4. 4
Victorian High
Detection, Drugs, and Empire
Marty Roth
The war with China has begun, and already several hundred Chinese have been murdered by our cruisers, because the government of China will not allow us to poison its subjects; in which poisoning, it appears, we have obtained a vested right. An expedition is Wtting out at Plymouth to "destroy Canton if necessary"; and Pekin also, it appears, if the Emperor "does not do us justice." Was there ever such an atrocious proceeding? It is enough to raise up all Asia to "do justice" on the English, for their centuries of crime, misrule and oppression in the East.
— J. J. DARLING,Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1840
Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.
— J. B. PRIESTLEY,Observer, May 1949
The early history of detective Wction is saturated with narcotic drugs. Edgar Allan Poe was an opium and Wilkie Collins a laudanum addict, and opium circulates through The Moonstone. Charles Dickens's Mystery of Edwin Drood begins in an East End opium den, and Arthur Conan Doyle's "Man with the Twisted Lip" ends in one. As for other drugs that were soon to become illicit, Count Zaleski, M. P. Shiel's dandified detective, smokes hashish cigarettes: the narrator of "The House of Orven" reports that "the air was heavy with the scented odor of … the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa … in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself."[1] And in The Sign of Four Sherlock Holmes injects himself with morphine or cocaine three times a day.[2] In an American silent Wlm of 1916 entitled The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, even that paragon of athletic health, Douglas Fairbanks, played the "world's greatest scientific detective," a character named "Coke Ennyday" who sticks a needle into some part of his body every thirty seconds.
Conan Doyle's "The Man with the Twisted Lip" is a disjointed tale that seeks to implicate almost all of its characters in addiction. It begins as a different kind of case, a story about a doctor and his patient: a frantic wife pleads with Dr. Watson to Wnd her husband, an opium addict, and Watson Wnds him where he may well belong, in an opium den in the "furthest east
Detectives might have taken drugs to calm or to stimulate their highly wrought and Wnely tuned nervous systems in what was early recognized as an anxious profession. Holmes "only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting."[4] And a female detective of 1917 is confronted by her Watson: "So you have fallen back on the cola stimulant again, Miss Mack?’ She nodded glumly, and perversely slipped into her mouth another of the dark brown berries, on which I have known her to keep up for forty-eight hours without sleep and almost without food."[5] By contrast, they might have done drugs as poets who dreamed the solutions to their mysteries, like Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin. Prince Zaleski smokes hashish because he is a turn-of-the-century aesthete and decadent—He lay back on his couch, volumed in a Turkish beneesh, and listened to me … with woven Wngers, and the pale inverted eyes of old anchorites and astrologers"and the aesthete, we have often been told, is one of the more likely templates for the detective.[6] So the Sherlock Holmes who takes cocaine also reads "old black-letter" volumes, plays Mendelssohn lieder on the violin, quotes Goethe and Jean Paul and speaks "on miracle plays, medieval pottery," and "the Buddhism of Ceylon."[7]
Just as early detective Wction is deeply, perhaps constitutively, steeped in drugs, it is also associated with empire, and this connection is constitutive. In this Wction, crime is the dark side of conquest and imperial rule returning to pollute the metropolitan homeland. At the very beginning of the genre stands the story of a gigantic ourang-outang taken to Paris from the Indian Archipelago that commits a hideous crime while attempting to imitate its white master shaving. The beast/criminal of Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" penetrates the security of a home and brutally kills a mother and daughter.
