Introduction

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Sabina Fazli
in Britain itself (Keep and Randall 207). The East India Company held a monopoly
on opium cultivation in Bengal and exported the product to China and Asian
regions with Chinese minorities.
Until the 1860s, opium was freely available in Britain, and both opium and alcohol
were the “favourite drugs of the Victorians” (McCormack 139). Both alcohol
and opium, pure or mixed as laudanum were not only recreational drugs but
also a staple medicine used for all kinds of complaints. The consumption of
opium was not yet regarded as morally dubious. After the middle of the century,
however, the danger of addiction began to be emphasised over the drug’s usefulness
as a medicine and tranquilliser so that the Pharmacy Act of 1868 checked the
availability of opium (139-140). The excesses of Romantic culture at the beginning
of the century were now frowned upon and what had been regarded as a “moral
weakness” eventually came to be viewed as a “disease” (139). The first society
which promoted the ban of opium and a cessation of opium trade to China had
been founded in 1840, but their cause gained renewed impetus after the Opium
Wars with the “Anglo-Indian Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade” in
the 1880s. By this time, under the impression of the Opium Wars, demands for
further outlawing of the drug were helped by a decline in the opium trade. With
the financial gains diminishing, as China herself had started to cultivate opium
poppies, the moral arguments against opium found more supporters (Foxcroft
67). Furthermore, with the discovery of alternative drugs as narcotics and painkillers,
the use of and need for opium in medicine dwindled (Van Ours 141).
The attitude towards opium (and alcohol) in Victorian literature was marked
by a growing severity as the century advanced, directed against all threats to the
Victorian ideals of “sobriety, responsibility, self reliance, chastity, moderation,
perception, and domesticity” (McCormack 143). With the growing demonisation
of opium it came to be viewed as a poison rather than a medicine and thus perceived
as criminal and especially connected to the criminalised East as part of its
huge repertoire of murderous substances (Harris 455). The effects of opium, too,
were imagined as a tropical disease, contagious and dangerous, issuing from the
land itself (454).
The Orientalisation of opium in literature goes back to Thomas De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the origin of a set of recurring motifs such as
the “exotic and sinister foreigners who smoke, eat, drink, convey and dispense
opium to decent Englishmen” (McCormack 142). Doyle’s opium dens as in “The
Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891) have been prefigured by Dickens’ The Mystery of
Edwin Drood (1870). With the suggestion that the empire enters the nineteenthcentury
novel primarily in the shape of its products (Boehmer 26) opium comes to
represent exotic and negative aspects associated with India and the Orient which
infect the imperial centre. An interest in opium and also in its criminal potential
was incited by James Esdaile’s Mesmerism in India (1866) and other works in the
same vein detailing the way mesmerism in combination with opium is used to