by Martin Booth
Such was the level of local addiction and the popularity of opium as a drink as well as a medicine, sales were always heavy on a Saturday night. At least one Fenland brewer, in Ely, added opium to his ale at source. The local practitioner, Dr Hawkins, reported seeing a King’s Lynn farmer enter a chemist’s shop, order 1½ ounces of laudanum and drink it down there and then. What was more, the man returned twice that day for a similar draught then purchased half a pint to take home for the evening.
The quantity of opium sold in the market towns of the Fens was astonishing. Whittlesea, with a population of 3700, had five chemists dealing primarily in opium whilst a chemist from Spalding testified he sold more laudanum in his four years in the town, to fifty regular customers, than he had in twenty years in another town. A Holbeach chemist took £700–800 a year for laudanum from the working classes of a single parish. Hunter reckoned each chemist sold 200 pounds of opium a year. In 1867, a King’s Lynn chemist declared to Dr Hawkins that he sold 170 pounds of solid opium, 6 gallons of laudanum and 6 of calming cordial for infants in 12 months: from these statistics it was estimated that 50 per cent of Britain’s imported opium was used in the Fens.
In Whittlesea, the local doctor estimated the average consumption for an addict was between 4 and 8 ounces a week and that many were restricted in their habit only by their income. Although opium was comparatively cheap as an occasional medicine, it was a financial burden on the habituated. In 1878, it was published that ‘a poor family will spend eight pence to one shilling per day for opium alone’, this equating to 8–11 per cent of an average labourer’s wage.
In later years, despite the advent of drug legislation, Fenland opium use continued. Although adult usage declined, opium pills were still given to children whilst animals were dosed with veterinary laudanum as late as the 1920s: a government report noted the high number of applications for veterinary opiates which were doubtless being taken by humans. Officialdom turned a blind eye to this, accepting the practice as a ‘local custom’.
The vast quantities of opium consumed in Britain were not used only by the likes of De Quincey or agricultural labourers. Every British person took opium at some time in their lives and many took it frequently.
Opium was, by 1800, long established in medicine. It was employed as a painkiller, a sedative and as a specific against fever and especially diarrhoea. This latter may seem insignificant today but, two centuries ago, diarrhoea was a killer and opium its best cure. Doctors serving with British companies or the military in the East knew of its success rate in the treating of dysentery and cholera, both of which dehydrated the body through diarrhoea. With the British cholera epidemics of 1831—2, 1848—9 and 1853—4, opium was heavily promoted and, mixed with calomel, saved thousands of lives.
The drug acquired the finest of testimonials. It worked. It was not a placebo, as were so many medicines, and it did away with the need for cupping, bleeding and the application of leeches upon which doctors had relied for centuries. By comparison with these crude treatments, opium was also gentle. It produced no inconvenience to the patient, save perhaps mild constipation with prolonged use, and it could be applied as a self-medication. Indeed, it was arguably the first genuine over-the-counter, commercially produced medicine for, until opium was widely available, most self-applied cures were home-brewed concoctions which were passed on either through oral tradition or such publications as Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.
Another promotional point for opium was the common person’s reluctance to visit the doctor. A consultation was expensive and could cost as much as 30 per cent of a skilled worker’s weekly income. In place of the doctor, many visited the chemist who, as a dispenser of drugs, offered cheap advice as part of the sales pitch. It was commonplace for chemists to suggest a treatment, often of their own formulation, which was sold by the penny’s-worth.
The sale of opium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was akin to the modern-day selling of proprietary medicines in Third World countries. Whereas a modern New Yorker or Londoner goes out and buys a pack of medication, in many poorer countries the packs are split and the contents sold individually with a verbal reading of the dosage. Patients purchase only what they can afford and need.
Laudanum was immensely popular yet other mixtures were just as favoured and became so widespread as to be included in the pharmacopoeia. One opium-based liquid was camphorated tincture of opium known as ‘paregoric’, the name deriving from the Greek for ‘consoling’ or ‘calming’: another was Battley’s Sedative Solution, officially called liquor opii sedativus, containing calcium hydrate, opium, sherry, alcohol and distilled water.
An indication of the chemist’s position in the treatment of everyday ailments can be gained from one London East End chemist who, in 1868, reported a Saturday morning income, in just three and a half hours, consisting of 209 penny customers, 12 one-shilling customers and over three shillings in patent-medicine sales. Most of this trade would have been in opium-containing preparations.
In 1857, the Sale of Poisons Bill addressed the issue of the sale of opiates with the intention of controlling it but it was debated whether such control was beyond enforcement due to such widespread use. Professor Brade of the Royal Institution commented,… ‘there are a number of persons who are in the habit of keeping laudanum by them: they take 10 or 20 drops … when their bowels get out of order, or when they are apprehensive of cholera’, whilst a Bristol magistrate pointed out a chemist could not be expected to keep opium under lock and key because he dispensed it at a rate of at least 100 times a day.
In time, not only chemists sold opium – so too did grocers and co-operative stores, rural general stores, booksellers and travelling peddlers. At a retail price of 1 penny for a third of an ounce, it was a bargain.
