Opiate Use in Literary and Middle-Class Society

Popular use always attracted most attention. But at all levels of society, opium and laudanum were commonly and unselfconsciously bought and used. Few who took the drug regularly would have bothered to analyse the reasons behind their consumption. As the discussion of popular self-medication has shown, the drug could originally have been taken for what can be called a `medical' need - sleeplessness, headache, depression - but as it was often and quite normally self-prescribed, the use continued perhaps after the strict `medical' condition had gone. In reality the medical uses of opium shaded imperceptibly into 'non-medical' or what can be termed `social' ones. The type of terminology now taken for granted in discussing opiate use and abuse was not at all applicable to the situation when opium was openly available.
What would now be called `recreational' use of opium (and what in the nineteenth century was termed the `luxurious' or `stimulant' use of the drug) was, however, rarely spoken of. Although, as reminiscences of the Fens indicate, even working-class use could have its `stimulant' and recreational effects, at first opium was not usually taken with such effects in mind, even if it did in practice produce them. Self-medication was the most common reason for opiate use. It is therefore surprising that historically the most attention has always concentrated on examples of recreational use. The use of opium in the early part of the nineteenth century by the circle of Romantic writers and poets, and by their friends and associates, has attracted the bulk of interest, even though, as Chapters 3 and 4 have shown, popular usage was far more extensive at that time. In the Romantic circle, the opium addiction of Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been particularly emphasized. Some discussions have drawn very direct and unsubtle parallels between the life of these opium eaters in nineteenth-century England and the current drug `scene'. De Quincey has been equated with a 'high-school drop-out', and his pattern of opiate use has even been related to the current American programme of methadone maintenance.1 A paraphrase of De Quincey's life was quite a regular component of medical journals at the height of the drug `epidemic' of the 1 960s. Calculation of his dosage of opium in current terms and analysis of his psychology, or of his experiences under the influence of opium, somehow did duty as historical input to the debate on drug use. Analysis of his untypical individual case was easier than an examination of the place of opium in nineteenth-century society as a whole.
Much more valuable work has been done from a literary point of view; and the Romantics' use of opium has been widely studied in so far as it contributed to their literary output. De Quincey and Coleridge have attracted most attention in this respect, too. Abrams, in a short study, The Milk of Paradise (1934), long ago stated the view that opium had affected patterns of imagery in the addicted writers, leading to `abnormal light perception' and `extraordinary mutations of space'. Elizabeth Schneider, however, in Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (1953), discussed in some depth the poet's composition of the poem long considered the epitome of an opium reverie. Casting doubt on whether Coleridge really wrote the poem when he said he did, in the summer of 1797, she traced its origins from a `complex literary tradition' involving pseudo-oriental writing, the Gothic fashion and even Milton. `There is reason to believe,' she concluded, `that its special character was not determined or materially influenced by opium.'2 Alethea Hayter's recent work, however, allows opium a more active role in literary creation. Her view, and Schneider's, that the `stimulant' effects of opium were new, and largely confined to the Romantic circle, is open to criticism. A study of opiate use in eighteenth-century society indicates that such effects were widely known, but unrevealed because of `cultural prejudices' and literary convention. The Romantic recognition of the value of the imagination brought to the fore not new, but unspoken effects.3 But her main assessment, that opium did indeed have an effect on literary creation, stands as the most acceptable current analysis. In her view the opium dreams of De Quincey, Crabbe or Wilkie Collins `crystallized the particles of past experience - sensory impressions, emotions, things read - into a symbolic pattern, an "involute", which became part of the life of the imagination and could be worked into literature' .4 The difficulty, however, remains, in proving that it was indeed opium that aided the literary result. As De Quincey himself noted, `If a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium eater, the probability is that ... he will dream about oxen.'5
The poets' use of opium was also not without its wider social significance. The life histories of opium eaters like Coleridge and De Quincey are in no sense a substitute for an analysis of opium's place in nineteenth-century society; but they do indicate what were contemporary attitudes and practice. De Quincey's flight from school, his wanderings through Wales, his journey to London to raise money, his months of near starvation there in the winter of 1802-3 and his friendship with the fifteen-year-old prostitute, the famous `Ann of Oxford Street', are well-known, and particular to his own experience. But the ease with which he could buy the drug and the self-medication thereby involved were typical of any opium user in the first half of the century. De Quincey's first purchase was in 1804, from a druggist near the Pantheon in Oxford Street: `when I asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as any other man might do; and furthermore, out of my shilling, returned to me what seemed to be a real copper halfpence..." De Quincey's dose may at times have been enormous
- 320 grains a day in 1816, 480 grains in 1817-18 and in 1843.
But the self-treatment of minor complaints involved in his story was entirely commonplace. De Quincey first took it, on the recommendation of an undergraduate friend, as a remedy for gastric pain and also to ward off the incipient tuberculosis to which he was thought to be succumbing. Indeed, at the height of the debate on Britain's involvement in the Indo-Chinese opium trade at the end of the century, Surgeon-Major Eatwell even made an analysis of De Quincey's medical history from which he concluded that he had been suffering from 'gastrodynia' and a chronic gastric ulcer -'whatever might have been the degree of abuse of opium, this drug had in reality been the means of preserving and prolonging life'.'
The origin of each other's opium habit was always subject to intensive debate between De Quincey and Coleridge. Each was anxious to accuse the other of taking opium for the pleasurable sensations which resulted. After Coleridge's death in 1834, Gillman, in a life of the poet, published a letter in which De Quincey was said to have taken opium solely to obtain pleasurable effects. Coleridge, on the other hand, maintained that he himself had taken it only as an anodyne -'nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus, or for any craving after pleasurable sensations...' .S De Quincey, who had become friendly with Coleridge while on a visit to Somerset in 1807, was deeply wounded. In response, his Reminiscences of the Lake Poets were not charitable in their treatment of Coleridge. In Coleridge and Opium Eating, De Quincey reiterated his view that Coleridge had begun opiate use solely as a source of luxurious sensations. `He speaks of opium excess ... the excess of twenty-five years - as a thing to be laid aside easily and for ever within seven days; and yet, on the other hand, he describes it pathetically, sometimes with a frantic pathos, as the scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight which has desolated his life."
In reality, the origin of both writers' opium habits was a particular illustration of the intertwining of `social' and `medical' usage so much a feature of opiate; use at the time. De Quincey may have begun taking the drug in self-medication - but he also took it for pleasurable sensations and as a relief from anxiety. At times of particular stress - for instance after the death of little Kate Wordsworth in 1812, of whom he was particularly fond - his opium consumption was enormous. Coleridge, too, was less than honest about his habit. His contention that he was `seduced' into the use of narcotics during a period of painful illness at Keswick in 1801 has been widely accepted. In a letter to Poole in May of that year, he described `the disgust, the loathing, that followed these fits, and no doubt in part, too, the use of the brandy and laudanum which they rendered necessary'. 10 But Coleridge had been known to take laudanum before this date. It had been given to him in Christ's Hospital sick ward; and in 1796 he had taken large quantities of laudanum for toothache while at the cottage near Stowey. Kubla Khan was written in the following year while Coleridge was taking opium ostensibly for dysentery, but possibly, too, to combat the anxiety caused by financial problems."'
Such controversies are clearly important in any evaluation of the poets' lives and writings. But they ignore the point that self-medication could easily shade into recreational use. Similarly, Coleridge's accusation, made in 1830 and repeated by Gillman, that De Quincey's Confessions had `seduced' others into `this withering vice through wantonness' ignored the established place of the drug in Society. 12 The accusation that more of the pleasures than the pains of opium eating appeared in the Confessions was to some extent remedied by De Quincey himself in his 1856 revised version. Examples of opium eaters who attributed their experimentation to reading the book are undoubtedly to be found. The writer James Thomson and the poet Francis Thompson both acknowledged such a debt. Certainly the author of the anonymous book Advice to Opium Eaters (1823) maintained that it had been hastily brought out to warn others from copying De Quincey.13 De Quincey's own defence against this charge stressed the links between `stimulant' and `narcotic' use, medical and non-medical. `A man has read a description of the powers lodged in opium,' he wrote in 1845, `or ... he has found those powers heraldically emblazoned in some magnificent dream due to that agency ... but if he never had seen the gorgeous description of the gorgeous dress, he would (fifty to one) have tried opium on the recommendation of a friend for toothache, which is as general as the air, or for earache, or (as Coleridge) for rheumatism. ...114 The `medical' use of the drug could, he recognized, easily develop into something more, even without specific advocacy.
