Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

It had been my intention originally to proceed to Westmoreland, both from the love I bore to that country and on other personal accounts.  Accident, however, gave a different direction to my wanderings, and I bent my steps towards North Wales.

After wandering about for some time in Denbighshire, Merionethshire, and Carnarvonshire, I took lodgings in a small neat house in B–.  Here I might have stayed with great comfort for many weeks, for provisions were cheap at B–, from the scarcity of other markets for the surplus produce of a wide agricultural district.  An accident, however, in which perhaps no offence was designed, drove me out to wander again.  I know not whether my reader may have remarked, but I have often remarked, that the proudest class of people in England (or at any rate the class whose pride is most apparent) are the families of bishops.  Noblemen and their children carry about with them, in their very titles, a sufficient notification of their rank.  Nay, their very names (and this applies also to the children of many untitled houses) are often, to the English ear, adequate exponents of high birth or descent.  Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, Paulet, Cavendish, and scores of others, tell their own tale.  Such persons, therefore, find everywhere a due sense of their claims already established, except among those who are ignorant of the world by virtue of their own obscurity: “Not to know them, argues one’s self unknown.”  Their manners take a suitable tone and colouring, and for once they find it necessary to impress a sense of their consequence upon others, they meet with a thousand occasions for moderating and tempering this sense by acts of courteous condescension.  With the families of bishops it is otherwise: with them, it is all uphill work to make known their pretensions; for the proportion of the episcopal bench taken from noble families is not at any time very large, and the succession to these dignities is so rapid that the public ear seldom has time to become familiar with them, unless where they are connected with some literary reputation.  Hence it is that the children of bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man from all contact with the οι πολλοι.  Doubtless, a powerful understanding, or unusual goodness of nature, will preserve a man from such weakness, but in general the truth of my representation will be acknowledged; pride, if not of deeper root in such families, appears at least more upon the surface of their manners.  This spirit of manners naturally communicates itself to their domestics and other dependants.  Now, my landlady had been a lady’s maid or a nurse in the family of the Bishop of –, and had but lately married away and “settled” (as such people express it) for life.  In a little town like B–, merely to have lived in the bishop’s family conferred some distinction; and my good landlady had rather more than her share of the pride I have noticed on that score.  What “my lord” said and what “my lord” did, how useful he was in Parliament and how indispensable at Oxford, formed the daily burden of her talk.  All this I bore very well, for I was too good-natured to laugh in anybody’s face, and I could make an ample allowance for the garrulity of an old servant.  Of necessity, however, I must have appeared in her eyes very inadequately impressed with the bishop’s importance, and, perhaps to punish me for my indifference, or possibly by accident, she one day repeated to me a conversation in which I was indirectly a party concerned.  She had been to the palace to pay her respects to the family, and, dinner being over, was summoned into the dining-room.  In giving an account of her household economy she happened to mention that she had let her apartments.  Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed) had taken occasion to caution her as to her selection of inmates, “for,” said he, “you must recollect, Betty, that this place is in the high road to the Head; so that multitudes of Irish swindlers running away from their debts into England, and of English swindlers running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route.”  This advice certainly was not without reasonable grounds, but rather fitted to be stored up for Mrs. Betty’s private meditations than specially reported to me.  What followed, however, was somewhat worse.  “Oh, my lord,” answered my landlady (according to her own representation of the matter), “I really don’t think this young gentleman is a swindler, because –”  “You don’t think me a swindler?” said I, interrupting her, in a tumult of indignation: “for the future I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it.”  And without delay I prepared for my departure.  Some concessions the good woman seemed disposed to make; but a harsh and contemptuous expression, which I fear that I applied to the learned dignitary himself, roused her indignation in turn, and reconciliation then became impossible.  I was indeed greatly irritated at the bishop’s having suggested any grounds of suspicion, however remotely, against a person whom he had never seen; and I thought of letting him know my mind in Greek, which, at the same time that it would furnish some presumption that I was no swindler, would also (I hoped) compel the bishop to reply in the same language; in which case I doubted not to make it appear that if I was not so rich as his lordship, I was a far better Grecian.  Calmer thoughts, however, drove this boyish design out of my mind; for I considered that the bishop was in the right to counsel an old servant; that he could not have designed that his advice should be reported to me; and that the same coarseness of mind which had led Mrs. Betty to repeat the advice at all, might have coloured it in a way more agreeable to her own style of thinking than to the actual expressions of the worthy bishop.