The Moonstone is a novel that is both Wlled with opium and Wxated on its connection with treasure from India:
Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond.… Who ever heard the like of it—in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution?[8]
Collins's novel begins by invoking both the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and the presentation to Victoria of the legendary Koh-i-Noor diamond that had been won as booty in the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1848–49. "Imagine then," writes a critic, Ashish Roy, "after this inaugural of formal imperial authority,
Invasion from the colonies took a variety of forms in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British writing, like "the rage for ‘Chinoiserie’ in fashionable decor, Chinese gardens on the best estates," or "Byron and Southey's Oriental Tales on the bookshelves of those in the know."[10] A sinister form of invasion was the persistent mythology of colonial acquisition as a disease or drug infecting the metropolis. Ezra Jennings, the English opium-eater of The Moonstone, is dying of a disease that is implicitly attributed to "the mixture of some foreign race in his English blood."[11] In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial invasion literally took the form of Oriental drugs that disrupted metropolitan life by overstimulating or debilitating it, by causing its citizens either to run amok or to become immobilized. Detective Wctions are primary evidence for such anxiety of empire: both Edwin Drood and "The Man with the Twisted Lip" are set in the East End of London, a place that, according to Barry Milligan, was configured "as a miniature Orient within the capital of the empire."[12] In his Tales of Chinatown, Sax Rohmer writes:
Yet here [Limehouse] lies a secret quarter, as secret and as strange, in its smaller way, as its parent in China which is called the Purple Forbidden City …. there was nothing which could have told the visitor that he had crossed the border line dividing West from East and was now in an Oriental town.[13]
English opium-smokers were even Orientalized by narcotic use; for Dickens's John Jasper, the opium den is charged with "contagion" and an "unclean spirit of imitation."[14] Watson's patient has a "yellow pasty face, drooping lids and pin-point pupils," and Holmes recreates the Orient at the St. Clair house as he
wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed, and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old brier pipe between his lips, his eyes Wxed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him.[15]
Drugs in detective Wction are obvious symptoms of this invasion from the colonies, and yet the connection between the drugs and imperial adventure is haphazard.[16] Drug-taking is a Western, not an Eastern phenomenon: the opium in The Moonstone is Wrmly located within the context of Western medicine, and in the Holmes tale Isa Whitney began to smoke opium at college in imitation of Thomas De Quincey. Other stories, however, tell us that
Why India? Partly because the tale operates through a feeble pun: it is set "Upon a warm, misty day, towards the close of November … during the strange interregnum of the seasons which in America is termed the Indian Summer" (942). For the rest, the great virtue of Poe's borrowing from Thomas Babington Macaulay's essay on Warren Hastings is that it takes us back to a moment in Anglo-Asian relations that grounds the connection between the drug and the colony. The function of drugs in Poe's tale, and in Dickens's Edwin Drood, is to take us back to the Orient: Drood opens to an opium vision of a clash of cymbals, as the "Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors" (1). Even when no specific topography is alluded to, the narcotic dream visions of De Quincey, Théophile Gautier, and others suggest Oriental associations. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, wrote to the Reverend George Coleridge that "Laudanum gave me repose, not sleep; but you, I believe, know how divine that repose is, what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountain and flowers and trees in the very heart of a waste of sands."[18] Thomas Burke, the author of East End opium tales, claimed that "As the drug is of Oriental earth, so it works upon brain and eye in Oriental imagery."[19]
Detective Wction, then, begins high on drugs and fully informed by imperial
After "the great debriefing that has accompanied the dismantling of the British empire," Marek Kohn writes, the opium wars are left as "the only episode in imperial history that is generally seen as unambiguously wicked."[20] At the time, William Gladstone said of them that "a war more unjust in its origins, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and have not read of."[21] In a letter to the American Congress in 1840, Caleb Cushing, the U.S. commissioner to China, described it as a war motivated by "base cupidity," which aimed "to coerce the Chinese by force of arms to submit to be poisoned."[22] The war was fought to protect the British trade in opium, which was grown in India and sold in China, because there was no other way for England to balance its trade payments except by creating a population of addicts and then catering to their desire. "The occasion of this outbreak," Karl Marx wrote in 1853, "has unquestionably been afforded by the English cannon forcing upon China that soporific drug called opium."[23]
England imported enormous amounts of tea from China, for by the nineteenth century tea had become England's drug of choice, relieving the British of the necessity of drinking ale in the morning. "What a curious thing it was," Leigh Hunt wrote, "that all of a sudden the remotest nation of the East, otherwise unknown, and foreign to all our habits, should convey to us a domestic custom which changed the face of our morning refreshments."[24] By the early 1800s, the new drink had become so popular that annual consumption amounted to 12,000,000 pounds.[25] Samuel Johnson confessed that he was a "hardened and shameless Tea-drinker … whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the Midnight, and with Tea welcomes the morning."[26]
The Chinese, however, had small regard for Western materials or craftsmanship; there was little they wanted to buy in return, as the Emperor Qianlong stated in a letter to King George III:
The virtue and prestige of the Celestial Dynasty having spread far and wide, the kings of the myriad nations come by land and sea with all sorts of precious things. Consequently there is nothing we lack, as your principal envoy and others have themselves observed. We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country's manufactures.[27]
The English dependence on Chinese products was burlesqued in a letter that Commissioner Lin Tse-Hsu wrote to Queen Victoria during the hostilities: he threatened that "by cutting off the export of tea and rhubarb [the Emperor] … could deprive his enemies of their principal source of pleasure and their only relief from constipation."[28] Rhubarb and opium are rhyming commodities, like opium and tea, but, unlike rhubarb, opium slows intestinal action and is one of the principal antidiarrheals in the Western pharmacopia.
