Victor the Addict? Laudanum and the Victorian Era

“Ever since my recovery from the fever I had been in the custom of taking every night a small quantity of laudanum, for it was by means of this drug only that I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life. Oppressed by the recollection of my various misfortunes, I now swallowed double my usual quantity and soon slept profoundly. But sleep did not afford me respite from thought and misery; my dreams presented a thousand objects that scared me” (132).

One thing I had never noticed before in reading Frankenstein is the reference to the drug laudanum, which Victor uses as a way of coping with his grief over the death of Clerval. A common drug of choice in the Victorian era, laudanum, a drug derived from the mixing of opium and alcohol, was cheap and easily attainable, as it was prescribed for various illnesses, ranging from coughs to cramps to heart problems, by doctors as a sort of catch-all cure. And it was a cure that was commonly taken by various important figures of the period, including Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Lord Byron, and, most famously, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem Kubla Khan was of course written after a laudanum induced dream and who was described as an opium addict in Thomas Quincey's novel.

To find reference to laudanum then in Shelley’s Frankenstein would not have been uncommon for the time, as Victorian readers may have likely been given the drug at some point in their lives for an ailment, however it is interesting to see then a correlation in the effects that laudanum can produce in a long term user and how they then match up the actions of Victor throughout the novel. His violent mood swings that would take him from happiness to great depression and despair, and his fits of madness that render him incapable of movement, it could possibly be read as Victor suffering from the effects of laudanum consumption and addiction throughout the novel although it is only mentioned only briefly towards the end. The monster could then be a real creature, or a figment of an opium induced dream, created by an addict attempting to place blame on someone other than himself for the many deaths occurring around him. There could be an argument made that Frankenstein is a study of addiction much in the line of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or maybe it was just a medicine Victor used to get some sleep.