I left the lodgings the very same hour, and this turned out a very unfortunate occurrence for me, because, living henceforward at inns, I was drained of my money very rapidly.  In a fortnight I was reduced to short allowance; that is, I could allow myself only one meal a day.  From the keen appetite produced by constant exercise and mountain air, acting on a youthful stomach, I soon began to suffer greatly on this slender regimen, for the single meal which I could venture to order was coffee or tea.  Even this, however, was at length withdrawn; and afterwards, so long as I remained in Wales, I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, &c., or on the casual hospitalities which I now and then received in return for such little services as I had an opportunity of rendering.  Sometimes I wrote letters of business for cottagers who happened to have relatives in Liverpool or in London; more often I wrote love-letters to their sweethearts for young women who had lived as servants at Shrewsbury or other towns on the English border.  On all such occasions I gave great satisfaction to my humble friends, and was generally treated with hospitality; and once in particular, near the village of Llan-y-styndw (or some such name), in a sequestered part of Merionethshire, I was entertained for upwards of three days by a family of young people with an affectionate and fraternal kindness that left an impression upon my heart not yet impaired.  The family consisted at that time of four sisters and three brothers, all grown up, and all remarkable for elegance and delicacy of manners.  So much beauty, and so much native good breeding and refinement, I do not remember to have seen before or since in any cottage, except once or twice in Westmoreland and Devonshire.  They spoke English, an accomplishment not often met with in so many members of one family, especially in villages remote from the high road.  Here I wrote, on my first introduction, a letter about prize-money, for one of the brothers, who had served on board an English man-of-war; and, more privately, two love-letters for two of the sisters.  They were both interesting-looking girls, and one of uncommon loveliness.  In the midst of their confusion and blushes, whilst dictating, or rather giving me general instructions, it did not require any great penetration to discover that what they wished was that their letters should be as kind as was consistent with proper maidenly pride.  I contrived so to temper my expressions as to reconcile the gratification of both feelings; and they were as much pleased with the way in which I had expressed their thoughts as (in their simplicity) they were astonished at my having so readily discovered them.  The reception one meets with from the women of a family generally determines the tenor of one’s whole entertainment.  In this case I had discharged my confidential duties as secretary so much to the general satisfaction, perhaps also amusing them with my conversation, that I was pressed to stay with a cordiality which I had little inclination to resist.  I slept with the brothers, the only unoccupied bed standing in the apartment of the young women; but in all other points they treated me with a respect not usually paid to purses as light as mine—as if my scholarship were sufficient evidence that I was of “gentle blood.”  Thus I lived with them for three days and great part of a fourth; and, from the undiminished kindness which they continued to show me, I believe I might have stayed with them up to this time, if their power had corresponded with their wishes.  On the last morning, however, I perceived upon their countenances, as they sate at breakfast, the expression of some unpleasant communication which was at hand; and soon after, one of the brothers explained to me that their parents had gone, the day before my arrival, to an annual meeting of Methodists, held at Carnarvon, and were that day expected to return; “and if they should not be so civil as they ought to be,” he begged, on the part of all the young people, that I would not take it amiss.  The parents returned with churlish faces, and “Dym Sassenach” (no English) in answer to all my addresses.  I saw how matters stood; and so, taking an affectionate leave of my kind and interesting young hosts, I went my way; for, though they spoke warmly to their parents in my behalf, and often excused the manner of the old people by saying it was “only their way,” yet I easily understood that my talent for writing love-letters would do as little to recommend me with two grave sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek sapphics or alcaics; and what had been hospitality when offered to me with the gracious courtesy of my young friends, would become charity when connected with the harsh demeanour of these old people.  Certainly, Mr. Shelley is right in his notions about old age: unless powerfully counteracted by all sorts of opposite agencies, it is a miserable corrupter and blighter to the genial charities of the human heart.

