Author: Barbara Hodgson
Publisher: Souvenir Press
Isbn: 0-285-63627-8

This is a little jewel of a book, with a sumptuous embossed cover and a wealth of high quality colour reproductions of rare engravings and mottled photographs of old Shanghai, smoking paraphernalia, languid opium smokers, obscure film stills and lurid crime novel covers. Short chapters cover the history of opium culture and preparation, European profiteering, 19th century patent medicines, racist stereotypes, restrictive legislation, and the gradual supplanting of opium by the more immediate (though less romantic) highs of morphine and heroin.

Hodgson is particularly good on the less obvious writers influenced by, or writing about, opium. So, besides Coleridge and de Quincy, de Nerval and Gautier, Baudelaire and Cocteau we get Ernest Dowson, Claude Farrère, Emily Hahn, Robert Desnos, Sax Rohmer and many others.

Hodgson’s tone is rather censorious after the fashion of Victorian propaganda, and can usefully be counterbalanced by reading James S Lee’s enthusiastic odyssey through oriental opium dens at the turn of the 19th century (Underworld of the East, reprinted in 2000 by Green Magic, BCM Inspire, London WC1N 3XX, with an introduction by Mike Jay).