by Martin Booth
That neither Wilkie Collins nor Sir Walter Scott recognised their own work does not suggest opium gave them something which had not originally existed within them in the first place. Collins had researched gemmology, India and somnambulism before embarking upon his novel and the historical background and geographical settings of Scott’s tale were familiar to him. Just as De Quincey had pointed out, if one talked of oxen, opium represented them: here were sustained examples of knowledge being recycled by opium.
Other writers were indebted and, in some instances, enslaved to opium. As Wilkie Collins reported, Bulwer Lytton took opium as a tranquilliser and stimulant, most probably introduced to it as a painkiller for the excruciating earaches he experienced throughout his life: his elder brother, who lived in Constantinople, might have prompted his first dose, for he suffered from migraines and was an addict who described the effects of taking opium as being like having one’s soul rubbed down with silk. Bramwell Brontë, the brother of the Brontë sisters, was an addict, whilst Byron and Shelley were occasional users. James Thomson experimented with it but he was to die from alcoholism whilst, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the poet Francis Thompson was heavily addicted. Baudelaire, born in 1821, was a heavy hashish user for many years but he turned late in life to opium, his poetry paying homage to it. There are reasons to consider others as candidates for opium usage: Hector Berlioz, Gérard de Nerval and, in later years, Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Rollinat were also either addicted or influenced by it.
It is fair to say most writers came across opium in the first place as an anodyne and only subsequently fell under its sway, the dreams and nightmares weaving themselves into their work often to become an essential and unavoidable part of it. Yet there were those who regarded opium as a boon to their writing, who had been afforded the opportunity of giving it up but chose to keep on with it. For them, opium was a path to the unattainable, a doorway into the cosmos. None realised, or chose to heed, De Quincey’s remarks that opium only displayed what was already in the mind.
For many addicted writers, opium did little to affect their characters adversely. They lived artistically successful lives, often becoming wealthy from their writings. There were those, like the guilt-ridden Coleridge, for whom addiction was a burden but they were of sufficiently strong will not to let the depression and despair of addiction oppress them.
On the other hand, there were those who were poor or burdened with the worries of everyday survival, and perhaps weak of character, who were changed by opium. They could become moody, sullen, mercurial of spirits and even suicidal, were often tormented, with their work showing this torment seething in them: a good example is Edgar Allen Poe, the American writer whose character was undermined by both opium and alcohol.
For over a century, a controversy has raged about whether or not Poe was an opium addict for at least a part of his life. Certainly, he was an opium user if not actually addicted and his work shows the unmistakable signs of opium: four of his fictional heroes are addicts. Poe tried to commit suicide by overdosing and his sister recorded often seeing him in a sad state from opium. Orphaned at the age of three and adopted by his Scots godfather who lived in Richmond, Virginia, Poe was partly educated in London, later attending the University of Virginia which he had to leave, broken by gambling debts. In 1831, he was dishonourably discharged from West Point Military Academy for deliberate neglect of his duties. Turning to journalism, he became a heavy drinker with an unstable temperament which both addictions eroded to such an extent he could not cope with his financial worries, his inner despair, the demands of his creativity and his wife’s fatal consumption. He quarrelled with landlords and contemporaries – his most notorious feud was with Henry Longfellow – and died tragically as a result of wounds received in a drunken brawl in Baltimore in 1849 with, it is thought, electioneering hooligans: some claim he was drugged by his attackers but it is just as likely he was either drunk or had taken opium.
Whether through literature, personal experience or observing the everyday world around them, there was hardy a person alive in Europe or the immigrant populations of North America at the time who was not well acquainted with opium. De Quincey and his social peers may have used it for pleasure as well as a release from pain – and marvelled at its heightened dreams – but there were many hundreds of thousands of common folk for whom opium was the only way out of the drudgery of a harsh life.
4
Poverty, Potions and Poppy-heads
Throughout the nineteenth century, opium was as widely used in Britain, Western Europe and America as aspirin or paracetamol are today – if not more so – and it was the main ingredient of a vast range of medicines, patent medicines and quack ‘remedies’.
