Opium's Imperial Intimacies:Reading Charles Wirgman's War Correspondence in the Illustrated London News

This article traces the literary and cultural registrations of a commodity which was key to the capitalist expansion of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the nineteenth-century: opium. Grown in the plantations of Northern India, opium was packed and shipped down the River Ganges to Kolkata. From there, it was smuggled via ship, up through the Pearl River and into China. Opium transformed the Victorian geographical and literary imagination. Unlike recent studies which have focussed on the ‘empire inside’ imperial texts or the ‘fugitive meaning’ of colonial commodities in Victorian fiction, opium’s distinctiveness lay in the open violence of the commodity exchange. For example, in 1860, on the eve of the Second Opium War, the Illustrated London News bemoaned the fact that Britain’s ‘former belligerent encounters with the Chinese did not rise in the imaginations of Englishmen at home’ and promised their readers that their coverage for the coming war would liven them to the ‘dignity of war’. This article will explore the ways in which one of the leading nineteenth-century periodicals of the day, the Illustrated London News, and the work of their special correspondent who covered the Second Opium War, Charles Wirgman, was crucial in both celebrating and condemning the imperial violence that pushed forward Britain’s policy of free trade expansionism. Coverage of the war, however, was accompanied by a public fascination for the details around opium production: the article will also pay specific attention to the racialized discourses in the press of opium consumption and production.