Substance Abuse in the Victorian Era

Interestingly, in the Middle Ages, the Church denounced everything and anything “eastern” as the “devil’s work” which meant drug addiction was extremely rare. Monks coming back from the Crusades found new uses in how to use drugs in helping the sick, but it would seem that was as far as it went.

The Victorian Era, however, had major problems with rampant drug abuse and alcoholism. Drugs like heroin, chloral, and laudanum were available and widely prescribed. The rapidly expanding British Empire brought drugs used from other lands into the country and, as a result, to the USA.

Common Drugs

Laudanum — a mixture of alcohol and opium derivatives ... common item included in the medicine kits of many proper Victorian families

Alcohol was easily produced and distributed ... these beverages were used to alleviate a host of ailments ... epilepsy, gout, kidney stones, colic, fever, headaches

The high use of barbiturates and depressants may indicate difficulties coping with the rigid social order.


OPIUM

1839: Opium Deaths
Opium and its preparations are responsible for more premature deaths than any other chemical agent. Opiates account for 186 of 543 poisonings, including no fewer than 72 among children.

18 March 1839: First Opium War
Lin Tse-Hsu, imperial Chinese commissioner in charge of suppressing the opium traffic, orders all foreign traders to surrender their opium. In response, the British send expeditionary warships to the coast of China, beginning The First Opium War.

1840: New England Imports Opium
New Englanders bring 24,000 pounds of opium into USA. US Customs promptly put a duty fee on the import

1856: Second Opium War
Britain & France win. Opium production increases.


HEROIN

.[source: http://drugs.uta.edu/drugs.html] ...

Heroin was a brand name coined for the bonding of morphine, opium's active ingredient, with acetic anhydride, a common industrial acid. The name was supposed to refer to the heroic, fearless and painless, sensation users felt after using it. It was discovered by a British chemist in 1874, and first mass produced by German pharmaceutical Bayer in 1898.

Drug abuse and drug problems were blamed on foreigners.

Be sure to check out ...
This site is dedicated to an investigation of the uses and abuses of drugs and alcohol within Victorian society. In particular, it investigates the role of drug and alcohol use in the production of art and literature and how drug and alcohol use gets represented in the literature and art of the period.



Famous Victorian Drug Addicts

• Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829–1862) = British model, poet, artist = addicted to laudanum ... 1st PG stillborn due to addiction ... 2nd PG Siddal overdosed ... Rossetti found her unconscious and dying in bed ... some say she left a suicide note that the doctor told Rossetti to burn
• poet & painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) addicted to chloral hydrate

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) = lifelong addict (started in childhood to treat spinal tuberculosis) ... had miscarriage because of abuse

• Samuel Coleridge (1875-1912) ... addicted to laudanum most of life ... the Royal Institute commissioned Coleridge to give a series of lectures in London... his use of opium caused him to cancel scheduled appearances

• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) suffered raging laudanum-induced hallucinations

• John Keats (1795-1821) suffered from cocaine, heroin, alcohol addiction

• Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) some say the inspiration of Alice in Wonderland came from his substance abuse hallucinations

• laudanum addict = novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

• laudanum addict = novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)

• Charles Tennyson (brother of Alfred Tennyson) was an opium addict (his poem Silkworms and Spiders alludes to his addiction)
















• some say Oscar Wilde abused opium as depicted in the decadent life-style in The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) suffered from opium and alcohol addiction

• Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-1882) ... misprescribed laudanum for sleep problems ... it caused anxiety & hallucinations ... because she experienced an increase of hallucinations, she was prescribed more laudanum & chloral hydrate which increased the problem leading to her eventual commitment to an asylum

• The Average Joesphine ... laudanum prescribed for menstrual cramp relief and vague aches ... spoon fed to infants

• 1883: J. B. Mattison (American doctor) suggested 30%-40% of American doctors were addicted


[Source: Morphine-Addicted Doctors, The English Opium-Eater, & Embattled Medical Authority by Barry Milligan of Wright State University, 2005, Cambridge Journal, Cambridge University Press)

~ From the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

Christian Women's Temperance Movement

The Victorian Era had an unrealistic and idealized vision of a family which led to and/or exacerbated a great many social ills. Opium use by females was considered “genteel” and “feminine” while public intoxication was deeply frowned upon.

[Note: As I documented earlier, the Victorians were well aware of the many problems associated with opium usage.]

Some went so far as to sterilize those that habitually consumed alcohol. In an 1897 Medico-Legal Society gathering, a Brooklyn doctor recommended women "be desexualized ... whether maid or matron” if they failed to respond to treatment.

[This practice was continued in the eugenics movement which emphasized the sterilization of “the unfit” & was picked up on by the Nazis approx. 33 years later in the 1930s]

The Women's Christian Temperance Movement was a Christian-based group. President Francis Willard, in 1874, began to push for prohibition. Earlier Temperance societies wanted to "temper" those using alcohol to socially accepted levels of alcohol consumption.

Problem: The more Christian women began to get involved in the issue, the more they realized how much women were being physically abused by their alcohol induced spouses leaving scares on their bodies and more.

1888: Dr. Lucy Hall studied 204 women under her care at the Reformatory Prison in Sherborn, Massachusetts. The majority began drinking before the age of 21 & over 1/3 of the married women had scars on their heads as a result of beatings from their drunken husbands.

Francis Willard, a brilliant strategist, pushed for prohibition. It is no coincidence that the 19th Amendment (prohibition) and the 20th Amendment (women's vote) passed within a year of each other. Her group was a major force behind prohibition, banning prostitution, and recreational drugs.

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

Substance Abuse Noted in Camp Songs of the Civil War

The following music CD contains a collection of songs & melodies well known to the troops on both sides of the War Between the States & is played on authentic instruments of the period

Southern Soldier © 1997
Favorite Camp Songs of the Civil War by the
2nd South Carolina String Band


old mailing address for them:
2nd South Carolina String Band / Kershaw's Minstrel Band
1820 Old Harrisburg Road,
Gettysburg, PA 17325

The jacket inside the CD cover states the tune, Rock the Cradle, Julie...

Pvt. James Dinkins, of Co.C, 18th Mississippi, described the march of McLaw's Division—which included Kershaw's South Carolina Brigade—toward Sharpsburg in September of 1862. Dinkins recalled, "The men moved along at a lively gait. As night came on, we sang all kinds of plantation songs, 'Rock the Cradle, Julie', 'Sallie, Get Your Hoecake Done', 'I'm Gwying Down the Newburg Road', and so on. The men ... moved along the road. The woods rang with their melodies." It was this vivid scene which inspired us to produce this album. The melody, the familiar 'Soldier's Joy', has been traced back to traditional Scottish fiddle tunes.

Part of Rock the Cradle, Julie lyrics state ...

Its 25¢ for the morphine,
Its 15¢ for the beer,
Its 25¢ for the morphine,
Lord drink me away from here!

Both sides would have been very familiar with this tune and sung it. Drugs were sold to get high within the camps of the soldiers ... both north and south

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

Substance Abuse Noted in the Literature of the Victorian Era

Substance abuse & addiction mentioned in tons of books of the time ... too many to mention

• The ground breaking work of the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) by Thomas de Quincey was published in 1821 in the London Magazine ... dealt with his laudanum addiction as a result of a falling out with poets Wordsworth & Coleridge

• speculation: Alfred Lord Tennyson's famous poem, "The Lotus Eaters" where he praises "slumber" over "toil" refers to the "exotic" consumption of hashish by Arabs (probably VERY accurate ... I am being charitable here)

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict

• Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim deals with the ready availability of opium in India & its power to addict and corrupt. Kim’s father “came across the woman who smoked opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites died in India” (Kim, 1) ... Kim, Chapter 3 has a wicked priest plotting to rob Kim’s Lama while he is under the influence of opium

• Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel The Moonstone a nightcap is laced with laudanum

• Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) ... central character, John Jasper, is an opium addict who lives a seedy double life



Alcoholism reared its ugly little head in the “classics”

• 1885 ... Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ... Stevenson ... began to examine by alluding to drug and alcohol addiction, homosexuality, prostitution ... Jekyll buys a house once belonging to a "celebrated surgeon" and, "his own tastes being rather chemical than anatomical" turns the former dissecting rooms into a laboratory for self-experimentation (chapter 5)

• substance abuse is reflected in the writings of the Brontë sisters who reacted to their brother Branwell's alcoholism

• Thomas Hardy's novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, deals with an alcoholic family

In 1925, the League of Nations passed strict regulations on international heroin trade

As shocking as this may seem, there are some today that convincingly argue drug addiction and substance abuse was more prevalent during the Victorian Age than today.

~ From the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

List of References About Medicine, Disease and Substance Abuse in the Victorian Era

Berridge, Virginia and Griffith Edwards. Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth Century England. London: Allen Lane, 1981.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. 1868. London: Oxford UP, 1982.

Hayter, Althea. “Wilkie Collins”. Opium and the Romantic Imagination. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Ware: Wordsworth, 1994

Mitchell, Sally. Victorian Britain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988.

Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Traux, Rhoda. Joseph Lister. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1944.

Reed, John R. Victorian Conventions. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1975.

Booth, Martin. Opium. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1966.

Curtis, Robert H. Triumph Over Pain, New York: David McKay Company, 1972.

Doyle, Christine. “Health and Well-being.” The Daily Telegraph. March 28. 2000: 26

Corey, Melinda and Ochoer, George. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1996.

Power, Sir D’Arcy. British Masters of Medicine. Baltimore, MD: William Wood and Company, 1936. .

Peterson, M. Jeanne. The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London. Los Angelos: University of California Press. .

Dunglison, Robley. History of Medicine. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1872. .

Alcoholism & Other Ills

From Lady Victorian Historian


The Salvation Army's founder William Booth (1829-1912) wrote a book about the immorality of the Victorian Era entitled "In Darkest England and the Way Out". It became a best seller after its 1890 release and set the foundation for how the Army could combat these issues. Basically, Booth said that the so-called Christian developed countries were no better off than those citizens of underdeveloped countries.

Booth did not live in a mansion or have servants. He and his wife and children worked hard to DO something and took a pro-active stance.

In his book he wrote ...

I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Note: Salvation Army founded in 1865

One of its stated objectives ...

The advancement of the Christian religion as promulgated in the religious doctrines... which are professed, believed and taught by the Army and, pursuant thereto, the advancement of education, the relief of poverty, and other charitable objects beneficial to society or the community of mankind as a whole.

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian