Welcome back, Michelle!
- --Swirling
ballroom scenes
- --Dinner
parties galore
- --The
dashing Mr. Darcy
Any of
these answers would be right, of course, but you’d also be correct if you’d
shouted out opium usage. Austen’s mother used opium to help her sleep, and her
father was an agent in the trade. Elizabeth Barrett Browning took opiates every
day from the age of fourteen, Sir Walter Scott consumed 6 grams a day, and
Samuel Coleridge was a regular user.
Yes,
indeed. I hate to burst your bubble of the romantic days of yore, but opium
addiction was an issue to be reckoned with.
The
first written account of the non-medicinal virtues of this drug is in De
Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, published in 1821. He
advocates opium usage not as a pharmaceutical pain reliever but as a trip into
“an inner world of secret self-consciousness.” Sounds positively hippyish, eh?
Had Mr.
Darcy been hanging out in a nearby opium den, these are the symptoms Elizabeth
Bennett should’ve looked for:
·
Red
or glazed eyes
·
Confusion
·
Slurred
or rapid speech
·
Loss
of appetite
·
Apathy
or depression
·
Frequent
headaches
·
Insomnia
While
Jane Austen preferred to write of dances and dinners, I dove into the seamier
side of things and made the hero in A Heart Deceived a recovering opium addict.
Why?
Because addiction is a contemporary problem with historical roots.
It’s just
as hard for my fictional character Ethan to turn down a bottle of laudanum as
it is for a real person today to pass on a hit of meth. With God’s help, it can
be done—which is exactly what Ethan discovers.
So take
care, gentlewomen, when searching out your Mr. Right. Opiates have been around
since the days of Pharaoh, and are likely here to stay.
Interested
in Ethan’s story? Check out A Heart Deceived.
****************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment