Contrary to popular belief, Britain did not introduce opium into China. The opium poppy, or papaver somniferum, is an annual with a growth cycle of about 120 days. It grows best in a loamy soil with moderate temperature and little rainfall. Some of China’s southern provinces, such as Yunnan, Fujian, and Guangzhou, are of such a climate and all of them had had a history of cultivating opium long before the British arrived.
Written evidence shows that opium has been used by men for at least 6,000 years and given that it is naturally occurring, its discovery should predate that of alcohol. People in antiquity had a fairly conservative view of opium: Hippocrates acknowledged that opium had a narcotic effect but was equally cautious about its addictive nature. Unfortunately, despite the rediscovery of classics during Renaissance, few have heeded the words of these ancient thinkers; the fifteenth and the sixteenth century witnessed a steep rise in opium addiction in Europe but due to the high price, it was mostly concentrated in the upper echelons of the society.
Attitudes towards opium remained fairly consistent in Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but it was also evident that there were fewer and fewer cautioning voices. In 1564, French naturalist Pierre Belon warned about the potential abuse of opium among people of Turkey (from whom Britain had been importing most of its opium as it had a higher concentration of alkaloids than the Indian ones). By 1700, however, scholarly writings on opium had been mostly stressing the benefits and pleasures of taking the drug and addiction was merely mentioned as one possible outcome.
The rise of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century further diminished any remaining warning voices. The Romanticist movement emphasised the liberty and spontaneity in thought and expression; it prioritised passions and personal feelings over rationality and logical thinking. Opium, whose mind-bending and conscious-expanding effects were long known at this point, became the perfect facilitator of such an artistic expression. In England especially, with the publication of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821, more and more people began to see opium-eating as a recreational, and at most an eccentric, practice—until the late 1820s when the continuous reductions in import duty made opium affordable for the working class.
In 1808, the General Hospital near Nottingham reported that there had been an astronomical sale of soothing syrup for babies. This type of syrup contained a tincture of opium and was made to reduce colic; and although it was sold to all classes, it was primarily bought by working-class mothers. According to this report, one Nottingham chemist was selling 600 pints of this syrup a year whilst in Coventry, approximately 12,000 does of the same syrup were given a week. As such, the early nineteenth century saw a sharp rise in infant mortality in relation to opiate-overdosing. One report shows that between 1863 and 1867, 235 infants had died from opium-overdose. Given that from the 1830s, the premise that opium was harmless had already begun to erode from public discourse, this number was likely to be much higher in the early to mid-nineteenth century.
But why was the soothing syrup so popular among the working-class mothers? Later research reveals that there were a few reasons for this—all of which were directly related to the low wages caused by the rise of industrial revolution. The first reason lies in the working-class people’s reluctance to visit the doctor. A consultation with a doctor could cost up to 30% of a worker’s weekly income and it was more economical for them to visit chemists who would offer cheap advice as part of the sales pitch. Secondly, wages among the working class were extremely low and both parents often had physically demanding jobs such as factory workers and domestic servants. They could not take care of their children and thus would send the babies to be taken care by child-minders—who usually had a second job as laundry-women. To keep the children quiet, these minders would feed them soothing syrup which could induce sleep. What is worse, when those working-class mothers came home from a day of exhausting work, they would feed the infants syrup again so that they could have a good night of sleep themselves. Moreover, since opium was known to suppress appetite, by making the infants less likely to be hungry, those mothers were trying to save some money from the already tight domestic budget.
The story behind the rise in opium consumption is a true embodiment of the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”: whilst Romantic intellectuals were indulging themselves in the pleasure of opium and becoming wealthy from their writings, thousands of others were using the drug as a way to escape from the drudgery of their working-class life.
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