Opium

by Martin Booth

  Inevitably, with such an extensive application of opium for a huge range of illnesses, addiction was common, yet it was hardly ever addressed and was generally accepted as the price one paid for the relief of pain. One reference to the hazard of addiction may be found in Purchas’s volume, Purchas His Pilgrimage, published in 1613:

  … they [travellers in Africa and Asia] suppose I know not what conjunction and efficacie both of Mars and Venus are therein; but being once used, must daily be continued on paine of death.

  Dr John Jones’s Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d published in 1700 – probably the earliest book specifically dealing with opium – mentioned the risk of addiction as well as the pleasures the drug offered. It did not specifically warn against opium, merely accepting addiction as a possible outcome of opium taking.

  Jones, who as well as publishing, practising medicine and studying opium, invented a clock improbably driven by bellows, wrote that opium produced ‘a dull, mopish and heavy Disposition’, caused a loss of memory and generally affected the whole body. He outlined both the physical and mental contra-indications of excessive usage or high dosage, also noting the effects of withdrawal. Almost certainly an addict himself, if Jones had not undergone withdrawal he had most certainly witnessed others going through its rigours, for he reported a sudden cessation of opium taking brought on ‘great, and even intolerable Distresses, Anxieties and Depressions of Spirits, which in a few days commonly end in a most miserable Death, attended with strange Agonies.’

  Yet, despite such a warning, he also emphasised the pleasurable sides of opium use which he appears to have regarded as not only being a vehicle for pleasant fantasies, the dulling of pain and release from anxiety, but also for ‘Promptitude, Serenity, Alacrity and Expediteness in Dispatching and Managing Business … Assurance, Ovations of the Spirits, Courage, Contempt of Danger, and Magnanimity … Euphory, or easie undergoing of all Labour, Journeys … Satisfaction, Acquiescence, Contentation, Equanimity’ and a good deal more. As a summary, he wrote ‘if [after taking opium] the person keeps himself in action, discourse of business, it seems … like a most delicious and extraordinary refreshment of the spirits upon very good news, or any other great cause of joy … It has been compared (not without good cause) to a permanent gentle degree of that pleasure which modesty forbids the name of…’ The pleasure Jones’s modesty forbade him to name might well be described as sex: addicts frequently comment on how orgasmic the sensation of opiates can seem. As for the illnesses Jones claimed opium would cure, his list covers almost every ailment from travel sickness to amputations, gout to bubonic plague and, most marvellous and ironic of all, he declared it was a cure for hypochondria.

  Perhaps the most vulpine aspect of Jones’s book was his claim that his was the truthful account of the ways and pitfalls of opium. Like any addict, he claimed miracles for the drug, insisting his book was written without prejudice or ‘any sly or sordid Evasion, or considerable Omission (which has been the perfidious Course of Authors in this case).’ In truth, he merely told what he saw through the addict’s eyes. His book was also criticised by a contemporary academic, with some justification, as being ‘extraordinary and perfectly unintelligible’.

  Jones summarised his thoughts by concluding, ‘opium does not operate by causing a grievous sensation and there being no other way left by which it may operate it must operate by causing a pleasant sensation … What can then cure pain and all its effects better than pleasure?’

  With the development of scientific curiosity, doctors and students began to wonder what it was about opium that made it work as it did yet opium lost little of its mystery. It was still referred to as ‘the Hand of God’ or ‘the sacred anchor of life’.

  Even Robert Boyle, author of The Skeptical Chymist and after whom the fundamental natural law is named, believed in opium’s occult secret. He was convinced it affected the ‘animal spirits’ and the nervous system. Dr John Freitag claimed its narcotic abilities were due to its extreme coldness, a concept dating back to the Middle Ages and the belief in humours. Monsieur Pomet, Chief Druggist to Louis XIV, explained opium’s capabilities in a similar vein:

  Opium procures rest by its viscous and sulphureous particles, which being convey’d to the channels of the brain, by the volatile parts, agglutinates and fixes the animal spirits, in such a manner that it stops for some time their circulation, from the swiftness of their former motion; so that during that obstruction, or tye upon the spirits, sleep ensues; for the senses are as it were fettered or locked up by the viscous or agglutinating property of opium.