The extensive use of opium was staggering. As Berridge and Edwards outlined in Opium and the People, consumption in Britain increased between 1831 and 1859 at an average rate of 2.4 per cent per annum. Imports rose from around 91,000 pounds (41,300 kilograms) in 1830 to 280,000 pounds (127,000 kilograms) in 1860, re-exported opium rising from 41,000 pounds (18,600 kilograms) to 151,000 pounds (68,500 kilograms), more than half selling to America.
Despite opium production in India, which was largely under British control, most of the importation came from Turkey, which was deemed to manufacture a higher-quality product. Indian opium had a low morphine content – at 4–6 per cent – which made it unsuitable for British pharmaceutical use: Turkish opium had a 10–13 per cent morphine content and could easily be exported through Smyrna, which had long been an important trading centre, used particularly by the British who had established commercial links with Turkey since the founding of the Levant Company in 1581.
The Ottoman Empire was a large market for British cotton goods, which were traded for corn, silk, raisins, wool, sponges and opium: between 1827 and 1869, 80 to 90 per cent of all imported opium was Turkish. The trading level never dropped below 70 per cent even with the advent on the market of Persian opium which was imported direct from Persia or via Constantinople where it was repackaged to look like the Turkish variety.
The Turkish near-monopoly on opium was not without detractors. In 1829, a Dr Webster stated quite bluntly that, if possible, opium should be grown in and obtained from a British colony, removing the reliance upon what he termed ‘the rascally Turks’. Such a wish was, however, beyond the bounds of fulfilment. The trade was too well established to be overturned by jingoistic considerations.
At first, the trading lines followed the old silk and spice routes by way of the Low Countries, France, Germany, Gibraltar and Malta and, of course, Italy, where Venice was in the last stages of decline as a trading power. In time, alternative routes developed. Marseilles became a major shipment centre, a position it held until the 1970s. Rotterdam and Amsterdam also developed into maritime drugs centres, which they remain to this day. Yet, by 1850, most opium was shipped direct from Turkey aboard British vessels, doing away with transhipment and foreign tariff charges.
In Britain, Liverpool, Dover and Bristol were all opium ports, yet the main centre for trading in Europe was London where a cartel of importers controlled the business. Initially, these merchants were those whose firms were descended from the Levant Company: when the company finally closed in 1825, the cartel disintegrated, leaving opium susceptible to free trade. Wholesale importers moved in, purchasing opium both by private deal and at auction. As in any commodity market, there were also spot buyers who speculated when they saw prices favourably low but who were not dedicated opium traders.
The centre of opium business was around Mincing Lane in London, where 90 per cent of the trade was conducted. It had been an important market-place since the sixteenth century but, by the mid-1700s, it was associated primarily with opium and, to a lesser extent, other drugs. Opium transactions were sealed in Garraway’s Coffee House, near the Royal Exchange, by a system known as ‘buying by the candle’. A small candle was lit at the start of an auction and bids accepted until the wick burnt away, at which
point the highest bid for the consignment ‘under the candle’ was accepted. Auctions took place fortnightly, began at 10.30 in the morning and were attended by about 100 buyers and brokers who bid throughout the day.
On occasion, deals were arranged between the London drug wholesale houses, such as the Apothecaries’ Company or Allen and Hanburys, and individual brokers of whom there were about thirty operating in London. The method of business was thus: every Saturday, a list was published in the counting house of the Apothecaries’ Company providing notice of forthcoming requirements. Brokers submitted samples the following Tuesday. The company’s Buying Committee tested the samples and ordered accordingly. In these circumstances, cargoes in bond were sold prior to customs clearance.