The acceptability of non-medical opiate use comes out most clearly in the public response at the time. When the Confessions were first published in the London Magazine in 1821 (and republished in book form in the following year), the literary reaction was one of excitement. The opium eating of the anonymous author and his stimulant use of the drug was a matter for moral condemnation from some quarters. But in general the reaction was interested and calm rather than hysterical. The Confessions were the first detailed description of English opium eating, although there were earlier, less widely circulated, medical analyses. The majority of descriptions available up to that time had presented the habit, along with opium smoking, as a peculiarly Eastern custom." De Quincey's eulogy of the drug proved the reality could be different, and that English opium eating was possible. Reaction was indeed a `mixture of intelligent appreciation and sanctimonious condemnation'. 16 The Confessions undoubtedly caused a furore, but the overriding impression is of calm interest even where the reaction was condemnatory. John Bull mounted a libellous attack on the author in 1824; Sir James Mackintosh praised the piece. The poet James Montgomery, writing in the Sheffield Iris, and the North American Review both cast doubt on its genuineness. 17
Opium eating was a prime concern, but the literary value of the work and the identity of the anonymous author were as important. The British Review was not `disposed to acquiesce in the justness of this panegyric on opium'. 18 The Medical Intelligencer, however, was full of admiration for the `beautiful narrative' and concluded that opium itself should be more widely used.19 The Confessions aroused interest, not fear or a desire for control. They even became a subject for humour. De Quincey appeared as the `English opium eater' in his friend John Wilson's 'Noctes Ambrosianae', semi-humourous literary dialogues published in Blackwood's Magazine. General Hamley, a regular contributor to Blackwood's, wrote `A recent confession of an opium eater', a humorous 'take-off' of De Quincey's work, when it was republished in a collected edition in 1856.20 Opium eating as a subject for humour, however heavy-handed, indicated a relaxed reaction.
On the other hand, Coleridge's attempts to reduce or break off his habit also indicated increased medical intervention in the condition and the beginnings of changed reactions. Between 1808 and 1814 he consulted many physicians and tried to restrict his quantity without success. After a period under the care of Dr Brabant, he removed finally to Highgate in 1816 to be permanently under the medical supervision of Dr Gillman. Here too, however, he continued to obtain lesser amounts of opium secretly. Dunn, the Highgate chemist, supplied him with three quarters of a pint of laudanum at a time, enough for five days' supply.21 Coleridge's habit was never as notorious as De Quincey's in his own life-time, and was not well-known even to his close friends. Campbell states that his indulgence in opium may have been suspected by the Wordsworths in 1802. But it was only on his return from his stay in Malta in 1806 that his friends were acquainted with the secret. Joseph Cottle, while on a visit to Coleridge in Bristol in 1813, noted the strangeness of his look. When both men called on Hannah More, Coleridge's hand shook so much that he spilled wine from the glass he was raising to his lips. Cottle was told by a friend that this `arises from the immoderate quantity of opium he takes.22
The social context of opiate use is thus implicit in the life-histories of the two men - the use of the drug in self-medication, its availability and the lack of concern evoked. But their own impact on the place of opium in society was also important. Their opium eating affected, as well as illustrated, the response to opium.
