Wilkie and "that all-potent and all-merciful drug" by Karen Maitland

Wilkie Collins in 1874, aged 50

Photographer: Napoleon Sarony

Today, 8th January, is the birthday of the Victorian novelist and playwright, Wilkie Collins, born in 1824 and famous for the enduring classics The Woman in White and The Moonstone. He was a very successful writer, earning £10,000 in just one year in 1863. Many modern novelists would envy him, given that, 154 years later in 2017/18, the average income for a full-time professional writer in the UK was less than £10,500. (Compare this to average annual salary for a clerk in the 1860's of around £100, and the average clerical salary today of around £21,000.)

But behind the success, he was battling illness which was diagnosed as ‘rheumatic gout,’ which cause his eyes to become ‘bags of blood’ and agonising pain in his legs and feet. He also developed neuralgia and arthritis, which meant that for the last 20 years of his life, he was often confined to bed and his famous novel, The Moonstone, was dictated from his bed between bouts of pain. 

His physicians tried all manner of medication until he finally sought pain relief in what he called divine laudanum, which he took in ever increasing quantities, becoming hopelessly addicted, as is the character, Ezra Jennings, in The Moonstone. Both author and character paid the price for the relief of their pain with terrible nightmares and hallucinations.

At this time, Laudanum was a mixture of opium and alcohol and was sold under names such as Godfrey's Cordial and Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup. Wilkie’s own father had taken Battley's Drops for his pain, which contained opium, sherry, and alcohol.

Engraving by Franz Muller-Munster (1867-1936)

Wilkie began to be unnerved by the movement of shadows in his gas-lit study, thought that ghosts followed him through the house and a green woman with tusks, waited for him on the stairs or in his bedchamber. On one occasion he was convinced she was biting chunks of flesh from his shoulder. Wilkie introduced the drug to his friend and patron, Charles Dickens, who also used it though not in such quantities as Wilkie.

‘Laudanum’ was originally the name for Cistus ladanifer a beautiful flowering plant found in western Mediterranean, also known gum rockrose and common gum cistus. Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss-German alchemist, combined this with opium and other ingredients such as crushed pearls and musk to produce a pain-relieving medicine. The name stuck, even when Cistus ladanifer was no longer included as an ingredient. In 1618, the London Pharmacopoeia describes laudanum as a ‘pill made from opium, saffron, castor, ambergris, musk and nutmeg’.

Cistus ladanifer or Laudanum

Photo: Juan Sanchez

Laudanum was not widely known until in the 1660’s, when the English physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) produced a tincture of opium that he also named laudanum, although the only ingredient it had in common with laudanum of Paracelsus was the opium. By the 18th century, the name laudanum was being given to any combination of opium and alcohol. George Young was one of several leading physicians who recommended the drug for all sorts of ailments including neuralgia, coughing, or diarrhoea, and to ease the symptoms of ague, rheumatism, consumption and cholera. 

In the early 19th century, there were laudanums containing a tincture of opium mixed with all kinds of other ingredients from the fairly innocuous such as cayenne pepper, brandy, whiskey, and wine, to the downright dangerous – belladonna, mercury, hashish, ether and chloroform. Laudanum was being prescribed for everything from colds to heart disease for adults and children, and was used widely during the yellow fever epidemic. It must have seemed like a miracle drug for patients racked with pain or fever, because it relieved the pain, helped them sleep and even dried up excessive mucus.

Victorian women of all classes, plagued by ‘women’s problems’ which they were not supposed to mention much less seek help for, could buy a bottle of laudanum to ease their pain without having to consult a male physician, and, in any case, many could not afford a doctor’s fees. That was both the attraction and danger of laudanum – it was cheaper than a bottle of spirits or wine because, being medicine, it was not taxed as alcohol, but it gave the same kind of escape from the stresses and miseries of life.

Photo: Cydone

Until 1908 in Britain, Laudanum or tincture of opium was also included in a number of baby’s ‘soothing’ syrups. Grandma’s Secret, Mother’s Treasure, Morrell’s Teething Syrup, Godfrey’s Cordial and Mrs Winston’s Soothing Syrup were just some of the brands a desperate mother or nursemaid could buy and, especially in the hands of parents or wet-nurses who either couldn’t read well or might think an extra dose would ‘do baby good’, these syrups could be lethal. Koop’s Baby Friend killed 11 infants in two years, and those were only the infant deaths that were investigated. There were probably many others that weren’t.

