15

The Myth of the Opium Den in Late Victorian England

The most obvious public legacy of the anti-opium movement was _the image of the opium `den' and of Chinese opium smoking in the East End of London which it helped to form. This emerged at the end of the century and has remained very much of a popular stereotype. The creation of the myth of the mysterious threatening `den' in the back streets of the East End had much to do with the moral campaign and the issues it raised.
The anti-opium campaign drew attention to what was an expanding yet curiously isolated alien community. There had been Chinese in Stepney as early as the 1780s. But there were only a handful at this period and throughout the first sixty years of the following century. The Chinese who came to this country were seamen, and their presence was transient.' Consciousness of the Chinese in England and of their opium smoking was related to increased Chinese immigration. It is clear that the number of Chinese settling in London began to expand quite rapidly in the 1860s. In 1861, there were an estimated 147 Chinese in the whole country, by 1881, 665. Another influx came just prior to the First World War. Most lived in London. In 1891, 302 China-born aliens out of a total of 582 were resident there. Many, in particular in the early years of permanent settlement, lived in the East End, in Stepney and Poplar. In 1881, 6o per cent of London Chinese lived in these two boroughs .2 London's `Chinatown' was a small area in comparison to its American counterparts. The Chinese who settled in England serviced Chinese seamen by establishing laundries, shops, grocers, restaurants and lodging houses. Their American counterparts were employed in railroad construction, company mining, farming or the manufacturing industries of San Francisco.3 The centre of English settlement lay in two narrow streets of dilapidated houses, now destroyed by bombing and redevelopment - Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway. The Chinese formed a small, sealed community, isolated by culture, language and the transience of their stay from the surrounding neighbourhood.
Opium smoking as a domestic phenomenon never attracted attention until the last decades of the century, for even the longevity debate took its examples from the Far East. But descriptions of opium smoking as a domestic phenomenon did begin in the 1860s. This was a reflection of the greater numbers of Chinese actually settling in the country, and of the general fashion for investigation of `darkest England', and East London in particular. The early presentations of opium smoking in the East End were notable for their calm descriptions of the practice. Attention was drawn to the growing alien community by the Prince of Wales's visit to East London in the 1 860s; and among the first descriptions of domestic opium smoking was that in London Society in 1868 which described the den he had been to in New Court, off Victoria Street in Bluegate Fields. Here lived Chi Ki, a Chinese married to an English wife, who had played host to the Prince .4 Such descriptions had an air of realism. The dens were `mean and miserable', squalid and poor, but not mysterious or threatening. A visitor to another den found the Chinese company he kept a 'pleasant looking, good tempered lot', while the room in which the smoking took place was clean and tidy. He admired the skill with which the opium was prepared for smoking, and wondered if the practice could be given wider application: `It might be useful if the subject were investigated by medical men, to see if opium smoking might not be found a convenient way of administering the drug to patients who otherwise cannot take it without the stomach being upset'.5
Dickens' famous description of opium smoking in New Court in his unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) marked the beginning of a more melodramatic presentation of the subject. The author and Fields, his American friend, had witnessed opium smoking in Bluegate Fields. In his fictional presentation of the subject, Dickens emphasized the links with mystery and evil, the degrading and demoralizing effect of the drug's use on both English and Chinese smokers, which became such a feature of later descriptions.6 The den as a haunt of evil, the evil and cunning Chinaman wreathed in opium fumes had their origin as public images in the 1870s. In the popular press, in social investigations like Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Dore's London, A Pilgrimage (1872), in fictional and literary presentations, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and perhaps most notably, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the practice of East End opium smoking was presented in a manner soon accepted as reality. Descriptions of the `fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes. ..'were commonplace. Those who read that `Upon the wreck of a four-post bedstead ... upon a mattress heaped with indescribable clothes, lay, sprawling, a lascar dead-drunk with opium... It was difficult to see any humanity on that face, as the enormous grey dry lips lapped about the rough wood pipe and drew in the poison' were unlikely to remain sanguine about the practice.' Not all writers were so obviously hostile; yet from the 1870s an increasing tone of racial and cultural hostility was discernible.8