Another form of self-medication was the patent medicines. These were liable to a 12 per cent stamp-duty tax on the retail price but this did not diminish their popularity which soared throughout the nineteenth century, prompted by lavish claims in the new art of advertising. Chemists were quick to ride the patent-medicine bandwagon, offering their own similar brews at a lower price, undercutting the cost of tax and advertising. Many were harmless, coloured, sugar syrups but, needless to say, a good many contained more toxic substances such as strychnine, prussic acid, aconite and opium.
Dover’s Powder was famous as a patent medicine but the most famous – which survives to the present day, although it no longer contains the drug in anything like the quantity it did – was Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne. It was invented as a cholera remedy by an Indian army doctor who sold the formula to a pharmaceutical manufacturer. It was marketed as a cure for a wide range of common ailments but it is best known today as a cure for diarrhoea. The original contained 2 grains of morphine (as hydrochlorate of morphia) per fluid ounce added to chloroform and tincture of cannabis: the modern version, now called J. Collis Browne’s Mixture, consists of 1 milligram of morphine anhydrous in every 5 millilitre dose with peppermint oil in a base of ethanol and caramel which gives it an authentic opium-brown colouring. Needless to say, chlorodyne produced addicts and it was not unknown as a vehicle for suicide, murder and accidental lethal overdose. Despite its risks, chlorodyne and similar medicines were a godsend. In Britain alone, they saved countless adults and children from death by dysentery and cholera, diseases which were inevitable in the crowded, unsanitary cities where food was contaminated and sewers at best rudimentary.
Yet opium did more than save lives: it provided an escape from the miseries and vicissitudes of working-class life. Men reverted to it to calm their fears of insecurity and poverty, to kill memories of long hours at the loom, the coal face or the plough. Women took it to numb the grinding poverty in which they lived and worked, struggling to raise a family and feed a husband.
People were introduced to opium quite literally as soon as they left their mother’s breast, and possibly before.
Although there were a large number of baby-calming liqu
ids on the market – including home-made recipes such as poppy-head tea – the most famous of all was Godfrey’s Cordial, a soothing syrup for babies which reduced colic and consisted of tincture of opium in a thick sugar syrup to disguise the bitter taste. Sales were astronomical. In 1808, a Nottingham chemist reported selling 600 pints a year whilst, in Coventry in 1862, it was estimated 12,000 doses were given a week. In Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, a chemist claimed to sell 25½ gallons a year to a population of 6000 – and he was not the town’s sole chemist.
The ‘comfort’, as Godfrey’s Cordial was colloquially known, had its competitors, the main ones being Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup – a popular sedative for babies throughout Europe and America which contained up to 1 grain of morphine per fluid ounce – Street’s Infants’ Quietness and Atkinson’s Infants’ Preservative.
Victorian baby preparations were sold to all classes, although they were primarily bought by the poor. Not only mothers purchased them for their fractious offspring. Baby-minders bought them in large quantities.
Wages amongst lower-class workers were low and both parents frequently worked at menial or physically demanding jobs for long periods. Babies, an inevitable product of poverty, were a hindrance. Infanticide was not uncommon but most infants, their mothers employed as domestic servants, in factories or in agricultural gangs, ended up in the hands of child-minders who charged about 3s a week (20 per cent of an average wage) to look after a child. The minders were most often in control of up to a dozen babies and were not only notoriously lax but they might also have had a second home job as well – say as a laundry-woman. To keep their charges quiet, they fed them soothing syrups: in this way, many children in poor areas were not only habituated to opium but spent much of their time in a semi-comatose state. What compounded the problem was that, when the mother returned from an exhausting day, she too dosed the child so she could get an uninterrupted night’s rest.
There was another convenient side-effect. Opium suppresses appetite so young children were less likely to be hungry and a strain on the already tight domestic budget. Inevitably, these children were frequently undernourished and in continual poor health, with a characteristic yellowish pallor to their skin. By the age of three or four many were, as one observer wrote, ‘shrank up into little old men or wizened like a little monkey’. When they grew older, few of these children were able to benefit from even the modicum of education available to them and they ended up providing the next generation of the working class, illiterate and condemned to a cycle of poverty and opium use.
The accidental lethal poisoning of children was not infrequent: opium was also used by despairing mothers to kill their own children, especially bastards. Certainly, it was used to murder infants in the infamous Victorian baby-farms and work-houses.
A poisoning inquest in Liverpool in 1876 sums up the situation and the ambivalence of most people’s attitudes towards infant mortality and murder. It outlined the case of a mother, who took at least an ounce of opium a week, whose two-day-old infant died from opium poisoning. The doctor attending the death put it down to opium taken through the breast in the mother’s milk. A more plausible explanation is the mother killed the infant in despair at having the responsibility of a child. The jury accepted the doctor’s explanation and the husband was cautioned to control his wife’s opium consumption. Such a verdict was common. Few doctors would have been willing to certify a cause of death which would implicate another member of his profession or undermine the use of opium. The attitude of many juries, comprised of common folk who knew full well what was going on, was that the death of a child, whilst to be pitied, was a mercy in disguise, an escape from the oppression of poverty or working-class life.