Trading in opium required specific commercial expertise and the rewards could be high, although so too could be the risks. Mincing Lane brokers and dealers seldom worked under a 50 per cent profit margin, which could rise to 100 per cent, but it could just as readily fall. As with any agricultural commodity, prices fluctuated widely according to growing and harvest conditions and the quality of the produce. A second element reducing profit margins was the publication of a monthly current prices list allowing end-buyers, such as chemists, to shop around for the best deal. Other factors stabilising prices were the removal of import duties, the increasing efficiency of business with the advent of postage and railway parcel services and the gradual supplanting of the general import merchant by the dedicated opium dealer. A final influence upon international pricing was the encouragement by producer-governments which advocated switching peasant farming from less commercial and more risky cash crops to opium, thus improving their people’s income and lives, simultaneously increasing local tax revenue.
Prices varied widely. Opium was liable to an import duty of 9 shillings per pound until 1828, then 4s per pound to 1836, when it was cut to 1s per pound, the level at which the duty remained until a free-trade agreement removed it in 1860. The reduction and abolition of tax, linked to increasing import quantities, brought the wholesale price consistently down for much of the nineteenth century.
In 1818, with duty at 9s, Turkish opium wholesaled for about £1 per pound ex-tax, 30s per pound tax paid: in 1851, the wholesale price was 21s per pound, tax paid. Substandard or poorer quality opium, such as Egyptian, was priced in 1858 at 6s 8d per pound, ex-tax. Needless to say, poor harvests or the loss of a cargo (as in 1865, when the SS Crimean ran aground off Smyrna with a cargo of several tonnes of opium) caused price fluctuations but, in general, the cost of opium did not rise more than 25 per cent in a century to 1900.
Despite the modest pricing of opium, there were those who sought ways to produce it without suffering import taxes or dealing with Webster’s ‘rascally Turks’. Between 1740 and 1830, attempts were made to grow poppies and harvest opium in Britain.
The opium poppy was an established wild plant in some parts of Britain and Ireland well before the eighteenth century. Whether it was naturally indigenous or had been introduced is uncertain but it was to be found, most notably in the Fens (the low-lying marshlands of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire) where it was used to make poppy-head tea and a variety of folk remedies.
The methods of cultivation were first described by a Mr Arnot in 1742:
What I have found most successful is to trench a spot of new rich ground, where Poppies had not grown the preceding year; for if they are continued several years on the same Ground they degenerate. A chusing the ripest and whitest Seed of the great single-flowered Turkey Poppy, I sow it in the month of March very thin and superficially in Drills at two Foot Distance each, to allow Place for Weeding, etc. As soon as the young Plants spring up, I take most of them away, leaving only the strongest most thriving Plants at about a Foot distant from each other.
The first person in Britain to produce opium was Dr Alston, Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. He achieved this is the 1730s, using the white poppy because of its large pods, although it was not until 1742 that he published the fact.
From 1763, the Society of Arts began actively to promote the study of medicinal plants, starting with the cultivation of rhubarb and offering a gold medal for new discoveries. Soon the society’s interest turned towards the poppy and opium, prompted by a winner of a 50-guinea prize, John Ball, who produced home-grown opium. Encouraged by Ball’s success and spurred on by a new prize of 50 guineas plus a gold medal for the production of 20 pounds of raw opium, Thomas Jones set 5 acres of ground near Enfield, north of London, in 1794. Despite problems with weeds and inclement weather, he succeeded in 1800 in producing 21 pounds of raw opium and took the prize.
The prize for the development of the medicinal plant went to Dr Howison, an ex-Inspector of Opium from Bengal. In 1813, he stated that a double red garden poppy was suitable for opium production in Scotland, but it was his experiments with the white poppy near London which convinced him commercial opium growing in Britain was feasible. The problems he faced were the fragility of the plant, which could not withstand strong winds, and the care needed in harvesting the pods. Nevertheless, he received the gold medal.
The next major breakthrough came in 1820. John Young, an Edinburgh surgeon and winner of another gold medal, set out to prove opium could be harvested in a cold, damp climate. He succeeded in cultivating poppies which not only gave opium but also oil at a profit of £50–80 per acre. His yield per acre was 56 pounds of opium, several hundred pounds of oil and oil cakes, in addition to a harvest of early potatoes planted between the poppy rows, affording the young plants a protection against the elements. In all, the venture showed a profit of £110 7s 6d.