  One of opium’s most avid students, Pomet referred to it as a ‘narcotick, hypnotick and anodyne’. It was good, amongst other things, for composing ‘the Hurry of the Spirits’, promoting insensibility, useful in diseases of the breasts and lungs, prevented the spitting of blood, cured coughs and colds, vomiting and looseness of the bowels, as well as being handy in the treatment of ‘cholick, pleurisis and hysterick cases’. His study of opium went so far as to chronicle its sources and types. He wrote:

  First, the pure from Cairo or Thebes. Secondly, the black and hard from Aden. Thirdly, the yellow and softer sort from Cambaia and Decam in the East Indies. Yet we generally at this time reckon but two sorts, being first the Turkish or Theban, which is weighty, of good consistency, thick and more solid than the Indian; of a lively fresh reddish colour, almost likes fresh aloes, of a strong poppy scent, of an acrid bitter taste, that will burn and flame; soft, easy to cut, and be dissolved in either water, wine or spirit of wine, and is pretty clean from dirt, excrements and filth. Secondly: the Indian opium, which is softer, yellower, lighter, not of so good a body, and much fouler, being in every respect inferior to the former.

  Attitudes towards opium persisted broadly unchanged through the eighteenth century although occult considerations were abandoned as scientific study increased. Medical writers began to assess opium, investigate and even criticise it. In his Family Herbal, the eighteenth-century physician Dr John Hill recommended caution and expressed his doubt about its alleged ability to cure a mad dog’s bite. George Young, in his Treatise on Opium published in the 1750s, and Dr Samuel Crumpe, in his Inquiry into the Nature and Properties of Opium in 1793, indicated the main features of addiction and touched upon the problems of withdrawal, but neither showed any sense of moral condemnation for either medicinal or recreational use. Crumpe went so far as to admit he had taken opium frequently and experienced its euphoria: there was no suggestion he took it to treat an ailment.

  Even the great Dr Samuel Johnson took opium on occasion, if only for medicinal purposes. Father of the English language, compiler of the first English dictionary, sage, seer and compendium of knowledge – or so his biographer, James Boswell, would have it – he was never addicted but took it to cure headaches and stomach trouble. Johnson, it seems, was wise to the dangers and wily enough to avoid them. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the biographer recorded:

  On Sunday, March 23 [1783], I breakfasted with Dr Johnson, who seemed much relieved, having taken opium the night before. He however protested against it, as a remedy that should be given with the utmost reluctance, and only in extreme necessity. I mentioned how commonly it was used in Turkey, and that therefore it could not be so pernicious as he apprehended. He grew warm and said, ‘Turks take opium, and Christians take opium; but Russell, in his Account of Aleppo, tells us, that it is as disgraceful in Turkey to take too much opium, as it is with us to get drunk. Sir, it is amazing how things are exaggerated.’

  Most people considered opium taking for pleasure a peculiarly Eastern custom, a quaint pastime or an eccentric vice. When he appeared in literature, as in Dr Russell’s History of Aleppo, the opium user was an object of curiosity rather than of censure or alarm.

  This eccentric vice paved the way for another, less common use for opium. For most of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century it was, for a select few, not just a miraculous catholicon but the key to a cupboard containing unt
old marvels.

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  Pleasure-domes in Xanadu

  Opium alters the recognition and perception of certain sensations. Dr John Jones wrote of how it wonderfully distorted candle flames, how the sound of a pin dropped into a brass bowl was magnified and changed, how church bells sounded as if heard along a ‘hollow valley’. At the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, this warping of sensation, in addition to the dreams and visual images opium promoted, was to have a profound effect upon the arts, in particular literature.

  The period is called the Romantic Revival, its writers known as the Romantics. The name was loosely applied to a body of European authors roughly between 1775 and 1835 who rejected the prevalent rules of classicism and neo-classicism. At the core of Romantic literature was a resurgence of the imagination, flights of fancy allied to narrative rather than description. Romanticism contained a new awareness of nature and the natural world, emphasised the need for spontaneity in thought and action, attaching considerable importance to natural genius exhibited through imagination. It also embodied a more liberated and subjective expression of passion, pathos and personal feelings. Opium, and the liberty of thought it produced, was instrumental in the development of the Romantic ideal.

  In Europe, the movement included such writers as Goethe, Schlegel, Hölderlin, Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël and Pushkin, whilst in Britain it embraced Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey, the core of the period extending between 1798, when the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, and 1832, when Sir Walter Scott died.

  The awareness of opium and its effects suddenly became a topic of discussion with the 1821 publication in Britain of De Quincey’s autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-eater. It was the first time opium addiction, or as De Quincey put it, ‘the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain’, was laid bare in a book in which its author stated opium, rather than himself, was the true hero of the piece.

  When De Quincey, who was born in Manchester in 1785, discovered opium is debatable. Some accounts suggest he first took it medicinally at the age of seventeen, others claiming he encountered it whilst a student at Worcester College, Oxford: he wrote it was in 1804 when he was twenty, purchased at the recommendation of a fellow law student from a chemist in London’s Oxford Street to cure toothache and neuralgia. Whenever it was, De Quincey never forgot his first taste:

  … in an hour, O heavens! What a revulsion! What a resurrection, from the lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me. That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up … in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea … for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness …

  Opium offered De Quincey new routes of evasion from his confused state of mind about his future and his misery over the loss of his companion, a prostitute with whom he lived in penury in London whilst studying law, who left him when he returned to his family. Opium became his new destination in life. He stressed it did not create anything new but embellished what already existed, heightening awareness of latent thoughts and imagination: as he put it, a man who spent his life talking about oxen would dream of oxen under its influence.