Cottle's own revelation of his friend's opium eating in his Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey was one indication of how later reactions to such usage were no longer as tolerant as they had once been. Cottle waited until after Coleridge's death before publishing. By the late 1830s there was more concern about the practice than there had been in the early 1820s. Taking as justification a letter of the poet's to Mr Wade in which he had expressly ordered that a `full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness' be given after his death, Cottle heightened, as well as expressed, the changed response. `When it is considered also, how many men of high mental endowments have shrouded their lustre, by a passion for this stimulus, and thereby, prematurely, become fallen spirits,' he declaimed, `would it not be a criminal concession to unauthorised feelings, to allow so impressive an exhibition of this subtle species of intemperance to escape from public notice? ... In the exhibition here made, the inexperienced, in future, may learn a memorable lesson, and be taught to shrink from opium, as they would from a scorpion.... '23
The `lesson' of opium eating came increasingly to be read into the experience of the two men. Indeed in some respects the social significance of Coleridge and De Quincey was in the last, rather than the first, decades of the century. Although the Confessions and evidence of Coleridge's opium use were never absent from discussions on opiate use in the first half of the century, it was during the period of anti-opium debate that their experiences were most directly related to changed reactions to opiate use. De Quincey and Coleridge were an established part of the domestic evidence with which the protagonists in the debate could buttress their arguments for and against the drug's consumption. Reissues of De Quincey abounded. There were at least thirteen editions and reissues of the Confessions between i880 and 1910, more than in the first half of the century. The poets' consumption of opium, their dosage, their periods of moderate addiction and their longevity were all cited as evidence .24 Coleridge, De Quincey and Wilkie Collins were `melancholy and well-known instances' of opium eating to the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (even if in this case the object was to stress the harmfulness of smoking rather than eating the drug). In evidence to the Royal Commission on Opium in the 1 890s, by contrast, their longevity and the consequent possibilities of long-continuing consumption were the point at issue .25
De Quincey and Coleridge were, after all, only exceptional and well-publicized instances of the commonplace use of opium in respectable circles in the first half of the century. Excessive concentration on their spectacular histories of addiction, and, at times, enormous dosages, has tended to disguise the overlapping of addiction, social and medical usage throughout middle-class society at the time. Among the writers, medical men and friends of the two men, use and addiction intermingled. In the circle which gathered round Dr Thomas Beddoes of Bristol, a disciple of Dr John Brown, were Coleridge and De Quincey, Charles Lloyd and Tom Wedgwood, the photographer, whose reliance on opium was notable in the last years of his life. It was through a recommendation of opium in Beddoes' edition of Brown's Elements of Medicine that Coleridge was supposed to have first taken the drug. Two of Tom Wedgwood's brothers married two sisters, whose third sister was married to James Mackintosh. Mackintosh, the philosophical writer and lawyer, was, like Beddoes, also a student and admirer of Brown. He was generally reported to be an opium addict, and while out in India, as Recorder of Bombay, he was in the habit of often taking laudanum. Mackintosh was a friend of Robert Hall, the Baptist preacher. Hall, too, was an opium addict and took as much as 120 grains a day. The stirring quality of his sermons was said to result from his use of the drug.26
Such a chain of inter-linking addiction is remarkable only in that it was documented; patterns of literary consumption were always the most accessible. Byron, for instance, took laudanum occasionally. When his wife, thinking him insane, had his belongings searched, she found not only a copy of Justine, but a phial of Black Drop. In 1821, six years later, he recorded that he was using alcohol, not opium, to raise his spirits - `I don't like laudanum now as I used to do.'27 Shelley was also heavily reliant on laudanum at times of excessive physical and mental stress. He recorded, after a violent disagreement with Southey in 1812, that `I have been obliged by an accession of nervous attack to take a quantity of laudanum which I did very unwillingly and reluctantly....' On his parting from his wife, Harriet, at a time when he was suffering much bodily pain in addition, `he would actually go about with a laudanum bottle in his hand, supping thence as
need might be'.28
Keats was taking laudanum in 1819 and 1820 and at one stage intended to commit suicide with the drug before his death in Italy.29 Sir Walter Scott wrote The Bride of Lammermoor in 1819 in the course of a painful illness for which he was being given up to two hundred drops of laudanum and six grains of opium a day.30 Branwell Bronte was overtly dependent on the drug (his consumption of it originally began in imitation of De Quincey). For sixpence he could buy a measure of laudanum at Bessy Hardacre's drug store opposite The Bull in Haworth; and he sometimes wheedled opium pills out of her when he had no money. 31 Dickens took opium occasionally at the end of his life, in particular to mitigate the stresses and physical ailments induced by his reading tour in America in 1867-8. The drug's effects provided a notable theme in his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). James Thomson's poem `The City of Dreadful Night', inspired by his use of opium; the secret addiction of Francis Thompson who, taking six ounces of opium a day, had descended into destitution before Wilfrid and Alice Meynell rescued him to write for Merry England; James Mangan's compensation for poverty and ill-health by laudanum and alcohol - all were part of the interlocking patterns of use and addiction.
Many other writers were undoubtedly dependent on the drug. Wilkie Collins took laudanum originally to deaden the pain of a rheumatic complaint and went on taking it for the rest of his life. Towards the end of his life Collins was in almost constant pain, carrying his supply of laudanum in a silver flask with him wherever he went. He had written in 1865:

Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart ... I have had six delicious hours of oblivion; I have woken up with my mind composed; I have written a perfect little letter ... - and all through the modest little bottle of drops which I see on my bedroom chimneypiece at this moment. Drops, you are darling! If I love nothing else,
I love you!32

It was in Collins's writing that the influence of opium was most clearly expressed. The Moonstone itself (1868) was written under the influence of opium as Collins, aware of his mother's impending death, struggled to meet a deadline while plagued with acute pain in his eyes. Like his part-autobiographical character, Ezra Jennings, the opium addict of the novel, he found that the `progress of the disease has gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it'. 33
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom Pickering has called `a well-balanced addict', took opium and morphia regularly. Robert Browning was shocked to find that `sleep only came to her in a red hood of poppies'. As she wrote to Miss Mitford, in 1840, `I took two draughts of opium last night - but even the second failing to bring sleep. It is a blessed thing! - that sleep! - one of my worse sufferings being the want of it. Opium - opium - night after night - ! and some nights, during east winds, even opium won't do. ...' Muriate of morphia she called her `elixir', but she was quite able to give up the drug altogether when she was pregnant and worried about its effect on the unborn child. Her use of the drugs was simply a fact of her life and not an important one for her literary output; Julia Ward Howe's jealous contention that Mrs Browning relied on `pinions other than her own' for the imagery and depth of her writing remains in doubt.34 Jane Carlyle, too, although probably not addicted, was taking much morphia in the 1840s. She was using the drug quite regularly from 1846 to 1853 to help her depression and sleeplessness. A dose given for her cough in 1846 induced, according to Caroline Fox, `not beautiful dreams and visions, but a miserable feeling of turning to marble herself and lying on the marble, her hair, her arms, and her whole person petrifying and adhering to the marble slab on which she
lay'.35
Regular middle-class use and addiction was not simply a literary matter, although evidence for it in those circles is most plentifully documented. Throughout `respectable' society addicts were to be found, with most note being taken of the habits of the famous. Clive of India died in a fit after taking a double dose of the opium to which he was accustomed. William Wilberforce was first prescribed opium for ulcerative colitis in 1788; Lord Carrington commented of him half a century later that `it is extraordinary that his health was restored by that which to all appearances would be ruined by it, namely the constant use of opium in large quantities'.36 In 1818, thirty years after his first prescription, he was still taking the same dose, a four-grain pill three times a day. Gladstone's sister Helen, a convert to Rome, was an invalid and a laudanum addict whom Gladstone himself found in Baden Baden in 1845 `Very ill from laudanum', having taken a dose of three hundred drops .37 John Thomson, whose Street Life in London was one of the earliest documentary photographic series, was also an opium addict. He, unlike most other users, had developed the habit after a lengthy visit to the Far East.38 George Harley, Professor of Practical Physiology at University College Hospital and later a writer on the uses and abuses of opium, also became dependent on morphia (which he took orally) after suffering intense eye pain. `I ... crawled back into bed, put out my hands, laid hold of the bottle containing the draught of morphia, and drained it to the bottom.' Harley later cured himself of his addiction by an agonizing period of abrupt withdrawal. After eight sleepless nights, ten hours of oblivion left him cured.39
Others, although not strictly dependent on the drug, took it for `stimulant' purposes. Horace Walpole remembered Lady Stafford saying to her sister, `Well, child, I have come without my wit today' when she had not taken her opium `which she was forced to do if she had any appointment, to be in particular spirits'. Jane, Duchess of Gordon, likewise took opium regularly and was lively and gay.40
Florence Nightingale took opium on her return from the Crimea, partly to counteract the effect of the ending of her work there, partly, too, for a medical reason. In July 1866, when suffering severe back pain, she wrote that `Nothing did me any good, but a curious little new fangled operation of putting opium under the skin which relieves one for twenty-four hours - but does not improve the vivacity or serenity of one's intellect.'41 Southey's mother took opium in large quantities during her last illness. Southey himself took the drug for sleeplessness, as did many others. In a letter to Sir Humphry Davy, another of the circle round Beddoes at Bristol, he complained of `nervous feelings of pain and agitation. Tonight I try if opiates will send me to sleep, and when I sleep, preserve me from broken yet connected dreams ...'.42
