On the morning of Dickens's Eatanswill election, the Buffs stood Blue voters free brandies laced with laudanum.

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Mr Holmes even tells you when the writing in the notebooks shows that Coleridge was drunk, or when it suddenly turns red (the poet's pen dipped either in laudanum, or in gout medicine).

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The industrial and French revolutions, which produced anxiety on a vast scale, saw De Quincey on opium, Coleridge on laudanum and Davy, in his chemical laboratory, giggling and whooping helplessly as he sniffed nitrous oxide gas.

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