  Early in his opium-eating days, De Quincey would take a draught of laudanum then set off to walk about London or to attend the opera. Knowing the drug heightened mental sensitivity to outside stimuli, he used its euphoria to expand his consciousness, to stretch the pleasure of being in the ordinary world with an ability to reach beyond the prosaic and mundane. Listening to opera became an exquisite pastime: even the sound of young ladies in the audience speaking Italian took on the qualities of the music which, heard through opium, stirred up memories, not as direct recall but ‘as if present and incarnated in the music’. Even the calls of market traders and banter of customers sounded like a weird music, the opium also eradicating the concept of time and altering perceptions of space. De Quincey often walked great distances, oblivious as to how long he was out.

  It was of this time that De Quincey wrote his famous eulogy to opium:

  O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium! that, to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs of grief that ‘tempt the spirit to rebel’, bringest an assuaging balm – eloquent opium!… thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples … beyond the splendours of Babylon and Hekatompylos; and, ‘from the anarchy of dreaming sleep’, callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the ‘dishonours of the grave’. Thou only givest these gifts to man: and thou hast the keys of Paradise …

  Although the lassitude of opium frequently removes the desire to record what wonders are experienced – and De Quincey himself reported how he wanted to write down what his intellect had undergone but found himself riddled with a ‘powerless and infantile feebleness’ – the dreams can be so exquisite and amazing as to outstrip the powers of literacy. In time, these visions spill over from the state of narcosis into everyday thought.

  This ability to visualise outside opium-induced sleep was summed up by De Quincey in four important observations. The first was ‘that, as the creative state of the mind increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point – that whatsoever I happened to call up and trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was apt to transfer itself to my dreams.’ In other words, the imagination could, in part, decide what the opium had as its raw dream material. Second came the awareness that ‘my dreams were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and funereal melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable in words.’ These emotions were surely a part of De Quincey’s own psychological make-up, although a sense of inexpressible melancholy is common to many addicts’ experience: it may well be an expression of the calmness opium promotes. His third observation was that ‘the sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected.’ This distortion provided a strange and omniscient visual imagery in addicts, often filled with fantastical buildings and structures, land- and seascapes and mountain vastnesses. Finally, ‘the minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them … but placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all the evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantly.’ The ability to recollect experiences is the stuff of the writer’s art.

  In these four points, it is surprising De Quincey does not mention the manner in which opium contorts or alters colours. In ordinary dreams, colours (if they appear at all) are unenhanced and realistic. In an opium dream, reds darken to maroons and blood crimsons, blues blacken to the colour of an early night sky, whilst yellows become solid and more luminescent. What is more, colours take on an almost tangible texture so the hue becomes only a part of their impact: one does not just see them, one also feels them.

  Undoubtedly, opium was a Pandora’s box of literary tools to the imaginative and erudite mind. It provided unique visual images, afforded a kind of mental time travel, gave a new way of observing the mundane and acted as an aide-mémoire.

  When De Quincey became habituated, he called opium his ‘Divine Poppy-juice, as indispensable as breathing’: it was his release from physical pain and mental anguish, but it gave him more. Through the freemasonry of addiction characteristic amongst addicts, he gained a sense of kinship with others with whom he shared the common belief that opium set them above normal mortals, for it gave such magnificent visions. In other words, it took him into another, miraculous universe where the incredible was accessible.

  As addiction increased, his dreams changed. The visual images remained, yet they metamorphosed. Visions of Babylonian architecture gave way to
torments. Emotions such as joy were replaced with guilt. De Quincey became haunted by a sense of unfathomable dread, imprisonment or of being pursued by an ill-defined, terrible hunter.

  De Quincey recorded, for the first time and in spectacular detail, just such an agonising dream, the likes of which are familiar in advanced opium addiction. He had met socially a Malay trader and, although their meeting was brief, it impacted itself upon his mind, for the Malay became an incubus in De Quincey’s imagination:

  The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. Every night, through his means, I have been transported into Asiatic scenery … in China or Hindustan … I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed … Thousands of years I lived and was buried in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and I was laid, confounded with unutterable abortions, among reeds and Nilotic mud … Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a killing sense of eternity and infinity … The cursed crocodile became for me the object of more horror than all the rest … I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case in my dreams) for centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with life; the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions …