included – found amusing.
An example of Beddoes’s intense drug involvement is revealed in a letter he wrote to his friend, Thomas Wedgwood: ‘We will have a fair trial of Bang [a misspelling for bhang, or cannabis] – Do bring down some of the Hyocyamine Pills – and I will give a fair trial of opium, Hensbane, and Nepenthe. By the bye, I always considered Homer’s account of the Nepenthe as a Banging lie.’
Coleridge, unlike many, made little effort to hide his addiction: he admitted to it openly. His friends William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and William Cottle were aware of his entrapment, the cause of his frequently sallow complexion, dull eyes and shaking hands. De Quincey recorded Coleridge at a lecture:
His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and in spite of the water which he was continually drinking through the whole course of his lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower. In such a state it is clear that nothing could sa
ve the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness and exhaustion, except the advantage of having been precomposed in some happier mood.
As lecturing was an important part of Coleridge’s livelihood, and as his addiction frequently meant cancellation of a lecture at the very last minute, with audiences waiting at the door, the effect on his income can be guessed and he lived much of his life at least partly supported by friends.
At times, Coleridge was deeply ashamed of his habituation, vehemently deploring it although he did not feel guilty and often dismissed it by blaming it on his weak health. He even claimed opium was essential to his earning a living, yet he was desperate to be rid of it, as De Quincey observed:
Grave, indeed, he continued to be, and at times absorbed in gloom; nor did I ever see him in a state of perfectly natural cheerfulness. But as he strove in vain, for many years, to wean himself from his captivity to opium, a healthy state of spirits could not be much expected. Perhaps, indeed [he went on, recognising the effects of habituation upon both Coleridge’s physical and mental well-being], where the liver and other organs had, for so large a period in life, been subject to a continual morbid stimulation, it may be impossible for the system ever to recover a natural action. Torpor, I suppose, must result from continued artificial excitement …
In 1812 and again in 1814, Coleridge sought medical help but to no effect. He even went so far as to employ a man whose job was to stand between him and the door of any chemist he might approach, forcibly ejecting him from it.
Eventually his health deteriorated so far that, in April 1816, he went to a Dr Gillman in Highgate, north London. Gillman controlled and reduced Coleridge’s dependency but he was unable to eradicate it for Coleridge surreptitiously obtained supplies to give himself a temporary boost. By the time he went under Gillman’s regime, he was consuming at least 2 pints of laudanum a week, occasionally 2 pints a day, the equivalent of 20,000 drops. The pharmacist who provided his ‘illicit’ supply claimed to sell him a 12-ounce bottle every fifth day, giving a dose of 1000 drops a day in addition to Gillman’s reduced intake: 1000 drops would kill 5 first-time users.
Whatever Coleridge thought of his addiction, which he admitted affected his moral nature, he was correct in his claim that in part he earned his living from it for, whilst it may have ruined his lecturing career, there can be no doubt it was an integral part of his literary creativity which, added to his extraordinary imagination, his considerable intellect and his catholic taste in reading, produced some of the most remarkable poetry in the English language.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are the two most famous of Coleridge’s many opium-influenced poems, although a fierce debate about the role of opium in the writing of the former has raged for decades. The Ancient Mariner was completed early in 1798, before Coleridge became addicted but certainly after his use of opium as a medicine for dysentery: the work is steeped in opium. A sensitivity to sounds, an awareness of the intricacies of colour and light, the visual images, the passage of elongated time, the sense of desolation and vast seascape and the presence of a spectral woman, all smack of opium, not to mention the central theme of an evil deed, persecution by a ghostly apparition and a catalogue of horrors. The mariner’s crew were from a ‘charnel-dungeon’, the ocean covered with ‘slimy things’ which ‘crawled with legs upon the slimy sea’, the surface ‘like a witch’s oils, Burnt green, and blue, and white’. The spectre is described:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
In Kubla Khan, the opening lines of which are so frequently quoted (and misquoted), the evidence of opium is also clear:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
The imagery of archaic architecture, vast caverns and dark seas precedes other examples in the poem, of voices and music heard in the distance, the tactile sense of the sunny pleasure-dome containing caves of ice and the wailing woman waiting for her demon-lover under a waning moon.
Both poems are drawn from the writing of others. The Ancient Mariner has its vague foundation in George Shelvocke’s account of rounding Cape Horn, whilst Kubla Khan has its roots in Purchas’s His Pilgrimage, with which the poet was familiar and, through it, conscious of opium and addiction. Such a talent and intellect as Coleridge possessed would almost assuredly have produced extraordinarily fine poetry without the aid of opium because, for Coleridge, opium was not the creative force behind his art, but a mere provider of material: in early 1801, he wrote to a friend that he looked back on his long and painful bout of rheumatism ‘as a storehouse of wild Dreams for Poems’. In other words, as De Quincey realised, opium was the tool by which Coleridge rearranged and reassessed experiences and stimuli received either through narcotic dreams or from outside sources such as books and lucid, everyday non-drug-influenced conversation.
Yet, for all his writing obtained from the storehouse of opium, Coleridge was concerned about his addiction. Just before he died, he wrote, ‘After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least some little good may be effected by the direful example.’
There were other poet-addicts, too. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was addicted at an early age. Although there is no substantial evidence, it seems likely John Keats took laudanum before the winter of 1819—20: he admitted dosing on mercury in the form of calomel to counteract a sore throat contracted in late 1818 whilst nursing his tubercular brother and it is highly plausible, with his fear of tuberculosis, he also took laudanum. Furthermore, in March 1819, Keats was hit in the face by a cricket ball and his writings of the next day suggest he took laudanum to kill the considerable pain.
Keats’s poetry suggests a more than passing familiarity with opium. In ‘To Sleep’, a sonnet from April 1819, he wrote:
’ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities
‘Ode on Indolence’, ‘Ode to Melancholy’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ all carry references to opium or the poppy whilst ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, written between 18 January and 2 February 1819, is rich with opium-prompted imagery which is hardly surprising for, at the time, Keats was taking medication for his sore throat and was suffering from toothache: laudanum was the common painkiller for any dental problem.
Not only poets were inspired or affected by opium. So, too, were prose-writers, the most famous being Wilkie Collins. When he was nine, Collins overheard Coleridge admitting his struggle against opium to his mother. The poet was in tears but Mrs Collins was a realist and replied, ‘Mr Coleridge, do not cry; if the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go and get it?’ This exchange made a lasting impression on young Wilkie’s mind. At twenty-three, he noticed how his father – the artist William Collins, who was dying of heart disease – found release from acute pain in doses of Battley’s Drops, a proprietary-brand laudanum. With such experiences, it is no wonder Wilkie Collins turned to laudanum to ease a rheumatic illness which caused temporary, partial blindness and brought terrible pains to his legs. He took opium for the rest of his life.
Quite open about his habituation, Collins drank a wineglass of laudanum nightly as a sleeping draught and carried a hip-flask at all times, in addition to keeping a decanter full in his home. To ease neuralgia in
later life, he also received morphine. Collins was, in fact, more than open about his habit: he was downright boastful. At a meeting with his friend, Hall Caine, he produced a glass of laudanum and, telling Hall Caine he would let him into the secrets of his prison-house, swallowed it in one. On being asked, Collins admitted he had taken such amounts for twenty years to stimulate his brain and to steady his nerves. Hall Caine questioned the ability of opium to stimulate Collins’s mind and enquired if it had the same effect on others, to which Collins replied it did – Bulwer Lytton was addicted, he said, and it stimulated him, too. Yet, when Hall Caine asked if he should take laudanum for nervous exhaustion, Collins paused and quietly advised against it.
The best known of Collins’s novels, The Moonstone, was written almost entirely under the influence of opium. Unable to write himself, Collins dictated the novel to a staunch-hearted secretary: her two predecessors had resigned their jobs, unable to face working with Collins as he writhed and groaned in pain. The plot, which is complex and tightly written, turns upon opium: the moonstone, a magnificent diamond, was taken by the hero of the tale while he was sleep-walking after having been unknowingly fed opium. When he read the book through, Collins could not recall the ending as being his work. It was not his only plot featuring opium: his earlier stories No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866) also involved laudanum.
Sir Walter Scott took laudanum whilst writing The Bride of Lammermoor, his doctor prescribing 6 grains of laudanum a day for a painful stomach complaint. Scott disliked opium for it depressed him and, to overcome its effects, he took long morning horse-rides to rid himself of what he called ‘the accursed vapours’. When the novel was finished, and Scott read the manuscript, he stated he could remember not one incident, character or conversation from the story. As Scott’s method of working was to ‘lie in bed in the mornings simmering over things for an hour or so before I get up – and there’s the time when I am dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping, half-waking project de chapitre – and when I get the paper before me, it commonly runs off pretty easily’, it is no wonder The Bride of Lammermoor was so alien to its author he would be waking and writing after a night of opium depression, a state superbly described in the heroine of the novel, Lucy Ashton, whose neurosis and anxiety lead to insanity.