Opium, the Paracetamol of the Romantic age.

.In the 19th century, opium use was widespread throughout the social order, usually in the liquidised form known as laudanum. It was particularly prevalent in East Anglia, as an aid against the anxiety-inducing flat landscapes of that country, and the aches and pains that this marshy world visited on the population. 

Working-class women used opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since dentistry was a hazardous business, and the prospect of losing your teeth for wooden dentures – like George Washington – was not a pleasing prospect. 

But narcotics lurk everywhere in the literature and experience of the 19th century, and not necessarily as a special ally of Romanticism. Opium stopped children crying, as well as providing a metaphysical escape route for Oxbridge drop-outs. It is even possible to see Tennyson’s In Memoriam as a courageous, repetitive mantra, whose poetic rhythm permits, precisely in its weary inventiveness, an alternative to reaching for the little bottles filled with the colourful waters of oblivion

Thomas de Quincey takes his place in the opium story for one famous reason: he confessed. He confessed for reasons familiar down the ages – it brought relief and celebrity. It’s a question, not of ‘kicking the habit’, but of writing your way out of trouble, on lines laid down by St Augustine, exoricising your doubts on papr,  and kept alive by Rousseau, embarrasingly confessional.