Wilkie Collins was not the only writer to become addicted to laudanum, Lord Byron took it in the form known as Black Drop, which is four times the normal strength, as did Coleridge. Somehow Coleridge managed to keep his addition a secret, though he could imbibe up to a pint in one day.

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning first took laudanum at the age of 15 after suffering a spinal injury, and at the time of her engagement to Robert Browning was taking 40 drops a day, which was large dose. Florence Nightingale also took it for medical reasons.

1781, 'Nightmare' by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)

A number of prominent people took laudanum to calm their nerves before a public speech, including John Hunter, the ‘Father of Anatomy’ (1728-93) who took 30 drops before giving lectures; William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist; and the Prime Minister William Gladstone who took it to steady his nerves before addressing parliament. I imagine there are days when modern Prime Ministers might sympathise with that.

Wilkie Collins tried many times to break his addiction through hypnosis and other means. On 26th February 1869, he wrote a letter to Mrs Benzon, 

‘… forgive me if I am absent tomorrow night. My doctor is trying to break me of the habit of drinking laudanum. I am stabbed every night at ten with a sharp-pointed syringe which injects morphia under my skin - and gets me a night's rest without any of the drawbacks of taking opium internally. If I only persevere with this, I am told I shall be able, before long, gradually to diminish the quantity of morphia and the number of nightly stabbings - and so emancipate myself from opium altogether.’ 

Sadly, he was never able to do that.

1863, Advert for 'Wolcott's Instant 

Pain Annihilator'

A few weeks ago, my wisdom teeth erupted. I couldn’t open my jaws more than half an inch. My cheeks swell up like a hamster with mumps and I discovered that sucking soup for Christmas dinner doesn’t make you feel festive, especially when soup is all you’ve been able to eat for a fortnight. It was massively painful and if I could have travelled back in time, I would have been snatching bottles of ‘Morrell’s Teething Syrup’ from any Victorian baby I could find.

Trying to stick to my daily writing routine whilst grizzling like an infant, I found a renewed admiration for Wilkie Collins. Since my teens, I’ve been captivated by his novels, but thinking about what he was battling when he wrote them, makes them seem even more amazing. He was able to turn the pain and nightmares that tormented him into great stories. Now that really is the stuff of fairy tales – spinning the nettles of life into pure gold. Happy Birthday, Wilkie!

Talking history in a writer's fiction... with the writer (Brenda Clough), by Gillian Polack

Because so many readers enjoyed the conversations I have with other writers, this month I’ve asked US writer Brenda Clough in to chat. First up, an introduction, then on with the conversation. It’s not a lot of to-and-fro, because, on this subject and at this moment, neither of us chose soundbites. Brenda has some interesting things to say, too.

Brenda: I've been publishing science fiction and fantasy since the 1980s. And I got into historical fiction in a science-fictional way -- with a time travel novel. You remember Lawrence 'Titus' Oates, right? British hero of Antarctic exploration. He's famous for stepping out into a blizzard with the carelessly British understatement, "I am just going out and may be some time," thus committing suicide to save his fellow explorers.

One of the big problems of time travel is what we may call the butterfly effect. If you step through your time portal to the late Cretaceous and step on a butterfly, will the present be the same when you get back? Or would that butterfly have been destined to nourish some important lizard, who would otherwise have become the progenitor of the human race? You open the door of your time machine and the year 2018 looks really weird, changed! And if this happens with a butterfly, what would happen if you hauled back a person?

So the easy solution to this problem is to go back with your time machine and choose a person to fish out of the past that absolutely will not have a butterfly effect. Someone who is in the historical record as not in the biosphere loop; whose body was entombed in the Antarctic ice ever since he died there in 1912. Bingo: Oates is the perfect candidate for a time travel experiment. He slams the door of his tent, walks out into the storm, and there you are, offering him a ride into the far future. But then, to write the novel (REVISE THE WORLD, from Book View Cafe), I needed to master the vocabulary and worldview of an Edwardian gentleman. I despise with a passion the kind of historical novel where the 14th century Benedictine novice in northern France is named Lindsay and sounds like she was born in Chicago in 2003, don't you? Oates had to sound and think like a guy born in 1880.

So I learned how, and made him sound right. And it was fun! And then, because I had acquired a nifty new skill writing in tight historical voice, I turned to another pet notion of mine. It has long been on my mind that Wilkie Collins sadly dropped the ball. How could he have failed to realize after writing THE WOMAN IN WHITE that there were many many more stories to tell about his incomparable heroine Marian Halcombe? The lady was the Modesty Blaise of the 1860s, Wonder Woman in a crinoline! 

Well, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I wrote A MOST DANGEROUS WOMAN, starting in Serial Box. Deliciously, they're going to publish it in the grand Victorian style, in episodes. I am borrowing as possible from the sensational novels that Collins and Dickens pioneered, not only cliffhangers but secret documents, anarchists, unwed mothers staggering through the snow, enraged menfolk with riding crops, and unpleasant incarcerations in Newgate Prison. And I fixed what a modern reader would feel are the problems with those period novels. Marian deals more realistically with the commonalities of women of the period: menstruation, pregnancy, birth control (or the lack thereof). She chafes at the things that would annoy you or me -- the way she absolutely cannot hold a job, the way she has to act like a foolish female. She has to be a perfect Victorian lady who just happens to be able to kick ass through her petticoats and hoop skirt. I am a fan of the fast and fun ride in fiction, but it has to be historically accurate!

Gillian: It reads to me as if your journey into history has been influenced very strongly by the stories you can tell. Mine has been influenced by the stories others tell.  That leads to profound differences in the way we see history, I suspect. Let's explore this for a bit.

For me there's not a right and a wrong way of talking about the past: there are only consequences. When a writer explains that they've entirely 'got' the Middle Ages and have understood the cultural differences dividing us from them, the immediate consequence is (I admit) that I mentally classify that work as a particular kind of fantasy. Not one with magic, but an alternate world history, with changed values but similar events. This is because that claim changes the story if the writer doesn't know what they know ie if they think they know everything. The sources for that claim to hold don't exist for the Middle Ages: it's that simple.

I own a pronunciation dictionary published in the late nineteenth century. This sort of document combined with early recordings give us an inkling of what some people would have sounded like at that time, in that place. We're getting closer to being able to interpret them that tightly. We simply don't have that kind of source for the Middle Ages.

It's like a recipe, and the less we know about a place and time, the more interpretation the writer has to do. The more of the ingredient 'sources can't help you here - work it out' plays a role. The biggest problem for me, with the Middle Ages, is one that the best writers seldom fall into. Call it a  misreading of the recipe. "There's no secondary material on this. Scholars haven't written about it. I can't read Latin/Old French. Let me make it up. I can, you know." And they do, which is  a good thing... and can result in amazing works. They're set in made-up worlds, though. Not historical worlds. (I talk about things like this in History and Fiction, if you want to explore it a bit more.)

Because I'm a Medievalist, my examples for this are often from the Middle Ages. Our historical knowledge for Western Europe is changing apace. Archaeological work used to be considered a useful discipline but not central. We looked at politics and stories to find out about the Middle Ages. Right now, archaeology is critical. It's driving changes in understanding daily life, for one thing, ranging from nutrition to how tightly wool was spun. This helps us (as fiction writers)  interpret a truckload of written evidence. It means we can bring some parts of the Middle Ages alive like never before. This is what my novel (to be reissued with a brand new introduction, later this year) Langue[dot]doc 1305 did. It's not most fiction writers know, but very like the one historians  knew that precise moment I wrote it.

Why? (I'm full of questions today) I read an analysis of a stew that had once been in a pot (I love archaeology!) and compared it with what we know about cooking from other sources. I looked at reports of bone analysis and found out a lot about who died and where. I was doing that research for another project (The Middle Ages Unlocked, which Katrin Kania and I wrote at the request of writers) and I mainly worked on sources for the Languedoc for the novel, but my background knowledge changed the way I made decisions about plot and character: the novel became quite different to other time travel novels because of this. When we take understanding back into the secondary sources we read for fiction we're capable (if we do the work) of using history quite differently in our fiction.

