The Opium Connection: Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, and D. W. Griffith.

An essay is presented on the exchanges and temporalities associated with the First Opium War of 1840-1842 in the works of essayist Thomas de Quincey, writer Charles Dickens and film director D. W. Griffith. It offers some broad reflections of the war in the film "Broken Blossoms or the Yellow Man and the Girl" directed by Griffith, and how Dicken's fiction influenced Griffith's film art. It also examines how de Quincey connected his lifelong experience of opium with two decades of thinking.