Dear Blog,
All is hectic today as I am leaving Manchester in an hour (!) to go to London for the next three months. I’ve been trying to clear stuff up and sort stuff out before leaving but can’t manage to do some of the things I still need to do. The universities IT system has been down which means I can’t do various of these tasks. I would have liked to have had a clean break and thought of nothing but research for this semester of research leave, but I guess that was always idealistic.
I have tried to get into the hang of this mind set over the past week, and have done some reading for the literature and drugs essay I’m writing for the Oxford Handbook of Romanticism. I’ve finally read Alethea Hayter’s 1968 book ‘Opium and the Romantic Imagination’, which is a real classic if now quite of its time. Hayter starts out with the premise that she is going to find out whether it is possible to tell the effects of opium on writing by those known to have taken the drug. She attempts a clinical approach, with appropriate limits and statements of what she will not be looking at or including, but is often left with speculation rather than certainty. This is as we would expect, I often wondered how Hayter could be sure that the metaphors, styles, content of writing examined was the direct product of opium addiction and not of the myriad of other influences upon the authors’ lives. Hayter was aware of this herself.
The book is great for giving a real sense of the ordinariness of opium use in the period. At one point Hayter offers a huge generalization ‘Every one, in fact, at that period took laudanum occasionally’ (p. 30). My every historical instinct heckled at this – how could she claim that ‘every one’ took it, and the ‘in fact’ in this sentence was an additional affront. But actually, after reading her book and reading about the many, many uses to which opium was put in medication (particularly, and heart-wrenchingly, in children’s medication), I wonder whether she was closer to being correct with this claim than not.
All of this work will be put to good use after my article has been written when I give the Manchester Science Festival talk on Tuesday 30th October at Manchester City Library on ‘Literature and Drugs: Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (www.manchestersciencefestival.com/whatson/litanddrugs). All are welcome to this and please come along if you are around. The same goes for my talk about Mary Wollstonecraft (http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/rights-of-woman/).
Last but not least, I’ve set up Facebook (English Salford) and Twitter (@englishsalford) accounts for our undergrad and postgrad students as a way for us to keep in touch with them with news and events. If you are one of our students, please sign up for this!
Best,
Sharon