Drugs, Alcohol and Addiction in the Long Nineteenth Century

Volume I

Daniel Malleck, Daniel Malleck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429789984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This collection captures key themes and issues in the broad history of addiction and vice in the Anglo-American world. Focusing on the long nineteenth-century, the volumes consider how scientific, social, and cultural experiences with drugs, alcohol, addiction, gambling, and prostitution varied around the world. What might be considered vice, or addiction could be interpreted in various ways, through various lenses, and such activities were interpreted differently depending upon the observer: the medical practitioner; the evangelical missionary; the thrill seeking bon-vivant, and the concerned government commissioner, to name but a few. For example, opium addiction in middle class households resulting from medical treatment was judged much differently than Chinese opium smoking by those in poverty or poor living conditions in North American work camps on the west coast, or on the streets of Soho.

This collection will assemble key documents representing both the official and general view of these various activities, providing readers with a cross section of interpretations and a solid grounding in the material that shaped policy change, cultural interpretation, and social action.

Volume I
DRUNKS, FIENDS AND THE ROOTS OF CONCERN

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I

Drunks and fiends; users and observers

The documents in this volume examine the way consumption of drugs and alcohol were represented across the nineteenth century. New drugs, pharmacological innovation and methods of ingestion altered the ability for people to get high. At the same time, and behind the scenes, new technology in distilling and brewing made alcohol cheaper and more interesting. The nineteenth century saw the Coffey still permit whiskey makers to distill a lighter spirit, blending this lighter (and cheaper) whisky to more challenging tipples to make it more palatable for a broader audience. It saw the hydrometer permit more precise measurements of alcohol content (and also permit more precise excise taxation).¹ New malting techniques enabled brewers to diversify their brews, and pale ales travelled literally around the world.² Colonization enabled Europeans to exploit new populations and the products of different ecosystems, while creating new markets in, or forcing new markets on, the colonized population. Louis Pasteur’s identification of yeast as the key factor in fermentation and development of pasteurization to reduce spoilage improved viticulture and brewing.

When historians examine drugs and alcohol in the nineteenth century, the tendency has been to look at these substances in their problematic forms. The temperance movement was a massive global network of citizens concerned about the dangers society faced from drunkenness and what they saw as a predatory liquor trade. It had roots in evangelical Protestantism and well-meaning liberal concerns for the plight of the poor. The opium trade in Asia, and especially the forceful imposition of opium on China despite its government’s concerted attempts to address the overuse of opium among its population, was seen by many like-minded reformers as a horrible injustice, even as they used the trade routes and extraterritoriality concessions wrested from the Chinese government to expand their evangelical mission.³ All of this activity generated a tremendous amount of literature: pamphlets, magazine, reports, meeting minutes and detailed accounts of meetings from sympathetic newspapers. Yet opium was a valuable medicine—some would argue the most valuable medicine—in the western pharmacopoeia, having effects on the human body that could deal with many of the symptoms of modern life. This utility and the gradual expansion of medical power meant that many people had taken opium, and some, whether through the exigencies of chronic pain or due to the distinct pleasurable effects of the drug, became habitual users.

Only in the past few decades, which is a short time for historians, has the academic study of attempts to restrict been met with research on the consumption of drugs and alcohol from a less problem-based focus. Such an approach is difficult, however, because much of the documentary evidence has come through the material generated by the “antis” who framed drugs and alcohol consumption as a problem, stripped from any potential benefits. Indeed, except for the generation of revenue, governments tend not to concern themselves with a product unless it becomes dangerous or perceived as such. Moreover, social movements rarely arise as a means of celebrating a well-appreciated product.⁴ Thus when examining the use of drugs and alcohol in history, we need often to read between the lines.

There have been some valuable attempts to do exactly this. Canadian historian of working class culture, Craig Heron, investigated the place of liquor in the lives of the people from early European settlement to the end of the twentieth century, placing liquor, its consumption and the places where people met to enjoy drinks together into a cultural context that did not ignore the dangers of over-drinking, but did not see the product as an unmitigated problem.⁵ Scottish historian Thora Hands’s Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain has addressed the historical focus on temperance by reconsidering the classic British temperance history, Brian Harrison’s Drink and the Victorians. Her work (based on a thesis entitled “Re-Framing Drink and the Victorians”) was not a critique of Harrison’s work but rather a history of drinking rather than the oft problematized “drink” and seeing where drink fit in the lives of Victorians.⁶ It is easier to find work on the positive aspects of drink from scholars of literature, whose work places drink within the context of stories being told.⁷ For example, Steven Earnshaw’s work on “the existential drinker” considers the idea of the drinker, including unrepentant drinkers such as “Mary Thompson.” Thompson’s story told to the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards befuddled the committee members, who could not figure out why an habitual seemed to choose to be one, and the story was “a unique individualist bump in that it cannot be ironed flat.”⁸ Similarly, and driven by contemporary political shifts, histories of cannabis have attempted to balance the drug’s suppression against the efforts to extoll its virtues.⁹

