Free Opium by Martin Booth Page B

material: in early 1801, he wrote to a friend that he looked back on his long and painful bout of rheumatism ‘as a storehouse of wild Dreams for Poems’. In other words, as De Quincey realised, opium was the tool by which Coleridge rearranged and reassessed experiences and stimuli received either through narcotic dreams or from outside sources such as books and lucid, everyday non-drug-influenced conversation.
    Yet, for all his writing obtained from the storehouse of opium, Coleridge was concerned about his addiction. Just before he died, he wrote, ‘After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least some little good may be effected by the direful example.’
    There were other poet-addicts, too. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was addicted at an early age. Although there is no substantial evidence, it seems likely John Keats took laudanum before the winter of 1819—20: he admitted dosing on mercury in the form of calomel to counteract a sore throat contracted in late 1818 whilst nursing his tubercular brother and it is highly plausible, with his fear of tuberculosis, he also took laudanum. Furthermore, in March 1819, Keats was hit in the face by a cricket ball and his writings of the next day suggest he took laudanum to kill the considerable pain.
    Keats’s poetry suggests a more than passing familiarity with opium. In ‘To Sleep’, a sonnet from April 1819, he wrote:
    â€™ere thy poppy throws
    Around my bed its lulling charities
    â€˜Ode on Indolence’, ‘Ode to Melancholy’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ all carry references to opium or the poppy whilst ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, written between 18 January and 2 February 1819, is rich with opium-prompted imagery which is hardly surprising for, at the time, Keats was taking medication for his sore throat and was suffering from toothache: laudanum was the common painkiller for any dental problem.
    Not only poets were inspired or affected by opium. So, too, were prose-writers, the most famous being Wilkie Collins. When he was nine, Collins overheard Coleridge admitting his struggle against opium to his mother. The poet was in tears but Mrs Collins was a realist and replied, ‘Mr Coleridge, do not cry; if the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go and get it?’ This exchange made a lasting impression on young Wilkie’s mind. At twenty-three, he noticed how his father – the artist William Collins, who was dying of heart disease – found release from acute pain in doses of Battley’s Drops, a proprietary-brand laudanum. With such experiences, it is no wonder Wilkie Collins turned to laudanum to ease a rheumatic illness which caused temporary, partial blindness and brought terrible pains to his legs. He took opium for the rest of his life.
    Quite open about his habituation, Collins drank a wineglass of laudanum nightly as a sleeping draught and carried a hip-flask at all times, in addition to keeping a decanter full in his home. To ease neuralgia in later life, he also received morphine. Collins was, in fact, more than open about his habit: he was downright boastful. At a meeting with his friend, Hall Caine, he produced a glass of laudanum and, telling Hall Caine he would let him into the secrets of his prison-house, swallowed it in one. On being asked, Collins admitted he had taken such amounts for twenty years to stimulate his brain and to steady his nerves. Hall Caine questioned the ability of opium to stimulate Collins’s mind and enquired if it had the same effect on others, to which Collins replied it did – Bulwer Lytton was addicted, he said, and it stimulated him, too. Yet, when Hall Caine asked if he should take laudanum for nervous exhaustion, Collins paused and quietly advised against it.
    The best known of Collins’s novels, The Moonstone, was