Publication Date

Spring 2020

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts

Keywords

Thomas De Quincey, Britain, China, Opium, Victorian medical use of opiates, Brunonianism, John Brown, Medical body, Personification of nations, National identity, Opium War

Abstract

What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in De Quincey's Confessions as a crucial bridge between Romantic sublimity, in which it purportedly acted as a mysterious technology for self-strengthening, and Victorian consumerism, when the drug became both a popular commodity among national and global users.

Copyright Date

2020

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Publication Statement

Copyright © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Literature and Medicine 38: 1 (Spring 2020), 1–25. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rights Holder

Johns Hopkins University Press

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

25 pgs

File Size

1.1 MB

Publication Title

Literature and Medicine

Volume

38

First Page

1

Issue

1577865600

Last Page

25

ISSN

1080-6571

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