Historians a novelists alike have the problem of preventing cultural baggage determining the plot. Having a society without women, without minorities who did exist and with minorities who didn't, without basic amenities (cleanliness!) without a sense of what that society was like. This comes down to what I call cultural baggage, but learned initially as historiography and ethnohistory. It's only seeing others in the past through rose-coloured glasses or through hate-coloured glasses or not seeing them at all or only seeing them in predetermined ways.

That's a new part to the question and a really good one to hand over to you on. There are two juicy subjects here, the first is what sources you used to build up those subjects so very thoroughly that they worked in your fiction, and the other is how you handle your baggage. for we all have that baggage and it's a constant battle to remember what it is and how it affects your work. I say this for myself, with my heartfelt anguish.

Brenda: I rely a lot on written material. (Alas, it's really difficult and expensive to physically get to Antarctica and I probably never will achieve it.) With Titus Oates I was fortunate in that every man on Scott's expedition kept a journal -- not only was it a Thing at that period. Everyone was encouraged to. The scientists kept scientific journals, everyone else just scribbled in notebooks. Also everyone wrote letters home, which were very often kept and published later. I have read just about everything every man on the Scott expedition ever wrote. What I look for is word usage, rhythms of speech -- how they talked. Because I want the historical characters to sound like they're of their time.

As to the things that -don't- appear -- profanity, for instance, was totally omitted, also everything involving sex. You wouldn't put cuss words in to the letters home, because they were almost certainly going to be read (even read aloud) by your proud mother or fond sisters, or shown to visitors at the tea table. Oates was one of the most dazzling cussers on the Scott expedition -- it's in the other explorers' journals. The very sailors on their ship were awestruck, British sailors who were probably foul-mouthed beyond anything we can imagine. Not a word of it got into his letters home to his mother. I had to make up his foul language from whole cloth (with much assistance from dictionaries of Edwardian profanity) because there's nothing to quote.

The same things pertain in the period novels. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens never used profanity, because their works were being printed in magazines, and being read aloud by the family fireside. Women (especially in Dickens) were sock puppets, so good and proper than you want to slug them one. Even Marian Halcombe, a proto-feminist heroine, has her role carefully truncated by the author. She's a thrilling presence in the first half of THE WOMAN IN WHITE but in the second half she's a clinging vine, laid low by typhus and the Victorian proprieties. The literary conventions of the day simply required you to have the hero in charge. The only active woman with agency was the villainness (as in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET) and it was essential that she come to a bad end before the last page.

Which is why historical fiction is so fine. We can -fix- it. Have you read Geraldine Brooks' MR. MARCH? It's the story of Mr. March, father of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy of LITTLE WOMEN. In the original novel, as you probably recall, Marmee (Mrs. March) is full of platitudes, a truly dull character. In MR. MARCH she's a creature of passion and drive, someone you could actually envision wanting to have dinner with. And I have handed back to Marian all the agency that Collins was obliged to strip away from her. Victorian England was weighted heavily in favor of money and marriage; if you a woman with neither like Marian you were toast. So I fixed it. A well-heeled husband of notable affection and appetite, and she's free to do anything. And, I will point out, a husband you love gives you lots of motivation, when anything threatens him. I hate to contemplate how often I've put Mr. Theophilus Camlet into dire peril so that Marian can rescue him.

Gillian: I feel that we’re at the beginning of a conversation. I won’t try to sum it up or conclude it. Instead I’ll say “watch this space” and invite you back sometime.

Hints for my Christmas Stocking – Michelle Lovric

This blog is for any patron of the arts, well-wisher, vecchio amante danaroso letterario ( ‘literary Sugardaddy’) or rich uncle wishing to curry favour with his favourite niece or anyone else waiting for some hints about what this particular History Girl would like in her Christmas stocking ….


Just a couple of books, honestly, such as

 Le Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia – 1753

The greasy fritter (holeless doughnut)
sellers on the streets of Venice

I’d translate this as Street Trades of the City of Venice, but really there is an element of art to it all, in the same sense that Venice herself may be described as a beautiful working puppet theatre on a grand scale. Le Arte is a collection of 60 etchings designed by the artist Gaetano Gherardo Zompini. Below each lively illustration is a rhymed triplet by Don Questini, parish priest of Santa Maria Mater Domini.

