Opium by Martin Booth Page B

in this way, many children in poor areas were not only habituated to opium but spent much of their time in a semi-comatose state. What compounded the problem was that, when the mother returned from an exhausting day, she too dosed the child so she could get an uninterrupted night’s rest.
    There was another convenient side-effect. Opium suppresses appetite so young children were less likely to be hungry and a strain on the already tight domestic budget. Inevitably, these children were frequently undernourished and in continual poor health, with a characteristic yellowish pallor to their skin. By the age of three or four many were, as one observer wrote, ‘shrank up into little old men or wizened like a little monkey’. When they grew older, few of these children were able to benefit from even the modicum of education available to them and they ended up providing the next generation of the working class, illiterate and condemned to a cycle of poverty and opium use.
    The accidental lethal poisoning of children was not infrequent: opium was also used by despairing mothers to kill their own children, especially bastards. Certainly, it was used to murder infants in the infamous Victorian baby-farms and work-houses.
    A poisoning inquest in Liverpool in 1876 sums up the situation and the ambivalence of most people’s attitudes towards infant mortality and murder. It outlined the case of a mother, who took at least an ounce of opium a week, whose two-day-old infant died from opium poisoning. The doctor attending the death put it down to opium taken through the breast in the mother’s milk. A more plausible explanation is the mother killed the infant in despair at having the responsibility of a child. The jury accepted the doctor’s explanation and the husband was cautioned to control his wife’s opium consumption. Such a verdict was common. Few doctors would have been willing to certify a cause of death which would implicate another member of his profession or undermine the use of opium. The attitude of many juries, comprised of common folk who knew full well what was going on, was that the death of a child, whilst to be pitied, was a mercy in disguise, an escape from the oppression of poverty or working-class life.
    For adults, opium provided more than a quiet child. It was used widely by London dockland prostitutes who drugged their clients with it so they might rob them: they also took it to counteract the misery of their profession, as a relief from muscular pains after a long night’s work and to counteract the symptoms of venereal disease. It is not inconceivable to think De Quincey was introduced to opium by his prostitute companion who would surely have been familiar with it. On occasion, opium was used as an intoxicant but this was not common. In the north of England particularly, drunkards took laudanum or opium pills as an occasional alternative to alcohol but in general, gin and ale were the usual tipple, being cheaper. Where laudanum drunks existed, the start of what has become a major undermining of late twentieth-century society occurred – drugs-related crimes began to appear on the records of magistrates’ courts, concerning addicts stealing to support their habits.
    It must be added that not all opium users, even frequent or chronic ones, were detrimentally habituated. Many cases were documented of people in their eighties and even nineties who were regular, even heavy users, but who remained in good health, apart from a tendency to become constipated and with the characteristic creamy-yellow complexion.
    Despite all the signs of opium’s potential for evil, addiction still aroused little public interest. For the average Victorian, opium taking was as much a part of society as the drinking of alcohol or the smoking of tobacco. Indeed, opium was more widely available in 1870 than tobacco was in 1970: and, like tobacco in the present day, it was primarily purchased by the