Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Adam Colman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Adam Colman Mike Jay (bio) Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Adam Colman; pp. vii + 209. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, €72.79, $84.99, £59.99. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term drugs referred to any medicine one might buy in a pharmacy, and the term addiction to the habitual enjoyment of any pleasure, often edifying ones such as reading or long walks. By the century's end, both terms had taken on their modern senses, more specialized and more censorious. This transition usually is described in medical terms, as involving the arrival of newly potent substances such as morphine and cocaine and methods of administration such as the hypodermic needle; the pathology of so-called morbid craving developed by clinicians from the 1870s onward; and the procession of statutory controls, beginning with the 1868 Pharmacy Act, that created a medico-legal category of the drug addict. Adam Colman proposes an alternative view: the development across the same period of an "addiction aesthetic" through which similar preoccupations were explored from a literary perspective. Colman defines the "addiction aesthetic" as a "repetitive, experimental" process that constantly "drives towards possible understanding" while never satisfying the desire that underpins it (17). It is a mode of scientific investigation, but equally of literary experiment, a hybrid form associated with the Brunonian theories of the maverick Edinburgh doctor John Brown (1736–88), who held that the body's energies can be stimulated or exhausted by the intellect and the imagination just as they can be by drugs. Brunonian theory was influential for many of the writers Colman examines, and Brown's ideas were recapitulated in cultural debates about the "literary addiction" of the Romantic era and the enervating thrills of late- Victorian sensationalism (168). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an avid reader of Brown, is identified in this scheme as a pivotal figure in the transition from the digressive, picaresque eighteenth-century mode of literary exploration to more focused, iterative approaches that advertised the kinship between literature and science. Percy Shelley's interest in the formative power of habits, both medical and intellectual, is reflected in the patternings and recurrences that structure The Cenci (1819). Thomas De Quincey literalized these metaphors by writing directly about his drug habit and connecting it explicitly to his aesthetic patterning, framing his discovery of the self through opium as an obsessive pursuit that he compared to the labyrinths and cul-de-sacs of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's prison drawings. De Quincey was explicit, too, in presenting his work to the reader as a form of scientific investigation in which the experimental method was expanded to include memories, dreams, and visions. By mid-century, addictive drugs commonly were deployed as subject matter for literary meditations on consumption, temptation, and desire. Colman reads Alfred Tennyson's The Lotos-Eaters (1832) as a cautionary fable of opium addiction, whereby habituation to the drug is driven home with linguistic repetitions, though it could be interpreted equally as a nostalgic plea for rustic simplicity and refusal of the obsessive pursuits of the addiction aesthetic. Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862) is less ambiguous in using the goblins' wares as a parable of uncontrolled consumption, reinforced by incantatory repetitions, as when Laura "sucked and sucked and sucked the more" in a doomed effort to quench her desire (127). Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), which was informed by his reading of Robert Macnish's study The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1827), develops the addiction aesthetic [End Page 343] through the form of the detective's quest, an iterative series of attempts to unlock the narrative's mystery. Many of the novel's characters and themes resonate with Macnish's theories, most obviously the endless lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a repetitive pursuit that continues until it has exhausted all available resources. The sensation novel, when it emerged in the second half of the century, often used drug addiction and the pursuit of knowledge as metaphors for one another. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson sets Dr. Jekyll and his potion...