Did high-society parties have nitrous oxide parties in Nineteenth century London?

Well, I don’t watch the show and as was pointed out, the way of administering it like this would probably result in a very small effect at best, BUT there certainly were nitrous oxide centered parties in the 19th Century. It actually continues today and is no laughing matter, since chronic abuse can cause serious health problems. I’ll freely admit, recreational laughing gas and ether use is a blindspot of mine (among many) as well as of most of the literature's at hand, but here’s a short version of what we know:

Joseph Priestley came upon nitrous oxide somewhere between 1771 and 1777. I’m not sure if contact with this substance is what causes the difference in dating of the discovery, but we do know that they were the same experiments which produced knowledge of oxygen as well. He called the gas “dephlogisticated nitrous air”.

Priestley was an eminent figure in the field of pneumatic chemistry and not too long after his discoveries, Dr. Thomas Beddoes established the Bristol Pneumatic Institute. Bristol was a spa town and Beddoes made sure that people knew about all the ground breaking pneumatic cures he and his colleagues offered at the Institution (19th century had its fair share of panaceas, claiming that various gases could be used to treat pretty much everything was not that far fetched at the time - although it did include carbon monoxide and cow’s breath).

At the tender age of 21, Humphry Davy enters the picture and also the Pneumatic Institute. He was a keen researcher of the effects of gases on the human organism. His organism to be precise, as he had something of an obsession with self-experimentation and came close to death several times as a result of having a whiff of some of the stuff they kept at the Institute. Strangely enough, nitrous oxide had somewhat of a bad reputation in the late 18h century amongst people in the know. But, Davy being Davy, he would not be deterred until his nose or mouth was in it. Well, this time he got lucky and in fact he described inhaling of the substance as being extremely pleasurable. He continued with his practice, which we might very easily call an addiction, up to the point where it’s sometimes claimed he inhaled up to 25 litres per day. When he had a toothache, he noticed that inhaling nitrous oxide helped with the pain and this is the beggining of the interest in the gas as an anesthetic, which was not very high for quite some time after Davy’s experimentation. It’s also from Davy where we get those parties. He continued expermenting with laughing gas on other people and he also introduced his simply fabulous habit to his poet friends. Among them for example Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was a fiend of various tastes (to be fair, they tended to stem from chronic illness and pain). Apparently it became very popular to use nitrous oxide at garden parties and it indeed was a pleasure of the higher, well educated, strata of society, especially those connected to the medical profession (the same is true of later favourite, ether)

A former attendant of a medical institution and a public entertainer Gardner Quincy Colton, introduced the drug to United States. He fancied himself a lecturer and used nitrous gas to demonstrate, well, how funny people are under the influence of nitrous oxide gas. During one of these demonstrations, dentist Horace Wells witnessed as one of the people being “experimented on” (whiffing laughing gas and acting silly in front of an audience) had nastily cracked his shin, but remarkably did not feel any pain (we don’t have a record of just how much angry he became after the effects wore off). Wells was astonished and decided to convince Colton to bring the gas to his office the next day. Then he, shall we say, pulled a Davy - he inhaled the gas and had his own tooth removed by a colleague of his. Impressed by the results he figured he just made an incredible discovery and wanted to publicly demonstrate the anesthetic effects of nitrous oxide to the medical establishment. A year later, he set up a demonstration at the Massachusets General Hospital in Boston - and it was a disaster. He miscalculated the dose and the patient made a loud sound when Wells began extracting his tooth. The nature of the scream is somewhat disputed, as it was supposedly not a one that a person makes during pain, but it nonetheless got Wells called a fraud. Despite few mishaps as the Wells demonstration, there were other successful ones and dentistry was in a dire need of an efffective anesthetic, which nitrous oxide had become in the latter part of the century.

Now, I am deeply dissatisfied with this answer and maybe there’s someone better equipped for it. I will definitely try to look into recreational use more and come back with something later. The parties definitely did exist, people supposedly acted all kinds of silly during them (becoming destructive to flower beds and such), but if the characters actually wanted to get high, they’d pinch their nose shut, put the silk bag into their mouth and inhale deeply.

Most of this can be found in:

W. D. A. Smith: Under the Influence. A History of Nitrous Oxide and Oxygen Anaesthesia (Park Ridge, IL: The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, 1982)

Thomas Dormandy: The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain (Yale University Press , 2006) - highly recommended as a further reading if you want to learn about anesthesia through the ages

I usually put a link to a song at the end of my answers, thematically connected to the topic. This time I’ll just tell you to go listen to that one song by Peaches.