“By a most unhappy quackery and through that most pernicious form of ignorance, medical half-knowledge, I was seduced into the use of narcotics.”
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
During the early nineteenth century, opium’s potential for abuse and addiction was either not widely known or, more likely, ignored. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) wrote in 1808 that druggists in the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire sold pounds of opium daily to the laboring classes. Surely, he argued, “this demands legislative interference.” Opium use could only hinder England’s industrialization by promoting indolence among its workers. Like that of the best moral crusaders, Coleridge’s pulpit pounding was underscored by hypocrisy. He was hopelessly addicted to opium.
Coleridge was the youngest of ten children. His older brothers endlessly tormented him, and he sought solace in the comforting arms of his only friends: books. After the death of his father in 1781, Coleridge was dispatched to a London boarding school for the remainder of his childhood. He proved to be a brilliant student and was awarded multiple scholarships to Jesus College, Cambridge, upon graduation. In 1791, he entered college for the fall semester. It was an enormous opportunity for the lower-class nineteen-year-old, and it was one that he would initially squander: he steadily lost his head in a blur of alcohol and gambling troubles and dropped out after two years at Cambridge.
Then he simply disappeared.
It took his family four months to find him. Coleridge had enlisted in the military under the alias “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.” Although he was an absurdly terrible soldier—the bumbling “Silas” couldn’t even ride a horse—he made friends with his fellow soldiers by ghostwriting love letters for their girlfriends and wives. It was his first taste of literary celebrity, but it bought him only a limited amount of exemption from the demands of military life. Sooner or later, he would have to learn to ride a horse. Thankfully, his brothers rounded up enough money to relieve him from his military obligation, and the military discharged him on grounds of insanity.
Back in school, Coleridge experienced a revelation after reading Descriptive Sketches, a book of poetry by William Wordsworth. Suddenly, the directionless Coleridge had a goal that didn’t require him to learn horseback riding: he would become a poet! This didn’t solve his need to make a living, a need intensified by his marriage in 1795. Furthermore, he dropped out of school for a second time. To make ends meet, he worked as a journalist and sold a volume of poetry to a bookseller—his first real publication. The time was right: whereas authors had once depended upon the support of wealthy patrons, government assistance, and religious institutions, changing copyright laws in Great Britain in the eighteenth century now allowed authors and printers to assert ownership over their work and earn income from it.
In 1797, after exchanging letters with Wordsworth, Coleridge walked forty miles to his idol’s home. When he neared the poet’s property in Dorset, Coleridge hurdled over a gate and broke into a sprint in the direction of the poet. Instead of running for his life, Wordsworth opened his arms to embrace Coleridge. They became instant friends. Within a few years, Coleridge, along with his wife and son, moved close to Wordsworth so that the two poets could be in daily contact.
In 1798, two wealthy literary patrons familiar with Coleridge’s work offered him a sum of 150 pounds per year to write—for the rest of his life. This was the kind of windfall lower- and middle-class writers dreamed of. It was more than enough to support his family on.
Unfortunately, the patronage also gave Coleridge plenty of time to lounge around the house, high on opium, without any worry of producing publishable material.
Opium, likely the first drug ever used by the human race, was a common painkiller in the nineteenth century. Not only was it used to relieve all manner of adult aches and pains (physical and mental), it also found its way into children’s medicines, such as Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. Opium was freely available over the counter in the form of pills and as laudanum, a liquid solution of opium and alcohol that was administered with an eyedropper.
Coleridge originally turned to laudanum for relief from indigestion. He did not understand what he had gotten himself into at first, “and saw not the truth, till my body had contracted a habit.” It’s unknown when he first used laudanum, but he was using it regularly soon after he moved to Dorset.
Not everyone believed Coleridge’s sob story. “Every person who has witnessed his habits, knows that, for infinitely the greater part, inclination and indulgence are its motives,” remarked the poet Robert Southey, a close friend and his wife’s brother-in-law.
Southey may have been right: Coleridge and his friends, including Wordsworth and the poet Charles Lamb, had long been fascinated with the effects intoxication could have on their creative endeavors. They looked up to the Scottish poet Robert Burns, an acute alcoholic who died at age thirty-seven of rheumatoid endocarditis. It was widely believed, even by Burns’s own mother, that the poet’s drunkenness was the match that lit his muse. Coleridge contributed a poem to a volume sold to raise money for Burns’s widow and six children. The tragic end to Burns’s career only made his whiskey-and-sex-filled poetry all the more alluring for Coleridge and other European poets, who made pilgrimages to Burns’s grave to pay their respects.
Coleridge’s own medicated state resulted in his famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” in 1797. One afternoon, after dozing off for three hours at his desk, he woke up with the poem fully formed in his head. He began to write down his vision but was interrupted by a knocking at the door. After he spent about an hour entertaining his visitor, he returned to the poem but found that, “with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” Frustrated, he shelved the fragment.
“Kubla Khan” might have been lost forever had Coleridge not recited the partial poem to Lord Byron in 1816. Leigh Hunt, another poet who happened to be in another room with them, recalled that Byron was “highly struck with his poem, and saying how wonderfully he talked.” Byron convinced his publisher, John Murray, to print “Kubla Khan” with an introduction explaining the circumstances surrounding the narcotic vision; the poem is now among the most widely read and anthologized pieces of romantic literature.
Despite the inspiration Coleridge derived from his drug use, his predilection for walking while stoned nearly cost him his life on several occasions. He once walked for eight straight days before sobering up—and found himself some 250 miles away from his house. During another one of his disappearances, police found a man’s lifeless body in a park with Coleridge’s name printed inside his collar. Before long, Coleridge turned up alive—and missing his clothing, which had been stolen from a launderer by the vagrant who died in them.
Coleridge’s blatant disregard for his own well-being was too much for his friends and family. He separated from his wife in 1808, and Wordsworth wrote him off as a lost cause in 1810. Coleridge’s literary career continued unabated, however, and he wrote poetry, criticism, and lectures all under the influence.
After a near-fatal overdose in 1813, Coleridge retired to a home in Bristol where he hoped to wean himself off laudanum. “I had been crucified, dead, and buried, descended into Hell, and am now, I humbly trust, rising again, though slowly and gradually,” he wrote to a friend in May 1814.
His rehab failed. In 1816, he moved into the home of a physician in Highgate, a London suburb. Despite the doctor’s attempts to regulate his patient’s laudanum dosage, Coleridge secretly obtained additional supplies from a local druggist. “I have in this one dirty business of laudanum a hundred times deceived, tricked, nay, actually and consciously LIED,” Coleridge wrote. At this point it was clear to him that he would never let go of opium, or it of him. They were wed for life.
In 1834 Coleridge died of heart disease, though his spirit had long since been broken. “When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief,” Charles Lamb said. “It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world, that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me.”