Not surprisingly, the most successful opium growers were those in the south of England, where the weather was milder. In 1823, Dr John Cowley and a Mr Staines, both of Winslow in Buckinghamshire, received a 30-guinea award from the Society of Arts for ‘143 pounds of opium, of excellent quality, collected by them from about eleven Acres of Land, planted with the Papaver somniferum.’
It was not long before reports came in of other poppy-growing ventures. Poppies were under limited cultivation in most of the southern counties of Britain. In some places, their legacy remains for opium poppies may now be found growing wild on the fringes of Sedgemoor in Somerset and in the countryside around Bridport in Dorset. Most of the growers found a ready local market for their produce for chemists were keen to buy opium at prices well below the market value, without the middleman and duty costs, although how good this opium was is hard to tell because no tests were done to verify the morphine content.
In general, the home-grown opium farmers were part-timers and none saw the poppy as a viable, long-term commercial crop. Indeed, the only successful commercial poppy product was not opium but poppy-heads.
This crop was grown in Mitcham, Surrey and was well-established as early as 1830: the London drug market for poppy-heads obtained the bulk of its supplies from this source. The pods yielded an extract known as ‘English opium’ with a 4 per cent morphine content. A bag of 3000 poppy capsules sold wholesale for about £4 10s 0d.
Poppy growing was never going to be successful on a large scale. The required hours of sunlight were too fickle to guarantee a high opium content, the ground could be too readily waterlogged by summer rains and the growing season, except in the far south of England, was too short.
One rural area of England, however, became synonymous with opium taking, to such an extent it was referred to as ‘the opium district’ and ‘the kingdom of the poppy’. The per capita consumption there was higher than anywhere else in the country. It was the Fens.
The reason for the high consumption of opium is unclear. Possibly, the people in this remote area had grown used to opium over the centuries, having used the wild poppy. On the other hand, local conditions might have prompted its popularity. Before the swamps were fully drained in the mid-1800s, malaria was prevalent and fever common amongst the scattered communities. Although quinine had been disco
vered and introduced to Europe in the 1640s, it was expensive, at ten times the cost of opium: obviously, the people resorted to the cheaper drug or relied upon herbal brews, including poppies, to reduce malarial fever. The damp climate with bleak winters promoted rheumatism and neuralgia and opium was used to relieve weather-induced illnesses as well as muscular pain brought on by heavy agricultural labouring.
Opium poppies were grown in Fenland gardens to provide herbal cures but most opium was obtained from chemists. Those in the cathedral city of Ely, in the centre of the Fens, sold more opium than any other drug. It was bought as a pill or a thin stick at 1 penny a time, and it was so common a customer had no need to even request it: a penny coin placed on a counter meant only one thing.
In his novel, Alton Locke, published in 1850, the Victorian reformer and novelist, Charles Kingsley, wrote about a Fenman explaining the taking of opium to a stranger:
‘Oh! ho! ho! – you goo into the druggist’s shop o’ market day, into Cambridge, and you’ll see the little boxes, doozens and doozens, a’ready on the counter, and never a venman’s wife goo by, but what calls in for her pennord o’elevation, to last her out the week. Oh! ho! ho! Well it keeps women-folk quiet it do; and it’s mortal good agin the ago pains.’ ‘But what is it?’ ‘Opium, bor’alive, opium!’
A penny’s-worth of ‘elevation’ was not taken merely as a medicine but, as the name implies, to lift its user out of the mire of Fenland mud and the drudgery of agricultural life. In 1863 Dr Henry Julian Hunter, a doctor in the Fens who studied the opium problem, reported: ‘a man may be seen occasionally asleep in a field leaning on his hoe. He starts when approached and works vigorously for a while. A man who is setting about a hard job takes his pill as a preliminary, and many never take their beer without dropping a piece of opium into it.’ Once opium was widely accepted as a medicine, it soon gained popularity as an intoxicant.
