London’s Immortal Druggists: Pharmaceutical Science and Business in Romanticism

Abstract

In the 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey famously recounts his first purchase of opium from an “immortal druggist” located in London’s Oxford Street, near what he calls, borrowing a phrase from Wordsworth’s “Power of Music,” “the stately Pantheon” (43; italics in text). Even more famously, De Quincey recollects that on his next visit to London the druggist had “vanished,” “evanesced,” or “evaporated,” confirming De Quincey in his fanciful notion that the chemist had been no “sublunary druggist” but rather an ethereal dispenser of “celestial pleasures” (43). While De Quincey’s particular druggist may have disappeared from Oxford Street, the Romantic-period urban landscape was populated with pharmaceutical businesses that proved more substantial and lasting. These small firms often included onsite laboratories and manufacturing facilities, in addition to their retail shops, and a number of them became famous throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, evolving into such household names as Allen & Hanburys, John Bell & Croyden, and Corbyn, Stacey & Co. With these commercial houses, the period marked the historical beginnings of a modern drug industry, one that combined wholesale and retail sales with pharmaceutical research and marketing.