THREE

Down and Out in Manchester and London

[i]

There was little chance of Thomas liking his new school, but his transition back into the classroom seems to have been as bad as he had feared. ‘From the glittering halls of the English nobility, I was transferred in one day to the cheerless … and rude benches of an antique school-room.’1 The headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, Charles Lawson, possessed a certain flamboyance, dressed as he was in ‘a complete suit of black velvet … lace ruffles at his wrists, black silk stockings, and diamond buckles on his shoes’, with a well-powdered peruke ‘projecting like a cauliflower, from behind’. But having spent fifty-one of his seventy-two years at the school, Lawson was out of enthusiasm and ‘apparently on the extreme verge of life’. Under his supervision, the curriculum revolved around Latin, Greek, and the Bible. The first class of the day began at seven in the morning and sometimes went on for over two hours, though the boys were expected to be finished breakfast and back at their lessons by half past nine. At noon, classes recessed for three hours, and then the boys returned to the oaken benches to work until five.2

Escorted by Hall, Thomas entered the school on Sunday, 9 November 1800, and was registered as ‘Thomas, son of the late Thomas de Quincey, merchant, Bath’.3 From the beginning, he disliked the upper schoolroom where he would be taught, for it was cavernous and presented a ‘dreary expanse’ of whitewash.4 Thomas and Hall arrived at the room and paced solemnly up to the front desk, where Thomas presented himself to Lawson, who handed him a volume of The Spectator and asked him to translate a section of one of Richard Steele’s essays. No task could have been more suited to his skills as a Latinist, and he dispatched it with great proficiency. Duly impressed, Lawson allowed himself the one and only compliment he ever paid Thomas, before enrolling him in his highest class.5

Like many other students in the school, Thomas was to stay as a boarder in Lawson’s home in Long Millgate, and shortly after his examination – indeed perhaps later that same Sunday – he was dropped off at his new lodgings. Years later he recalled ‘the horrors of my first night in that cave of despair’, but in other recollections he makes it clear that his first evening contained some pleasures. Guided by ‘a homely servant up dilapidated staircases’, he stumbled along ‘old worm-eaten passages’ until at length he was shown into a dimly lit room in which sat a company of about sixteen boys, two or three of whom came forward to welcome him. ‘Heavens!’ he recollected with some embarrassment, ‘how shocking to my too cultivated ears and too fastidious taste’ were their dialects. Yet he immediately noticed ‘the grave kindness and the absolute sincerity of their manner’. The students at Bath had more ‘graceful self-possession’, but the ‘best of them suffered by comparison with these Manchester boys in the qualities of visible self-restraint and of self-respect’.6

Homework that evening was a translation from Hugo Grotius’s De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1627). Thomas was impressed by the boys’ discussion of it, and especially so by the contribution of the fourteen-year-old Ashurst Turner Gilbert, the future bishop of Chichester, who stood up against the prevailing tenor of the conversation, and ‘revolutionized the whole logic’ of it. Thomas, however, could not entirely dissemble his ‘state of dejection’, and in an attempt to cheer him up, one of his new schoolmates brought out some brandy. It was the first time that Thomas had tried it, and he was astonished at the effect it had on him, for it worked a ‘rapid change’ in his ‘state of feeling’, and ‘at once reinstalled’ him in his ‘natural advantages for conversation’.7 Brandy, on many future evenings, was similarly to animate and soothe him.

Classes were soon under way, and it took only a short time for Thomas to discern that Lawson was no longer up to his job. Indeed, the two schoolfellows who joined him in the first form also sailed far beyond the headmaster, who inevitably became the butt of the trio’s merriment. Lawson would sit at his desk furiously cramming for a lesson on Sophocles, while ‘we never condescended to open our books, until the moment of going up, and were generally employed in writing epigrams upon his wig, or some such important matter’. Lawson was not about to give up, however. Through ‘pure zealotry of conscientiousness’, he still insisted on discharging all of his duties ‘to the last inch’, so that his pupils were confined in the classroom for much of the day, typically short-changed on the time supposed to be allotted for their meals, and given no opportunity for exercise or open air.8 It was a grinding routine that was harder on Lawson than it was on his students, but it soon began to take a toll on Thomas.

Yet apart from these strains, there were encouraging signs in the first months that he might reconcile himself to Manchester. His mother was trying to make it as appealing as possible. She paid for an ‘airy and cheerful’ private room that served him for both study and sleep. She sent ‘five guineas extra, for the purchase of an admission to the Manchester Library’. She bought him a piano, in order that he might indulge his ‘voluptuous enjoyment of music’ (though he soon decided that he would rather listen to a proficient than learn to play himself). What is more, he was benefiting from the school. His fellow students continued to inspire in him ‘a deep respect’. ‘My intercourse with those amongst them who had any conversational talents, greatly stimulated my intellect.’ On the annual speech day in December, he was asked to recite a Latin exercise on a topic remarkably well suited to his talents, and upon which he no doubt excelled: ‘Dolor ipse disertum fecerat’, a line from Ovid’s Metamorphoses which translates as ‘For grief inspired me then with eloquence.’9 It is a theme that underscores much of his finest writing.

Thomas also at this time developed a firm friendship with an old family friend, the Reverend John Clowes, a Church of England clergyman who had published several translations of the famous Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. It was Thomas’s first close connection with a published author. Clowes was fifty-seven years old at the time, but to Thomas he seemed much nearer to eighty, ‘a sublimated spirit dwelling already more than half in some purer world’. Their friendship was based on a shared enthusiasm for ‘literature – more especially the Greek and Roman literature’ – and Thomas took great pleasure in the fact that Clowes treated him as an equal. He called often at the clergyman’s home, an oasis of beauty and quiet in the centre of the city, and would typically be led by one of the ancient servants into the library, which featured marvellous stained-glass windows and a ‘sweet-toned organ’, and where Clowes would sit writing, reading, singing, and playing music. On perhaps the most memorable of their meetings, Clowes gave Thomas an edition of Homer’s Odyssey, and then ‘sat down to the organ, sang a hymn or two … chanted part of the liturgy, and finally, at my request, performed the anthem so well known in the English Church service – the collect for the seventh Sunday after Trinity – (Lord of all power and might)’. Thomas benefited enormously from the inspiration and solemnity of these performances, though he did not develop an admiration for Swedenborg, and Clowes never tried to bias him in that direction.10 His enduring interest in subjectivity, redemption, and spiritual insight, however, almost certainly owe a debt to these hours in Clowes’s company.

The schedule at Manchester Grammar School kept Thomas occupied for much of the day, and alone in his room in the evenings he spent most of his time reading. As regarded the classics, Euripides was his favourite Greek dramatist, while he preferred Livy, ‘both for style and matter, to any other of the Roman historians’. In English history, he was making himself ‘critically familiar’ with the period of the Civil War, ‘having been attracted by the moral grandeur of some who figured in that day’. And ‘already, at fifteen’, he had a thorough knowledge of ‘the great English poets’, including Thomas Chatterton, who had achieved notoriety in the 1760s by forging a series of poems supposedly written by a fifteenth-century parish priest named Thomas Rowley, and who had died in 1770 at just seventeen years old, an apparent suicide.11 Chatterton’s idealism, iconoclasm, and artfulness held immense appeal for Thomas, while the potent myth of Chatterton as the sensitive genius driven to an early grave by a callous society began to shape his own thoughts on self-representation.

None of the opportunities offered by the school, however, removed the sting of being sent there in the first place, and within six months he was irritable and dull. He outlined his distress in a letter to Altamont, who was sympathetic, if surprised. ‘The disorder you complain of is certainly of very recent acquirement, and therefore may the more easily be got the better of, as I sincerely hope it will, and speedily,’ he wrote on 5 May 1801. ‘When we were more acquainted you had no disposition to idleness at all.’12 Thomas had been more industrious in recent weeks than he cared to acknowledge to Altamont; nevertheless, Manchester Grammar School was turning out just as he had feared, or perhaps as he had decreed. He felt ill. He felt trapped. He felt angry.

The gloom was temporarily broken up by the summer holidays. Thomas, Pink, and Henry were to spend them with their mother, who was renting a cottage in Everton, at that time a ‘distinct’ and ‘well-known village upon the heights immediately above Liverpool’. Pink and Henry were to journey from their school at Horwich Moor down into Manchester, where Thomas was to meet them, and take them on to Everton.13 Unhelpfully, Mrs Quincey gave him this task even though she clearly doubted his ability to perform it: ‘I must repeat, do not let Henry go from you a moment, and let Pink mind the luggage.’ For all that, the trip seems to have passed without incident, as the boys wound their way from Manchester through to Liverpool, and then up the hill to Mr and Mrs Best’s cottage, 9 Middle Lane (now Everton Terrace). The cottage was so small that you could ‘reach the chimneys with your hat’, Mrs Quincey had told Thomas, but it had ‘a delightful view of the water’, and she was ‘persuaded’ that he would ‘like this place’.14

Across the street lived William Clarke, a banker, who called on Mrs Quincey ‘merely in the general view of offering neighbourly attentions to a family of strangers’, and who lent them books and brought them vegetables. With his knack for befriending adults, Thomas was soon on intimate terms with Clarke, and in one of his favourite roles: mentor. Every morning at dawn he crossed the street to Clarke’s house and read the Greek dramatist Aeschylus with him.15 It was also at Clarke’s that Thomas met a number of Liverpool’s most prominent Whig intellectuals, including the poet and historian William Roscoe, the physician and editor James Currie, and the minister and politician William Shepherd. In a later reminiscence, he maintained that these meetings gave him little pleasure: Roscoe was ‘a mere belle-lettrist’, Currie was ‘constitutionally phlegmatic’, and Shepherd was ‘a buffoon’.16

Yet even in the reminiscence, it is clear that Thomas had a good deal in common with these men, and that his interaction with them forced him to think more deeply about the composite nature of his own political sympathies. Shepherd was a vigorous critic of ‘the pious Hannah More’, and Thomas’s own dislike of her undoubtedly intensified as he sat and listened to these diatribes. Roscoe deplored the slave trade, as did Thomas, who admired the ‘boldness’ with which he wrote on the ‘popular side’ of the political spectrum, and the ‘great moral courage’ with which he defended his liberal views. Currie had recently produced his landmark edition of the works of Robert Burns, and Thomas talked ‘with and against’ him as his own knowledge of the poet steadily expanded.17 Mrs Quincey and Thomas were both reading from the Burns edition, but their reactions to it were very different. She thought Currie had erred by playing up Burns’s Jacobinism. Thomas thought the opposite, that Currie had gone out of his way to suppress the poet’s radical views. To some extent, in taking such a contrary position, Thomas may simply have been trying to bait his mother. But he seems also to have realized that the difference in their positions could be traced back to a fundamental contradiction in Currie, who embraced ‘the essential spirit of aristocracy’ even as he aligned himself with ‘partisan democrats’.18

Roscoe and Currie had one additional role to play that summer. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been their guest as recently as June 1800, when he visited Liverpool on his way north to take up residence at Greta Hall in Keswick in order that he might live and work near Wordsworth, who resided thirteen miles away at Town End, Grasmere. Coleridge saw ‘a great deal’ of Roscoe and Currie during his stay, and undoubtedly spoke to them of his many intellectual projects, including his work on the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which had been called for in response to the steady sale of the first edition, and which appeared in January 1801 in two volumes, the first of which reprinted the 1798 poems in a revised order, and the second of which contained a wealth of new material by Wordsworth.19 Yet for Thomas, perhaps the most exciting part of the new edition was the title page, as it was here that he learned for the first time that these poems had been written ‘by W. Wordsworth’, though in his famous ‘Preface’ to the collection Wordsworth also announced that four of the poems – including ‘The Ancyent Marinere’ – had in fact been ‘furnished’ by a ‘Friend’. Five months later, when Thomas arrived in Everton, he had still not been able to determine the identity of that ‘Friend’. It was almost certainly Roscoe and Currie who informed him that it was Coleridge.20

As grateful as he was for the information, Thomas quarrelled with one of the men who gave it to him – in all probability Roscoe, who valued Coleridge as a political writer, but was much less impressed with him as a poet. The Lyrical Ballads, Thomas knew, constituted ‘a grand renovation of poetic power… interesting not so much to England as to the human mind’. Roscoe and Currie, however, continued to believe in both the quality of their own verses, ‘and the general standard which they set up in poetry’. Thomas probably held his tongue for a while as he listened to the Liverpool men debate the relative merits of different poets, but at some point he must have told them flatly that they were labouring at a level risibly below Coleridge’s – ‘the difference being pretty much as between an American lake … and a carp pond’ – and he evidently caused great offence when he did so. To Thomas, Roscoe and Currie did not deserve to be as close to Coleridge as they were. He did. He understood Coleridge’s genius. They did not. They were ‘timid … imitators’ of outmoded poetic devices. He was a kindred spirit. Thereafter, he seems to have seen nothing of the two Liverpool men, but he acted prompdy on the knowledge he gained from them, searching ‘east and west, north and south, for all known works or fragments’ by Coleridge and Wordsworth.21

[ii]

And so passed away the summer of 1801, together with ‘the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of … Everton’. In August, Thomas was undoubtedly chafing at the thought of returning to Manchester Grammar School, but when he arrived back at Lawson’s house in Long Millgate, or just shortly thereafter, he received some wonderful news: Lady Carbery was coming to live in Manchester! Mrs Schreiber was still in poor health, and White had suggested that they relocate to the city as a much cheaper alternative to him travelling out to them. Thomas was delighted. Every night Lawson gave him leave ‘to adjourn for four or five hours to the drawing-room of Lady Carbery. Her anxiety about Mrs Schreiber would not allow of her going abroad into society, unless upon the rarest occasions. And I, on my part, was too happy in her conversation – so bold, so novel, and so earnest – voluntarily to have missed any one hour of it.’22

Lady Carbery and Thomas occupied themselves in a number of different ways. White invited them to tour his personal museum, which Thomas had visited as a boy. This time he was not shown the clock-case which housed the mummified old lady, but he and Lady Carbery did see another of the museum’s great prizes, for White drew them into a corner and showed them a skeleton. ‘That’, he said, ‘is a cast from the celebrated Lancashire highwayman’ Edward Higgins, and he proceeded to regale them with a remarkable story. At the time of Higgins’s execution for robbery, White was a student of the anatomist William Cumberland Cruikshank, who regarded Higgins as ‘so uncommonly fine’ a specimen of the male physique that he wanted the privilege of dissecting him, and so spared ‘no money or exertion … to get into possession of him with the least possible delay. But not everything went according to plan. By ‘some special indulgences from one of the under-sheriffs beyond what the law would strictly have warranted’, the hanged man was ‘cut down considerably within the appointed time, was instantly placed in a chaise-and-four, and was thus brought so prematurely into the private rooms’ of Cruikshank, that life was not ‘as yet entirely extinct’. White was among the three or four students present at the time, and to one of them Cruikshank observed quietly: ‘“I think the subject is not quite dead: pray put your knife in (Mr X. Y.) at this point.” That was done; a solemn finis was placed to the labours of the robber, and perhaps a solemn inauguration to the labours of the student.’ This anecdote – in its combination of the ludicrous and the grotesque – ‘struck’ Thomas ‘a good deal’, as it ‘seemed to imply that all the gentlemen in the dissecting-room were amateurs’ in the business of producing corpses.23 It was one of his first insights into an enduring preoccupation: murder as a fine art.

He and Lady Carbery were also involved in other more edifying activities. Under the tutelage of the noted Manchester evangelical clergyman Cornelius Bayley, Lady Carbery was learning Hebrew, and she agreed to teach Thomas the language (as he had previously taught her Greek), though the project failed to gain much momentum and was soon dropped. More memorably, one day Thomas decided ‘with a beating heart’ to read Lady Carbery ‘The Ancyent Marinere’. He did not dare seek ‘sympathy from her or from anybody else upon that part’ of the Lyrical Ballads which ‘belonged to Wordsworth’. Those poems were sacred. But the ‘wildness’ of the mariners adventures convinced him that he might hazard Lady Carbery’s approval of Coleridge. Initially, ‘she listened with gravity and deep attention’. Yet the poem did not maintain its hold on her, for when they reviewed it, she ‘laughed at the finest parts, and shocked me by calling the mariner himself “an old quiz”’. A measure of redemption came later when Lady Carbery ‘suddenly repeated by heart’, to Dr Bayley, ‘the beautiful passage: – “It ceased, yet still the sails made on”’. Bayley ‘seemed petrified: and at last, with a deep sigh, as if recovering from the spasms of a new birth, said – “I never heard anything so beautiful in my whole life”’.24

With the Christmas holidays approaching, Thomas was once again called upon to deliver a speech at the annual school assembly. His family was in the audience, as was Lady Carbery, who ‘made a point of bringing in her party every creature whom she could influence’, including Lord Massey ‘with his brother and his lovely wife’, Lord Grey de Wilton, and Lord Belgrave. When his name was announced, Thomas rose and declaimed Latin verses (presumably that he himself had written) on the recent British subjection of Malta. ‘Furious … was the applause which greeted me: furious was my own disgust.’ Thomas wanted praise – but not for excelling amongst schoolboys. Anyone with a quarter of his talent could do that. It was a school assembly. The audience would have clapped for anything, no matter whether his verses had been twice as bad or four times as good. And why was he in the position of having to collude in his own humiliation anyway? It was all so irritating, so childish. After he finished, he went and sat down right beside Lady Carbery, rather than returning to his ‘official place as one of the trinity who composed the head class’. It was a gesture intended to make his dissatisfaction public. He did not want to be in that room and with those boys. He wanted to be with adults. He wanted to be away. That night Lady Carbery told him ‘that she had never witnessed an expression of such settled misery and also (so she fancied) of misanthropy, as that which darkened my countenance in those moments of apparent public triumph’.25 Thomas was reaching the end of his rope.

Meanwhile, for reasons that were not entirely clear to him, his mother had decided against living in Bath, and had embarked on an extensive tour of England in search of another place to live. She had a number of requirements, including ‘good medical advice’, ‘elegant (or, what most people might think aristocratic) society’, and a local clergyman who adhered faithfully to the articles of the English Church as ‘interpreted by Evangelical divinity’, for her views were now ‘precisely those of her friend Mrs Hannah More, of Wilberforce, of Henry Thornton, of Zachary Macaulay (father of the historian), and generally of those who were then known amongst sneerers as “the Clapham saints”’.26

When at last Mrs Quincey made a decision, however, she was guided primarily by price, which overturned her other conditions, and which led her to purchase ‘the Priory’, ‘an ancient house … on a miniature scale’ attached to St John’s Church in Chester, for the ‘unintelligibly low’ sum of £500. Internally, ‘the glory of the house … lay in the monastic kitchen’, while ‘the little hall of entrance, the dining-room, and principal bedroom, were in a modest style of elegance’. Externally, a ‘miniature pleasure-ground’ contained ‘a pile of ruined archways’ surmounted ‘by the exquisite beauty of the shrubs, wild flowers, and ferns’.27 Buying the property, and then arranging for major renovations, took a great deal of Mrs Quincey’s time, as was plain when she wrote to Thomas. ‘I have two letters of yours in my desk, but not easy to find, and I cannot answer,’ she informed him. ‘… I remember you mentioned something about cravats, which I never answered, nor can I now.’28

It was February before she found time to pay him a visit. Eight weeks had passed since the Christmas assembly debacle, and it is clear that his frustration had only grown worse. It is also clear that his mother had no inkling of it. Finally, on the morning of Tuesday, 16 February 1802, they had an argument in which Mrs Quincey’s angry teenage son gave her an earful. Filled with ‘amazement and anguish’, she returned to Chester, from where she wrote to him two days later. He had proposed leaving the school and spending two years at home before enrolling at Oxford. ‘Surely’, she countered, ‘Mr Lawson’s school may afford you better opportunities for study than you could have in any other family!’ He seems to have suggested that he would not lower himself by competing for an Oxford scholarship. ‘What to say to you on the subject of pecuniary advantages I scarcely know,’ she declared, ‘since you are so unhappy as to think £100 a year added to your own fortune despicable, and that the honourable competition with your equals for the reward of literary superiority is a degradation.’ He touted what he believed to be his noble lineage. ‘Were you to stir up doubtful and remote pretensions to a line of ancestry’, she cautioned him, ‘you would become truly ridiculous.’ He told her he was destined for preeminence. She was not so sure. ‘I cannot think you believe a total revolt from our rule will make you in any sense great if you have not the constituents of greatness in you, or that waiting the common course of time and expediency will at all hinder the maturity of your powers, if you have them.’ He argued vociferously in favour of his liberty. She insisted on his obedience. ‘I would urge you to consider that the language you use when you say “I must” or “I will” is absolute disobedience to your father’s last and most solemn act, which appoints you to submit to the direction of your guardians, to Mr Hall and myself in particular, in what regards your education.’29

Mrs Quincey sent the letter and waited two weeks. No reply. So she wrote again. She was not going to back down, but he had made his point and she was genuinely worried about him. ‘Now that I see you threatened with uncommon danger I must endeavour to help you,’ she asserted, ‘though I may err in the means, or you may defeat them; my tenderness shall follow you through every change and period of life; if the world forsakes you (a probable thing, though not in the catalogue of your present expectations), I cannot.’ But having sounded a fairly conciliatory note in her opening, she went on to push her piety at him in a way that seems likely to have goaded the defiance she was trying to subdue. ‘At some period of your life you must be convinced, either to your dismay or advantage, that every human being is brought upon this stage of existence for the great purposes of glorifying God above all, and of doing good, and preparing for his own permanent happiness.’ Thomas’s problem was that he was pursuing ‘self glory’, and its ‘monstrous adjuncts … independence and pride’. He set far too high a value on ‘the most dangerous faculty of the mind, the imagination’, which will ‘desolate’ his life and hopes ‘if it be not restrained and brought under religious government’. He was embracing the wrong books: ‘Let your daily reading be the works of men who were neither infidels nor Jacobins’, a directive she issued without naming specific authors, though she no doubt had Currie in mind, and perhaps even Wordsworth and Coleridge. Thomas needed to change course, and that meant embracing the right book: ‘I command you, in the name of that God whom you must serve or lose, that you do conscientiously read every day at least a chapter in the Gospels or Epistles.’30

Thomas did respond to this letter, but he did so in a manner that was unlikely to ease the tensions between them, as he undoubtedly recognized. He began pointedly by addressing his mother as ‘Mrs de Quincey’, perhaps as a way of signalling right from the start that he intended to defy her even as to her preference in her own surname, and perhaps also to remind her that, in flip-flopping from ‘Quincey’ to ‘de Quincey’ and back again, she too had shown signs of pride and uncertainty.31 He then proceeded to list his grievances, which broke down into three main categories. One, he was lonely. ‘Naturally, I am fond of solitude; but every one has times when he wishes for company.’ Two, he detested Manchester. ‘In this place trade is the religion, and money is the god. Every object I see reminds me of those occupations which run counter to the bent of my nature … I cannot stir out of doors but I am nosed by a factory, a cotton-bag, a cotton-dealer, or something else allied to that most detestable commerce.’ And three, his health was in steep decline. A number of factors were involved, including most prominently the ‘want of exercise’, ‘the badness of the air’, ‘the short time one has to eat one’s dinner in’, and the atrocious medical attention he was receiving, for he was now under the care of an aged quack who had prescribed an unvarying consumption of ‘one horrid mixture, that must have suggested itself to him when prescribing for a tiger’, and that Thomas was convinced was doing him far more harm than good. ‘To fight simultaneously with such a malady and such a medicine, seemed really too much.’ ‘Gradually the liver became affected: and connected with that affection arose, what often accompanies such ailments, profound melancholy.’32

There may also have been yet another reason why Thomas wished to leave Manchester. In a report issued only a few years after this time, school officials lamented that ‘the resorting to taverns and intercourse with women of the town’ had become ‘a fashion amongst the Boys in the higher classes of the school, which no vigilance of the masters can suppress’. Thomas seems to anticipate these concerns when he explains to his mother that at ‘Lawson’s… there is a form of restraint kept up’, but ‘any person may elude’ it. ‘I could prove this to you from many instances of the most unbridled licentiousness – which have fallen under my own observation… Here I have no motive for resisting the temptation to enjoy that unrestrained liberty which is continually offered to me; – at home, whilst I retained any shame, I should have at least one motive for curbing my passions.’33 Thomas’s taste for prostitutes developed at around this time, and it seems probable that in this letter he is alluding to his first sexual encounters with ‘women of the town’. The experience had confused him, for while he had ‘no motive for resisting the temptation’, he clearly felt distressed at his inability to curb his passions. He was safer at home. In Manchester, he was fast losing his sense of shame.

Mrs Quincey had a mixed reaction to Thomas’s long roll call of complaints. In the main, she was annoyed. ‘Must you govern me or must I govern you?’ she asked him sharply. ‘I see no use in repeating the same things, or all the new ones in the world, if you only say the old one, that you are miserable.’ She understood that he wanted to leave Lawson’s, but where was he going to go, and how was he going to employ his time ‘to better advantage’?34 She wanted answers on these issues, and Thomas was not addressing them. Further, one section of his letter must really have made her blood boil. Where on earth did he find the gall to sneer at the Manchester cotton trade? His father had been ‘allied to that most detestable commerce’, and it had brought him both honour and wealth, as she no doubt forcefully reminded him. Thomas, however, was not in a mood for listening, and he scoffed at his father’s legacy even as he prepared to make requests to enjoy more of the fruits of it.

Yet his letter did have some effect. By late April, Mrs Quincey had consented to his appeal to be allowed to leave school well before the end of term, though she did not invite him to live at the Priory: ‘it is sufficient to say that the necessity for this affair being settled before you come home is more than ever apparent’. Instead, she paid for him to return to Mr and Mrs Best’s cottage at Everton, where she no doubt hoped that he would be restored by relaxation and the fresh sea air. She also agreed to ‘produce the £100 a year’ that he seems to have been requesting as a kind of allowance, but first she needed more details from him. Would he please write to her by 26 May to inform her of his plans ‘within the compass of the £100 a year?’35

His answer arrived a week after the deadline his mother had specified, and once again seems to have been designed to provoke rather than to propitiate. Mrs Quincey should probably have taken a deep breath, and responded when she felt calmer. But she let her frustration get the better of her, and in a heated letter she berated her son and drove them both much nearer to the breaking point. ‘These opinions of yours at sixteen’, she snapped, ‘have probably been suggested, certainly swelled into importance, by the advocates for early emancipation and other preposterous theories.’ She sincerely lamented his illness, ‘and with tenfold concern because it is produced by your sick mind, which no earthly physician can cure’. She was tired of his deliberately confrontational stance: ‘you tell me that my warm desire for a thing has strengthened your hatred to it’. She brought in Hall to try and broker a deal, and she was happy to sign any agreement Thomas reached with him. But negotiating with Hall, Thomas shot back, was like negotiating with an ‘impassive granite block’, and the two failed to find any common ground. Mrs Quincey even agreed to an early removal to Oxford, though Thomas now spoke ‘doubtfully’ about even wanting ‘to go to college’. By late June, after months of bickering and wrong-headedness on both sides, mother and son reached deadlock, for he refused to ‘unfold’ himself about his future plans, and she would not grant the £100 allowance until she knew what he intended to do.’36 Exasperated and clinging to the last vestiges of her authority, she pulled the financial plug on the Everton cottage, and in July Thomas was back as a student at Manchester Grammar School.

[iii]

Mrs Quincey may have won the battle, but she was about to lose the war. Within only a few weeks of returning to the school, Thomas was suffering from all the old symptoms of ill-health and unhappiness, in addition to the humiliation of being forced to return. He made a decision: he was leaving. Lawson would not like it. Neither would Hall. Neither would his mother. But he could see no other way out of this misery. If no amount of effort on his part solved his problems, why not simply run away from them? His mother was not listening to him when he wrote as a schoolboy. Perhaps he would make a stronger impression when he wrote from a position of liberty. She wanted him to stay at the school. She insisted that he stay. However she could not make him stay. ‘Under the whirl of tumultuous indignation and of new-born hope’ which ‘suddenly transfigured’ his ‘whole being’, Thomas committed himself to bolting.37

From his guardians’ point of view, as he later conceded, his decision was incomprehensible. He had already been at the school for nineteen months. All he had to do was to hold on for another year and a half and he would be eligible for the £50 bursary, a crucial supplement that would enable him to top up his patrimonial allowance, and that would place him at Oxford at around the time of his eighteenth birthday on an ‘adequate income’ of £200 a year.38 Surely that was reasonable? Surely he could reconcile himself to that?

He could not. Thomas remembered his resolution as ‘the sole capital error’ of his boyhood, and he wished that he had been wise enough to listen to whispers of ‘monitorial wisdom’ that had warned him against ‘the evil choice’. At one point he blamed his decision on his own ‘wilful despair’ and ‘resolute abjuration’ of hope. Yet at another he denied that it was his fault, and claimed that he was right to fight back against his mother and his guardians. ‘The steady rebellion upon my part in one-half, was a mere human reaction of justifiable indignation; but in the other half it was the struggle of a conscientious nature … feeling it as the noblest of duties to resist … those that would have enslaved me.’ The leading factor in his decision to flee, however, seems to have been his conviction that a ‘mere excess of bodily suffering and mental disappointments’ left him no choice.39

He quickly began to prepare a course of action. Money was needed, and with only two pounds in his pocket, he wrote to Lady Carbery and requested a loan of five guineas. Her response was a letter enclosing twice that amount. Then, he took Ashurst Turner Gilbert into his confidence. He wanted to tip three of Lawson’s servants one guinea each, as it was the proper, gentlemanly thing to do for those whose ‘daily labours’ had been increased by his residence in the house. Since he could not pay them without prematurely disclosing his plans, however, he gave Gilbert the three guineas and asked him to distribute them after he had made his escape. His mother had drummed politeness into him so thoroughly that he made it a priority even when he was running away! Finally, he advanced a small sum to a groom. His plan was to pack up a parcel of books and clothes for himself, and then put everything else – including his growing library – into a large trunk. On the appointed morning, the groom was to steal up to his room, help him to remove the trunk, and then take it off to the carrier, who would forward it on to the Priory. Nothing was to be left behind. Thomas wanted to make it clear that he was gone for good. With these stratagems all in place, he found himself with roughly nine guineas remaining. It was enough, he calculated, to allow him to live for about three weeks at the cheapest inns.40

Now, where to go? Not unexpectedly, his initial choice was to travel north to the English Lakes. They had long held for him ‘a secret fascination, subtle, sweet, fantastic, and even from [his] seventh or eighth year, spiritually strong’ because of their close proximity to his native county of Lancashire, but more significantly, because ‘this lovely region’ was the home of Wordsworth, whom he longed to meet, and with whom he already dreamt of forming a close friendship. The more he thought about it, though, the more he realized that he needed to wait. The principle of ‘veneration’ was ‘by many degrees too strong’ in him for any face-to-face meeting at this point, while the thought of appearing before the poet as a ‘homeless vagrant’ horrified him. As a result, he quietly put it around that he was planning to run away to the Lakes ‘in the hope of thus giving a false direction to any pursuit that might be attempted’, and then set his sights on a walking tour through Wales, where the landscape had so impressed him two years earlier when he and Westport had travelled to Holyhead. Adding to the attractiveness of this plan was the thought that his route to Wales would take him through Chester, where he could make a clandestine stop at the Priory, and speak to his sister Mary.41 Their mother would by that point know of his flight, and while Mary would probably not be able to stop her from fuming, she could at least assure her that Thomas was safe.

Naturally, in the midst of these well-laid plans, there was a hitch. On Monday, 19 July, less than twenty-four hours before he was set to leave, Thomas unexpectedly received a strange letter, postmarked from Hamburgh, and addressed in a foreign hand to ‘A Monsieur Monsieur de Quincy, Chester’. Hastily he tore it open. Out dropped a bank draft for ‘about forty guineas’. At first he thought it was some kind of gift from Providence designed to aid him at this most critical moment, but as he read through, he was able to piece together that it was dated from some place in Normandy, and addressed to a poor emigrant, who was a relative of the French sculptor and archaeologist Quatremère de Quincy, and who now in the summer of 1802 had a chance to return to France because of the recent Peace of Amiens. ‘Such an obscure person’, however, was ‘naturally unknown to any English post-office’, and thus the letter had been forwarded to Thomas, ‘as the oldest male member of a family at that time necessarily well known in Chester’. His initial plan was to carry the letter to the Manchester post office at some point that day, as he was very anxious not to be thought a thief. But he was ‘unable to carve out any opportunity’ amidst the burdens of Lawson’s schedule, and ‘without a distinct explanation in my own person, exonerating myself, on the written acknowledgement of the post-office, from all farther responsibility, I was most reluctant to give up the letter’.42 So he tucked it away with a promise to himself that he would deal with it as soon as he had secured his freedom.

At five o’clock the boys finished their classes and adjourned for the ‘solemn evening service of the English Church – read by Mr Lawson’, after which the school ‘dissolved itself’. Thomas distinctly recalled the light of that summer evening, ‘broad and gaudy’, as the sun lingered above the horizon, and the clock passed from six to seven to eight, at which time the ‘students were all mustered; and the names of all were challenged according to the order of precedency. My name, as usual, came first. Stepping forward, I passed Mr Lawson, and bowed to him, looking earnestly in his face, and saying to myself, “He is old and infirm, and in this world I shall not see him again.”’ Thomas was right: he never did see Lawson again, but he remembered him with generosity. ‘Very sincerely I respected him as a conscientious man’, and as a ‘sound and accurate (though not brilliant) scholar. Personally I owed him much gratitude; for he had been uniformly kind to me, and … I grieved at the thought of the mortification I should inflict upon him.’43

Thomas left the ceremony, climbed the stairs to his room, and retired to bed. It was a difficult night, and by half past three he was up, resolved though full of conflicting emotion. ‘I lingered … as under some sense of dim perplexity, or even of relenting love for the very captivity itself which I was making so violent an effort to abjure.’ He went to his window and gazed out ‘with deep emotion at the ancient collegiate church’ of St Mary (now Manchester Cathedral), and watched as it began to ‘crimson with the deep lustre of a cloudless July morning’. How peaceful the dawn was. How agitated he felt. He turned from the window, dressed himself and, with hat and gloves in hand, prepared to leave. But again he lingered. ‘Here I had read and studied through all the hours of night; and, though true it was, that, for the latter part of this time, I had lost my gaiety and peace of mind’, yet ‘as a boy passionately fond of books … I could not fail to have enjoyed many happy hours in the midst of general dejection.’44

His final moments in the room were later framed in a way that clearly suggests a parallel to his experiences in the bedchamber of his dead sister Elizabeth.45 ‘Suddenly a sort of trance, a frost as of some death-like revelation’, wrapped round him, and he was taken back to the incident almost exactly two years earlier when he and Westport visited the Whispering Gallery, and Thomas was convinced that he heard the softest of sounds seized upon and returned as volleying thunders. What if the words he was now whispering to himself were heard throughout the world? What if the decision he was making to leave Manchester came back to haunt him in huge and menacing shapes? These fantasies staggered him. And then, just as had been the case in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, ‘a sudden step upon the stairs’ broke up his dream, and recalled him to himself. The groom was coming to assist him with his trunk. Thomas surveyed ‘the chair, hearth, writing-table, and other familiar objects’, before turning to face a portrait of the seventeenth-century Duchess of Somerset ‘which hung over the mantelpiece; the eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful, and the whole countenance so radiant with divine tranquillity, that I had a thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, to gather consolation from it’. As an idealized representation of female beauty that is at once celestial and maternal, the duchess seems to have both invoked and displaced Elizabeth.46 Thomas stared at her picture as the old church clock chimed that it was now six in the morning. He leaned forward, kissed the portrait, and left the room.

The groom was waiting. He retrieved Thomas’s massive trunk, hoisted it up on to his shoulders, and began a slow and steady descent, while Thomas took his much smaller package and glided down before him to the foot of the stairs. When, however, the groom neared Lawson’s quarters, his nerve faltered, his foot slipped, and the trunk falling from his shoulders, careened down the stairs, and slammed into Lawson’s bedroom door ‘with the noise of twenty devils’. Both Thomas and the groom thought that all was lost, but the ludicrousness of the situation soon took over, and when the groom ‘sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter’, Thomas joined in. As a matter of course they expected the headmaster to appear, but no sound issued from his room. ‘Mr Lawson’, Thomas concluded, ‘had a painful complaint, which oftentimes keeping him awake, made his sleep, when it did come, peculiarly deep.’47

Gathering courage from the silence, the groom picked up the trunk again, reached the bottom of the stairs without further incident, and passed with Thomas out into Long Millgate, where he placed the trunk in a wheelbarrow and departed for the carrier’s. Thomas stood for a few moments watching him as he made his way down the street, and then set off himself on a ‘south-western route’, a volume of Euripides in one pocket, and a volume of Wordsworth in the other. Looking back on this morning from a distance of more than half a century, he characterized his decision to flee as ‘a ruin which reached him ‘even at this day by its shadows’.48 He had crossed the Rubicon. And fiercer trials lay immediately in wait. He was not yet seventeen years old.

[iv]

What to do with the ‘odious responsibility’ of the letter? It weighed heavily on him as, two hours after he left Manchester, he made his way into the ‘cheerful little town of Altrincham’. He had his breakfast here and rested for about an hour, before regaining the road to Chester. During the remainder of that eventful day, he covered an additional twenty-two miles, exulting already in the enormously beneficial influence of the air and the exercise, and stopping in the evening at a roadside inn to enjoy a ‘safe and profound night’s rest’. Chester was still eighteen miles away and, towards the close of the following day, he enjoyed the ‘matchless spectacle’ of an ‘elaborate and pompous sunset hanging over the mountains of North Wales’. Lines from Wordsworth’s ‘exquisite poem’ ‘Ruth’ came to his mind, and Thomas recited them as he neared the town, where he found an inn and spent the night.49

The next morning, he set himself the task of getting rid of the letter. He felt certain that, in the fifty hours that had elapsed since his flight from Manchester, two separate parties – one from the school, the other from the post office – must be in pursuit of him, and he worried too that if he walked through the Chester streets he might be recognized by one of his mother’s servants. Unable to think in the cramped quarters of his room, he slipped quietly from the inn, shaped a course along the medieval city walls, and then descended into an obscure lane which gradually brought him to the banks of the River Dee. Here he found himself all alone, with the exception of a woman who was distant about a quarter of a mile and walking towards him. Suddenly Thomas heard the roaring of water, and was amazed to see what looked like a small tidal wave surging up the river from behind her. Both he and the woman ‘ran like hares’ for a short distance, and then stood together as the wave rushed by ‘with the ferocious uproar of a hurricane’, and a ‘salute of waters’ that touched their feet. That, the woman explained, was ‘the Bore’, a natural phenomenon on the Dee that occurs when high sea tides form a wave that travels up the river. As the two discussed the event, it occurred to Thomas that this woman might be just the person he needed to help him solve the problem of the letter. He explained his situation to her, begged to put his thanks ‘into the shape of half-a-crown’, and was no doubt immensely relieved when she agreed to assist him. Two hours later she was back from the post office with the very welcome news that the letter had been safely returned and all was well.50

That left the problem of the Priory, where he needed to get word to Mary about his plans without arousing the suspicions of his mother. At dusk, he reconnoitred the house, hoping in some way to attract his sister’s attention, but instead his interest was immediately arrested by the unexpected sight of beautiful Arab and Persian horses in the grounds, as well as a host of extra servants, all of which signalled to him that his uncle Penson was on temporary leave from India and residing there. Thomas went away, returned in an hour with a note for Mary, and gave it to one of his uncle’s servants, with a request that he would convey it to ‘the young lady whose address it bore’. Not more than a minute later, who glided in amongst the miniature ruins of the Priory ‘but my bronzed Bengal uncle! A Bengal tiger would not more have startled me’.51 The runaway was taken inside and arraigned.

Did he have any idea what he had put them through? As soon as the school officials discovered he was gone, they had sent a letter to Mrs Quincey on a ‘well mounted’ express, which must have galloped by Thomas at around noon on the first day of his flight, and which arrived at the Priory about three o’clock. More distressingly, that same day, and less than an hour later, a second communication arrived, this time from the post office, ‘explaining the nature and value of the letter that had been so vexatiously thrust’ into his hands. What were they to think? Mary alone was certain that he was innocent. As soon as she heard the news, she arranged for a male escort and a female servant to accompany her in a carriage-and-four to the Lake District, as the rumour was that Thomas had headed in that direction, and she was determined to speak with him before anyone else did. And now here he was skulking around the Priory while his sister was off on some wild-goose chase! Had he given any thought at all to the kind of example he was setting as the oldest son? Granted, the issue of the letter had now been resolved, but what were his two brothers to make of his example of ‘wilful insubordination’ at school? Thomas’s ‘conscience smote’ him. He had not thought of his brothers, and his mother’s ‘sorrowful suggestion’ that they might follow his example ‘thrilled’ him with ‘remorse’.52

If he could have explained the depth and corrosiveness of his misery, he felt that his mother would instantly have sympathized with him, but his heart was freighted with what he called the ‘insupportable … burden of the Incommunicable’. ‘At this moment, sitting in the same room of the Priory with my mother, knowing how reasonable she was – how patient of explanations – how candid – how open to pity – not the less I sank away in a hopelessness that was immeasurable from all effort at explanation.’ It was just as in that distressing dream of his childhood when, from ‘languishing impotence to face … the difficulty’ in front of him, he lay down ‘without a struggle before some all-conquering lion’. They were too different. His mother was ‘predisposed to think ill of all causes that required many words’, while he was ‘predisposed to subtleties of all sorts and degrees’.53

In his uncle, he found an unexpected ally, and through his intercession two different alternatives were discussed: Thomas was granted permission to stay at the Priory; or he could pursue his original intention of walking amongst the Welsh mountains, provided that he agreed to do so ‘upon the slender allowance of a guinea a-week’. It was an easy choice. He knew that his mother was ‘ready to extend … her wonted kindness; but not that sort of kindness which could make me forget that I stood under the deepest shadows of her displeasure’. Every hour in the house increased his agitation. He could not even wait for Mary’s return.54 As soon as it was possible, he lit out for Wales.

His first stop seems to have been at the request of his mother, who had old friends – a Mrs Warrington and a Mrs Parry – residing in the Flintshire vale of Gresford. Thomas’s stay with them was short. They ‘forced’ him into society rather more than he wanted, and he was put off by their highly manicured pleasure gardens: ‘even the little brooks were trained to “behave themselves”’. He travelled next to ‘the fine vale of Llangollen’, where he visited Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Better known as the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, these two aristocratic women had retired to Wales over twenty years earlier to devote themselves to literature, gardening, and seclusion. Thomas discussed Wordsworth with them, but they were unimpressed, a response that he almost invariably took as a kind of personal insult. ‘They must have felt a very slight interest in myself,’ he asserted, and ‘I grieve to say that my own feelings were not more ardent towards them.’55

He pushed on to Bangor, where for some weeks he rented ‘a very miniature suite of rooms’, and where he probably was on 15 August when he marked his seventeenth birthday. His landlady was a loquacious woman who took great pride in the fact that she had once served in the family of the Bishop of Bangor, Dr William Cleaver. One evening during Thomas’s stay she dined with Cleaver, and happened to mention that she had taken in a lodger. Cleaver reminded her that they lived on the highroad to Holyhead, so that a multitude of English and Irish swindlers were likely to find themselves travelling through Bangor. ‘O my lord, I really don’t think that this young gentleman is a swindler,’ she replied, before returning home and tactlessly repeating her remarks to Thomas. ‘You don’t think me a swindler?’ he exploded. ‘For the future, I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it.’56 And with that he packed up and left. Such a reaction suggests more than just his gentlemanly sense of honour or his teenage touchiness. The rumours or the guilt surrounding his possession of the ‘Monsieur Monsieur de Quincy’ letter had clearly followed him to Bangor, in his conscience and maybe beyond. Thomas was already very adept at inflating his own anxiety, and it was often the case that ‘the crime which might have been, was in [his] eyes the crime which had been’. Or perhaps his tidy account of how the letter was returned by the woman he met on the banks of the Dee conceals a much murkier set of circumstances?57

Two and a half hours of walking out of Bangor brought him to Caernarfon, but here he found no lodgings that suited him, ‘and for some time, therefore, having a small reserve of guineas, I lived very much at inns’. Indeed, he found comfortable places to stay at ‘intermitting distances of twelve to sixteen miles’ everywhere from Shrewsbury, Llangollen, Llanrwst, and Conway, through Dolgellau, Tan-y-Bwlch, Harlech, and Barmouth, to ‘the sweet solitudes of Cardiganshire’ and ‘the gorgeous wood scenery of Montgomeryshire’. As summer gradually passed into autumn, Thomas could not imagine a ‘happier life … than this vagrancy’. In the days, he embraced the freedom, the fresh air, and the vigorous walking, all of which were steadily restoring his physical and mental health. In the evenings, he enjoyed the music of the Welsh harp, read when books were available, and honed his skills as a conversationalist, where he prided himself on two essential qualities: ‘first, an inexhaustible fertility of topics, and … secondly, a prematurely awakened sense of art applied to conversation’.58

He made several new friends in these perambulations, including two lawyers, both of whom he bumped into often as they made their rounds ‘on market-days through all the principal towns in their districts’. He also met an accomplished young German named De Haren, who introduced him to the German language, which he picked up with his usual precocity, and which he began to study in the works of such writers as Jean Paul Richter, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, and Johann Georg Hamann.59 Further, it was probably in late September or early October that Thomas stayed for three pleasant days with a family of young Welsh Methodists, who – it has been plausibly suggested – lived in a large house that has since been demolished, but which used to stand on the farm now known as Glanllynnau, which lies on the main road between Afonwen and Criccieth. When Thomas arrived, the parents were away at a Methodist meeting, but a number of the sons and daughters were on hand, and he soon made himself useful to them. ‘Here I wrote … a letter about prize-money for one of the brothers, who had served on board an English man-of-war; and, more privately, two letters to sweethearts for two of the sisters.’ However, when the parents returned, their ‘churlish faces’ told Thomas that he was no longer welcome, and he set out again.60