The question of the harmfulness and general effects of opium smoking was an important part of the anti-opium debate. Increased interest in the East End opium den paralleled the rise of_ the anti-opium movement; and the establishment of opium smoking in England as well as in China was weighty argument for the anti-opium point of view. It gave added substance and immediacy to arguments about the effects of the practice in China. Many of the arguments deployed in an Indo-Chinese context were also relevant to the domestic scene. East End Chinese, like their Far Eastern counterparts, should be `saved' from the habit. Anti-opiumist moral feeling took little account of cultural differences -'these ruinous dens' were full of poor Chinese, 'helpless slaves to this expensive indulgence'. England's duty was not only to China but to the Chinese in England - the `Vile, unhabitable tenements, transformed into the homes of vicious, ruinous indulgence ... constitute a pitfall and trap to many of those simple Easterns ... Has England no duty here? Have those ill-paid servants no claim upon our care?'9
The anti-opium arguments used for China were also applied to the East End. The missionaries in China had encountered intense hostility at many levels of society, in part inspired by the privileges granted to them by the various treaties concluded between China and the foreign powers. The missionaries, how. ever, had used opium as a convenient explanation of their notably lack of success, and such arguments were also employed in domestic context. A correspondent in the London City Mission, Magazine in 1877 blamed the drug for the lack of enthusiasm for Christianity among the Chinese. `The dirt, smoke, repulsive characters and sometimes the semblance of religion assumed to cover fraud and abominable sin, make the heart sick and the head ache; and I often feel how difficult it is to launch the life-boat in such a dangerous sea.'10 The existence of English opium den was of considerable propaganda importance; an anti-opium tract issued by the S.S.O.T. castigated the `depraved appetite' and the `weak and unmanly' nature of the Chinese East End opium smoker."
The medical/anti-opium link was a strong one, as Chapter n makes clear. Many of the doctors who supported the amti-opium movement were also concerned with domestic opium smoking In the 1890s Benjamin Ward Richardson spent some time visiting the London dens in an attempt to compare smoking with eating opium, or injecting morphia. He concluded that there were con siderable differences between the various methods, but neverthe. less condemned opium smoking. Surgeon-Major Pringle agreed He told the meeting of the British Medical Association u Nottingham in., 1892 that the importance of getting rid of the `opium smoking saloons' in London `could not be overesti. mated'.12 Domestic opium smoking, in the view of the growing group of doctors specializing in addiction, provided further sup port for a view of narcotic use which was rapidly becoming accepted. Medical men concerned with domestic opium use, an( those who argued against Far Eastern use of the drug, were boil agreed that moderation was impossible, addiction inevitable an( moral and physical decline the result. `So powerful is its fascina tion, so fatal its hold, that loss of time, deferred expectancy, the trouble of preparation, nothing can win from the irresistible craw ing, which, once felt, so rarely loosens its grip.'13
appeared to be justified by the existence of opium dens and their effect on English people. A Daily Chronicle report in 1881 had described how a large proportion of the crew of the S. S. Merionethshire had been found disporting themselves in a Limehouse opium den when they should have been on board ship.'' But the time when opium smoking could be a humorous matter was soon over. The opium dens run by `cunning and artful Chinamen' wer part of the racial stereotype which emerged. As an L.C.C. inspector, an ex-policeman, pointed out after his visit to the Chinese area and its opium dens in 19o4, `oriental cunning and cruelty ... was hall-marked on every countenance ... until my visit to the Asiatic Sailors' Home, I had always considered some of the Jewish inhabitants of Whitechapel to be the worst type of humanity I had ever seen...'. At the opium den itself, the `loathsome apartment' where the drug was prepared led to smoking rooms where seamen lay, `dazed and helpless, jabbering in an incoherent manner'.15 Observers saw something menacing in the very passivity which smoking the drug induced. Dr Richardson thought that opium smokers were `very dangerous under those circumstances ... they might rise up, and be mischievous to anyone who might perform an experiment upon them,Supporters of the anti-opium cause were also active in dissemi nating the belief that opium smoking was somehow threatening in its implications for the indigenous population. The belief that the immorality of Britain's conduct towards China ('The Great Anglo-Asiatic Opium Curse') would somehow come home to roost however simple it might be'.16
The `menace' of opium smoking lay not just in its effect on Chinese smokers in East London, but in the possibility of contamination of English people by such practices. There was some anxiety that the habit might spread among the working class in the East End, especially since, in the investigation of the 1840s, Dr Southwood Smith had pointed out the area as one where opium was consumed in large quantities by the local population. The evidence of a local inhabitant who frequented Limehouse Causeway at this period indicated that Chinese and English populations mostly kept their distance. The boys who ran errands for the Chinese lodging house keepers sometimes tried to smoke the drug. `I only smoked it once... They always like to see you smoke opium, a Chinaman....'
