The nineteenth-century opium complex: From Thomas Love Peacock to Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue proposes that two discrete nineteenth-century histories of opium – a literary history, initiated by the drug confessions of De Quincey, and a colonial history, exemplified by the commercial activities of the East India Company (in which Thomas Love Peacock participated) in cultivating opium in Bengal for export to China, leading to the first Opium War – are common elements in a nineteenth-century ‘opium complex’, a set of interlocking practices of individuals and (quasi)state actors, extending across the globe. Sherlock Holmes detective stories are read as compressed registers of tensions that inhere in this complex.

‘At present all things are changing in the aspects of English colonization and our Asian commerce’, wrote Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) in an article entitled ‘The Opium and the China Question’ published in Blackwood’s Magazine in June 1840.

The mere expansion of our Indian empire, and the widening circle of our Asiatic relations, would gradually multiply our shipping, our social necessities, and our points of contact with foreigners in all Eastern seas.

Consider, he continued, ‘[F]resh emporia, such as Singapore’; ‘Ceylon [which] has been rising rapidly in importance’; and note, he added, ‘[o]ur increasing intercourse with the Red Sea’, opening the zone across what we now refer to as the Middle East, to speed traffic from London to Calcutta. But that was not all. There were also the new settler colonies – he mentions the ‘colonial importance of New South Wales’ and the ‘infant colony of New Zealand’ – as well as growing ‘missionary efforts’, their ‘separate centres of radiation’ which ‘interknit[…]as a chain of posts in active intercommunications’. ¹ Here, in June 1840, was a new world order. Through commerce, culture, and the emigration of Britons, enabled by what De Quincey referred to as ‘the magical revolution of locomotion’, Britain had taken its ways of life and its modes of business to distant regions of the world. But this rapid spread of Britishness across the globe brought its own dangers. In ‘the[se] distant outposts’, knitted together by the delicate threads of belief and custom, De Quincey feared that British interests were vulnerable to material attacks from what he perceived, with his characteristic vitriol, as ‘uncivilized’ racial groups. In 1840, the flashpoint of this vulnerability was opium – the potent drug that would lend its name to two military campaigns that shaped global trade, British imperialism, and East–West relations in the mid nineteenth century and since.

De Quincey, of course, had a more personal and enduring relationship with opium than his discussion of ‘The Opium and the China Question’ suggests. To read that essay, one would not register that Britons of any kind – let alone the author of the essay – consumed this exotic commodity. Yet when Thomas De Quincey published his Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1821, almost twenty years beforehand, he penned a hymn to a drug that shaped his life and imprinted his literary career. He also set the terms for a mode of writing about drugs, addiction, dreams, and intense sensory experiences that persists in narratives about intoxication even today. ² While critics have noted the explicit orientalism of his representations of drugs, ³ they have only recently paid concerted attention to the highly politicised, international context of opium production, distribution, and consumption during the middle decades of the century. ⁴ Although the drug that De Quincey and his ilk consumed in Britain likely came from Turkey, ⁵ at the time, northern India presented a new global source of opium on a massive scale. The British East India Company’s cultivation of vast poppy plantations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Bengal permanently altered the landscape, environment, and population of those regions, while also producing a supply of commodities for British trade principally with China. Although the importation of opium had been banned by the Chinese government since 1729, British trade in the drug steadily increased to the extent that, by the 1830s, opium was the ‘world’s most valuable single commodity trade’. ⁶ The illicit supply of opium to China by British merchants was the trigger for two military campaigns between Britain and China known as the Opium Wars (the first Opium War, 1839–42 and the second Opium War, or Arrow War, 1856–60). ⁷ These controversial operations stimulated techno-military innovation, ⁸ as well as a rambunctious justification for ‘free trade’. ⁹ Opium and the technologies of cultivation, communication (largely steam powered), economic exchange (licit and illicit), military power, and individual and national freedoms associated with it, shaped social life in regions across the world and the East and the West. If De Quincey’s opium sensorium refashioned elements of western cultural production and consumption in the nineteenth century, it did so in the context of transformations in commodity production, ‘free trade’, global occupation, and militarisation that affected both transnational contact and daily life worldwide.

De Quincey is certainly the most prominent writer to concern himself with opium and the Opium Wars in this period, yet he was not the only one. Critics from M. H. Abrams to Susan Zieger have traced a history of literary representations of opium experience in the nineteenth century in works stretching from Crabbe and Coleridge at the beginning of the century, to Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle at the end, establishing that throughout that period, opium was considered to be an agent with intense aesthetic and psychological powers. ¹⁰ In the twentieth century too, writers such as William Burroughs and Jean Cocteau have continued this tradition. ¹¹ Studies of these writers have often concentrated on the ways in which opium experiences produce complex psychological states, and a pathology of consumption, which presents as a typical form of modern subjectivity. ¹² Moreover, these studies focus on the local and national contexts of opium consumption, while the international aspects of the opium trade are observed more sketchily. More recently, however, commentators motivated by the global turn in historical scholarship have considered opium as an international commodity whose impacts on different regions of the world might be traced in a more broadly defined literary corpus. Carl A. Trocki’s influential study, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy (1999), ¹³ offered an analysis of the British Indian opium trade to China and Southeast Asia which considered the relationship between the drug trade and European colonialism. Since then other studies have considered the shaping impact of the opium trade on social relations, customs, and environment in South and East Asia. ¹⁴ Literary critics too, notably Ross Forman, Peter Kitson, and Sanjay Krishnan, have taken on board the implications of their analyses, in order to reassess the complex intertwining of Britain and Asia in nineteenth-century imaginings. ¹⁵

It is curious, perhaps, that literary figures, who have more often been associated with the somatic effects of opium consumption, are also prominent in the political history of the drug. Yet, as the essays in this volume explore, the entanglements of literary writers with the various histories of opium run deep. To explore them reveals not only the extent to which Britain was implicated in the opium trade, but also the ways in which its literary culture operated in its shadow. It may well be a surprise to discover that the author Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) – an exact contemporary of De Quincey – although not himself an opium eater, also played a decisive role in Britain’s opium trade with China and the ensuing military operation in Hong Kong during the first Opium War. But the involvement of a single actor in two distinct fields of activity – as a novelist and reviewer of the London stage, ¹⁶ and as a high-ranking administrative agent of the powerful British monopoly, the East India Company, which at the time held dominion over extensive regions of the subcontinent, and controlled its own vast private army – points to the complex networks of association that underpinned the cultures of early nineteenth-century globalisation.

In fact, the administrative work that Peacock carried out at the East India Company, and its consequences in India and China, constitute as significant a part of the history of opium as De Quincey’s Confessions. Peacock worked at the East India Company offices in London between 1818 and 1856. ¹⁷ His job involved examining the revenue dispatches from Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, including the revenue raised through the production and export of opium. This work was made difficult by the slow speed of communications between India and London. It was this that spurred his interest in steam navigation, the field of his ‘most notable achievements’, as his biographer put it, at the East India company. ¹⁸ He developed a deep knowledge of both the technical elements of steam power and its strategic uses, and was not only referred to as an authority on steam ships by government, but also held to be directly responsible for commissioning, sometimes designing, and distributing steam ships across the world. He refers to them jokily as his ‘iron chickens’, ¹⁹ but this name disguises the fact that they were armed gunboats. Through introducing steam ships to and within India, Peacock literally speeded up the mail, from a six-monthly delivery to a monthly delivery between London and Calcutta, contributing to De Quincey’s ‘magical revolution of locomotion’. ²⁰ He also militarised the mail route to India, and sent armed ships to Asia that would later find their way to the South China Seas during the Opium War. ²¹

Throughout the 1830s, Peacock was enjoined as an expert witness in parliamentary enquiries on steam navigation, and from his evidence, one can see the intricacy and extent of his technical knowledge. He addresses questions of dimensions and design; issues of fuelling, and the logistics of refuelling; where ships should be built, and their assemblage, whether on site in Britain, or transported in parts for assemblage in Egypt. ²² He is also interrogated about routes to India, and expresses his preference for river navigation, the development of the Euphrates as a river route for steam powered vessels to India. This preference is driven by his concerns about Russia, considered by Britain at the time to be a real and present threat to the empire in India. In 1838, Peacock writes in a private letter ‘if we do not mean to fight in central Asia, we may as well leave the field to Russia, who certainly does mean to fight there some time or other’. And he speculates, ‘Surely we shall begin by sending troops up the Indus: Indian troops from India; but European troops how? I say down the Euphrates.’ ²³ Peacock’s researches in river navigation were underpinned by his classical learning, and his interest in the three great river networks in the so-called cradle of civilisation – the Euphrates, Indus, and Tigris. He reputedly kept a ‘thick book’ in which he collected ‘every notice of […] rivers in Gibbon, Balbi and others’. ²⁴ But his researches were also driven by his interest in technological innovation. The historian Daniel Headrick has traced Peacock’s involvement in the development of steam ships in collaboration with major industrialists, and in creating new routes to India across the Middle East, through which ‘a new opportunity opened up by technological innovation’ transformed a region that had been ‘an obstacle’ in the age of sail, into a region ‘worth coveting’. ²⁵

Peacock’s involvement in this work is tracked in the records of the East India Company. Much of the activity takes place in the auspiciously named Secret Committee, the body that managed the Company’s engagements with foreign governments, and its covert commercial activities. Here we see Peacock’s role in a secret plot to divert steam ships to China in 1839, at the beginning of the Opium War. ²⁶ The papers, which include memos signed by Peacock and letters in which he briefs the Committee on steam technology, not only insist on the secrecy of operations, but actually put out false information about destinations, to the extent that it is alleged that it was a surprise even to the crew when they arrived in Canton. This includes the secret redeployment of the largest steam ship ever built, the Nemesis. As one writer puts it, Peacock’s ships saw ‘honourable service’ in the Opium Wars. ²⁷

Although Peacock is not the direct subject of the essays in this special issue, his work at the East India Company shadows the explorations that each of them undertakes. It contributes an important element to what we might understand as the nineteenth-century ‘opium complex’. This set of interlocking practices of individuals and state or quasi state actors stretches from the aestheticised and sensory drug confessions of De Quincey, to the militarised commercial ventures of global capitalism, represented by the specific opium operations of the East India Company. What is most interesting in this context is the way in which Peacock combined his administrative labours that focused on Asia, with his life as a London writer, deeply embedded in metropolitan literary networks and immersed in the theatrical and operatic life of the city, apparently holding the two apart, yet nonetheless crossing easily from one to the other. It highlights not only the curious telescoping of vast geographical distances in his daily affairs, but also the ways in which the production and export of opium saturated his life as much, perhaps, as they did De Quincey’s. With this in mind, the essays in this volume examine related ways in which opium figures in the works of a range of writers: De Quincey’s elaboration of a kind of sonic warfare that Miranda Stanyon tracks transferring between his works on opium consumption and on the Opium War; the cognitive dissonance that seeps into Dickens’s late works following his son’s somewhat mysterious journeys in the East during the second Opium War as related by Julia Kuehn; or the powerful way in which, in Javed Majeed’s essay, Gandhi sequesters the associations of opium addiction to build a rhetoric and practice of decolonisation through ascetic bodily discipline.

Peacock’s clandestine activities at the East India Company, moreover, demonstrate the ways in which, from the 1830s at least, the opium trade stimulated the aggressive militarisation of communication networks. These networks were characterised by secrecy, violence, and defensiveness, and they have had a lasting impact on the regions that they remapped. One of the themes that comes out very strongly in these essays is the important role that communication networks played in the making of colonial modernity. Whether it was the transnational circulation of printed texts by missionaries, as explored here by Kendall Johnson, or the transmission of documents and contraband through the post, as examined by Devyani Gupta, or the eccentric personal journeys of Smith and Dickens Jr to China during the second Opium War as described by Kuehn, the fluid mobility of people, texts, and things, all made possible by De Quincey’s ‘magical revolution of locomotion’, underlay the making of modern modes of being. In this ‘magical revolution’, the essays demonstrate, opium played an overdetermined role. The point is made most emphatically by Gupta’s analysis of the conveyance of opium in the Indian postal network. One of the most significant effects of opium in this nineteenth-century context, it seems, was as an agent of diffusion, a means of transmission or transport – in more ways than one. Opium itself might even be thought of as a De Quincey-esque ‘magical revolution’, inspiring and provoking new modes of connection, and new methods of mobility.

Peacock’s contribution to the East India Company’s opium trade does not infiltrate his own literary works in any obvious way, yet, as the essays which follow demonstrate, its impacts and effects are evident in the literary works of others through the nineteenth century. Opium’s colonial history, as well as its addictive nature, feature in a range of prominent nineteenth-century texts, including Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Moonstone (1868), Dickens’s unfinished work Edwin Drood (as discussed by Kuehn), and Oscar Wilde’s gothic-fantasy The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Perhaps the most striking literary instance of the nineteenth-century opium complex is to be found in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes ‘adventure’ stories, published in the Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1892 and the best example of the popular nineteenth-century detective genre. ²⁸ Drug use is part and parcel of the familiar environment of crime and misdemeanour that Doyle does so much to create. A number of Holmes’s criminal cases involve narcotic or noxious substances in some way, including heroin, morphine, and mysterious toxins derived from exotic plants. ²⁹ Doyle’s detective hero is also a practised drug taker, with a regular habit of self-ministering, by injection, ‘a seven-per-cent solution’ ³⁰ of cocaine as a means to heighten his detective skills. Holmes’s personal drug use is tempered by the disapproval of his friend Doctor Watson who, in his authority as narrator and trained medical professional, reiterates the damaging consequences of narcotic abuse. Yet cocaine remains entangled with the detective’s celebrated intellect and method, something that even Doctor Watson fails to deny. Rather than simply being the standard of crime, then, drug experiences in Doyle’s imaginative world also open up new possibilities. They have the potential to alter both bodies and minds, and become the gateway to fantastic adventures. Opium, with its knotted histories of global violence and artistic consumption, is particularly evocative in the Strand canon of adventures. In complex ways, Doyle’s stories encrypt references to both De Quincey’s aestheticised drug experiences and Peacock’s work in the militarised colonial administration of opium. Engaging with themes of Empire, intoxication, disability, and secrecy, the Holmes stories index the intense effects on individual (and often racialised) bodies of drug consumers in late nineteenth-century London, and discourses associated with opium’s colonial history, including the costs of war, the circulation of foreign people and substances in metropolitan space, and the position of Britain in an illegal trade.

Opium use in the Holmes adventures is explored explicitly in the story ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (December 1891), when Watson enters a London East-End drug den to rescue an errant patient, Isa Whitney, and is surprised to find Holmes instead, in disguise and with ‘an opium pipe dangling down from between his knees’. ³¹ Holmes is revealed to be there on a case, gathering information on the disappearance of a British businessman, Neville St Clair, but opium and the opium trade remain at the heart of the story’s central mystery as Holmes and Watson investigate the possibility that the den’s proprietor, a ‘rascally Lascar […] of the vilest antecedents’, ³² has committed St Clair’s murder. Doyle’s opium den is squalid and impenetrably gloomy, ‘thick and heavy with brown opium smoke’, ³³ but it is also a site of cross-cultural encounter. Located behind the ‘high wharves’ ³⁴ of the River Thames in the ‘farthest east of the City’, ³⁵ the den appears to Watson to be like ‘an emigrant ship’, ³⁶ indexing its position as an epicentre for the flow of people, goods, and capital into the city from the far-reaches of the world. The den’s owner is South Asian and its workers are Austronesian. The nationality of the den’s patrons is not expressly identified; in fact, Doyle’s opium smokers appear barely human, as a series of disembodied figures ‘lying in strange fantastic poses with bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins pointing upward’ ³⁷ and producing slow guttural sounds. Such representations reiterate opium’s potentially destructive impact on individual lives and bodies, but they also gesture towards the insidious racial hierarchies that inform the Holmes stories that posit ‘non-white’ races as sub-human. Drawing on nineteenth-century racial stereotypes, Doyle also raises the alarming possibility that smoking opium can lead to social, racial, and cultural decline through the depiction of Watson’s patient Whitney, who has physically degenerated and appears to the reader as the ‘wreck and ruin of a noble man’, with a ‘yellow pasty face, drooping lids, and pin-point pupils’. ³⁸

Regular readers of the Strand would have been familiar with such representations of opium use. A month before the appearance of the first Sherlock Holmes story (and five months before ‘Twisted Lip’) the Strand editors had published an article by the novelist Coulson Kernahan entitled ‘A Night in an Opium Den’ (June 1891), offering a first-person account of smoking opium in an establishment on Ratcliffe Highway. In the article, Kernahan describes the squalor of the den and the stupefaction of its inhabitants, who gaze at him with slow faces and move with a ‘listlessness’ ³⁹ to their bearing. The patrons of the Ratcliffe den are distinctly racialised: Kernahan joins two white men, two Chinese characters, and ‘a partly naked Malay of decidedly evil aspect’, likened to a coiled ‘python in a serpent house’. ⁴⁰ Like Doyle, Kernahan depicts the opium den as a space of degeneration, informed by contemporary racial hierarchies. In such a ‘reeking hole’, Kernahan confirms, it is perhaps no surprise that the ‘white skin’ of the London opium smoker grows ‘bleached’ by their habit, appearing ‘dirtier and more yellow’. ⁴¹

While Kernahan unequivocally designates his surroundings as threatening and foreign, he is also keen to establish a legitimate British tradition of opium smoking in his Strand article, set apart from the squalor of the den. He achieves this via persistent references to the opium habits of great British literary authors peppered through the text, including notes on the experiences of Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Coleridge, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Dickens. Kernahan is also quick to position himself within this impressive group of literary opium-takers. During his time in the Ratcliffe Highway den, Kernahan asserts that he had fantastic dreams like De Quincey, and smoked from the exact same pipe that Dickens had used during a visit, which had ‘had the honour of making that distinguished novelist sick’. ⁴² Kernahan’s decision to publish the article under the moniker ‘The Author of A Dead Man’s Diary’ (a sly piece of self-promotion for an earlier sensation novel), rather than his own name, also suggests a determination to connect drug experiences with a growing body of literary work, produced by nineteenth-century writers who smoked, or had smoked, opium. Through these alignments, the tacit implication is that opium smoking can be productive, instead of degenerative, but only in the ‘right’ (white British male) hands.

