Child Labour in Victorian England

Although child labour was to arouse the strongest of emotions during the Victorian Era, it was certainly not a new phenomenon.  In England children had always worked although, while Britain was a primarily agrarian society, much of the work was “hidden,” being in the fields and a part of a family’s work structure.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of factors combined to make child labour more visible and more dramatic.  As I. J. E. Keil has noted, “ ‘Industrial Revolution’ became the commonplace characterisation of the complex developments in Britain during the later 18th and first half of the 19th cents.”  With the advent of the steam engine and its application to factory production there was accelerated movement from animal power to machine power.  The development and rapid expansion of railways, dependent for their motive power on steam, contributed to the distribution process, but at the same time allowed for the movement of people. Movement to the urban centres was expedited by a series of Parliamentary Acts in the later years of the 18th and the early years of the nineteenth century which accelerated the process of enclosure.  Indeed, in the eighty years between 1780 and 1830, more than 4,000 local acts were passed and between six and seven million acres or just over twenty percent of the land area of Britain was enclosed, forcing many smallholders off the land.

Many of those who left the land were forced into factories, Blake's "dark Satanic Mills." Here workers, especially women and children, were exploited.  Children especially were useful where the industrial processes required access to those parts of machines which were too difficult to be reached by the larger adults.  Children were cheap and were always available since their small earnings were often just enough to make the difference between survival and starvation for a family.  In Lancashire alone, 30,000 children  a year were employed in the mills in the 1830s.  Children were in demand, as well, in the mines where they could squeeze through small openings and were often harnessed to wagons full of coal to pull the loads to the surface.

Some of the voices of the working children can still be heard in the 1842 Report of the Children's Employment Commission. John Riley worked in a pin making factory.  At the time he was interviewed, he was eleven years old, had been in the workhouse for six years and had been making pins for five years, having started when he was six years of age. He worked from 9 to 12 and from 1 to 4 and in addition to which he worked after supper two or three times a week.  He told the interviewer that he never got beaten; even if he failed to do the quantity of pins that was expected.

John Edelsten of the firm of Edelsten and Price, pin manufacturers, noted, in testimony, that the children working in the factory were of the lower class and their families "could not afford to do without the produce of their children's labour, however small." He went on to say that if the children did not work, "the parents of most of them must come on the parish for relief."

Ellen Clark, who worked for a tobacconist had begun working as a tobacco stripper at around the age of ten.  The work entailed the stripping of the wet leaves and “laying them smooth in a row.”  At first, the smell was so unpleasant that she threw up, but in a few days she became accustomed to it.  The smell, she said, “makes all the children ill at first.”  Her workday began at 7 o'clock in the morning with  a thirty minute break for breakfast at 8:30 and an hour for dinner at noon.  At 4 o'clock she had half-an-hour for tea.  She went to Sunday School for most of that day finishing at 8:30 in the evening. 

Ellen told the interviewer that she “never gets to walk out in the fields even on Sundays,” but of course that day was taken up with schooling.  She did have a few holidays during the year; New Year's Day, Christmas Day and Good Friday and, on those days she went to Church and to school. Those were, however, her only holidays.
 
In the Derbyshire Potteries children were also employed. Esther Ann Eley was eight years of age when she was interviewed.  She had been employed for ten days turning a wheel for which she received 2s 6d a week. She had been to school, but as she said, “they ne'er larnt her aught.”

John Froggart  was eleven years old and worked at the Shipley Pottery where he had been employed for three months.  For turning the wheel he received 3s per week.  His work day began at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening.  During the day he had half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. He got his meals on the premises where he had meat, potatoes, bread, and beer for dinner.  Although he had attended Sunday school for four years, he was still doing the Easy Lessons.

Even for those children who were slightly older, the work must have been hard and dangerous. Frederick Cave was fifteen years of age when he testified and had been working in the Machine Rooms of a Lace Manufacturer.  He worked from ten to twelve hours a day and often, in addition, he might work all night two or three times a week, finishing at six in the morning before returning to work at eight.  His father had died two years earlier and “he was forced to look out for his own living.”  Although he had a little school and now attended Sunday School, he could barely read and couldn't write, signing his testimony with his mark.

Such was life for many of the working children in the first half of the century. Children died or were terribly maimed in the pursuit of employment.    But even as late as the 1880s, George Sims could write,

I know one little lad who is employed at pulling out the planks which have been pushed through the machine by men, and he has one hand now on which only the thumb is left. Then there is the lemonade-bottling, which is another industry largely employing the lads of poor neighbourhoods. The bottles are liable to burst, and cases of maiming are almost of daily occurrence.