But the amount of such smoking was minute.17 The fear of pollution through opium smoking extended into a belief that opium smoking was spreading among the white middle-class population. The establishment of such a practice was thought to be an illustration of racial degeneracy. The classic theory of contagion was clearly related to the onset of economic decline, competition for jobs and class tensions in the period of late Victorian imperialism. Professor Goldwin Smith, speaking at an anti-opium meeting in Manchester in February 1882, had drawn attention to the large influx of Chinese into America, Canada and Australia, bringing with them a `hideous and very infectious vice'."' Other writers on anti-opium matters made more specific links with the domestic effects. The Rev. George Piercy, an East End missionary and antiopiumist, warned of the dangers. Drawing parallels with the spread of the practice in America, he condemned the habit: `we really have a new habit, prolific of evil, springing up amongst us ... it is coming close to us with a rapidity and spring undreamt of even by those who have dreaded its stealthy and unseen step'.19 The association with middle-class degeneracy was a particular feature of the late-nineteenth-century presentation of the opium den, most notable in fiction in Wilde's Dorian Gray. As C. W. Wood commented in 1897, in the course of a fictional presentation of the theme, `very many of these celestials and Indians are mentally and physically inferior, and they go on smoking year after year, and seem not very much the worse for it. It is your finer natures that suffer, deteriorate and collapse. For these great and terrible is the ruin.' 20 There were tales of two prosperous `opium establishments' in the East End, set up exclusively for a white clientele and patronized by Englishmen or `society women seeking a new sensation'. Furnished in lavish style, entry to them was obtainable only by means of a password. The West End opium smoker, seeking after fresh thrills, was a new facet of the contemporary presentation of the opium den. 11 I `1" as a particular illustration of the anti-opiumist argument which stressed the domestic retribution likely to be incurred through encouragement of the Indo-Chinese trade.
The image of the opium den associated with late-nineteenthcentury London has remained so persistent that it is worth attempting to assess the reality of the practice. The hostile reaction evoked in anti-opiumist literature and in fiction appears on further examination to have disguised something much more prosaic. It is impossible to find out how much opium was being imported for smoking. Published import/export data unlike their American counterpart, ignored prepared opium. The umber of houses, however, where the practice took place appears to have been small in relation to the furore it caused. In 1884, even a hostile observer thought that there were only about half a dozen in the East End. Later inquiries elicited from the police only the information that there were thirteen Chinese boarding houses in the area. It was tacitly accepted that opium smoking would probably take place in a fair number of them. `Opium smoking is a national habit with them, and they indulge in it in their bedrooms. The practice is rather on the decrease than otherwise.'22 The `den' was a shifting entity, changing its location almost as often as the floating population of seamen in the area. Miss Mary Elliott, whose father was Vicar of St Stephen's, Poplar, in the late nineteenth century, remembered the impermanent nature of the opium den. When the police raided a suspect house, they would find it empty, or fresh Chinese moving in who `of course' knew nothing of the previous tenants .23
Nor was reaction to the practice so universally hostile as the accepted image of the opium den might suggest. Many of the more open-minded investigators of the practice came to the conclusion that there was really no such thing as an opium den at all. Opium smoking, along with gambling, was simply a relaxation enjoyed by many Chinese, and the rooms where it took place were something akin to a Chinese social club. A reporter sent by the Morning Advertiser, who had gone to the East End full of preconceived ideas about opium smoking, had to admit that `it was not repulsive. It was calm, it was peaceful. There was a placid disregard of trivialities, politics, war, betting, trade, and all the cares, occupations, and incidents of daily life, which only opium can give 1.24 Several who visited the area came to conclusions which differed from the accepted stereotype. One such visitor smoked five pipes of opium in `Chinatown' in the 1870s, and experienced hallucinations in which a centipede about four or five inches long with a chain round it was walking up his leg. `This will not be my last trial,' he declared. `As for the so-called "dens", they seemed to me simply poorly fitted social clubs, and certainly as free from anything visibly objectionable, as to say the least of it, publichouses of the same class. '25 His last point was taken up by those who fel' that to stigmatize opium smoking simply because it was an alien recreational practice was hypocritical when domestic alcohol consumption continued relatively unchecked .26
The reactions of those who lived in the area at the time and saw opium smoking at close quarters tend to agree with such moderate assessments. These are the best antidote to the opium den myth. In 19o8, news that young boys had been mingling with the Chinese seamen in Limehouse was a cause for concern to the London County Council's Medical Officer.27 One of those boys, living as an old man a few hundred yards from where he used to run errands for the seamen years before, disagreed sharply with the view of the den presented in late nineteenth-century fiction : `... you'd push a door open and you'd see them smoking ... I used to be in number 11, and in that house there on the second floor we had one bed, but on the ground floor, we had two, two beds. They were always there and as they walked in, and as they fancied a piece of opium....' There were no set houses reserved for opium smoking. It was simply a way in which Chinese seamen spent part of their leisure time while they were on shore:
There was one or two houses, but, of course, it took place in most houses. In every house that I've been in, there's been a bed or two. It was quite natural for the people who lived in that house.... They're ordinary working people that come in here and have their pipe, because they're paid off from the shipping and they have their pleasure time in the Causeway as long as their money lasts.
