During
the Victorian era, the use of opium and the effect that it had on the
imagination of writers was quite profound.
Many of the most famous writers, poets, and artists active before and
during the Romantic Movement were users of the drug, including Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Oscar
Wilde.
At
the time, opium was as common as aspirin is today and was the base ingredient
in many patent medicines. Physicians
in both England and America provided opium gum pills and opium penny sticks to
patients, while pharmacists sold opium-laced concoctions such as Godfrey’s
Cordial - containing opium, treacle, water, and spices - directly over the
counter as laudanum.
Inspired
by Thomas DeQuincey’s book, Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater, American writer William Blair described his own
experiences with opium in An Opium-Eater
in America, a Victorian-era article that appeared in the July 1842 issue
of the Knickerbocker, a New York
magazine.
Suffering
from the pains of headache and stomach ailments, Mr. Blair took
ten grains of opium in a cup of coffee during his evening meal.
Afterward, his pain relieved, he felt well enough to venture out to the
theater. Once arriving at that
venue, he acted so out of character that his theater friends thought him
suddenly mad. But it was while he
was seated inside during the performance that he lapsed into strange waking
dreams and surreal visions while staring at the ceiling, the efforts of the
actors all but lost to him as he was drawn deeper into his opium revelry.
In
the following excerpt from that article, he describes his experience, even
lapsing into reference to the gods of Greek mythology in his attempt to
explain himself:
While
I was sitting at tea, I felt a strange sensation, totally unlike any thing I
had ever felt before; a gradual creeping thrill, which in a few minutes
occupied every part of my body, lulling to sleep the before-mentioned racking
pain, producing a pleasing glow from head to foot, and inducing a sensation of
dreamy exhilaration (if the phrase be intelligible to others as it is to me),
similar in nature but not in degree to the drowsiness caused by wine, though
not inclining me to sleep; in fact so far from it, that I longed to engage in
some active exercise; to sing, dance, or leap. I then resolved to go to the
theatre - the last place I should the day before have dreamed of visiting; for
the sight of cheerfulness in others made me doubly gloomy.
I
went; and so vividly did I feel my vitality - for in this state of delicious
exhilaration even mere excitement seemed absolute Elysium - that I could not
resist the temptation to break out in the strangest vagaries, until my
companions thought me deranged. As I ran up the stairs I rushed after and
flung back every one who was above me. I escaped numberless beatings solely
through the interference of my friends. After I had been seated a few minutes,
the nature of the excitement was changed, and a "waking sleep"
succeeded. The actors on the stage vanished; the stage itself lost its
reality; and before my entranced sight magnificent halls stretched out in
endless succession, with gallery above gallery, while the roof was blazing
with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was
thronged with strange, gigantic figures, like the wild possessors of a lost
globe, such as Lord Byron has described in "Cain"; as beheld by the
Fratricide, when guided by Lucifer he wandered among the shadowy existences of
those worlds which had been destroyed to make way for our pigmy earth. I will
not attempt farther to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of
"brown gum" had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words
that I can command would do justice to its Titanian splendor and immensity.
Below is a short bit of verse that a poetic observer of Mr. Blair’s experience might
have written. Please indulge the author for its quaintness and
simplicity:
Mr.
Blair Drinks the Milk of Paradise
First, the onset of a creeping thrill
Then pacification of pain
Gnawing discomfort lulled, then stood still
Drifting to Lethian plains
Encased in a glow, like walking through silk
Gave rise to peculiar desire
To laugh, to sing, to dance, and leap
While juggling Promethean fire
A theater date, his manners were tossed
Toward friends he normally greeted
All sense of self momentarily lost
Then he presently found himself seated
Now in a state of enthralling delight
Propelled toward absolute bliss
A ceiling ablaze in the Victorian night
Bejeweled in celestial grist
And the grand, magnificent visions beheld
Were conjured by simple brown gum
Awash in the grip of an enchanting spell
A disciple of Morpheus become
References: An
Opium Eater in America, by William Blair
