Opium in Coleridge’s Day

The most striking features about opium in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the contradictory facts that, while it was widely used and easily available, almost nothing was known about it.  Medical knowledge of the drug's properties was scanty and unreliable:  few people realized, for example, that opium was addictive, and no one understood that withdrawal symptoms were the result of discontinuation or diminished dosages.  Indeed, everything that was known about it seemed positive and beneficial.  Laudanum (i.e., the simple alcoholic tincture of opium) was freely dispensed to relieve pain in cases as different as toothache and cholera; similarly, opium was used as a "cure" for a host of emotional and psychological disorders; and, in such seemingly innocent patent-medicines as Godfrey's Cordial, it served as a soothing syrup to quiet restless babies, often permanently.  In Coleridge's day, "most doctors and patients still thought of opium not as a dangerous addictive drug but mainly as a useful analgesic and tranquillizer of which every household should have a supply, for minor ailments and nervous crises of all kinds, much as aspirin is used today.”

Since the medicinal use of opium was so common and widespread, it is not surprising to learn that its use involved neither legal penalties nor public stigma.  All of the Romantic poets (except Wordsworth) are known to have used it, as did many other prominent contemporaries.  Supplies were readily available:  in 1830, for instance, Britain imported 22,000 pounds of raw opium.  Many Englishmen, like the eminently respectable poet-parson George Crabbe, who took opium in regular but moderate quantity for nearly forty years, were addicts in ignorance, and led stable and productive lives despite their habit.  By and large, opium was taken for granted; and it was only the terrible experiences of such articulate addicts as Coleridge that eventually began to bring the horrors of the drug to public attention.

Coleridge's case is a particularly sad and instructive one.  He had used opium as early as 1791 and continued to use it occasionally, on medical advice, to alleviate pain from a series of physical and nervous ailments.  "I am seriously ill", he wrote in November 1796; "The complaint, my medical attendant says, is nervous -- and originating in mental causes.  I have a Blister under my right-ear -- & I take Laudanum every four hours, 25 drops each dose."  The evidence of Coleridge's letters argues that during the period 1791-1800 he used opium only occasionally and almost always for medical reasons.  The turning-point, may be traced to the winter and spring of Coleridge's first year at Greta Hall, Keswick, in 1800-1.  During this period a prolonged and debilitating succession of illnesses, which Coleridge blamed on the raw, wet climate of the Lake District, caused him to use regular and increasingly larger doses of laudanum in an effort to assuage the torments of what he described as an "irregular Gout combined with frequent nephritic attacks".  But the opium cure proved ultimately to be more devastating in its effects than the troubles it was intended to treat, for such large quantities taken over so many months seduced him unwittingly into slavery to the drug.  

And his life between 1801 and 1806 (when he returned from Malta) is a somber illustration of a growing and, finally, a hopeless bondage to opium.

—from “Opium and the Dream of ‘Kubla Khan’” in John Spencer’s book A Coleridge Companion, London: Macmillan Press, 1983.