Soon after this I contrived, by means which I must omit for want of room, to transfer myself to London.  And now began the latter and fiercer stage of my long sufferings; without using a disproportionate expression I might say, of my agony.  For I now suffered, for upwards of sixteen weeks, the physical anguish of hunger in.  I various degrees of intensity, but as bitter perhaps as ever any human being can have suffered who has survived it would not needlessly harass my reader’s feelings by a detail of all that I endured; for extremities such as these, under any circumstances of heaviest misconduct or guilt, cannot be contemplated, even in description, without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness of the human heart.  Let it suffice, at least on this occasion, to say that a few fragments of bread from the breakfast-table of one individual (who supposed me to be ill, but did not know of my being in utter want), and these at uncertain intervals, constituted my whole support.  During the former part of my sufferings (that is, generally in Wales, and always for the first two months in London) I was houseless, and very seldom slept under a roof.   To this constant exposure to the open air I ascribe it mainly that I did not sink under my torments.  Latterly, however, when colder and more inclement weather came on, and when, from the length of my sufferings, I had begun to sink into a more languishing condition, it was no doubt fortunate for me that the same person to whose breakfast-table I had access, allowed me to sleep in a large unoccupied house of which he was tenant.  Unoccupied I call it, for there was no household or establishment in it; nor any furniture, indeed, except a table and a few chairs.  But I found, on taking possession of my new quarters, that the house already contained one single inmate, a poor friendless child, apparently ten years old; but she seemed hunger-bitten, and sufferings of that sort often make children look older than they are.  From this forlorn child I learned that she had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came; and great joy the poor creature expressed when she found that I was in future to be her companion through the hours of darkness.  The house was large, and, from the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the spacious staircase and hall; and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts.  I promised her protection against all ghosts whatsoever, but alas! I could offer her no other assistance.  We lay upon the floor, with a bundle of cursed law papers for a pillow, but with no other covering than a sort of large horseman’s cloak; afterwards, however, we discovered in a garret an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some fragments of other articles, which added a little to our warmth.  The poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for security against her ghostly enemies.  When I was not more than usually ill I took her into my arms, so that in general she was tolerably warm, and often slept when I could not, for during the last two months of my sufferings I slept much in daytime, and was apt to fall into transient dosings at all hours.  But my sleep distressed me more than my watching, for beside the tumultuousness of my dreams (which were only not so awful as those which I shall have to describe hereafter as produced by opium), my sleep was never more than what is called dog-sleep; so that I could hear myself moaning, and was often, as it seemed to me, awakened suddenly by my own voice; and about this time a hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as I fell into a slumber, which has since returned upon me at different periods of my life—viz., a sort of twitching (I know not where, but apparently about the region of the stomach) which compelled me violently to throw out my feet for the sake of relieving it.  This sensation coming on as soon as I began to sleep, and the effort to relieve it constantly awaking me, at length I slept only from exhaustion; and from increasing weakness (as I said before) I was constantly falling asleep and constantly awaking.  Meantime, the master of the house sometimes came in upon us suddenly, and very early; sometimes not till ten o’clock, sometimes not at all.  He was in constant fear of bailiffs.  Improving on the plan of Cromwell, every night he slept in a different quarter of London; and I observed that he never failed to examine through a private window the appearance of those who knocked at the door before he would allow it to be opened.  He breaksfasted alone; indeed, his tea equipage would hardly have admitted of his hazarding an invitation to a second person, any more than the quantity of esculent matériel, which for the most part was little more than a roll or a few biscuits which he had bought on his road from the place where he had slept.  