The solution was simple, John Keay writes in his history of the East India Company: "Redirect the Indian surplus to Wnance the China deficit."[29] Medical historians Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards put it another way: England had perfected the "technique of growing opium in India and disowning it in China."[30] The opium trade with China was a source of great individual fortunes and generated profits enough to pay a substantial part of the cost of administering England's Indian empire. As Marx wrote in a New York Tribune editorial in 1858, "The Indian Wnances of the British Government have, in fact, been made to depend not only on the opium trade with China, but on the contraband character of that trade."[31] Figures differ as to the profitability of this trade once called "the largest commerce of the time in any single commodity," but in 1838 the value of opium sold in China was estimated as the government of India's third largest source of revenue.[32]
In its conquest of India between 1729 and 1800, Britain acquired vast poppy Welds in Bengal. In 1773, Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, took over a limited Indian opium trade and expanded it greatly: Hastings actually initiated the Anglo-Chinese opium trade by switching a consignment to Canton when war with the Dutch temporarily closed the market for opium in their East Indian colonies. By the time the company was investigated by the Crown and its monopoly ended in 1833, this operation had become too profitable to be shut down. Thereafter, the opium traffic was run as a British government enterprise, and this included raising and harvesting the crop, preparing the opium, licensing the smuggling operations, and laying out necessary bribes in China.[33]
When the Chinese government tried to enforce its prohibition against opium smuggling, Britain treated this as a provocation and declared war against a militarily enfeebled power. In addition to the human cost of the addiction, the military cost to the Chinese was extremely high: in the Battle of Chapu, for example, the casualties were 1,200 to 1,500 Chinese and 9 British.[34]
The wars were fought over opium, but that fact was rarely mentioned in the attendant discourse of war and diplomacy; the Treaty of Nanking that ended the Wrst Opium War does not even mention the drug.[35] According to Nathan Allen,
the real cause of all these troubles—the opium trade—was as much as possible kept out of view.… Men who had so great interests at stake, whose characters also were implicated, would of course employ the best talents and all possible means that money could command—writers, attorneys, and orators, to make the "worse appear the better cause."[36]
Officially, the war was fought against the kowtow, fought, as Marx phrased it, for "an alleged infringement of the fanciful code of diplomatic etiquette." The demand that free-born Englishmen prostrate themselves to the Emperor of China as a condition of doing trade with him was declared insupportable, a dire violation of the national character. De Quincey declared that if Lord Amherst had made kowtow, "the next thing would have been a requisition from the English Factory of beautiful English women, according to a Wxed description, as annual presents to the Emperor."[37]
Lord Amherst refused to kowtow, feeling sure that the Chinese saw "that superiority which Englishmen, wherever they go, cannot conceal."[38] The Opium Wars were supposedly fought to repudiate the Chinese assumption of cultural superiority. The kowtow alibi may have been put in place by the British to obscure the immorality of the opium trade, but it was more a sign of similarity than otherness between the two cultures: it betokened a recognition that China had preempted the Manichean epistemology of the West just as the West was completing its own racist global project. By referring to all Westerners indiscriminately as "barbarians," the Chinese mocked Britain's own linguistic practices: "In various [Chinese] documents the Western ‘barbarians’ are described as cunning and malicious, impatient and without understanding of values, inconstant, insatiable, avaricious, thinking only of profit and … inscrutable."[39]
The images of immigrant Chinese and opium dens in Victorian and Edwardian Wction should have been at least double-edged, since a vocal temperance opposition in England made it clear at the time that the English were contaminating the Chinese, not the other way around. Nevertheless, in a new genre of popular Wction, China invaded England through the East End opium den and proceeded to turn its citizens into addicts. The imperial adventure was inverted, and the Anglo-Chinese opium wars were written in reverse in a corner of London. "This Chinese control of Britain would be anxiety-inducing enough," Barry Milligan writes, "even if it were limited to the marginalized population of the East End":
But in fact the opium master's influence extends horizontally beyond the East End to more central districts of London and vertically all the way to the uppermost echelons of the empire. Besides attracting "lords and dukes and even princes and kings," one opium master claims to have been visited by no less than the Prince of Wales himself, who allegedly was moved to invite the master and his wife to come directly to the palace to "smokee pipe wi’ me."[40]
That opium went to China, however, was hardly unknown; it had been written into one of England's master-texts: the second part of Robinson Crusoe, where Robinson takes a shipment of opium from the Straits of Malacca to China because it bore "a great Price among the Chinese."[41] By the time of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, however, the direction of the traffic had been reversed in the service of ideology, as Bella imagined her Pa "going to China in that handsome three-masted ship, to bring home opium."[42]
Tea and opium were an imperial binary, a trade-off. Both are drugs but one was "civilized" and "mild," the other barbaric and strong. Both were identified with their consumers rather than their producers, so that opium that was British-produced and illicitly sold to China soon became the demonic Chinese product par excellence, and tea, which was Chinese and sold to the English, very soon came to constitute Britishness itself.
