Munter, Robert

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

366 IDS10IRE SOCIALE- SOCIAL IDS10RY of official attitudes fnxn the mid-century which stigmatized opium taking and sanctioned restrictive legislative controls. Berridge and Edwards attribute the growth of formal cootrols to an alliance between the State and the newly professionalized bodies of doctors and pharmacists. The doctors who had widely and unhesitatingly prescribed opiates in the first half of the century now professed alarm at their toxic ef-fect on public health and advocated a more narrowly "scientific" treatment use, particularly with the development of hypodermic injection of morphine, an opium derivative. Pharmacists were also con-cerned with adulteration, and the 1868 Phnrmacy Act restricted the sale and availability of opiates. The increasing currency of the disease model in medical theory reconceived addiction in terms of deviancy, such, that it became both disease and vice- a failure of will. From this cautionary spe-cialist perspective, it was the lower classes who were most fallible to the degeneracies of "infant dop-ing" and the "luxurious" use of opiates. Thus was professional self-interest reinforced by class dis-crimination and opium eating, newly labelled a "problem" demanding penal as well as medical con-trol. A lay anti-opium movement in the late-century added another discriminatory judgment in scapegoating the East End Chinese and their sinister opium dens, though the evidence suggests they were harmless enough resorts. A nice example of the deteriorating image of drugtaking, from normal through exotic to dangerous, comes from the increasingly disapproving response of Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes' cocaine habit. The greater part of the book was written by Virginia Berridge, a social historian; Griffith Edwards, a psychiatrist, concludes with a lengthy chapter relating nineteenth-century experience to the present. Here, it is made plain how the nineteenth-century problem framewor~ and reliance on formal cootrols are still the dominant responses to drug use. The book's argument from its historical reconstruction is that society would be better served by allowing cultural ecology to assert its own self-balancing controls, though this is to simplify a case that is made with a shrewd regard for the complexities of the issue and eschews any facile resort to history as a repository of ideal alternatives. The tone throughout is judicious not partisan, and the emphasis on specifics and social context makes the use of history properly instructive rather than polemical. This is an impressive piece of work, both in exposition and interpretation, though there are some problems with the theoretical frames of the larger argument. The model of a natural equilib-rium of controls suggests a misplaced optimism in the face of evidence from other fields that equi-libria seem more generally to have been contested in the nineteenth and probably every other century. Foucault's argument tOr the institutionalization of discipline and surveillance seems to fit well enough, but there is no acknowledgment of his emphasis, however ambiguous, on resistance to power and dominance. But then, in passing, the book suggests that the decline in popular drug use in the nine-teenth century was also a consequence of voluntary disuse. Why was this so? * * * Peter Bailey University of Manitoba Jeremy Black - The English Press in the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Pp. xv, 321. Dr. Jeremy Black's book is a study of the chief features of the eighteenth-century newspaper press in England. He has made an exhaustive search of the secondary material and has thoroughly digested the output of the press. He picks up the story with the "upsurge in press activity during the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis" (5) and the "spate of new titles" (12) that followed the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. He provides informative summaries of economic news, advertisements, crime and sport coverage; sources and distribution, circulation and costs; and the problems of COMPTES RENDUS- BOOK REVIEWS 367 censorship over political cooftict and subversive opinion. All are very solid contributioos. When he elevates himself above the purely factual data, he occasionally offers a brilliant analysis of events, e.g. his reflections on the more recent historiography of the press ( 114-6). At times, he writes quite clean prose such as "Eighteenth-century newspapers were characterized by a paranoid mentality, rigid convictions and a style that e){ploited humour, mock advertisements, fictional creeds ... and fake-prophecies" (5), and, now and then, epigrammatic fragments such as "sympathetic to popular distress but opposed to popular action ... (272). Overall, however, an awkward style severely lessens his contribution. There are clumsy subtitles in lieu of transitional sentences and paragraphs and a prolixity of long block quotes so similar as to be not only tedious but overkill. Also, the author assumes the reader's familiarity with the nuances of eighteenth-century political development and, consequently, provides too few labels. More disconcerting than the strained style is the failure to organize and analyze the material. The content of the papers is generalized for the century as a whole, suggesting little change or devel-opment, while the discussion of this content is scattered through several chapters. Besides, we learn nothing of the statiooers themselves: how they lived, their various associations or their economic sta-tus. One may be referred to as "the printer of the aggressively partisan York Courant" (63), but we are not told how it was partisan. Further, we get no feeling for individual papers: were some objective, responsible or dependable journals; and others, more sensational, given to hyperlx>le and falsehood? Black raises questions of whether there existed a radical press or whether newspapers played any role in the formulation of public opinion. As for a radical press, he concludes that "it was only the Jacobite printers who really wished to see major changes in Britain prior to the French Revolu-tioo" ( 131 ), but he never really attempts to define public opinion and is, therefore, unable to establish the role of the press in its development. In this latter regard, he enlists the support of other historians, stating that many of us are equally uncertain as to the influence of the press, and he adds "with rea-son" ( 138). The reason, he contends, is that we are afforded no real proof of such influence. (Surely he demands too strict documentation: few contemporaries would have admitted "the press made me do it".) Still, despite such disclaimers, Black states that press anti-semitism in 1732 "led to anti-semitic acts" (155), that "the press was increasingly used by significant political and economic groups as an effective way of conveying a message" or to "popularize the idea of the representative nature of MPs" (292), and that the newspaper was the "principle means by which ... the political nation was informed of foreign affairs" (221 ). The author readily admits to many of these shortcomings, apologizes for his superficiality and for not being able but "to draw attention to a few features of the problem and to pose some questions" (114). Certainly, he would have liked to throw more light on political, social and economic issues, but "the economic news carried by the press still awaits systematic study" (66), while there has been "no systematic study of the relationship of the press and political, constitutional and ideological con-cepts" (306). His pious hope is that the present worlc "will lead more scholars to read the newspapers of the period and to consider their significance" (306). Dr. Black obviously was in a position to con-tribute far more than he did, and I for one was disappointed that he chose to pass the task on to others. * * * Robert Munter San Diego State University 

Jeremy Black — The English Press in the Eighteenth Century.

https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/37118/33706

Jeremy Black — The English Press in the Eighteenth Century.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)