For adults, opium provided more than a quiet child. It was used widely by London dockland prostitutes who drugged their clients with it so they might rob them: they also took it to counteract the misery of their profession, as a relief from muscular pains after a long night’s work and to counteract the symptoms of venereal disease. It is not inconceivable to think De Quincey was introduced to opium by his prostitute companion who would surely have been familiar with it. On occasion, opium was used as an intoxicant but this was not common. In the north of England particularly, drunkards took laudanum or opium pills as an occasional alternative to alcohol but in general, gin and ale were the usual tipple, being cheaper. Where laudanum drunks existed, the start of what has become a major undermining of late twentieth-century society occurred – drugs-related crimes began to appear on the records of magistrates’ courts, concerning addicts stealing to support their habits.
It must be added that not all opium users, even frequent or chronic ones, were detrimentally habituated. Many cases were documented of people in their eighties and even nineties who were regular, even heavy users, but who remained in good health, apart from a tendency to become constipated and with the characteristic creamy-yellow complexion.
Despite all the signs of opium’s potential for evil, addiction still aroused little public interest. For the average Victorian, opium taking was as much a part of society as the drinking of alcohol or the smoking of tobacco. Indeed, opium was more widely available in 1870 than tobacco was in 1970: and, like tobacco in the present day, it was primarily purchased by the poor and lower classes, contemporary studies showing the deeper the poverty, the greater the desire to buy opium.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, opium was seldom regarded by either the public or the medical profession as a problem although, very occasionally, concern was shown. When, in 1828, the Earl of Mar died, an investigation found he had been eating opium for thirty years, once telling his housekeeper he consumed 49 grains of solid opium and an ounce of laudanum a day. On hearing this, his insurers refused to honour his life insurance, contending his habit affected his life expectancy. A few years later, a Professor Christison of Edinburgh concluded to a Scottish court that opium-eating shortened life.
The premise that opiates were harmless began to be eroded from the 1830s, the availability of drugs worrying those members of the newly evolving public health movement as well as doctors in what was becoming a well-defined medical profession with new standards and ethics. Opium became a medical matter and, as a result of a number of inquiries, was regarded by the 1860s as a social and medical problem to be considered with other poisons, addiction becoming regarded as chronic poisoning. Mortality statistics started to register opium as a cause of death. In 1860, a third of all fatal poisonings were due to opiates and casual overdosing was so common that domestic health publications gave instructions for dealing with poisoning.
The main reason for so many accidental overdosings was the unreliable strength of opium mixtures, the non-standardisation of doses and the uneven levels of adulteration: laudanum from one druggist could be very much stronger than that from another. In addition, habitual users frequently misjudged the limits of their tolerance. Opiates also accounted for the majority of suicides throughout the nineteenth century and, although no statistics exist for criminal poisonings, laudanum was sufficiently prevalent in murders as to warrant being mentioned in the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861.
Mortality statistics gathered by the Registrar General’s office caused the medical profession to press for the restriction of opiate availability on public health grounds. The statistics were also good propaganda for the growing public health movement, with infant mortality as the campaigners’ central pivot. The Ladies’ Sanitary Association published penny tracts with such dramatic titles as The Massacre of Innocents which condemned the use of soothing syrups by the poor. There was more than a hint of class consciousness in these tracts: the middle-class ladies who distributed them had little knowledge of the plight of the poor and conveniently overlooked the fact many middle-class children were also soothed with opiates.
The matter of doping infants regularly appeared in the medical press and it was debated in Parliament. Yet articles and parliamentary discussions, although th
ey touched upon adult addiction, again only dealt with the working classes. Middle- and upper-class opium usage was either ignored or tolerated. Only the temperance movement addressed the problem across the classes, and then only in passing, allying the problem to alcoholism which was considered more prevalent in the workers.
It was generally believed that the way to combat the problem was to reduce the availability of opium and, in 1868, the first steps were made to control opiates. The 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act brought together the interests of legislators, doctors and pharmacists after several previous attempts at legislation had failed. The act, which listed opium and its preparations amongst a total of fifteen poisons, restricted who could sell opium and how they might do it: however, it carried no serious penalties for contravention and the concept that a law could illegalise a substance and prohibit its use or possession was far off into the future. Nevertheless, as the supply of opiates became increasingly limited, they started to acquire the enchantment of forbidden fruit with which dangerous ensorcellment they have been associated ever since.
Although registered doctors could dispense opiates under the act, chemists were appointed the only purveyors of poisons and therefore of opium, the details of every sale being recorded in a poisons register. All containers had to be clearly labelled ‘poison’, the skull-and-crossbones symbol coming into use. In effect, the restrictions were not at all stringent and hard to enforce but there was a small decline in the mortality statistics, with a distinct dip in infant mortality which dropped to a third of the pre-act total by 1880. Yet by 1900, the overall opium death rate remained at the same level as prior to 1868.