ABSTRACT
Victorian respectability encompassed some surprising practices. In nineteenth-century Britain not only cannabis, but opium and, later in the century, cocaine, were all sold legally. From a late twentieth-century perspective the Victorians seem to have taken a relatively liberal attitude to opium, whether used as a sedative or a stimulant. Although opium was widely and legally used, both as a sedative and a stimulant, during the Victorian period, these were also the years when the problems associated with habitual use of the drug and the need for legislative controls over its sale first became matters for public debate. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, first published in 1821 and then, in a much revised version, in 1856, is the seminal book on opium for the nineteenth century. In The Moonstone, as in the other Victorian fictions already cited, crime and opium go hand in hand.
