Best house to buy in oblivion free#

Robert Clive, вЂClive of IndiaвЂ™, used laudanum to ease gallstone pain and depression. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley suffered terrible laudanum-induced hallucinations. Anne Bronte is thought to have modelled the character of Lord Lowborough in вЂThe Tenant of Wildfell HallвЂ™ on her brother Branwell, a laudanum addict. Authors, poets and writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot were users of laudanum. Many notable Victorians are known to have used laudanum as a painkiller. Withdrawal symptoms included aches and cramps, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea but even so, it was not until the early 20th century that it was recognised as addictive. Laudanum addicts would enjoy highs of euphoria followed by deep lows of depression, along with slurred speech and restlessness. One teaspoonful to be taken night and morning. And as twenty or twenty-five drops of laudanum could be bought for just a penny, it was also affordable. Called the вЂaspirin of the nineteenth century,вЂ™ laudanum was a popular painkiller and relaxant, recommended for all sorts of ailments including coughs, rheumatism, вЂwomenвЂ™s troublesвЂ™ and also, perhaps most disturbingly, as a soporific for babies and young children. The most popular preparation was laudanum, an alcoholic herbal mixture containing 10% opium. Opium preparations were sold freely in towns and country markets, indeed the consumption of opium was just as popular in the country as it was in urban areas. Shocking though it might be to us in the 21st century, in Victorian times it was possible to walk into a chemist and buy, without prescription, laudanum, cocaine and even arsenic.

Opium and other narcotic drugs played an important part in Victorian life. Since the British captured Calcutta in 1756, the cultivation of poppies for opium had been actively encouraged by the British and the trade formed an important part of IndiaвЂ™s (and the East India CompanyвЂ™s) economy.

Best house to buy in oblivion free#

Britain had fought two wars in the mid 19th century known as the вЂ Opium WarsвЂ™, ostensibly in support of free trade against Chinese restrictions but in reality because of the immense profits to be made in the trading of opium. The India-China opium trade was very important to the British economy. These dens catered mainly for seamen who had become addicted to the drug when overseas.Дespite the lurid accounts of opium dens in the press and fiction, in reality there were few outside of London and the ports, where opium was landed alongside other cargo from all over the British Empire. In the 1800s a small Chinese community had settled in the established slum of Limehouse in LondonвЂ™s docklands, an area of backstreet pubs, brothels and opium dens. The public must have shuddered at these descriptions and imagined areas such as LondonвЂ™s docklands and the East End to be opium-drenched, exotic and dangerous places. Opium smokers in the East End of London, London Illustrated News, 1874 Lying pell-mell on a mattress placed on the ground are Chinamen, Lascars, and a few English blackguards who have imbibed a taste for opium.вЂќ So reported the French journal вЂFigaroвЂ™, describing an opium den in Whitechapel in 1868. вЂњIt is a wretched holeвЂ¦ so low that we are unable to stand upright. The opium den with all its mystery, danger and intrigue appeared in many Victorian novels, poems and contemporary newspapers, and fuelled the publicвЂ™s imagination. вЂњThere were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.вЂќ Oscar Wilde in his novel, вЂThe Picture of Dorian GrayвЂ™ (1891).