DESCRIPTION
Opium was an unremarkable part of daily life in Romantic Britain. It was highly prized by the medical community as a painkiller, and people of every age and class actively and unselfconsciously used it to treat a wide range of major and minor ailments. The Romantic age, however, also marks the crucial moment when British opium-eaters began to celebrate the drug, not for its medicinal powers, but for its recreational properties, as seen especially in the works of John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey.
