Opium was an unremarkable part of daily life in Romantic Britain. It was highly
prized by the medical community as a painkiller, and people of every age and class
actively and unselfconsciously used it to treat a wide range of major and minor
ailments. The Romantic age, however, also marks the crucial moment when British
opium-eaters began to celebrate the drug, not for its medicinal powers, but for its
recreational properties, as seen especially in the works of John Keats, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey.