Soothing Syrup: opium and opium products were readily available
There were more ‘hard drugs’ in Torquay in the 19th century than any time before or since.
An estimated five out of six working class families used opium on a regular basis in Victorian England and many of Torquay’s famous residents and visitors freely used opium and other drugs.
Opium was primarily imported into Britain from Turkey and India with an estimated 22,000 pounds of opium being brought into the country in 1830 alone. There were also attempts made to grow opium in Britain as an ‘agricultural improvement’.
As importation increased opium became the Victorian standard medication for everything. Many patent opium products appeared and physicians dispensed opiates directly to patients or wrote prescriptions for them. Numerous household remedies contained opium, including many directed at children.
They included Dalby’s Carminative, McMunn’s Elixir, Batley’s Sedative Solution, Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup, Dover’s Powder, and Syrup of Poppies. Godfrey’s Cordial was sold by the thousands of bottles and was commonly administered to children and infants to help them sleep.
Thomas DeQuincey, the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater called opium ‘God’s own medicine’.
One English physician wrote:
“Anyone who… strolls about the streets on a Saturday evening, watching the country people as they do their marketing, may soon satisfy himself that the crowds in the chemists’ shops come for opium; and they have a peculiar way of getting it. They go in, lay down their money, and receive the opium pills in exchange without saying a word. For instance… one evening in August 1871; went into a chemist’s shop; laid a penny on the counter. The chemist said – “The best?” I nodded. He gave me a pill box and took up the penny; and so the purchase was completed without my having uttered a syllable. You offer money, and get opium as a matter of course. This may show how familiar the custom is…”
Understandably, opium was utilised for recreational as well as for healing purposes.
Injecting, however, was seen as being generally unacceptable. Though there were opium dens in London and many of the ports catering to seafarers, smoking was also seen as a vice practiced by ‘Orientals’. It’s, therefore, unlikely that Torquay had the kind of opium den seen described in the literature of the time.
Rather, the use of mood altering substances was generally through liquid intake in the form of laudanum and absinthe.
Laudanum was a combination of opium and alcohol. It was used in ancient Greece and has been a potent pain killer and mood altering drug for centuries. Until the early 20th century, laudanum was sold without a prescription and was a constituent of many medicines.
Initially, it was seen as a lower class drug, but later became popular among all social groups. It was less expensive than alcohol because it was not taxed. DeQuincey wrote of how you could purchase laudanum from many street vendors: “Happiness can be bought for a penny.”
Wealthy women even used it as a fashion aid in order to achieve the highly desirable pallid complexion of tuberculosis.
Of course, laudanum was highly addictive.
Absinthe is an anise-flavoured spirit, high in alcoholic content. Although many herbs were used in making absinthe, wormwood was an important ingredient. Used to eliminate tapeworm in humans, wormwood had the side effect of a mood altering drug. Yet, absinthe was relatively expensive and its use was restricted to the middle class and the artistic community.
Being very bitter, absinthe was usually served with water and sugar. The absinthe was placed in a glass and water was drizzled over a sugar cube. One way to consume laudanum was adding a few drops to a glass of absinthe, as Johnny Depp is seen doing in the Jack the Ripper movie From Hell.
We have numerous records of famous users of opium. It looks like all of the Romantic poets, with the exception of William Wordsworth, used it at some point, often to enghance their poetry.
South Devon visitors that we know used opium are many, and include Percy Shelley in Torquay and John Keats in Teignmouth.
Other visitors have written well-informed literature describing opium use and there have been suggestions that they may well have been users themselves. Oscar Wilde (who lived in Babbacombe for four months in 1892) featured the drug as part of the decadent life-style in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described scenes of abuse, the latter featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes.
Only later did people realise that laudanum use was habit-forming and demanded increasing doses to provide relief.
For example, poet and Torquay resident Elizabeth Barratt Browning was a long-term user of opium. She began her use of the drug when she was 15 to treat the pain from a spinal injury complicated by ‘nervous hysteria’:
“My opium comes in to keep the pulse from fluttering and fainting… to give the right composure and point of balance to the nervous system. I don’t take it for ‘my spirits’ in the usual sense; you must not think such a thing.”
Other drugs were locally available. An interest in hashish came from a growth of awareness about the Orient, though it was apparently confined to a small group of prosperous initiates. There is speculation that another Torquay visitor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, was describing the consumption of hashish in his 1838 poem The Lotus Eaters, for example.
Yet, alcohol was the most common drug in Torquay. Its consumption was a popular pastime, with beer, cider and spirits being given freely to anyone who could afford to buy, including children.
However, drunkenness, and the related loss of self-control, was associated with the lower classes and a real cause for concern.
In response, a Torquay Temperance Society was started in 1843 to take the place of “a Society in which entire abstinence was not a necessary qualification for membership…” (Incidentally, the term ‘teetotal’ probably comes from the T in total, with some activists signing a ‘T’ after their name to signify a pledge for total abstinence.)
As the working classes were seen as most open to temptation and the greatest threat to public order, a series of British Workman Public Houses were opened “where refreshments of all kinds can be had, but no intoxicating liquors”. The first was in Union Street in 1872, followed by Vaughan Parade – for the benefit of fishermen and sailors – and then Market Street.
In contrast, opium use didn’t produce as much social concern. It seems as though the better classes could engage in substance misuse without it being considered a vice, unless use was taken to excess. The medicinal use of opiates was accepted and a ‘social’ or recreational use was generally respectable. Indeed, opium was actually preferred because it didn’t produce the violence associated with alcohol.
