The nineteenth-century opium complex: From Thomas Love Peacock to Sherlock Holmes

• Josephine McDonagh ^[1] ; Briony Wickes
  1. [1] University of Chicago

     University of Chicago

     City of Chicago, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Literature and history, ISSN 0306-1973, Vol. 29, Nº 1, 2020, págs. 3-18
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • This introduction to the special issue proposes that two discrete nineteenth-century histories of opium – a literary history, initiated by the drug confessions of De Quincey, and a colonial history, exemplified by the commercial activities of the East India Company (in which Thomas Love Peacock participated) in cultivating opium in Bengal for export to China, leading to the first Opium War – are common elements in a nineteenth-century ‘opium complex’, a set of interlocking practices of individuals and (quasi)state actors, extending across the globe. Sherlock Holmes detective stories are read as compressed registers of tensions that inhere in this complex.