The Opium Connection: Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, and D. W. Griffith

This essay deals with the First Opium War of 1840–42, reflecting on how the war ramified in the divergent imaginations of the East and the West. I begin with an 1840 essay by Thomas De Quincey, “The Opium and the China Question.” From there, I move to two interrelated case studies, exploring how D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919), with its celebrated advancement of the sentimental system of film narration, derived its own melodramatic core sequences from Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). What considerations led Griffith to embed the insular London story elements he borrowed from The Old Curiosity Shop in a narrative that begins in Shanghai? And what, if anything, is to be made of the fact that Dickens’s novel dates precisely to the period of the First Opium War?