Doyle’s ‘Twisted Lip’ story suggests likewise. Although Watson pours scorn on the opium smokers in the East End den, deeming them to be ‘the dregs of the docks’, ⁴³ he excuses Whitney’s opium habit as a ‘foolish freak’ acquired at college in the legitimate pursuit of the aesthetic sublime. Whitney’s respectable credentials are confirmed in the opening line of the narrative, introduced as ‘brother to the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St George’. ⁴⁴ As Watson explains, the unfortunate younger Whitney, ‘having read De Quincey’s description of his dreams and sensations, […] drenched his tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects’. ⁴⁵ Framing ‘Twisted Lip’ in this way, and through the example of De Quincey, Doyle reminds readers, as Kernahan had done in the earlier Strand article, of a separate mode of British intellectual and artistic opium taking that contrasts to the activities in the East End den. Reiterating these divergent traditions, Holmes also finds much-needed stimulation in intellectual drug use in the story, albeit in the form of tobacco. Unable to fathom the mystery of St Clair’s whereabouts, Holmes stays up all night and smokes ‘an ounce of shag’. ⁴⁶ The description of Holmes’s tobacco smoking, however, seems designed to recall earlier scenes in the opium den. Holmes ‘construct[s] a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged’ with his ‘eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless’ all night until the room is ‘full of a dense tobacco haze’. ⁴⁷ Unlike the deformed figures in the den, Holmes’s substance-induced immobility is temporary, creating a still point for his detective art. On solving the riddle, Holmes leaps up with a ‘sudden ejaculation’ ⁴⁸ of triumph and the narrative pace quickens to its final denouement – the unmasking and discovery of the missing man St Clair.

In ‘Unpacking Intoxication, Racialising Disability’, Mel Y. Chen demonstrates how the language of incapacity and the concept of intoxication are not medically neutral, but rather culturally and racially charged. Tracing the interanimations of race and disability in the nineteenth century, Chen shows how certain racial groups were framed as ‘slower’ than others. ⁴⁹ Through its entangled depictions of substance use, addiction, but also intellect, art, and mobility, ‘Twisted Lip’ is a compact expression of these racialising (and racist) logics that Chen identifies, and that similarly underpin the nineteenth-century opium complex. Reorganised bodies (to borrow terminology from Stanyon’s contribution to this issue) are at the centre of Doyle’s opium narrative: intoxicated bodies, disabled bodies, bodies in disguise, and missing bodies. Holmes initially believes, for example, that St Clair has been dismembered in the opium den by the Lascar proprietor, and then disposed of via a trap door (‘Ay, bodies, Watson,’ Holmes tells his horrified companion, ‘We should be rich men if we had £1000 for every poor devil who has been done to death in that den’ ⁵⁰ ). St Clair, in truth, has been hiding in plain sight as a ‘crippled beggar’, ⁵¹ acting disabled in order to elude recognition. Holmes, too, apes the immobility of the opium smoker in order to inveigle his way into the den undetected by the enemy Lascar. These performances of intoxication and immobility thus encapsulate a set of nineteenth-century racial dynamics that posit the resilience of the white body against the incapacity of the ‘non-white’ subject and that underpin the nineteenth-century opium complex.

One further story in the Strand’s Holmes canon that reveals the extent to which the nineteenth-century opium complex informed Doyle’s imagination is a narrative that, on first inspection, seems to have nothing to do with opium at all. Read as part of a series, however, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ (January 1892), directly following ‘Twisted Lip’ and published just before ‘The Speckled Band’, an Indian-themed adventure that also deals with foreign poisons, can be understood as the middle narrative in a tripartite set of Holmes stories connected to, and informed by, the opium trade. Taken individually, ‘Carbuncle’ is a largely uneventful Christmas story that revolves around a stolen gemstone hidden in the body of a goose. Curious moments of ‘cognitive shortfall’ (see Kuehn’s essay) in Holmes’s deductive reasoning, however, suggest that all is not as it seems in the narrative. ‘Carbuncle’ contains a famous, if somewhat immaterial, scene in which Holmes deduces a man’s entire life from a lost felt hat, which scholars have typically viewed as a fairly light-hearted episode that performs Holmes’s unique detective skill for the reader’s pleasure. This scene accrues more significance, however, when contrasted with a series of subtle, but loaded, mistakes that Holmes makes about the eponymous gemstone at the heart of the narrative. Despite claiming to have read about the stolen carbuncle ‘in The Times every day lately’, ⁵² Holmes’s history of the gemstone is entirely erroneous. Rather than simply reveal the detective’s (or Doyle’s) fallibility, these errors actually index the Opium War with China. Holmes asserts, for example, that the carbuncle was found ‘in the banks of the Amoy river in southern China’. ⁵³ While there is no river named as such, Amoy, or modern-day Xiamen, referenced both a famous site of battle during the first Opium War as well as one of the first five ports opened to British trade following the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) at the end of the first war. A further error in the narrative concerns the chemical makeup of the gemstone itself. Although Holmes admires the ‘purity and radiance’ of the brilliant ‘blue stone’, ⁵⁴ the chemical formula of a carbuncle or, as it is more commonly known, a garnet, means that the stone is always red. The colour blue thus seems to be a deliberate narrative choice, possibly connecting the carbuncle to the blue-black seed of the opium poppy, but perhaps, more vividly, recalling the distinctive hue of another important commodity, grown and produced in India and traded by Great Britain – indigo.

In this way, the stolen carbuncle can be read as a potent signifier for the spoils and plunders of empire. These heavy burdens are not left unexamined as the narrative also gestures tacitly towards the costs of colonial gains. Holmes emphasises the gemstone’s ‘sinister history’ since it was first discovered in China: ‘there have been two murders, a vitriol throwing, a suicide, and several robberies brought about for its sake’. ⁵⁵ The carbuncle crystallises the weltering chaos of the colonial world, encrypting a highly profitable, yet contentious, aspect of nineteenth-century colonisation in a unique and desirable item hidden in a goose. Passed from the farmer, to a market seller, to a customer, to Holmes, and carrying its smuggled treasure, the goose comes to symbolise the vast, secretive networks of exchange that characterised the nineteenth-century opium trade and supported colonial modernity. Crucially, the carbuncle, via the Christmas goose, imports these concerns into the Victorian domestic space. In a similar manner to ‘Twisted Lip’, bodies (albeit animal ones) are depicted as contaminated, even violated, by damaging external substances produced and imported from the colonies. The suggestion here is that while the globalisation of trade has increased British wealth and power, it has simultaneously opened British culture to a range of toxic, and yet intoxicating, influences that have the capacity to destabilise the nation.

Doyle’s ‘opium’ narratives thus return us to the anxiety that De Quincey expressed regarding Britain’s precarity in the new global order that it had created. It is worth noting that the criminal perpetrators of all three Sherlock Holmes stories are not foreigners, but Britons, who have been led astray by financial greed. In an uncharacteristic act of mercy, but typical to the ‘Christmas story’ genre in which ‘Carbuncle’ sits, Holmes allows the gem thief to escape, on the grounds that he believes he will be ‘saving a soul’. ‘Send [the thief] to jail now’, Holmes explains, ‘and you’ll make him a jail-bird for life’. ⁵⁶ The ‘jail-bird’ pun returns the reader to the central figure of the goose and its encrypted opium history. In this context, it is not Holmes’s benevolent act that is important, but the future actions of the carbuncle thief. Here, the narrative gestures towards the role of opium in biopolitical modes of control. Biopower is the form of governance that Michel Foucault argues aims to optimise and produce the life of the nation through the regulation of its ‘species body’. ⁵⁷ The international trade in opium, the colonial violence required to sustain it, as well as the addictive force of a drug like opium as it acts on the individual body are all part of a nexus of the state’s powers which intervened in and regulated the lives of citizens. ⁵⁸ In this light, Holmes’s act of mercy becomes a biopolitical orchestration on a micro-scale, seeking to regulate and manage individual habits and behaviours. The implications of this reading suggest consequences for both individual agents and national bodies – a message that is surprisingly similar to that which Javed Majeed finds in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.

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The essays in this issue interrogate and shed new light on what we have called the nineteenth-century opium complex. All take a cue from the new scholarship that identifies opium as a commodity with global impacts, namely those of violent military contact. All are transnational in scope, spanning Britain, India, and China, and locate opium’s agency on the imagined borders between them. By linking together opium’s sensory regimes and the transcontinental military campaigns that the commodity provoked, moreover, the essays consider the vastly different scales on which opium produced its coercive and violent dynamics. They explore how opium is not only an agent of sensory pleasure and pain that shapes individual corporeal and psychological experience, but it is also a player in the proceedings of British colonial expansion, a constituent in the construction of the ideology of ‘free trade’, an item of commodity culture, and a medium of both colonial oppression and resistance.

