Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tracing the fragments of modernity
- Part I (De)Generating doubles: duality and the split personality in the prose writing of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde
- Part II The stripping of the halo: religion and identity in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, James ‘B. V.’ Thomson and Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Part III Infected ecstasy: addiction and modernity in the work of Thomas De Quincey, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Bram Stoker
- Introduction
- 8 A change in physical economy: Thomas De Quincey's confession
- 9 Coming like ghosts to trouble joy: Alfred Tennyson's ‘The Lotos Eaters’
- 10 Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood: Christina Rossetti's addictive market
- 11 The blood is the life: Bram Stoker's infected capital
- Conclusion: Ghost-script
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - The blood is the life: Bram Stoker's infected capital
from Part III - Infected ecstasy: addiction and modernity in the work of Thomas De Quincey, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Bram Stoker
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tracing the fragments of modernity
- Part I (De)Generating doubles: duality and the split personality in the prose writing of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde
- Part II The stripping of the halo: religion and identity in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, James ‘B. V.’ Thomson and Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Part III Infected ecstasy: addiction and modernity in the work of Thomas De Quincey, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Bram Stoker
- Introduction
- 8 A change in physical economy: Thomas De Quincey's confession
- 9 Coming like ghosts to trouble joy: Alfred Tennyson's ‘The Lotos Eaters’
- 10 Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood: Christina Rossetti's addictive market
- 11 The blood is the life: Bram Stoker's infected capital
- Conclusion: Ghost-script
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The habit was when a new batch arrived for whom there were no beds, to take those who were stupefied from opium and nearest death and remove them to make room for the new arrivals. Many were said to be buried alive. One man brought his wife to the hospital on his back and, she being in great agony, he tied a red neck handkerchief tightly round her waist to try and relieve the pain. When he came again to the hospital in the evening he heard that she was dead, and lying in the dead house. He sought her body to give it more decent burial than could be given there (the custom was to dig a large trench, put in forty or fifty corpses without coffins, throw lime on them and cover the grave). He saw the corner of his red handkerchief under several bodies which he removed, found his wife and saw that there was life in her.
In a letter to her son, written around 1875, Charlotte Stoker provided a first-hand account of the cholera outbreak that took place in Sligo, Ireland, in 1832. Taking into consideration the concentration upon contagious diseases from the 1860s onwards in British medical and social concerns, Stoker's mother's words draw together a series of issues that are intrinsic to this discussion, namely, the dangers of disease, opium treatment and the possibility that the supposed dead could still be animate.
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- Information
- Labyrinths of DeceitCulture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 256 - 283Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008