Nor, in his eyes, was the image of the dazed, lolling opium smoker, caring for nothing but the drug, at all typical. Opium smoking was an aid to hard work, not a distraction from it, and smokers managed to combine their habit with a normal working existence. `I've known them to get up at eight, seven or eight in the morning, smoke opium twice, two periods of opium, and then go and do their duty, do their work and they won't go to bed before eleven o'clock at night.' 28 In Liverpool at the same period, a City Council report on the Chinese settlements in the city revealed a similar reaction. The practice of opium smoking was limited; and even local police officers saw few harmful effects in it.29
The way the Limehouse resident saw opium prepared tallies almost exactly with the reports, shorn of their sensationalism, given by outside investigators. The preparation of the raw opium for smoking was a lengthy process, involving shredding the raw drug into a sieve placed over an ordinary two-pint saucepan containing water. This was simmered over a fire, and the essence, filtering through the sieve, fell to the bottom of the pot in a thinnish treacle. Opium was often scraped out of the pipes in the house and added to the raw variety. The pot in which the essence landed would be constantly pushed and kneaded, although in some houses this was done in a different way. `They got a long feather of a bird, a large bird, and they'll just skim the top of the opium, and until that opium is absolutely perfect without a bubble on it, and it's boiled to the amount that they've tested, and that's that....' The opium thus prepared was stored in lidded earthenware jars. Sometimes it was sold to outside customers; often seamen would buy it when going aboard ship. It was carried about in a hollowedout lemon - the inside of the lemon taken out, the shell put over a broom handle and bound tightly with string until it was completely dried out. Opium was weighed in this too.
They bring out a great big quill from some gigantic bird ... with a little leaden weight at one end, with a nice silk coloured ribbon on it and a steelyard ... and they'll put your empty on first and they'll weigh your empty. They'll weigh it, dive down under the counter, put it in, like treacle, weigh it again then give it to you. And I've gone there for a cook and he's had is/6d ... they got a lot for is/6d.30
A special pipe, about eighteen inches long and often made of dark-coloured bamboo, was used for the actual smoking. One end, hollow and open, served as the mouthpiece. At the closed end, a tiny bowl `made of iron and shaped like a pigeon's egg' was screwed in. Prior to smoking, a small quantity of prepared opium was taken on the point of a needle and frizzled over the flame of a lamp -'twist it and twist it until it becomes sticky, a solid sticky substance...'. The opium pipe was then placed over the lamp and the opium inserted on the point of a needle through a small hole in the bowl of the pipe. The smoker would draw continually at the pipe until the substance was burnt out - `the Chinaman ... took the bamboo fairly into his mouth, and there was at once emitted from the pipe a gurgling sound - the spirits of ten thousand previous pipe-loads stirred to life'.31
The interest aroused in the practice by the growth of the antiopium movement had led to a corresponding period of medical experimentation with opium smoking. Smoking the drug was suggested for the treatment of tetanus; it was said to be 'an easy, inoffensive, and very efficacious mode of treating chronic and neuralgic affections ...'. An opium pipe (complete with `all appurtenances, including lamp, vessel for oil, boxes for opium, etc.') was available for medical experimenters and others from Farmer & Rogers, in Regent Street, price 10/6.32 Brereton's book on opium smoking and the publications of the defenders not only of the opium trade, but of opium's medical usage, encouraged such experimentation. A pamphlet dealing with Opium Smoking as a Therapeutic Power According to the Latest Medical Authorities was available from the 1870s - although its publication was discontinued in 1903 after strong protests from the Lancet.33
Medical usage had its parallels in social experimentation. Notably lacking at this period was any extensive narcotic-using drug sub-culture. But there were signs that the increasing deviance of _opium use was beginning to be reflected in self-conscious `recreational' use. Opium smoking as a distinctively different means of using the drug was the first form to experience this development. The drug began to be used for smoking among a small section of artistic society in the 1890s. `Recreational' smoking of opium - and of other drugs such as cannabis and mescal - was largely confined to the `radical Bohemia' of the avant-garde arts world and left-wing intelligentsia, small groups whose, flouting of `respectable' late-Victorian convention emphasized an interest in the spiritual, non-materialist side of life which encompassed both the occult and the effects of drugs.34 Opium smoking was very much part of the developing drug `scene'. Perhaps the most notable literary exponent in the I890s was Count Eric Stenbock, the son of a Bremen family settled in England, but who had inherited estates in Estonia. Stenbock's practice of smoking opium was as notorious as his alcoholism. This homosexual occultist, accustomed to appear with a live snake encircling his neck, was truly `a sort of living parody of Ninetyism'.35 Yet opium smoking was also practised by other, less theatrically flamboyant members of the 1890s scene. The poet Arthur Symons described the experience in `The Opium Smoker'.

I am engulfed, and drown deliciously.
Soft music like a perfume, and sweet light
Golden with audible odours exquisite,
Swathe me with cerements for eternity.
Time is no more, I pause and yet I flee.
A million ages wrap me round with night.
I drain a million ages of delight.
I hold the future in my memory.36

Oscar Wilde's description in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and the revelations of the Sherlock Holmes stories were indicative At the milieu in which such use was acceptable. The reality was, however, sometimes more prosaic than its fictional presentation. The Limehouse resident who saw West End 'slummers' trying opium smoking in the early 1900s remarked that many had to give up because they could not keep the flame alight.
The reality of the practice was thus more prosaic, more narrowly circumscribed than the myth would suggest; the reaction of local people most in touch with it was tolerant; and the associations with white society limited. Yet opium smoking evoked a distinctly harsher legal response. In the early twentieth century, the legal :controls imposed on the alien practice of opium smoking were to be an indication of the attempt which was to be made to introduce a generally absolute narcotic policy. But there was no distinct legislative response to Chinese opium smoking in England in the nineteenth century. 37 Moves against opium smoking in England first came at a local level and expanded at the time of the First World War into nationwide control .38 The myth of the opium den was in the wider sense a domestic result of imperialism and the reaction to economic uncertainty. The Chinese and their opium use were a useful scapegoat. The cultural insensitivity which inFormed the reactions to Far Eastern opium use had its domestic :counterpart; and the reaction to what was in reality only the customary relaxation of Chinese seamen illustrated both the structural tensions of late Victorian society and the changed place of opium within it.

References

1. The following chapter is in part based on V. Berridge, `East End opium dens and narcotic use in Britain', London Journal, 4, No. 1 (1978), pp. 3-28. See also, for the Chinese in London, P.P. 1814-15, III : Report on Lascars and Other Asiatic Seamen; and P.P. 1816, X : Correspondence ... Relative to the Care and Maintenance of Lascar Sailors during their Stay in England.
2. Figures are taken from K.C.Ng, The Chinese in London (London, Institute of Race Relations, 1968), pp. 5-11.
3. J. Helmer and T. Vietorisz, Drug Use, The Labor Market and Class Conflict (Washington, D.C., Drug Abuse Council, 1974), PP. 3-7, details the position of immigrant Chinese in the U.S.A. See also J. Helmer, Drugs and Minority Oppression (New York, Seabury Press, 1975), PP- 31-2.
4. Anon., `East London opium smokers', London Society, 14 (1868), pp. 68-72.
5. Anon., `What opium smoking feels like. By one who has tried it' (187o, unattributed), John Burns collection, Greater London Record Office.
6. J. Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (London, Chapman and Hall, 1874), vol. 3, p. 488, describes how the visit to the opium den took place. The scene is in C. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (London, Chapman and Hall, 187o, Penguin edn 1974) PP. 37-9, 77.
7. G. Dore and W. B. Jerrold, London, A Pilgrimage (London, Grant, 1872; New York, Dover edn 197o), pp. 147-8; see also O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London, Ward Lock, 1891, Penguin edn 1966), pp. 207-8.
