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  • The Making of Addiction: The “Use and Abuse” of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain
  • Barry Milligan
Louise Foxcroft. The Making of Addiction: The “Use and Abuse” of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain. The History of Medicine in Context. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007. vii + 199 pp. $99.95 (978-0-7546-5633-3).

Addiction’s advent as a medical and cultural concept in the nineteenth century is complex, requiring at least the resources of cultural criticism, sociology, and medical history to do its story justice. Add to this the fact that the evolution sprawled across Germany, Austria, and the United States as well as Great Britain, and it becomes clear that adequate coverage of the subject is probably beyond the scope of any single academic career, let alone one book.

This daunting story provides the title for Louise Foxcroft’s The Making of Addiction, and the book itself makes an inroad toward telling it. The subtitle, however, more accurately describes the book’s tighter focus: “the ‘Use and Abuse’ of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Examining some out-of-the-way periodical pieces alongside more familiar points of reference, such as Coleridge’s poetry and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Foxcroft attempts to delineate “the medical and popular understanding of addiction” (p. 1). She sometimes treats these two strands of understanding as the intertwined elements they almost certainly were, asserting of Coleridge’s and De Quincey’s works, for instance, that they “formed a basis of understanding for the layperson and for the medical profession; they influenced the overall social and scientific attitudes towards the chronic use of opium” (p. 37). At a broader methodological level, however, she isolates the two threads, even dividing the book into distinct halves, “The Cultural History of Addiction in Nineteenth-Century Britain” and “The Medical History of Addiction in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” This dualism leads to some artificial distinctions, even contradictions. In the space of one page, for instance, we are told that by the late nineteenth century opiates “became full of meaning for the drug users and those around them, clouding a purely scientific and empirical explanation” and, at the opposite extreme, that “the drug and its properties were increasingly discussed and thought of in purely medical terms” (p. 113). The argument is marred by other slippages as well, as in matters of chronology. After spending most of chapter 2 detailing the establishment of the degraded opium addict as a stereotype in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for instance, the author speaks of the familiar figure as “nascent” in 1876 (p. 69). Similarly, the terms “Victorian,” “the nineteenth century,” and “late eighteenth and early nineteenth century” are used interchangeably, once even in the course of a single page (p. 40).

Foxcroft laudably unearths some out-of-the-way sources not treated in other considerations of the subject, such as Sara Coleridge’s poem on her own opiate use (p. 45) and a lush passage about Chinese opium smoking in a little-known masque attributed to Oscar Wilde (p. 71). However, she is also inexplicably careless with some of her sources, as in her assertion that “In 1868 the respectable London Society magazine carried an article entitled ‘East London Opium Smokers’ which reappeared twenty years later as ‘An Opium Smoke in Tiger Bay’ in a collection of the journalist James Greenwood’s writings” (p. 63). Although Greenwood did [End Page 745] indeed publish a piece with that title, it appeared five rather than twenty years later1 and apart from its subject matter is not even substantially similar to the anonymous London Society article.

Despite its claims to the contrary, The Making of Addiction’s subject matter has been covered more effectively elsewhere. Virginia Berridge’s Opium and the People2 is still unsurpassed as a social history of opiate use in nineteenth-century Britain, and for nuanced analysis of opiates’ role in nineteenth-century British culture, readers would do better to turn to Terry Parssinen’s Secret Passions, Secret Remedies,3 among others.

Barry Milligan
Wright State University

Footnotes

1. James Greenwood, In Strange Company: Being The Experiences of a Roving Correspondent, 2nd ed. (London...

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