These depictions of the working class in Venice are lovely because they show professions that speak of the city’s picturesque past. I love the combinations of the trades such as

Conza Lavezzi (Tinker and Cat Gelder);

Inchiostro (Ink and Rat Poison Seller);

And the glimpses into Venetian appetites provided by specialists like the

Caraguoi (Snail Vendor);

Dolce de Vedeletto (Blood Pudding Seller);

Frittole (Fritter Maker);

One can see the ways Venetians enjoyed themselves in these professions:

Fitta Palchi (Keeper of Theatre Boxes);

Coro d'Orbi (Blind Musicians);

Mondo Novo (Peep Box Operator).

And of sadly lost jobs like the

Marmotina (Marmot Keeper);

Metti Massere (Maidservants' Agent)

This is a book to give pleasure for years … and OMI in New York just happen to have a lovely facsimile edition for just 1900 euros 

If it’s not too much to ask, I’d also like a work by Gaultier de Coste, Seigneur de la Calprenède, called Hymen’s Præludia: or Love’s Master-Piece. Being that So-much-Admired Romance, intituled, Cleopatra. In Twelve Parts. Written originally in the French, and now rendered into English, by Robert Loveday [and John Coles, James Webb and John Davies].

This dark, speckled jewel may be had for just 2000 of your finest English pounds from Blackwell’s Rare Books, a site well worth a wistful pre-Christmas browse.

I’d be overjoyed to find in my stocking a copy of Automata, by Alfred Chapuis, Edmond Droz and Alec Reid, Editions du Griffon, 1958. My next book, The Fate in the Box, is set in a fantasy Venice of 1783, when a shadowy slave army of Winder-Uppers is forced to keep the mechanical devices of the city ticking, and in researching it, I discovered many outrageous and hilarious devices that were fascinating the public before batteries were invented.

There’s a particularly fine version of Automata at Classic Rare Books, bound in full crimson morocco gilt, with crimson watered silk endpapers, and all edges gilt, with 18 full-page colour plates, and 488 monochrome illustrations and diagrams within the text.

It’s only £1000 and you can find it here 

I could not help being attracted to Thomas Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead, (Hodder & Stoughton) a relative youngster with a 1990 publications date, and the very reasonable price of £20 at RFG Hollett & Son.

I’d love all three volumes of Wilkie Collins’s lesser-known masterpiece, Armadale (1866)about a bigamous, murderous, heartless opium-addicted redhead, Lydia Gwilt, and her many male victims, all of whom seem to sleepwalk into her cruel clutches, while the reader cries out ‘No! No! Just look at those serpentine coils of blood-red hair! Can't you see she's evil on legs?’ Haven’t seen an edition anywhere yet, outside of the London Library, but still hoping.

And, failing that, an amusing little volume by ‘Unknown’ from 1848: The Sinks of London Laid Open - A Pocket Companion for the Uninitiated, to Which is Added a Modern Flash Dictionary Containing all the Cant Words, Slang Terms, and Flash Phrases Now in Vogue, with a List of the Sixty Orders of Prime Coves.

Now if someone really wanted to push the boat out, how about an immensely covetable first edition of John Donne, published just two years after his death, with elegies and Juvenilia?

There’s just a bit of rebinding and spot of worm damage to the lower cover. I don’t want to tell you the price, because the value is beyond rubies for those of us whose adolescent passion for Donne has never slackened. Visit it anyway, just to imagine, at Peter Harrington.

Now, the bibliophile’s equivalent of Terry’s Chocolate Orange for the heel of the stocking?

For me, it would be The Jelly Book by Ralph Steadman (not to be confused with Don't Put Your Finger in the Jelly, Nelly! by Nick Sharratt). No, this is a proper History Girls’ jelly book, dealing with the natural and social history of jelly, explaining how it grows on trees, and is picked by kind people. At factories the good jelly is sorted from the bad (the bad jelly is use to stuff pillows and mattresses). Thereafter jelly’s progress up the social scale is pretty triumphant, all the way to the Mayor’s table, carried there between the horns of a cow who provides fresh cream on the spot. As I remember, the mayor’s favourite flavour is lemon …

There’s an American edition of The Jelly Book available at Eastman Books in Albany, Oregon, USA for around £30 including p&p. 

Would anyone else like to share their Christmas stocking list?