8. See, for example, R. Rowe, Picked Up in the Streets (London, W. H. Allen, 188o), pp. 38-42; J. Platt, `Chinese London and its opium dens', Gentleman's Magazine, 279 (1895) pp. 274-5; and `London opium dens. Notes of a visit to the Chinaman's East-End haunts. By a Social Explorer', Good Words, 26 (1885), pp. 188-92. Others are cited in V. Berridge, op. Cit., p. 24.
9. Good Words, op. cit., pp. 188-92.
10. `Opium smoking in London', Friend of China, 3 (1877), pp. 19-20, originally in the London City Mission Magazine.
11. `The Chinese in London. No. 4. An opium den', Tract in the Braithwaite Collection, op. cit., Ms. Vol. 207.
12. `The medical aspect of the opium question', supplement to Friend of China, i3 (1892), op. cit., and `Report of the British Medical Association Annual Meeting at Nottingham', British Medical Journal, 2 (1892), p. 258.
13. Good Words, op. cit.
14. Daily Chronicle, 17 October 1881, quoted in Friend of China, s (1882), p. 28.
15. `Opium dens in London', Chambers' Journal, 81 (19o4), pp. 193-5. 16. Friend of China, supplement 13 (1892), op. Cit. 17. Interview with W. J. C., Limehouse, 1976. 18. A. J. Arbuthnot, `The opium controversy', Nineteenth Century, 11 (1882), pp. 403-13. Publicity given to H. H. Kane's `American opium smokers', Friend of China, 14 (1881), pp. 44o-44, also tended to the same conclusion.
19. G. Piercy, `Opium smoking in London', Friend of China, 6 (1883),PP. 239-42, originally published in the Methodist Recorder.
20. C. W. Wood, `In the night watches', Argosy, 65 (1897), p. 203
21. East London Advertiser, 28 December 1907.
22. Friend of China, 7 (1884), p. 220; Public Record Office, Foreign Office papers, F.O. 371, 423, 19o8, `Report on Chinese opium dens by Commissioner of Police'; also P.P. 1909, CV: Correspondence Relative to the International Opium Commission at Shanghai, pp. 307-9.
23. East End Herald, 3o December 1955.
24. Friend of China, 7 (1884), p. 220. See also W. Besant, East London (London, Chatto and Windus, 19o1), pp. 2o5-6.
25. Anon., John Bums Collection, op. cit. 26. The Times, 25 and 28 November 1913.
27. Hansard, 14 (1893), col. 17o4. This is also mentioned in Papers presented to the Public Health Committee, 21 May 1908, and Minutes of the Public Health Committee, 5 November 1906 and 21 May 1908, London County Council Records, Greater London Record Office.
28. Interview with W. J. C., Limehouse, 1976.
29. Report of the Commission Appointed by the (Liverpool) City Council to Inquire into Chinese Settlements in Liverpool (1907), p. 7. J. P. May,
`The Chinese in Britain, 186o-1914', pp. 111-24 in C. Holmes, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1978), quotes similar evidence for Birkenhead in the 1900s.
30. Interview with W. J. C., op. cit.
31. There are descriptions of the process in, amongst others, J. Greenwood, In Strange Company (London, Henry S. King, 1873), pp. 22938; Notes and Queries, 8 (1896), p. 129; Anon., `A night in an opium den', in G. Cotterell, ed., London Scene from The Strand (London, Strand Magazine, 1974), pp. 76-9; and Daily Graphic, 14 February 19o8.
32. See discussion on the medical utility of opium. smoking in Medical Times and Gazette, 2 (1868), p. 704, and r (1869), pp. 26-7 and 320.
33. `A dangerous pamphlet', Lancet, 2 (19o3), PP- 33o-31
34. For a more extensive consideration of the drug sub-culture and its structural roots, see V. Berridge, `The origins of the English drug "scene"', in J. Kramer, ed., Drugs and the Arts (California, 1979).
35. R. Croft-Cooke, Feasting with Panthers. A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers (London, W: H. Allen, 1967) pp. 25o, 253-4; J. Adlard, Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties (London, Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1969), PP. 45 and 64-5; and E. Rhys, Everyman Remembers (London, J. M. Dent, 1931), pp. 28-9.
36. A. Symons, `The opium smoker', in Poems (London, Heinemann, 1902), vol. I, p. 3
37. State laws against the practice were being enacted in the U.S.A. at this time; see D. F. Musto, The American Disease. Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1973), PP- 36,244-5.
38. See V. Berridge (London journal), op. cit., pp. 3-23.