Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century

by Mike Jay

Coleridge and de Quincey swilling bitter draughts of opium, Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes dallying with cocaine, Baudelaire and Gautier rapt in hashish fantasies behind velvet curtains, even Queen Victoria swallowing her prescription dose of cannabis - these snapshot images are familiar, but what is the story which lies behind them? How did cannabis and cocaine, opium and ether, mushrooms and mescaline enter the modern world, and what was their impact on the nineteenth century's dreams and nightmares?
Emperors of Dreams tells the stories of how all these substances were first discovered, and paints a fresh and startling picture both of today's illicit drugs and of the nineteenth century. It shows that the age of Empire and Victorian values was awash with legal narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics, and traces their progress through the rapidly evolving worlds of science and colonial expansion, the demi-mondes of popular subculture and literary bohemia, and the rising tide of temperance and prohibition.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Drugs, Science, Medicine, Sociology

277 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2002

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Reviews

[Dfordoom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mike Jay’s Emperors of Dreams (Dedalus Books, 2000) is a fascinating look at drugs in the 19th century. It's yet another example of the popular perception of the Victorian era as repressive and paternalistic being quite wrong. For most of the 19th century most western governments adopted the very sensible and (by today’s standards) amazingly enlightened policy of considering that if you wanted to take drugs it was your own business and that it was not the place of government to interfere. At the beginning of the 19th century the only drugs available were tobacco, alcohol, caffeine and opium. Over the course of the century new drugs, such as nitrous oxide, appeared. New derivatives of older drugs (such as morphine) also appeared, and other drugs previously more or less unknown (such as cannabis and various plant hallucinogens) were introduced to the European world. And the drug hysteria slowly started to build, fuelled partly by the medical profession (anxious to increase and consolidate its growing power) and more particularly fuelled by racism. Drugs were seen as an insidious plot by the inferior races to bring about the degeneration of the white race, and they were seen as a means by which dastardly foreigners such as the Chinese could take revenge on Europe for their humiliations suffered at the hands of European colonialism. Racism was an even bigger factor in the United States, with ludicrous fears of black “coke fiends” menacing the purity of white womanhood, and with cannabis seen as a drug that would turn Mexicans into sex-crazed maniacs who would also endanger white women. Indeed racism remains a major factor in US drug policy. The chapters on drugs that are now more or less forgotten or regarded merely as anaesthetics, such as ether and nitrous oxide, are especially interesting. A very thought-provoking and highly entertaining book which I highly recommend.

[Essie Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and very well written indeed.