George IV was given opiates, too, for their narcotic effect. The Duke of Wellington commented in 1826 on the King's excessive use of spirits : `he drinks spirits morning, noon and night; and he is obliged to take laudanum to calm the irritation which the use of spirits occasions ...'. Jane Austen's mother had opium similarly to help her sleep. Lady Sarah Robinson, whose only daughter had recently died, was in 1826 calmed from `an overwhelming rage' by the administration of `a quantity of laudanum' .43
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, who suffered from tuberculosis and a spinal deformity, was addicted to laudanum and died of an overdose. Yet Rossetti nevertheless strongly urged Janey Morris, in the course of a romance obsessively over-concerned with illhealth, to take chlorodyne for neuralgia. 14 Oliver, the son of Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti's associate, advised Frederic Shields, the artist and, like Rossetti, addicted to chloral, to take `A dose of chloral Monday, sour milk Tuesday, Laudanum Wednesday, on Thursday a little spirits, while on Friday you might modestly content yourself with fifteen to twenty-five drops of chlorodyne. In this way you would not grow hardened to any one of them, and each would retain its full power and proper efficiency. 145
There were other less famous but nonetheless `respectable' opium eaters. In Morwenstow in Cornwall, the opium taking of the Rev. Robert Hawker was exaggerated by the stress of his wife's death in 1862. Hawker had a neighbour, Oliver Rouse, whose favourite tipple was gin and paregoric.46 Mostly the opium use of these less known circles went unremarked. In general, a gallery of such individual opium users and eaters is certainly no reliable guide to the incidence of usage at that time. It is, however, a valuable indication of how the situation of open availability operated before the 1868 Pharmacy Act and to a great extent beyond it. It is perhaps surprising to find that famous personalities of the period were dependent on, or regular users of, a drug the use of which is now shunned or regarded most usually as symptomatic of a diseased or disturbed personality. Many managed their dependence without the physical and mental deterioration, the social incapacity, or the early death which is the stereotype of contemporary narcotic addiction. Addiction, in fact, was not the point at issue for those users of the drug and their contemporaries. The experiences, and their publication, of Coleridge and De Quincey may with hindsight be seen as landmarks in the process of changing perspectives on opiate use, as helping gradually to engender a harsher, more restrictive response. But for their contemporaries, opium was a simple part of life, neither exclusively medical nor entirely social.

References

1. For an example of this tendency, see R. E. Reinert, `The confessions of a nineteenth century opium eater: Thomas De Quincey', Bulletin of Menninger Clinic, 16 (1972), pp. 455-9.
2. E. Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 17.
3. A. Knight, `The milk of paradise in the patent remedy: a study of the uses of opium in eighteenth century English society and literature', unpublished typescript, c.1971, argues that `stimulant' effects of the drug were experienced by eighteenth-century writers. I am grateful to Judith Blackwell for loaning me this typescript.
4. A. Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London, Faber and Faber, 1968, paperback edn 1971), p. 335.
5. Quoted by A. Hayter, op. cit., p. 107.
6. T. De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (London, Taylor and Hessey, 1822, Penguin edn 1971), P. 71.
7. W. C. B. Eatwell, `A medical view of Mr De Quincey's case', appendix 1, in A. H. Japp, Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings (London, John Hogg, 1890).
8. J. Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, William Pickering, 1838), vol. 1, p. 245.
9. Some of De Quincey's criticisms of Coleridge are in `Samuel Taylor Coleridge', pp. 93-4; and 'Coleridge and opium eating', pp. 7 ][-111 in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, 1862).
10. J. D. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A Narrative of the Events of His Life (London, Macmillan, 1894), p. 122.
11. M. Lefebure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (London, Victor Gollancz, 1974), P. 44, 199-200,251; E. L. Griggs, `Samuel Taylor Coleridge and opium', Huntington Library Quarterly, 17 (1954), PP. 357-8.
12. J. Gillman, op. Cit., p. 245.
13. Anon., Advice to Opium Eaters (London, W. R. Goodluck, 1823), preface.
14. H. A. Page, Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings, with Unpublished Correspondence (London, John Hogg, 1877), pp. 271-2.
15. Baron de Tott, Memoires du Baron de Tott, sur les Turcs et les Tartares (Amsterdam, no publisher, 1784), pp. 158-9.
16. M. Elwin, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in Both theRevised and the Original Texts with its Sequels, Suspiria de Proftmdis and The English Mail Coach, by Thomas De Quincey (London, Macdonald, 1956), Introduction.
17. H. A. Page, op. Cit., Pp. 237-8.
18. `Confessions of an English Opium Eater', The British Review and London Critical journal, 20 (1822), PP, 474-88.
