Abstract
This chapter argues that conceptions of opium in long-eighteenth-century culture, in medical and literary genres of writing alike, predominantly harked back to classical precedent, which had dominated for centuries, there being then scant scientific understanding of opium’s chemical physiological mechanisms. The essay historicises opium’s known effects as “medicine”—that opium induces indolence, stupor, insensibility, drowsiness, dulling, lulling, forgetfulness and, principally, alleviates pain—and shows that in both medical and literary discourses the diction used in opium imagery was the same. The essay contends that John Keats, along with many of his post-1780s contemporaries, drew on the neoclassical tradition in their use of opium imagery, rejecting the Brunonian theory of stimulation later embraced by Thomas De Quincey.
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Notes
- 1.
Some critics, however, have overlooked Keats’ use of opium imagery in his poetry: for example, that Keats’ “writing does not indicate any particular interest in the drug” (Boon 2002, 31).
- 2.
For example: “It is observed by all, that [opium] mainly affects the Genus Nervosum, and animal Spirits, and not the Bloud and Humors” (Jones 1700, 24) and “Effects will all be heightened by the Mixture of the Opiate Particles with the Blood; Which is hereupon Rarefied, and Distends its Vessels, especially those of the Brain” (Mead 1702, 143).
- 3.
In both instances, Chaucer makes reference to opium explicitly, which his source material had not: Ovid’s Heroides 14 (Emerson 1919, 287) and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (Chaucer 2008, 826). Ovid merely referred to wine’s soporific effects: “Yourself lay quiet in the grip of the sleep the wine had given you” (172–73). In Teseida (Book V), Palamon daringly escapes from prison by changing clothes with Alimeto, his physician. In Chaucer’s revision, instead of a physician assisting Palamon’s escape, opium enables the absconsion.
- 4.
Founding member of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries (1617), apothecary to James I and Royal Botanist to Charles I.
- 5.
Although published in 1811, Outlines of Lectures remained in use during Keats’ time at Guy’s Hospital, evident from the inscription inside the front cover in King’s College London’s copy, “Robert Pughe 1817”.
- 6.
See essay in this volume by Joseph Crawford.
- 7.
- 8.
Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians; George I’s physician-in-ordinary.
- 9.
- 10.
By 1742, it was known, through Charles Alston’s experiments, that opium applied externally—i.e. in the manner we would today usually associate with the word balm—was ineffective (159).
- 11.
- 12.
Though it may have been written by John Oldham or William Wycherley (Wilmot 1999, 490).
- 13.
N.B. the term anaesthetic itself did not materialise until the mid-nineteenth century.
- 14.
The poem’s opening line, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains”, was originally “My Heart aches and a painful numbness falls”.
- 15.
Some eighteenth-century poets had, in fact, bucked the trend by treating opium as a creative agent. Thomas Warton, for instance, “stealing sleep”, in Pleasures of Melancholy (1747), desired soaring dream-visions: “opiate dews” will “mystic visions send” “as Spenser saw” and “Milton knew” (7). Warton, ironically, differs from Spenser’s and Milton’s own opium-as-stupefying imagery mentioned above, but foreshadows De Quincey in consuming opium in order to unleash “his creative mind” and to be taken “thro’ bewild’ring Fancy’s magic maze” (7). But this was unusual. Indeed, in Confessions, De Quincey cites Shadwell (butt of Dryden’s mockery) as the only poet he can “remember” who had “eaten opium” in order to procure “splendid dreams” (1998, 72).
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Cox, O. (2020). Historicising Keats’ Opium Imagery Through Neoclassical Medical and Literary Discourses. In: Roxburgh, N., Henke, J.S. (eds) Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture, 1780–1900 . Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53598-8_2
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