One subfield of drink history in which problematization of drinking has not been a central feature is in the studies of drinking spaces. Ironically, the pub, tavern, and saloon were the main villains to nineteenth-century temperance reformers, and yet Perry Duis and Madelon Powers wrote expansive studies of the turn-ofthe-twentieth-century saloon in the United States; Julia Roberts placed the rural tavern in nineteenth-century Upper Canada; and historians both academic and popular, including Paul Jennings, Anthony Cooke and Pete Brown have examined the British pub.¹⁰ Australia has seen a number of important books on the pub, most especially on women’s work in pubs offering a contrast to the normal gendered perception of the drinking space by seeing it as a contested place of employment and livelihood for women.¹¹ Historians of other countries and other periods also have explored the drinking space as a place of recreation, socialization, and even revolution. Scott Haine’s work on the Parisian Café examines the place of the drinking space, (cafes were not merely for coffee) as a site of intellectual exchange and connection.¹² Works on the early modern tavern are similarly robust, such as found in the World of the Tavern essay collection.¹³ Apart from the aforementioned works on cannabis, there is little history on drug cultures that does not examine the practice from the perspective of drug taking as problematic.

The documents in this volume present a variety of ways that drugs and alcohol were discussed in the nineteenth century. Rather than present positive accounts of use, which would be a small collection indeed, this material provides a range of perceptions of drug and alcohol consumption in the nineteenth century. It begins with some classic discussions of drugs and includes studies of the variety of drugs and the different contexts in which they were consumed. Since the nineteenth century was an era of colonialization and also of scientific exploration (often these activities went hand in hand), numerous writers attempted to process the information they were collecting about different substances. Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater set the field of engagement for this type of literature, and the “opium eater” trope reappears in many forms. Indeed, it became so popular that other books or articles chronicling drug use later in the century often used the “opium eater” or at least the “eater” language, notwithstanding the fact that most of the time the mode of ingestion was not, in fact, eating. DeQuincey drank laudanum, a mixture of brandy and opium. Although DeQuincey’s habit was iatrogenic, based upon medical prescription, laudanum was also consumed recreationally. It was linked to such romantic authors as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, and the association was so well known that medical textbooks would refer to the experiences of Coleridge and DeQuincey rather than attempt to provide descriptions of the opium habit from medical observation.¹⁴ H. G. Cole’s Confessions of an American Opium Eater, written half a century later, could not avoid framing it as a liberation narrative (“from bondage to freedom”) but still retained some of the prurient elements that captured the imagination of moralists and sensualists alike.

At the same time, other drugs were gaining attention. William O’Shaughnessy examines the history and common uses of cannabis extracts, connects them to potential therapeutic value and then, in a method typical of the period, describes his own personal consumption experiments.¹⁵ F. H. Ludlow’s classic The Hasheesh Eater made no pretense of being scientific, encouraging indulgence and self-exploration.¹⁶ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a somewhat conservative general interest periodical, used the publication of a relatively dry medical textbook, Jonathan Pereira’s Elements of Materia Medical and Therapeutic, as a way of indulging in an extensive discussion of a variety of drugs. The author intentionally drew upon the stories in DeQuincey’s Confessions which he called “as fresh and new as ever” as a framework for discussing the “natural wants” of man. Specifically, he sees three orders of wants: food for sustenance, liquor to help “assuage” his cares, and narcotics so that “his enjoyments, intellectual and animal are multiplied and for the time exalted.”¹⁷ Even Victor Robinsons’s Essay on Hasheesh, published in the beginning of the twentieth century when the negative ideas of inebriation and habituation had established themselves within the dominant discourse around drug and alcohol consumption in the west, is a strangely adulatory description of the fantastic and even hilarious experiences of hasheesh users. The descriptions seem more suited to the writings of romantic authors a century earlier. Apart from O’Shaughnessy warning readers of the potential delirium from “hemp inebriation” these accounts did not condemn this behaviour.

The examinations of cannabis and its various extracts vary considerably from the perception of opium. After the middle of the century the opium habit was becoming a problem, most notably observed by physicians. In his extensive Opium and the Opium Appetite, American physician Alonzo Calkins condemned the lure of opium presented through the florid works of romantic authors. Calkins, who was a member of a prominent and deeply religious New England family, was especially concerned about how the temptation of opium would reduce individuals to a subhuman state. He did not mince words:

Let the man deliberately yield himself up to the mastery of a depraved appetite, the soul must perforce become contaminated from the festering virus, the moral sense will be perverted, the finer sensibilities and nobler aspirations will decline and die out until existence itself seems shrunken to the diminutive proportions of a troglodyte semi-creation.¹⁸