19. `Confessions of an English Opium Eater', Medical Intelligencer, 3 (1822), pp. 116-18.
20. 'Noctes Ambrosianae', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, r4 (1823), PP. 485-6; `A recent confession of an opium-eater', ibid., 8o (1856), pp. 629-36.
21. E. L. Griggs, op. Cit., pp. 36o and 364-78.
22. J. Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (London, Houlston and Stoneman, 1847), pp. 360-61; J. D. Campbell, op. Cit., p. 200.
23. J. Cottle, op. cit., pp. 348-9; Cottle's `wretched reminiscences' of Coleridge's opium eating were heavily criticized in the Quarterly Review, 59 (1839), PP. 1-33.
24. 'Coleridge and opium', British Medical Journal, 2 (1884), p. 1219, and ibid, r (1885), pp. 109, 210.
25. `Opium eating and opium smoking', Friend of China, 11 (189o), pp. 138-40; P.P. 1894, LXI: Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission on Opium, q. 16872.
26. This circle of opium users and addicts is described in M. Lefebure, op. cit. pp. 61-2, and in A. Hayter, op. Cit., pp. 27-8.
27. L. A. Marchand, Byron, a Biography (London, John Murray, 1957), vol. 2, p. 559; P. Quennell, ed., Byron, a Self-Portrait. Letters and Diaries, 1798-1824 (London, John Murray, 1950), vol. 2, p. 566.
28. T. L. Hood, ed., Letters of Robert Browning (London, John Murray, 1933), pp. 223-4; R. Holmes, Shelley, The Pursuit (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), pp. III, 113, 115 and 391-2.
29. A. Hayter, op. cit., pp. 306-28. I am grateful to Robert Gittings for the information about Keats' suicide plans.
30. A. Hayter, op. Cit., p. 293.
31. W. Gerin, Branwell Bronte (London, Thomas Nelson, 1961), pp. 159, 289.
32. Quoted in P. Haining, ed., The Hashish Club (London, Peter Owen, 11975) pp. 66-8.
33. W. Collins, The Moonstone (London, 1868, Penguin edn 1966), p. 430.
34. G. Pickering, Creative Malady (London, Allen and Unwin, 1974), pp. 262-4; A. Hayter, Mrs Browning. A Poet's Work and Its Setting (London, Faber and Faber, 1962), pp. 58, 60-62, 67-8; A. Hayter, Opium, op. Cit., pp. 278-9.
35. W. Monk, ed., The Journals of Caroline Fox (London, Elek, 1972), p. 171; A. Hayter, A Sultry Month (London, Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 156; L. and E. Hanson, Necessary Evil: The Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle (London, Constable, 1952), PP. 388, 439 and 516.
36. J. Pollock, Wilberforce (London, Constable, 1977), P• 79.
37. S. G. Checkland, The Gladstones. A Family Biography 1764-1851 (Cambridge University Press, 1971) Pp. 290-91, 351 and 377-80;
M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, eds., The Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 3, p. 487.
38. C. Beaton and G. Buckland, The Magic Image (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), P. 74.
39. Mrs A. Tweedie, ed., George Harley (London, Scientific Press, 1899), pp. 174-6. I am grateful to Mr L. M. Payne for drawing this reference to my attention.
40. H. Walpole, Selected Letters (London, Dent, 1926), p. III ; A. Calkins, Opium and the Opium Appetite (Philadelphia, J. Lippincott, 187 1), P• 139
41. G. Pickering, op. cit.
42. H. Davy, Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific (London, John Churchill, 1858) PP. 42-3.
43. Duke of Wellington, Wellington and His Friends (London, Macmillan, 1965), pp. 69-70; R. W. Chapman, ed., ,lane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others (London, O.U.P., 1952), p. 26; V. Dickinson, ed., Miss Eden's Letters (London, Macmillan, 1919), p. 132.
44. J. Bryson and J. C. Troxell, eds., Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976), pp.131-2.
45. D. I. Macht and N. L. Gessford, `The unfortunate drug experiences of Dante Gabriel Rossetti', Bulletin of the Institute for the History of Medicine, 6 (1938), PP. 34-61.
46. P. Brendon, Hawker of Morwenstow. Portrait of a Victorian Eccentric (London, Jonathan Cape, 1975), pp. 194-7, 200, 212, 224.