The essays analyse a wide range of different artefacts. These include printed texts, both magazines and books in many and mixed genres from Dickens’s unfinished late sensation novel, Edwin Drood (1870) to Gandhi’s classic work of Indian decolonisation, Hind Swaraj (1909, ‘Indian Self-Rule’); performances like Albert Smith’s comic lecture show, To China and Back (1858); and, in Gupta’s essay, the entire network of postal communication within British India, as observed through state archives of the Indian postal service. To a large degree, the particular archive each author chooses on which to base their explorations shapes the manner of their investigation. Each develops and deploys distinct strategies through which to examine their material. Miranda Stanyon turns to new work in sound studies to analyse the intriguing insistence on pipes – both organ and opium pipes – in De Quincey’s rhetoric on the Opium War, to reveal the ‘dense relationships between opium, empire, and sound in nineteenth-century Britain’. Stanyon’s analysis, underpinned through a recourse to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘bodies without organs’, finds new and suggestive ways of linking the personal domain of the addict with the experience of imperial warfare, while also exploring the resonances between De Quincey’s critical categories and those of the postmodern theorists. Kendall Johnson draws on the evidence of print journalism in his examination of the interventions of US missionaries working in Hong Kong into American debates about the justification for the first Opium War. He focuses specifically on the republication of John Quincy Adams’s ‘Lecture on the War with China’ (1841) in the Canton-based Chinese Repository (1832–51). Johnson signals the ways in which the journal’s editors foreground British opium smuggling in their footnoted version of Adams’s lecture (a subject largely elided by Adams himself) in order to refute Sinophobic logic, and to gesture instead to the immoral implications of a British war waged in defence of smuggling. Julia Kuehn’s essay on the second Opium War also draws on print archives to explore a curious ‘cognitive shortfall’ that Sino-British tensions produced. She pursues the tantalising intersections of opium in the lives and travels of two unlikely sojourners to China in a time of war: the entertainer Albert Smith, who travelled to Hong Kong to collect material for a light-hearted one-man show, and Charles ‘Charley’ Dickens Jr, sent by his father to China in order to learn more about the tea trade. For Kuehn, the ‘tone-deaf’ nature of both of these travellers is representative of the ‘affective and epistemological unease that results from and accompanies’ the experience of war in foreign territories, an explanation that she goes on to suggest informs literary depictions of opium in the years following the second Opium War. Historian Devyani Gupta draws on her research in the archives of the British Indian postal service in order to reconstruct the ways in which postal networks in British India both allowed and depended on the traffic of contraband opium. Noting the ‘centrality of opium within imperial networks of trade and finance’, Gupta’s essay demonstrates in intricate detail how that imperial system spawned a national network that brought opportunities for both compliance and resistance to colonial authority. Intellectual historian Javed Majeed’s analysis of Gandhi’s accounts of dietetics and consumption sheds light on the biopolitics of opium in his critique of colonial power. As Majeed points out, opium addiction provided Gandhi with a metaphor for Indian dependency on British colonialism, but it was also linked to a set of material practices that supported British rule in India and its later dominance in China and Hong Kong.

As they move between literature and history the essays in this special issue present a range of methods for analysing opium’s dynamic role in nineteenth-century histories of conflict and commerce, as well as its entanglement in various personal and local stories in which opium is a habitual feature of everyday life. The diversity of topics covered captures the breadth and depth of opium’s influence in the long and global nineteenth century. While the essays remind us of the special history of opium, its connections with geopolitical conflicts and metropolitan cultural figures, and its deep embeddedness within a cultural imaginary, they also suggest new lenses for interpreting the magical powers of the commodity in a colonial history of capital.