Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Laudanum and Morphine, in Her Own Words

In October 1845, while she was still planning to winter in Italy (a plan her father’s opposition soon ended),¹ Elizabeth Barrett wrote to her friend Mrs. Martin about her health with unusual frankness. Her doctors had told her the English winter was the problem, and that one lung was “very slightly affected, but the nervous system absolutely shattered, as the state of the pulse proves.” Then she added a detail about her treatment: “I am in the habit of taking forty drops of laudanum a day, and cannot do with less, that is, the medical man told me that I could not do with less, saying so with his hand on the pulse.”²

The sentence, and especially its correction in the middle, is a useful way into one of the best documented opiate histories of the Victorian period. Barrett Browning (she took the second surname on her marriage in 1846) used laudanum and then morphine for many years of her adult life. Because she was a prolific letter writer, and because a large share of her letters survive and have been published, we can hear her describe that use in her own voice: what she took, what she believed it did, who told her to take it, and how she felt about it. This article follows those letters and sets them in the medical and legal world in which opium was an ordinary remedy.

An illness without a name

Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806 and grew up at Hope End in Herefordshire. In April 1821, when she was fifteen, she and two of her sisters fell ill; the sisters recovered, but she grew progressively worse and that June was sent to Gloucester for treatment.¹ A story told after her death, by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, held that at about fifteen she hurt her spine when she fell while saddling her pony; her son later attributed the injury to a strain while tightening the pony’s girths. Frederic Kenyon, who edited her letters in 1897, repeated the story but already doubted part of it, noting that her long confinement to a sickroom came later and, by her own account, “from a different cause.”²

That later cause was a crisis in 1838, which Kenyon described as “the breaking of a blood-vessel.”² The family had just settled at 50 Wimpole Street in London. In August 1838 she was sent to Torquay on medical advice to recover from a lung hemorrhage, and there, on 11 July 1840, her favorite brother Edward drowned in a sailing accident. She suffered a near-fatal illness afterward and did not return to Wimpole Street until September 1841.¹

What was wrong with her remains unknown. Her physicians never arrived at a diagnosis, and modern writers have proposed many; a 2011 paper argues, from the symptoms in her letters and diary, for a rare inherited muscle disorder, hypokalemic periodic paralysis.³ Readers should treat every such retrospective diagnosis as a hypothesis. What the letters do record clearly is the medicine.

What her doctors prescribed, and why

Opium was not the only drug. In June 1838 she told her friend H. S. Boyd that she had “a pulse that flies off at a word and is only to be caught by digitalis,” and soon after that she had “been forced to take digitalis again, which makes me feel weak.”² At Torquay her physician, Dr. Scully, kept her in bed for most of a winter.² The common thread in this treatment was the pulse: a fast, irregular, “fluttering” pulse was read as the sign of an overwrought nervous system, and the remedies were meant to steady it.

Her own explanations of the opiate follow the same logic. On 15 November 1845 she reassured Robert Browning, then courting her by letter, that she did not take it to lift her mood: “My opium comes in to keep the pulse from fluttering and fainting … to give the right composure and point of balance to the nervous system. I don’t take it for ‘my spirits’ in the usual sense.” She added that a visiting doctor had made her take a dose early, while she was talking cheerfully, “just for the need he observed in the pulse,” and that “I am not even subject to an opium-headache.”⁴

The fullest account came on 5 February 1846. She admitted it “might strike you as strange that I who have had no pain […] should need opium in any shape,” and then described sleeplessness, restlessness “till it made me almost mad,” weakness and palpitation. “So the medical people gave me opium,” she wrote, “a preparation of it, called morphine, and ether,” and she had been calling it “my amreeta draught, my elixir,” because “the tranquillizing power has been wonderful.” She reported that her doctor, a Mr. Jago, had warned that “it would be dangerous to leave off the calming remedy […] except very slowly and gradually,” and she insisted that she had never gone beyond the quantity first prescribed.⁴

Three points stand out. First, the drug was prescribed, and both she and her doctors framed it as management of the nerves and pulse, not of pain. Second, her doctor already warned that stopping abruptly carried risk, and advised a slow reduction. Third, she was conscious of how the habit might look, and took care to place responsibility with “the medical people.” The October 1845 letter, with its self-correction (“that is, the medical man told me”), shows the same instinct.

A courtship conducted around a dose

Robert Browning approached the subject carefully. On 4 February 1846 he wrote that “I never dared, nor shall dare inquire into your use of that,” because he knew she took it only under “the most absolute necessity,” so that an increase meant more illness and a decrease less.⁴ His letter of 24 February thanked her for “the good news of the increasing strength and less need for the opium.”⁴

The drug also appears in the couple’s more domestic exchanges. On 6 August 1846, explaining to Browning where her quarterly income went, she wrote: “My greatest personal expense lately has been the morphine.”⁵ Two weeks later Browning, missing her, asked teasingly, “May I call you my morphine?”⁵ Her reply (post-marked 22 August, though headed “Friday Evening” and so written the night before) turned the joke into something closer to self-knowledge: “Can I be as good for you as morphine is for me, I wonder … even at the cost of being as bad also? Can’t you leave me off without risking your life,” she asked, “nor go on with me without running the hazards of all poison.”⁵ The passage shows that she understood both sides of the drug: it helped her, and it carried the danger of a substance that could not safely be dropped.

They married at St. Marylebone Church on 12 September 1846 and left for the Continent a week later, settling first in Pisa.¹ On 19 December 1846 she wrote from Pisa to her sister Henrietta: “Tell Arabel that I have not left off my draughts” and added that she had not been “charmed” up to that point, “though gradually I am diminishing it.”⁶ The letter does not name the drug, but in context (her sister’s evident concern and the reduction Mr. Jago had recommended) it most likely refers to her morphine.

