‘Morphinomania’: Morphine use in three Edwardian novels

To be young, socially privileged, and in love; such is the happy situation of Felix Wilding, the euphonious hero of Robert Hichens’s 1902 novel. The object of Felix’s adoration is socially prominent Valeria Ismey, who is the more attractive for being older and married; this after all is the 1900s, and Victorianism, represented by Felix’s loving, ineffectual mother, is in retreat. No: Mrs. Ismey’s problem – one evident to the reader before it is to Felix – is her hopeless

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Douglas Small, Cream and Cocaine: Hallucination, Obsession, and Sexuality in Victorian Cocaine Addiction

This post accompanies Douglas Small’s Journal of Victorian article ‘Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man’ which can be downloaded here. Painless Surgery Cocaine occupied something of a contradictory position in the late-Victorian cultural imagination. Albert Niemann had isolated the cocaine alkaloid from raw coca leaves as early as 1860, but it was not until 1884 that cocaine truly entered the popular consciousness. In September of that year, a Viennese Ophthalmologist (and friend of Sigmund

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