"Opium and the people: opiate use in nineteenth-century England". Essay review.

VIRGINIA BERRIDGE and GRIFFITH EDWARDS, Opium and the people: Opiate use in nineteenth-century England, London, Allen Lane; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xxx, 369, £20.00. After reading Opium and the people, one is tempted to believe that opium was the religion of the masses. The drug was omnipresent in Victorian society. It was sold, without restriction, not only by chemists, but by booksellers, drapers, and even haberdashers. It was available as powder, as pills, and, most popularly, in alcohol, as laudanum. Later in the century, it was available as an injectible alkaloid, morphine. It was the active ingredient in many of the most notorious Victorian patent medicines, including Godfrey's Cordial and Collis Browne's Chlorodyne. Opium was used as a sedative, an anaesthetic, an anodyne, a hang-over remedy, and as an anti-diarrhoea agent. It was bought by the Nottingham lace-worker to quieten her colicky infant; by the Fenland agricultural labourer to relieve the pains of ague; by the London clerk to commit suicide; and by Thomas De Quincey to enhance the sensual pleasure of a night at the opera. The first seventeen historical chapters are written by Virginia Berridge. Griffith Edwards has added a concluding chapter that relates the nineteenth-century experience to the present. Berridge draws imaginatively on an array of literary and quantitative evidence to construct a richly-documented case. She argues that the perception of opium changed drastically in the course of the century. Before 1850, opium was used freely and widely without arousing much concern. In the latter half of the century, both medical and lay observers began to denounce the drug. This was not so much because actual opium consumption was rising, Berridge states (although this is a matter of some confusion in the book), but because of the changing social context. Professionalization of pharmacists and medical men, the debate over the India-China opium trade, the temperance movement, and the class bias in society all affected the way later Victorians perceived the drug. On the whole, Berridge makes a powerful and convincing case. Over the past few years, I have been dealing with some of the same issues that Berridge addresses in this book, although I have sometimes approached them differently.' It seems appropriate to me to emphasize three of these major differences.