Italy and the later years

The Italian years brought her a measure of health and an active life in Florence, where the couple settled in 1847. They also brought repeated pregnancy loss: the chronology of the Brownings’ letters records a first miscarriage on 21 March 1847 and several more over the next few years, and the birth of their only child, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, called Pen, at Casa Guidi on 9 March 1849.¹ Popular accounts sometimes link those losses to her morphine use or to attempts to stop it. The sources read for this article do not establish such a link, and it is not asserted here.

Her use of opiates also became, at least once, a matter of public insinuation. According to a summary of Louise Foxcroft’s history of addiction, the American writer Julia Ward Howe wrote a poem implying that opium fed Barrett Browning’s poetry; Robert Browning was furious, while she is reported to have remarked to him, unruffled, that she would not be alive without her morphine.⁷ The episode is known here only at second hand.

She died at Casa Guidi on 29 June 1861 after a short respiratory illness that began with a sore throat about nine days earlier.¹ Robert Browning wrote that she “suffered very little pain,” spoke of plans for the summer on her last evening, and died in his arms in the early morning.⁸ Claims that morphine caused or hastened her death circulate widely but rest on inference, not on any medical record cited in the sources consulted here.

Opium as ordinary medicine

Nothing about Barrett Browning’s prescription would have struck her contemporaries as exotic. Laudanum, a tincture of opium in alcohol, was a household remedy,⁷ and before 1868 there were no restrictions on buying opium, which was readily available even in small villages.⁹ The historian Virginia Berridge, author of Opium and the People, a study of opiate use and drug control in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England,¹⁰ has noted that opium was freely available until the late 1860s, and that in the 1840s public health investigators were already asking whether industrial workers were using opiates in place of alcohol.¹¹ Research summarized by the University of Exeter in 2018 found that many women writers of the period took opium for restlessness, anxiety and insomnia, the same complaints Barrett Browning described, and that Britain was importing over 130,000 pounds of opium for home consumption by 1838.⁹

The dangers were also familiar. In February 1862, less than eight months after his wife’s death, Robert Browning wrote to Isa Blagden that the wife of his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “who had been, as an invalid, in the habit of taking laudanum, swallowed an overdose” and died.¹²

The Pharmacy Act of 1868

Regulation came seven years after Barrett Browning’s death. The Pharmacy Act of 31 July 1868, “An Act to regulate the Sale of Poisons,” required anyone opening a shop to sell or dispense poisons, or calling himself a chemist and druggist, to be registered.¹³ Its Schedule A defined the poisons. Part 1 held substances such as arsenic, prussic acid and strychnine; Part 2 included “Opium and all Preparations of Opium or of Poppies.”¹³

The rules for opium were light. Section 17 required every poison to be sold in a container “distinctly labelled with the Name of the Article and the Word Poison” and with the seller’s name and address. The stricter requirements (that the buyer be known to the seller and that the sale be entered in a signed register) applied only to Part 1 poisons. Part 1 did, however, include “all poisonous vegetable Alkaloids and their Salts,” a category that on its face covered morphine, the drug Barrett Browning herself used. The act also left large gaps: section 16 exempted “the making or dealing in Patent Medicines,” and section 17 did not apply to medicine supplied by a qualified apothecary to his patient.¹³ In practice, then, the act moved retail sales of opium into the hands of registered chemists and put a warning label on the bottle, while leaving proprietary opiate remedies and doctors’ prescribing much as before.^{13 11}

Seen against that background, Barrett Browning’s case is less a story of a poet’s private habit than a well documented example of standard Victorian practice: a chronic, undiagnosed illness, a pulse read as a sign of “shattered” nerves, and a physician’s prescription of an opiate that the patient was then advised not to stop. What makes her case unusual is the record she left. In her letters she named the drugs, quoted her doctors, tracked her doses, noted the cost and joked about it with the man she married. Those letters are the best guide to how one patient understood a medicine that the law would soon begin, cautiously, to call a poison.

Footnotes

1. The Brownings’ Correspondence, Chronology, 1821-1861. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Kenyon ed., Letters of EBB, vol. 1: to Mrs. Martin, Oct. 1845; to H. S. Boyd, June 1838; Torquay letter on Dr. Scully; Kenyon’s biographical notes. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Buchanan and Weiss 2011, abstract. ↩

4. Letters of RB and EBB, vol. 1: EBB to RB, 15 Nov. 1845; RB to EBB, 4 Feb. 1846; EBB to RB, 5 Feb. 1846; RB to EBB, 24 Feb. 1846. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Letters of RB and EBB, vol. 2: EBB to RB, 6 Aug. 1846; RB to EBB, 21 Aug. 1846; EBB to RB, 22 Aug. 1846. Dates for the courtship letters are post-mark dates. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Huxley ed., Letters to Her Sister, letter 2 (Pisa, 19 Dec. 1846). ↩

7. Aikens 2012, summarizing Foxcroft 2007; also for the definition of laudanum. ↩ ↩²

8. Kenyon ed., Letters of EBB, vol. 2: RB to Miss Haworth, 20 July 1861. ↩

9. University of Exeter news release, 9 March 2018. ↩ ↩²

10. Berridge 1999 (catalogue record). ↩

11. Berridge and Bourne 2005, “Illicit Drugs and Public Health.” ↩ ↩²

12. Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, RB to Isa Blagden, 15 Feb. 1862. ↩

13. Pharmacy Act 1868, ss. 1, 16, 17 and Schedule (A). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