How did 18th century’s literary women relieve domestic distress? With opiates

It wasn’t just men such as Coleridge and De Quincey who took drugs, study of Mary Robinson and Harriet Martineau reveals
Top: Mary Robinson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Harriet Martineau Bottom: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, Anna Seward
Top row: Mary Robinson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Harriet Martineau. Bottom row: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, Anna Seward Composite: Getty/Alamy

The fantastical poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the scandalous journal of “opium eater” Thomas De Quincey notoriously celebrate the influence of opium. Now, beyond Coleridge’s “caverns measureless to man” and De Quincey’s nightmarish visions, a new academic study is to reveal that many of the female stars of the British literary scene of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were equally dependent on the drug.

“While men like De Quincey and Coleridge were among the first to write openly about opium’s creative effects and so are seen as the originators of the tradition of British drug literature, contemporary women writers tended instead to view it as a comfort, a way of coping with the demands of artistic life,” said Dr Joseph Crawford, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, whose paper is due to be published as part of research titled Psychopharmacology and British Literature.

“While male indulgence was seen as both antisocial and creative, women did not write about it this way,” said Crawford. “The concept of ‘addiction’ was still in its infancy, but there were clear views about the social acceptability of kinds of usage. It was judged not on the basis of whether someone was dependent upon the drug, but in terms of whether they took it as a stimulant or a relaxant, and whether their reasons for doing so were moral or immoral, selfish or selfless.”

Mary Robinson, a writer and former actress, was far ahead of Coleridge with her claim to have been poetically inspired by taking laudanum, the medicinal opiate widely sold at grocers and pubs. In 1791, six years before the great Romantic poet woke from his reverie to write his mysterious masterpiece, Kubla Khan, Robinson’s poem, The Maniac, came to her after a night of delirious visions in Bath.

“Robinson took ‘near eighty drops of laudanum’ for pains in her leg and that night she had dreams about a homeless madman she had seen in the streets of Bath that day. In the morning she dictated the poem to her daughter and then later claimed to have no memory of the incident,” said Crawford.

The use of laudanum as a painkiller was common and it was relied on as we now rely on aspirin or paracetamol. When Coleridge described writing Kubla Khan, before the notorious interruption from “the person from Porlock”, he said he been prescribed an “anodyne”. The drug was seen as less risky than drinking spirits because, until it was synthesised into a powerful narcotic later in the 19th century, its effects were milder than alcohol.

Coleridge’s writer daughter, Sara, also took laudanum, as did the social activist and author Harriet Martineau and the poet and novelist Letitia Landon. Other notable women writers of the era with a habit were Henrietta O’Neill and Anna Seward.

Sara Coleridge’s poem Poppies imagines an addicted mother seeing her son looking at the apparently innocent flower: “He loves their colours fresh and fine, /As fair as fair may be; / But little does my darling know / How good they are to me.”

She was less forgiving of De Quincey’s dependency. In a letter she sympathised with Dorothy Wordsworth’s fear that her friend De Quincey would take up with “the horrid drug again”, acknowledging her own hypocrisy later by adding “horrid I call it when thinking of him & some others, in me that is rather ungrateful, as it has done me much good & no harm”.

Crawford believes these contradictory views expose ambivalent attitudes at the time. While the drug was relied upon by women as an accessible way to cope with “female complaints”, such as menstrual pain, depression and even the quieting of sick children, it was also seen as indulgent if overused by maverick men. Robinson, Seward and Sara Coleridge all depicted it mainly as a form of household medicine, Crawford argues, rather than as an intoxicant and valued it for its ability to provide the rest that would let them deal with domestic or creative tasks.

“For all of these women, opium formed part of ordinary domestic life, used to manage pain, illness and distress, and valued for its power to sedate and tranquillise rather than for its stimulant properties or its ability to induce dreams and visions,” Crawford sums up, quoting the opening lines of Seward’s 1773 sonnet – “Thou child of Night and Silence, balmy Sleep / Shed thy soft poppies on my aching brow!”

Venerated 19th-century writers Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, were also habitual users of opium, said Crawford, with Barrett Browning even referring to the drug as “my elixir… because tranquillising power has been wonderful”.