George Eliot, Opium, and the Ambience of European Cities

In December 1860 George Eliot wrote to Barbara Bodichon, 'I have faith in the working-out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other church has presented. ...The highest "calling and election" is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance.' This might reasonably be supposed to be not a reference to personal experience of opium but merely an employment of an analogy that was by no means original: George Eliot is unlikely to have been familiar with Karl Marx's claim in 1844 that 'Religion ... is the opium of the people', but almost certainly knew of Novalis's earlier formulation, Ihre sogenannte Religion wirkt bloss wie ein Opiat: reizend, betaubend, Schmerzen aus Schwache stillend', their so-called religion functions simply as an opiate, stimulating numbing...