Opium dens

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The Opium Den (1881) by William Lamb Picknell.

The romantic side of the addiction business. Needless to say, there’s a lot more of this kind of thing. The ultimate opium-related pictorial art is still Attila Sassy’s remarkable Opium Dreams from 1909, a series of drawings which can be seen at 50 Watts in high-quality scans.

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The Opium Den (no date) by Vincent G. Stiepevich.

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Chez la Marchande de Pavots (The House of the Poppy Merchant, 1920) by George Barbier.

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Opium den from Fantasio (1915) by George Barbier.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Opium fiends
La Morphine by Victorien du Saussay
Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
The Dark Ledger
Demon rum leads to heroin
German opium smokers, 1900

Opium fiends

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When bachelor dens cast over waking hours a loneliness so deep (1904).

From morphine to opium. Despite drug addiction being an equal opportunities affair, many representations of opium dens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tend to show women as the victims. This is probably chauvinistic in part—women being thought of as the weaker sex—but no doubt also connects to xenophobic fears about the white slave trade that fueled so much popular fiction of the time. The photo above at the Library of Congress is one exception with its young man chilling with a hookah in his fur-lined den, as you do. (He’s not necessarily smoking opium, of course…) The posters below, all from 1899, are also from the Library of Congress, and are more typical both in their sensationalism and in the dens being filled with white women.

As for Miss Ada Lewis, Mesmerize Magee was a “dope song” by Melville Ellis from a farce entitled A Reign of Error (1899), in which she recounts how her dope is paid for by a young policeman (the Magee of the title) who the lyrics describe as being “green as a pill”. When Magee worries about spending his wages in this fashion Ada has to wield her charms. And people think of 19th-century entertainment as being entirely wholesome and innocent…

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Previously on { feuilleton }
La Morphine by Victorien du Saussay
Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
The Mask of Fu Manchu
The Dark Ledger
Demon rum leads to heroin
German opium smokers, 1900

La Morphine by Victorien du Saussay

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Manuel Orazi’s illustrations (above and below) have been travelling the recursive paths of the Tumblr labyrinth recently. I was hoping to find covers for other editions but the third image here (from 1930) is the only one that’s turned up. La Morphine, Vices et passions des morphinomanes by Victorien du Saussay was published in 1906, and is described by Barbara Hodgson as “a stark novel of addiction, failed cures, incest, indecent exposure and adultery” (In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine, and Patent Medicines (2001)). Orazi apparently produced 22 interior illustrations but (again) they don’t appear to be available for the moment.

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The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
Manuel Orazi’s Salomé
Demon rum leads to heroin
La belle sans nom
German opium smokers, 1900

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

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Illustration by W. Graham Robertson (19o8).

(No, this doesn’t concern Pink Floyd.)

The chapter – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – is normally dropped because it jars, seems so strange compared to all the others and, to some, is vaguely homoerotic. [Kenneth] Grahame thought it essential.

Thus Mark Brown discussing the curious seventh chapter of The Wind in the Willows (1908) wherein Mole and Rat have a mystical encounter with the Greek god of nature in the British countryside:

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

Brown’s article concerns a forthcoming exhibition, Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, at the British Library, part of the summer’s Olympic celebrations. Kenneth Grahame’s hand-written text of chapter seven will be on display together with a later Arthur Rackham illustration of the goat god. The Library makes a point of noting that the Pan chapter is sometimes excised from the book although I’m not sure how often this occurs, it’s been present in all the editions I’ve seen including the cheap paperback edition I have somewhere. W. Graham Robertson’s rather fine drawing above (showing Mole and Rat bowing to their presiding deity) embellishes the first UK edition. Paul Bransom’s illustration below is the frontispiece to a 1913 US edition.

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Illustration by Paul Bransom (1913).

One benefit of this bit of news has been finding Robertson’s illustration which gives Brown’s use of “homoerotic” a slight twist. Robertson was a children’s illustrator and playwright who Neil McKenna in The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003) describes as being a member of the surreptitiously gay art world in London during the 1890s. (If there’s to be any dissent about this let’s note that one of his plays was entitled Pinkie and the Fairies…) Robertson knew Oscar Wilde but fell in with the contra-Wilde fraternity, notably Robert de Montesquiou, so gets left out of many accounts of Wilde’s circle. He was however immortalised by John Singer Sargent in this well-known portrait. I’ll be writing a little more about Robertson and Sargent’s painting at a later date. For more about the surprising recurrence of Pan in Victorian and Edwardian literature, see this earlier post.

Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library opens on May 11th and runs throughout the summer.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrator’s archive

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The Great God Pan
Peake’s Pan

Amy Sacker, book designer

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Manders: A Tale of Paris (1899) by Elwyn Barron.

Amy Sacker (1872–1965) was an American book designer, illustrator and bookplate artist, one of a number of female designers and illustrators whose careers began in the last years of the 19th century. I’ve mentioned before how women struggled at this time for acceptance in the male-dominated spheres of painting and sculpture. Those who insisted on pursuing an artistic career were encouraged to concentrate their impulses in the decorative arts with the result that women are a lot more visible in the illustration and design of this period. (See this earlier post about Margaret Armstrong, and these pages at Princeton University Library about women printers, binders and book designers.)

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The Kindred of the Wild (1902) by Charles G. D. Roberts.

The cover above is from the Amy Sacker website which features information about Ms Sacker’s bookbindings, illustrations and bookplate designs. A recent post here mentioned the Troutsdale Press collection of Amy Sacker bookplates from which the two examples below are taken. These often show people in Renaissance or medieval garb drawn in a style reminiscent of Walter Crane. More of them can be seen at the Internet Archive while the University of North Carolina archive has 120 examples of her cover designs.

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The book covers archive

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Troutsdale Press bookplates
Margaret Armstrong book designs