To see a portion of the 1842 Report on the use of child labour in the mines, including some horrific images, click here.

A note on manners, gentle reader

During the middle years of the nineteenth century, a knowledge of etiquette became increasingly important on formal occasions. Books on the subject regularly appeared in order to provide a guide to proper behaviour for those who wanted, or needed, to know how to engage in formal relationships. Just how significant these rules were for most people is questionable. Certainly some elements of them filtered down into everyday behaviour, but they were hardly the be-all and end-all that the writers of books on the subject would have had their readers believe them to be. Cassell’s handbook on etiquette, published in 1860 and aptly entitled, The Hand-Book of Etiquette: Being a Complete Guide to the Usages of Polite Society, opens with a preface which informs the reader that:

In order to enjoy polite society, and to be thoroughly suited for it, we must have a knowledge of those rules and regulations which the custom and common consent of well-bred people have established and drawn up into a kind of social code, entitled Etiquette. To render the public familiar with this code is the object of the present work.

Etiquette has a long and fascinating history. Reference to the correct order of precedence is mentioned as early as in Beowulf, when Wealtheow the queen, “mindful of etiquette,” takes the goblet first to the King then to the courtiers. Not surprisingly many of the procedures and orders of precedence centred around the court from which, like the circles from a stone dropped in water, they expanded into all classes and places.

By the end of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the influence of certain individuals who were considered masters of social etiquette, or at least setters of the fashionable trends, men like Beau Nash and Beau Brummell, was strongly affecting British polite society. The rules they imposed were often mere whims, but so powerful were they as arbiters of taste that it is said that the Prince Regent was careful never to leave his waistcoat unbuttoned beyond that degree that Beau Brummell stipulated as correct.

G. Kitson Clark, in The Making of Victorian England, has argued that the development of Victorian etiquette was

essentially part of the history of the battle for refinement and civilization, and above all the better protection of women, against the promiscuity, animalism, brutality and grossness which had been common even in the eighteenth century.

“Unfortunately” he continues, this led to “the development of an etiquette which becomes in many points otiose and extremely cumbersome, the encouragement of taboos which are at best ridiculous, and the imposition of a code which can be extremely cruel.”

In George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, Carrie, the wife of a senior clerk, Charles Pooter becomes quite concerned about the proper order for paying a call. Both she and her husband have pretentions to move in a better class. The matter is, at least temporarily, resolved when Carrie finds she has no calling cards and, therefore, could not possibly visit her friend. Clearly more cards would have to be printed and then there “would be quite time enough to discuss the etiquette of calling.”

Undoubtedly, Carrie had been reading either Cassell’s or some other guide to etiquette which made quite clear the process of using calling cards. Cassell’s, for example, explains that "The etiquette of visiting cannot be carried on without proper attention to the time when cards should be sent or brought, and without recollecting the persons for whom they should be left.”

As to who could visit whom, there was an accepted structure of what was or was not appropriate. A lady could not visit bachelors or widowers unless a female relative of the person being visited was present to do the honours. A married woman might call on a bachelor or widower if she was accompanied by her husband or brother. If she was unmarried, even though accompanied by a male relation she “should have the countenance of a married lady’s presence.”

By the middle and late years of the Victorian Era, the most trivial demands of etiquette could lead to the downfall of one in the upper strata of society. Poor speech or the incorrect usage of terminology might prove fatal. As “Madge” in one of her guides to etiquette pointed out, “coffee” must be pronounced “cawffee”, “lunch” is never heard in good society–the meal is “luncheon”, calls are “made,” not “paid,” and one drinks “tea” but doesn’t “take” it.

Even something as slight as the correct manner to crack nuts at the dinner table was not too miniscule a topic to fall under the eagle eye of “Madge” who noted that the man who knew how to crack nuts would be “in request by the ladies on either side, for, for some reason, women are seldom adepts in freeing the nut from the shell.”

All through the Victorian Era, knowledge of what was correct seemed to become increasingly important, particularly for women but also for men in their relations with women of their own or better classes. In the process, and as part of the attempt to maintain a degree of exclusivity, the rituals became gradually more trivial and progressively more exacting. Etiquette had truly become a game for the initiates.

To download Routledge's Manual of Etiquette (c. 1860), click here.

The tailors and the Lady

A dispute between a tailor and a customer hardly seems newsworthy. Even should the matter go to court, it would be unlikely to merit more than passing notice in a local newspaper. Yet in May of 1873, just such a dispute (Creed and another v Walters) was the subject of great interest in papers around London, ranging from the Daily News to the Illustrated Police News. The story even made it into the Western Mail in Cardiff. What made this case so remarkable was the defendant in the case was Catherine Walters, better known as “Skittles” and the most celebrated courtesan of the middle years of Victoria's reign. So popular was she - or at least so well known - that The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times thought it sufficiently amusing to make her case the subject of one of its frequently appalling puns. "'Skittles' speaks of a fashionable tailor as being 'one of the old war-horses of the trade.' A heavy charger we suppose."

In the court it was pointed out that

the defendant, Miss Walters, was a lady very well known in London and in Paris, and her personal attractions had secured for her a very considerable number of admirers, under the protection of some of whom she had from time to time lived.

The argument was over a bill in excess of three hundred pounds for riding habits and numerous alterations.

Nor was this the only time Skittles name was to appear in the popular press. Just three years later, when she was in Paris, the following appeared.

Miss Catherine Walters, an English lady, who may, perhaps, be better known to some of your readers than she is to your correspondent, brought an action, which came on for hearing yesterday, against M. Faure, the well-known publisher, demanding damages for injury to her reputation occasioned by a book called 'Memoires d'une Biche Anglaise," with her portrait in the title-page. The curiosity of the public met with a disappointment, for it happened that - to use the words of a disappointed Irish attorney - a 'compromise broke out between the parties.' The publisher undertook to destroy all the copies of the work remaining on hand, and the lady's counsel declaring that she scorned to make the action a monetary speculation the affair was concluded.

Again, in 1890, her name featured in the case of Beauclerk v Beauclerk in which Skittles was named as having been intimately involved with the husband almost thirty years earlier. Such was the power of her name that it took precedence over the names of several others with whom the husband was involved. Although the couple had been living separately for twenty years, the court held that there were no grounds for a dissolution of the marriage since there was no proof that the husband had molested his wife or interfered with the custody of their child in the years of their separation.

During the sixties and seventies, the grand decades for the courtesans, Skittles was the most talked abut and admired of the breed. She was, as William Hardman so bluntly put it, “a w[hore] sir, much sought after by fast young swells.” With all of the most elegant women of the day she rode, through the season, in Rotten Row.

The Danae! the Amazons! the lady cavaliers! the horsewomen! can any scene in the world equal Rotten Row at four in the Afternoon, and in the full tide of the season?

asked the journalist, George Augustus Sala. There the dandies of London gathered at the wooden rails, ladies in their crinolines strolled accompanied by their footmen, children played in the park and here and there one could see “wicked old bucks, splendidly attired, leering furtively under the bonnets” of respectable women.

The “pretty little horsebreakers” as those of the demi-monde parading up and down the Row were known, could be seen

in their ravishing riding-habits and intoxicatingly delightful hats: some with the orthodox cylindrical beaver, with the flowing veil; others with roguish little wide-awakes, or pertly cocked cavalier’s hats and green plumes.

One correspondent to The Times of 29 January 1861 suggested that if its editors took chairs to Rotten Row they might then see, and be able to tell the public in a "leader",

Who rides the best horse in the row? Who drives the most rampageous ponies? Whom do all the best girls ape in dress and deportment, and in equipage if they can; aye, and in talk too? Who first set the fashion of the ‘pork pie’ hat? Who restored the ancient chimney pot? Why one of our ‘pretty horse-breakers.

"And there, as Alfred Austin, later Poet Laureate, wrote in 1861, “… defiant, spurning frown and foe,/With slackened rein swift Skittles rules the Row./Though scowling matrons champing steeds restrain,/She flaunts Propriety with flapping mane."

She had a passion for horses and was a first class rider. Sir Willoughby Maycock, as a young man, was riding home from the hunt with his father when two riders raced past “and were over the fence and in front of us in the twinkling of an eye.” One, a woman, “wore a habit that fitted like a glove, and a bit of cherry ribbon round her neck. … she was a perfect dream.” As they pelted past, she shouted to her companion, Jim Mason, the winner of the 1839 Liverpool Grand National, and one of the finest horsemen in England, that she expected when they reached home her bottom would be as red as her ribbon. It was, of course, the incomparable Skittles.

Born in 1839, at sixteen she became the mistress of George, Lord Fitzwilliam and, when she left him for Lord Cavendish, Fitzwilliam settled £300 a year on her and banked £2,000 in her name. Cavendish, later Marquess of Hartington, settled £500 a year on Skittles in addition to giving her horses and a house. The affair lasted for four years, and was frequently painful for both of them. Among her intimate friends were the Prince of Wales and the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. W. E. Gladstone, who always had an interest in the demi-monde, sent her twelve pounds of Russian tea and brought her a bunch of narcissi, telling her she had a small waist and then testing his statement “by manual measurement.” “I have not,” he assured her, “come to talk politics.”

Skittles was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer and had poems written to her and about her by Wilfred Scawen Blunt aas well as Alfred Austin. Her notoriety was such that even without being named, it must have been clear to readers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that the criticism of Landseer’s “The Shrew Tamed” was referring to Skittles, especially since the model (not Skittles herself) looked so much like the lady in question.

“The Shrew Tamed”--a high-bred horse of soft silken coat, dappled with play of light and shade as on velvet--subdued by a “pretty horsebreaker,” is certainly unfortunate as a subject. ... We hope it will now be felt by Sir Edwin Landseer and his friends that the intrusion of “pretty horsebreakers” on the walls of the Academy is not less to be regretted than their presence in Rotten Row.

Skittles lived into her eighties, long enough to see the end of the First World War. In her last years she would take the air, pushed in a bath-chair in Hyde Park, where once she had ruled the Row.

To read the report of the case of Creed and another v Walters as it appeared in The Daily News (London, 6 May 1873), click here.

The First Jew to Take a Seat in Parliament

It is commonly believed that the first practicing Jew to sit in the House of Commons was Lionel de Rothschild. Technically this may be true, but the first practicing Jew to vote in the House was David Salomons (image on the left), a cousin to Rothschild. In 1851, in the Greenwich by-election, he was returned as the member for that constituency.

Salomons was a newcomer neither to politics nor to public life. He had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament on no fewer than three previous occasions. In 1837 and 1841 he had unsuccessfully contested Shoreham and Maidstone respectively and in 1847 had failed yet again at Greenwich. And although Rothschild had been elected five times in the decade between 1847 and 1857, he had been denied his seat for his failure to swear the oath of abjuration “on the true faith of a Christian.” Salomons had made clear his objections to this sort of thing before. In 1835, and again in 1844, he had stood for the court of Aldermen of the City of London and while elected in both instances, his objection to the form of oath required meant that he was unable to take his seat.

Unlike his cousin who had, in a most gentlemanly way withdrawn after making his point, Salomons decided to try a different approach. After his election in 1851, he took the oath, simply leaving out the words “on the true faith of a Christian.” After taking his seat, Salomons voted on three divisions. The House of Commons debate that followed on from this was extensive and, would, at times, have bordered on the hilarious had not the issue been so important.

The question, put to the Commons on the 2nd of July was, "That David Salomons, Esq., is not entitled to vote in this House, or to sit in this House during any Debate, until he shall take the Oath of Abjuration in the form appointed by Law.” Clearly the issue was twofold. The first, and more technical issue, was whether or not the words that Salomons had left out were a necessary part of the oath which he took and by his failure to recite them he made the oath null and void. The second and broader question; and the one which many of those debating the issue hoped to avoid, was whether a practicing Jew should be a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, a "Christian" nation.

The previous year, the Member for the University of Oxford, Sir R. H. Inglis, a devout evangelical Christian had "tenaciously adhered to the notion that until Baron Rothschild abjured Judaism and professed Christianity he was not entitled to be spoken of, even in courtesy, as the hon. Member for the City of London," and while he reconsidered his position, it is likely that there remained many who shared his earlier views. T. E. Headlam, on the other hand, thought the whole matter was absurd. The oath was "utterly unsuited" he argued, "to the present time; had become entirely obsolete, and ... it was not desirable for any reason whatever that it should be retained." "The oath," he went on,

"was worse than useless—it was most objectionable to compel Members when they first entered upon their duties in that House, whether they were Christians or Jews, to go through the solemnity of taking that unnecessary oath: it was a practice calculated to impair the idea of the sanctity of an oath, and to weaken the sense they would otherwise have of the engagements which upon such occasions they might fairly be called upon to enter into. If the oath itself was obsolete and unsuited to the times, the mode in which it was taken was still more improper, and, in his mind, approached even to blasphemy. In the first place, they handed to a Jewish Member coming to the table of the House an Old Testament, thereby recognising his denial of the truth of Christianity, and then, after recognising his denial of the truth of Christianity, they called upon him to swear upon the true faith of a Christian."

As a result of taking his seat and voting, an action was brought against him in the Court of Exchequer on the grounds of having presumed "to sit or vote without having taken the oath in the manner prescribed." The penalty for each breach was set at £500. The decision was clear in law and it was found that Salomons was guilty. He immediately appealed to the Court of Exchequer Chamber and the appeal was heard in 1853 with Sir John Campbell, Chief Justice of the Court of Queen's Bench presiding. Commenting on the decision reached on appeal, Campbell told the House of Lords,


"We heard it elaborately argued, and I, for one, formed my own opinion. I was clearly of opinion that the judgment of the Court of Exchequer was right. In both Houses of Parliament I have voted for the admission of Jews to Parliament. I thought that the law by which they were excluded was unjust, and I have therefore, on all occasions when the question has been introduced, voted for their being admitted constitutionally and lawfully. But sitting as a Judge, in which capacity I had not to make but to declare the law, it appeared to me that the arguments of the three Barons who decided against Mr. Salomons were unanswerable, and that it really was the intention of the Act of Parliament, when read and fairly construed, that no person should be allowed to take that oath except in the manner which is prescribed by the Act of Parliament."

Certainly Salomons had brought the issue of admission to the Parliament for non-Christians to the forefront of political debate, but the price exacted against him was indeed severe. He was fined £1,500 for having voted on three occasions and as a result of his conviction stood to suffer civil penalties including becoming "liable to deprivation of the right to be a party to any civil suit, to be a guardian of a child, or an executor, and to the loss of several other rights of citizenship." Government action, however, removed all of these liabilities with the exception of the fine.

Over the following years numerous attempts were made by the House of Commons to remove the passages in the oath which kept Jews from membership in the British Parliament. All of these efforts were continuously obstructed by the House of Lords until, in 1858, a compromise was achieved which allowed each house to determine the nature of the oath required for admission. Thus it was, that seven years after Salomons first took his seat and voted in the Parliament, Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in the House and only a year later, at the general election that Salomons was returned from Greenwich, the constituency which he continued to represent until his death in 1873. In the interim, Salomons was knighted in 1855 after being elected the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London (see picture to the right) and in 1869 received a baronetcy. And while Rothschild, once admitted to the Parliament, never spoke in that body, Salomons remained an active member giving more than 250 speeches in his Pariamentary career.

To read Lord Campbell's summary of the case, click here.

Opium Dens and Opium Usage in Victorian England

An East End Opium Den, 1870

For many, images of the darker side of Victorian London are shaped by the descriptions of writers like Henry Mayhew in the middle decades of the century, or by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, and James Greenwood a few decades later. In addition to their often sensational images there are the descriptions we derive from the fiction of the times. Thus, our image of Victorian London's drug culture, if indeed such a culture existed, is composed in part of sensational journalism and in part of sensational fiction.

Among the writers of fiction who concerned themselves with the use of opium and the opium dens that were supposed to be a part of the darker side of the great Metropolis, particularly in the years of Victoria's reign, were Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The question we are faced with is whether the descriptions are an accurate portrayal or overdrawn and sensationalized accounts.

One of the best known scenes involving the taking of recreational drugs is found in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tale, The Sign of the Four.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

It was this performance that Dr Watson had been witnessing "three times a day for many months;" a performance he found both disturbing and dangerous.

There are two primary images one is left with when considering the use of opium or its derivatives, the most common of which, in the nineteenth century was laudanum, a tincture of opium widely used as a painkiller. On the one hand, we have the image of its use amongst artists and writers, including both Coleridge and DeQuincy in the early years of the century. Later, Wilkie Collins was a regular "drinker" of laudanum for the pain of gout and other maladies. Among other Victorians using laudanum were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens. Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, died as a result of an overdose of laudanum and Rossetti himself was to follow her to the grave, in all probability as a result of his own overuse of laudanum and opium.

The second image is that of something resembling a widespread network of opium dens throughout the United Kingdom, spreading like tentacles from its centre in London. Such an image is a gross exaggeration. While there were opium dens in London and in all probability in most of the port cities of the United Kingdom, they were few and far between. In most cases they catered to the habits of seamen addicted to the drug and there is no evidence of any "network" of opium dens.

The image painted in the newspapers is not a pleasant one. Nor is that protrayed by novelists. The "pipe dream" with which The Mystery of Edwin Drood opens is singularly upsetting to the reader as is the whole scene in the opium den. The Picture of Dorian Gray, too, is laced with references to opium and interludes in low dens where opium smokers may go to find oblivion. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like Charles Dickens, has placed the drug scene in The Man with the Twisted Lip in a dockland setting and has peopled the opium den with seamen, mostly Chinese and Lascars or East Indian sailors. The den is in Upper Swandam Lane,

a vile alley lurking behind the high wharves which line the north side of the river to the east of London Bridge. Between a slop-shop and a gin-shop, approached by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black gap like the mouth of a cave, I found the den of which I was in search. ... I passed down the steps, worn hollow in the centre by the ceaseless tred of drunken feet; and by the light of a flickering oil-lamp above the door I found the latch and made my way into a long low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the forecastle of an emigrant ship.

Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the newcomer. Out of the black shadows there glimmered little red circles of light, now bright, now faint, as the burning poison waxed or waned in the bowls of the metal pipes. The most lay silent, but some muttered to themselves, and others talked together in a strange, low, monotonous voice, their conversation coming in gushes, and then suddenly tailing off into silence, each mumbling out his own thoughts and paying little heed to the words of his neighbour. ... As I entered, a sallow Malay attendant had hurried up with a pipe for me and a supply of the drug, beckoning me to an empty berth.

Such descriptions are no more sensational than those that appeared in the newspapers and journals of the day. An article in the French journal Figaro, reprinted in the Pall Mal Gazette, in 1868, puports to describe an opium den, in Whitechapel. It is a "wretched hole,"

... so low that we are unable to stand upright. Lying pell-mell on a mattress placed on the ground are Chinamen, Lascars, and a few English blackguards who have imbibed a taste for opium.

While opium dens may have been a staple of a certain type of Victorian fiction, the more common reality was that amongst Victorians the most frequent use of opiates was in the form of pharmaceuticals. There is no question that during most of the Queen's reign opium and its derivatives was readily available over the counter from local chemists, usually in the form of laudanum. Numerous household remedies contained opium in one of its forms including many used with children. Among the best known of these was Godfrey's Cordial which was commonly adminstered to children and infants as a sleeping draught. Karl Marx, in Das Capital, commented on this when he wrote of "disguised infanticide and stupefaction of children with opiates," and he went on to claim that

In the agricultural as well as the factory districts of England the consumption of opium among adult workers, both male and female, is extending daily.

Anthony Wohl, in Endangered Lives: public Health in Vicorian Britain, has pointed to the Fens where "poppy tea" was widely drunk and used for general medicinal purposes with a consequent wasting in children and possibly malnutrition leading to death.

Another popular medication was Dover's Powder which, like many others, was used in the treatment of a wide variety of complaints including gout, headache, syphilis and malaria. It is likely that the sense of well-being brought on as a result of the opiate was frequently mistaken by patient and doctor alike as a cure. Despite the popularity of such medications, and the ease with which they could be purchased, not everyone favoured their use. Godfrey's Cordial, for example, was referred to as "pernicious quackery" in The Visitor, or Monthly Instructor, for 1838. And there were many physicians who opposed the use of opiates. As early as 1840, Dr Anthony Todd Thomson, at a meeting of the Westminster Medical Society, told his colleagues that he

had no doubt that consuming opium, either in the crude or liquid state, or inhaling it from a pipe, tended materially to shorten life.

Not that such warnings were heeded. Opium and tinctures of the drug were readily available and inexpensive and, as one writer to The Daily News of 23 June 1879, commented, he was astonished at the widespread use of opium to keep children from getting cross. He went on to point to the "infinite detriment" to children of the extensive use of "opium, soothing syrups, and other baneful cordials ... by large masses of the mothers among our labouring population."

So, what can we make of this? I think there are three conclusions that might be drawn. First, the smoking of opium was seen as a vice practiced by orientals. The constant reiteration of this in both works of fiction and popular journalism suggests a clear level of xenophobic content. Second the misuse of laudanum appears to have been largely associated, in the public mind, with its use amongst the lower and labouring classes. Finally, it tends to reinforce the view implicit in so many elements of Victorian life that those in the better classes might engage in the same practices without them being considered vices unless and until they were carried to extreme excess.

To read Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood, click here.