Unlike the majority of his countrymen, John Quincy Adams felt that the fuss about opium was a distraction in a civilizing mission against China that the West was bound to carry out one day or other. He was aware of another resonance between opium and tea and between the two Indian empires, the one in the east and the one in the west. In China, chests of opium were dumped into Canton harbor and become the occasion of the Wrst Opium War. In the American colonies, chests of tea were dumped into Boston harbor and become the signal of the American War of Independence.
In the subsequent history of detective Wction, one of the Wrst elements to undergo censorship was the connection between crime and empire. When detective Wction became a genre system in the 1920s, a relatively tight province of writing under official control, rules for writing produced by authors like S. S. Van Dine and authors’ organizations like the Detective Club dictated that this link could never again be mentioned: never again might the criminal be a gigantic ourang-outang, nor might three Indians in London dog the steps of the Imperialist plunderers. Well before this "golden age" of detective Wction, however, in the later Holmes tales, Conan Doyle had ruled politics out of order. In "The Bruce-Partington Plans," Holmes asks Watson if there is anything of interest in the papers, but Watson informs us that "by anything of interest, Holmes meant anything of criminal interest. There was the news of a revolution, of a possible war, and of an impending change of Government; but these did not come within the horizon of my companion."[43] But even The Moonstone only teased the reader with an imperial solution. According to one recent critic, "to make the point absolutely clear that any political motives in this novel are to be understood as a disguise for something else, the culprit's corpse is discovered in the disguise of a dark-skinned East Indian sailor, only to be unmasked by the police for the [white, Western] philanderer he is."[44]
Drugs were suppressed in the text of detective Wction as they had been in the text of empire. It is Wtting that opium should be present in The
In The Moonstone, Franklin Blake is not only acquitted of the theft of the diamond but also absolved of smoking opium. In "Twisted Lip" the crime that starts out coincidental with opium dens in London is soon detached from them. The two white men in compromising positions, both vaguely accused of opium addiction, are fully exonerated by the story's end. Both are in the opium den on other business: one is a private detective impersonating a drug addict in order to pursue an investigation; the other is a professional beggar who Wnds the den a convenient place to set up shop, while the only "true" opium addict is hustled off the scene before the story fairly begins. This is a tremendous narrative shift in a tale that is otherwise loaded with narcotics and alcohol.
In one set of rules for detective Wction by Ronald Knox, entitled "A Detective Story Decalogue," the Wfth commandment reads "No Chinaman must Wgure in the story." Monsignor Knox (who also wrote detective stories) then told us that he did not know why this should be: "I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of ‘the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo,’ you had best put it down at once; it is bad."[47] In the reformulated genre, guilt became so subtle and unmarked as to be virtually indistinguishable from innocence. The purpose of the ongoing detective story would be to mystify guilt, to make it exquisitely Wne and intricate, hard to detect, painstakingly rarified. But the guilt of smuggling opium and then covering that crime with a declaration of war is not at all hard to detect, except in the actual history of Anglo-Chinese relations. The literary crimes of the detective novel would move as far as possible from crimes of empire and crimes of class.