What Is a ‘Pipe Dream’?

The first appearance I could uncover of the term used in a comparable, though not identical manner to the way the phrase is used today is in Tales of Life and Death Volume 1 (1870) by Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley, a British politician, writer and sportsman.

While we can see the meaning taking shape here, the story itself seems to refer to pipes of tobacco, rather than a pipe with any hallucinogenic properties. Indeed, while many etymological studies of the term seem to suggest it refers to the fantastical works of England’s Romantic Poets (Shelley, Byron etc.) who were renowned opium users, its rise to prominence in the USA in the mid-to-late 19^th century is likely linked to the opium crisis that followed the Civil War.

The Civil War left a generation of Americans with long term pain conditions that doctors and surgeons increasingly sought to treat with morphine – the Smithsonian Magazine (January of 2018) featured the following story of a physician in New Orleans in 1870:

Not only did British and American capitalism thrive on the opium trade during the 19^th century (with the British fighting two wars to essentially force China to legalise the opium trade), they also used it as a key pillar of the Chinese Exclusion Act as they attempted to blame the dangers of opium addiction on immigrant railway workers.

However, with opium dens proliferating throughout major US cities by the 1870s, it would make far more sense for the phrase to have developed independently in America than to reference a literary movement that would have meant little to them.

With the first use commonly attributed to a Chicago Tribune article in 1890 – including by the OED as follows:

It must be noted that the phrase was already in such common use that it could be used in an 1884 speech to the House of Representatives by Hon. Frank Hiscock of New York:

As with many idioms, it’s impossible to pin down an exact point of origin, but by the point at which common use spills over into written documents, and based on the historical circumstances of the period preceding that, it’s fairly safe to say that ‘pipe dream’ likely took on its recognised modern meaning in the mid-19^th century in response to the America’s own opium crisis, though it may have evolved from similar colloquialisms in the UK.