Opium Dreams: Desire, Decay, and the Victorian Imagination
What does it mean for a society to fall in love with oblivion?
From ancient ritual intoxication to the smoky parlours of 19th-century London, opium has long occupied a strange and seductive place in human history—at once medicine, muse, and menace.
This lecture traces the cultural, social, and psychological impact of opium across the ages, culminating in its profound entanglement with Victorian society.
In the 1800s, opium was everywhere: prescribed by doctors, sold freely in chemists, and consumed across all classes—from exhausted factory workers to poets, painters, and aristocrats seeking transcendence. It soothed pain, inspired visions, and quietly tightened its grip on a nation in the throes of industrialisation and empire.
Through the writings of figures such as Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we explore how opium shaped literature and the creative imagination—fueling dreamlike beauty, but also paranoia, fragmentation, and despair. We will step inside the opium dens of London’s East End, examine the moral panic they provoked, and uncover how addiction, colonial trade, and class anxieties became deeply intertwined.
This lecture moves between the intimate and the imperial: from private visions to public crises, from the quiet laudanum bottle in the bedside drawer to the vast machinery of the Opium Wars.
Rich in atmosphere and grounded in cultural history, Opium Dreams invites you into a world of velvet shadows and chemical longing—where pleasure and ruin walk hand in hand, and where the boundaries between medicine, vice, and art begin to dissolve.
Speaker Bio:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