Similar discussions expanded the concern, many presenting images of individuals in this “troglodyte” state.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, opium and cannabis retained an exotic fascination, with the sorts of experimentation designed to determine their usefulness and dangers; less was the case with alcohol, a domestic, and familiar, intoxicant. The work of Benjamin Rush and Thomas Trotter, as discussed earlier, both viewed drink and drunkenness as causing problems. Rush was unrelenting in his criticism, while Trotter sought to modulate the invectives of “the priest-hood… and the moralists,” who have “declaimed against it as a vice degrading to our nature” by offering objective medical evidence of the problems of over-drinking.¹⁹ Yet medical examinations did not always result in unfettered criticism of drunkenness. In his Anatomy of Drunkenness Scottish physician Robert MacNish considered the immediate effects of drink, as well as other substances, and classified drunkards in order to enact a more sophisticated understanding of the condition. He attempted to classify drunkards into six types, based upon humoral physiology (sanguineous, melancholy, choleric and phlegmatic) and innovations based upon observation (surly and nervous). MacNish also described variations of drunkenness based upon the type of “inebriating agent” distinguishing opium, tobacco and other non-alcohols from alcoholic beverages, but also observing the different types of drunkenness from different types of beverages: wine, spirits and malt liquors. Yet his is not entirely critical, and he recognizes with more sympathy the pleasures of drink when, prior to drunkenness “the soul is commencing to expand its wings and rise from earth”—doubtless an eloquent description of many student experiences with drink.²⁰

The works of Rush, Trotter and MacNish were central to the problematized view of alcohol, but a parallel discourse did exist. Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia included a discussion of drunkenness as a natural and generally unproblematic state. Although he did not shy away from discussing the potential dangers of drunkenness to physical health, this was for Darwin a minor issue. American military surgeon Edward Cutbush was similarly less critical of drink than his compatriot Rush. Although he preferred that soldiers drink only water, he admitted they rarely chose that beverage exclusively and he therefore felt it was important to discuss the various types of alcoholic drinks and their physiological value. Apart from strong spirits, Cutbush finds healthfulness in most alcoholic beverages, mirroring the sentiments of Rush’s moral thermometer. Noted British physician Francis Anstie’s discussion of wine takes the discussion of the general healthfulness of that beverage for the broader population, introducing the eponymous Anstie’s Limit of how much alcohol can be consumed without problem: 1.5 ounces of pure spirit, in case you’re counting.

Perhaps alcohol was too common a drink of the common man, or too familiar to western writers, but few spent much time lauding their drunken state. Much more frequent were writers lamenting the drunkenness of themselves and their peers, such as is found in Whitman’s Franklin Evans, or the inebriate and Jack London’s John Barleycorn. Other authors also presented drunkenness in a pathologized form, subtly coded for their readers. For example, George Sands included a minor character in Adam Bede who, several scholars have argued, bore a behavioural likeness to Sands’ own mother, Christiana Evans.²¹ More blatantly, Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall includes a character that Pam Lock argues represents the author’s own brother Branwell, and the book is part of a broader discussion of drunkenness in Victorian literature; Anne’s sister Emily presented a dangerous drunkenness in Wuthering Heights.²² Similar representations of drink and drunkenness were replete throughout the nineteenth-century literature, although not always representing real people.

Alcohol consumption in the public space was often a major irritant and motivator for temperance reformers (as will be discussed in more detail in Volume III), but many other observers examined public spaces of both drink and drug consumption in a variety of ways. The pub or tavern as a space of meeting and relaxation was a common trope in British writing, where the ubiquity of the pub doubtless, combined, with many authors’ own personal experiences, modulated the often shrill commentary of temperance reformers who saw their job as to destroy that persistent social institution. Renowned author and social commentator Charles Dickens had tremendous sympathy for the conviviality of a bourgeois tavern, and often wrote of a homey and comfortable environment. Later in the century, sociological and anthropological studies such as those of E. C. Moore and Royal Melendy sought to understand the perception and use of the saloon. Moore and Melendy examined the saloons of Chicago. Although Moore concludes with typical progressive scoffing at the people who find the saloon an important part of their lives, he admits to his readers that these spaces were valued, even if not ideal. Melendy, in contrast, was writing as part of the investigations of the Committee of Fifty, a group of businessmen and liquor interests who sought to present an alternative to temperance histrionics with serious research. His work argues that the negative images of the saloon were merely the exaggerations and myopic perceptions of zealous temperance advocates. The conclusion of the first part of his examination comments on the versatility of the social space of the saloon, even as it remains a “cause of genuine consternation among Christian people.”²³ That both of these accounts were published three years apart in the same academic journal illustrates how contentious these spaces were.

Less debatable as a problem was the opium den. It had a place deep in the popular imagination, and many stories from renowned authors included the opium den as a place of degradation. Dickens’s Edwin Drood, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and some criminals pursued by Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes frequented such places ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Drink, drugs, and the creation of addiction in the west
• VOLUME I Drunks, fiends and the roots of concern