Or, if he had asked a party—as I once learnedly and facetiously observed to him—the several members of it must have stood in the relation to each other (not sate in any relation whatever) of succession, as the metaphysicians have it, and not of a coexistence; in the relation of the parts of time, and not of the parts of space.  During his breakfast I generally contrived a reason for lounging in, and, with an air of as much indifference as I could assume, took up such fragments as he had left; sometimes, indeed, there were none at all.  In doing this I committed no robbery except upon the man himself, who was thus obliged (I believe) now and then to send out at noon for an extra biscuit; for as to the poor child, she was never admitted into his study (if I may give that name to his chief depository of parchments, law writings, &c.); that room was to her the Bluebeard room of the house, being regularly locked on his departure to dinner, about six o’clock, which usually was his final departure for the night.  Whether this child were an illegitimate daughter of Mr. –, or only a servant, I could not ascertain; she did not herself know; but certainly she was treated altogether as a menial servant.  No sooner did Mr. – make his appearance than she went below stairs, brushed his shoes, coat, &c.; and, except when she was summoned to run an errand, she never emerged from the dismal Tartarus of the kitchen, &c., to the upper air until my welcome knock at night called up her little trembling footsteps to the front door.  Of her life during the daytime, however, I knew little but what I gathered from her own account at night, for as soon as the hours of business commenced I saw that my absence would be acceptable, and in general, therefore, I went off and sate in the parks or elsewhere until nightfall.

But who and what, meantime, was the master of the house himself?  Reader, he was one of those anomalous practitioners in lower departments of the law who—what shall I say?—who on prudential reasons, or from necessity, deny themselves all indulgence in the luxury of too delicate a conscience, (a periphrasis which might be abridged considerably, but that I leave to the reader’s taste): in many walks of life a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage; and just as people talk of “laying down” their carriages, so I suppose my friend Mr. – had “laid down” his conscience for a time, meaning, doubtless, to resume it as soon as he could afford it.  The inner economy of such a man’s daily life would present a most strange picture, if I could allow myself to amuse the reader at his expense.  Even with my limited opportunities for observing what went on, I saw many scenes of London intrigues and complex chicanery, “cycle and epicycle, orb in orb,” at which I sometimes smile to this day, and at which I smiled then, in spite of my misery.  My situation, however, at that time gave me little experience in my own person of any qualities in Mr. –’s character but such as did him honour; and of his whole strange composition I must forget everything but that towards me he was obliging, and to the extent of his power, generous.

That power was not, indeed, very extensive; however, in common with the rats, I sate rent free; and as Dr. Johnson has recorded that he never but once in his life had as much wall-fruit as he could eat, so let me be grateful that on that single occasion I had as large a choice of apartments in a London mansion as I could possibly desire.  Except the Bluebeard room, which the poor child believed to be haunted, all others, from the attics to the cellars, were at our service; “the world was all before us,” and we pitched our tent for the night in any spot we chose.  This house I have already described as a large one; it stands in a conspicuous situation and in a well-known part of London.  Many of my readers will have passed it, I doubt not, within a few hours of reading this.  For myself, I never fail to visit it when business draws me to London; about ten o’clock this very night, August 15, 1821—being my birthday—I turned aside from my evening walk down Oxford Street, purposely to take a glance at it; it is now occupied by a respectable family, and by the lights in the front drawing-room I observed a domestic party assembled, perhaps at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay.  Marvellous contrast, in my eyes, to the darkness, cold, silence, and desolation of that same house eighteen years ago, when its nightly occupants were one famishing scholar and a neglected child.  Her, by-the-bye, in after-years I vainly endeavoured to trace.  Apart from her situation, she was not what would be called an interesting child; she was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners.  But, thank God! even in those years I needed not the embellishments of novel accessories to conciliate my affections: plain human nature, in its humblest and most homely apparel, was enough for me, and I loved the child because she was my partner in wretchedness.  If she is now living she is probably a mother, with children of her own; but, as I have said, I could never trace her.

This I regret; but another person there was at that time whom I have since sought to trace with far deeper earnestness, and with far deeper sorrow at my failure.  This person was a young woman, and one of that unhappy class who subsist upon the wages of prostitution.  I feel no shame, nor have any reason to feel it, in avowing that I was then on familiar and friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate condition.  The reader needs neither smile at this avowal nor frown; for, not to remind my classical readers of the old Latin proverb, “Sine cerere,” &c., it may well be supposed that in the existing state of my purse my connection with such women could not have been an impure one.  But the truth is, that at no time of my life have I been a person to hold myself polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a human shape; on the contrary, from my very earliest youth it has been my pride to converse familiarly, more Socratio, with all human beings, man, woman, and child, that chance might fling in my way; a practice which is friendly to the knowledge of human nature, to good feelings, and to that frankness of address which becomes a man who would be thought a philosopher.  For a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor limitary creature calling himself a man of the world, and filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and education, but should look upon himself as a catholic creature, and as standing in equal relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated, to the guilty and the innocent.  Being myself at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are technically called street-walkers.  Many of these women had occasionally taken my part against watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps of houses where I was sitting.  But one amongst them, the one on whose account I have at all introduced this subject—yet no! let me not class the, oh! noble-minded Ann—with that order of women.  Let me find, if it be possible, some gentler name to designate the condition of her to whose bounty and compassion, ministering to my necessities when all the world had forsaken me, I owe it that I am at this time alive.  For many weeks I had walked at nights with this poor friendless girl up and down Oxford Street, or had rested with her on steps and under the shelter of porticoes.  She could not be so old as myself; she told me, indeed, that she had not completed her sixteenth year.  By such questions as my interest about her prompted I had gradually drawn forth her simple history.  Hers was a case of ordinary occurrence (as I have since had reason to think), and one in which, if London beneficence had better adapted its arrangements to meet it, the power of the law might oftener be interposed to protect and to avenge.  But the stream of London charity flows in a channel which, though deep and mighty, is yet noiseless and underground; not obvious or readily accessible to poor houseless wanderers; and it cannot be denied that the outside air and framework of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive.  In any case, however, I saw that part of her injuries might easily have been redressed, and I urged her often and earnestly to lay her complaint before a magistrate.  Friendless as she was, I assured her that she would meet with immediate attention, and that English justice, which was no respecter of persons, would speedily and amply avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had plundered her little property.  She promised me often that she would, but she delayed taking the steps I pointed out from time to time, for she was timid and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young heart; and perhaps she thought justly that the most upright judge and the most righteous tribunals could do nothing to repair her heaviest wrongs.  Something, however, would perhaps have been done, for it had been settled between us at length, but unhappily on the very last time but one that I was ever to see her, that in a day or two we should go together before a magistrate, and that I should speak on her behalf.  This little service it was destined, however, that I should never realise.  Meantime, that which she rendered to me, and which was greater than I could ever have repaid her, was this:—One night, when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt more than usually ill and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho Square.  Thither we went, and we sat down on the steps of a house, which to this hour I never pass without a pang of grief and an inner act of homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the noble action which she there performed.  Suddenly, as we sate, I grew much worse.  I had been leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I sank from her arms and fell backwards on the steps.  From the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of the liveliest kind, that without some powerful and reviving stimulus I should either have died on the spot, or should at least have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all reäscent under my friendless circumstances would soon have become hopeless.  Then it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor orphan companion, who had herself met with little but injuries in this world, stretched out a saving hand to me.  Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment’s delay, she ran off into Oxford Street, and in less time than could be imagined returned to me with a glass of port wine and spices, that acted upon my empty stomach, which at that time would have rejected all solid food, with an instantaneous power of restoration; and for this glass the generous girl without a murmur paid out of her humble purse at a time—be it remembered!—when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare necessaries of life, and when she could have no reason to expect that I should ever be able to reimburse her.