Cost often shaped his movements. Sometimes he encountered ‘preposterously low prices’, such as when he lived with cottagers and could spend as little as one guinea in every three weeks. But in other places, accommodations – including the ‘expense of a bed and the chambermaid’ – totalled as much as half-a-guinea a day, which was three times more than he could afford. Part of his solution was to carry a canvas tent, which he himself manufactured, and which he used roughly nine nights in every two weeks to avoid paying for lodgings. Such ingenuity created its own set of problems, though: ‘This tent, as may be imagined, was miserably small; both to make it more portable, and also on account of the tent-pole, which, to avoid notice and trouble, was no more than a common walking cane.’ Moreover, sleeping in the fields disturbed the cattle, and Thomas lay awake ‘in constant anxiety’ lest one of them ‘should break into my preserve, and poach her heavy foot into my face’. It was also getting much colder now. Barring rain and wind, it was possible to sleep in the tent until the end of October, but ‘as winter drew near, this bivouacking system became too dangerous to attempt’. Indeed, one night Thomas got caught in a storm for six hours wandering about Mount Snowdon, and it was midnight before – ‘cold and perishing’ – he received assistance and was given a bed.61

No longer able to save money by camping, Thomas was forced to look for lodgings well off the beaten track, where prices were much lower, and his dwindling resources could be stretched much further. But there was one ‘deadly drawback’ in such a scheme: the ‘utter want of access to books, or (generally speaking) to any intellectual intercourse. I languished all the day through, and all the week through – with nothing whatever, not so much as the county newspaper once in seven days to relieve my mortal ennui.’ In addition, hunger was becoming a real issue. Long walks in the fresh mountain air had done a great deal to restore his health, but they had also given him a large appetite that he was finding it increasingly difficult to satisfy on only one guinea a week, even with his various other cost-cutting measures. Gradually, he was compelled to reduce himself to a single meal a day of only tea or coffee, and at length this too was withdrawn, after which ‘so long as I remained in Wales, I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, &c. or on the casual hospitalities which I now and then received’.62

In early November, Thomas was back in Bangor or its vicinity, from where he wrote to Lord Sligo, whose former title of Altamont had now passed to his son. Thomas apparently told him nothing of his present troubles, but he was undoubtedly pleased with Sligo’s warm and prompt response. ‘I derived great pleasure from the note you so kindly addressed to me,’ he told him, and ‘I shall … always feel a sincere interest in all which concerns you.’ Yet it was also at this time that Thomas began to acknowledge that he could no longer rely on his adolescent connections to keep up a close relationship with an aristocrat such as Sligo. ‘Every way, I saw that my own dignity … required that I should no longer go into any circles where I did not stand on my own native footing … What had been abundantly right for me as a boy, ceased to be right for me when I ceased to be a boy.’63 Perched on the edge of adulthood, he needed to make his own way, to build his own successes, to command attention for his own achievements. The thought made him both miserable and reckless.

He came suddenly to a resolution: he was going to live in London. And he was going without telling his mother or his guardians. It meant that he would forfeit his current weekly allowance of one guinea. But he had devised a much better plan that would give him roughly the same amount of money, and far more independence. He would borrow £200 from a moneylender, subdivide that sum into yearly allotments of £50, and then live anonymously in London for four years until he turned twenty-one and came into possession of his inheritance. Rent in the city would cost him ‘say £25’ a year, which would leave him that sum again for his other annual expenses. Such a plan was more than sufficient for his needs, he reasoned, and unquestionably preferable to eking out an existence from week to week in Wales based on hand-outs from his mother that were no longer even covering his basic necessities. Yes, on this scheme he would miss out on university. But he convinced himself that he was not likely to gain much from a place like Oxford in any case. Far better to live freely in London, enjoy the many riches of the city, and get an education that way. In November he set the wheels in motion, writing to a London moneylender and discussing his plans with various Welsh friends, who pitched in to give him £12, enough he hoped to enable him to travel to London and live there for a few weeks until his loan came through.64

As he prepared to leave, ‘mere accident’ carried him to Oswestry, where he met ‘the very warmest amongst my Welsh friends’, a lawyer who, ‘as it turned out, resided there’. Coerced by his kindness, Thomas stayed with him for several days, enjoying his large library, ‘youthful frankness’, and ‘kindling intellect’. However, when he realized that his presence was interfering with his friend’s business obligations, he announced his departure. It was the close of November, but the weather had temporarily turned sunny, and Thomas decided to walk to Shrewsbury, and then catch the coach down into London. He and his friend set off one morning and covered most of the first five miles together, before bidding each other goodbye. The remaining thirteen miles Thomas travelled alone, the beauty of the day, the passing of the season, and the uncertainties that lay ahead all combining to put him in a melancholy mood. ‘So sweet, so ghostly, in its soft, golden smiles silent as a dream, and quiet as the dying trance of a saint, faded through all its stages this departing day, along the whole length of which I bade farewell for many a year to Wales, and farewell to summer.’65

He arrived in Shrewsbury at least two hours after nightfall, and checked into what was probably the Lion Inn. Four servants with wax-lights guided him into a large ballroom, the only space available to him because of renovations at the hotel. Thomas took a seat and gazed around him. The room, noble and sumptuous, had ‘three gorgeous chandeliers’ hung from a ceiling of nineteen or twenty feet, and enough space for two orchestras, while its emptiness on this November night invoked within him a contrary vision of those many hours when it must have been full of bustling crowds, and laughter, and music. Outside, meanwhile, a fierce storm had been brewing, and he listened as it raved in ‘one vast laboratory of hostile movements in all directions’. Over the course of the past day, Thomas’s thoughts had been divided between Wales and London. But now as he sat in the Shrewsbury ballroom, Wales fell away from him, as the towering dimensions of the room and the raging strength of the storm ‘brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London’. ‘Sole, dark, infinite’, it brooded ‘over the whole capacities’ of his heart until he had worked himself up into ‘the deadliest condition of nervous emotion’.66

On one level, it hardly made sense. Why cut himself off from fifty-two guineas a year in Wales to live on fifty pounds a year in London? Did he fear that if he returned to the Priory his mother or Hall would force him back to Manchester Grammar School? Did he simply want freedom on his own terms at any cost? Or did he imagine himself as a kind of Chattertonian figure, travelling to London – like Chatterton – at seventeen years old, brilliantly gifted and ready to make his mark? Or were there still other factors involved that he simply never divulged – that his many reminiscences disguise rather than reveal?

He was besieged by second thoughts, but his pride would not let him reverse a decision that he already half-regretted. In retrospect, he presented it as a kind of fate, dreadful but irresistible, that drew him down to London, some ‘hidden persecution’ that bade him ‘fly when no man pursued’. But looking back he also felt compelled to embrace the decision, for it defined him even as it damaged him, set him apart even as it set him back. At two in the morning, Thomas heard the sound of wheels, followed a few moments later by the announcement that the London Mail had been given a fresh team of horses and was now ready for departure. He left the hotel and boarded the coach. Twenty-eight long hours later, many of them undoubtedly passed in the dejection of his own thoughts, he arrived, a teenage runaway, at the General Post Office in Lombard Street.67

[v]

By ten that morning, Thomas was in the office of a Jewish moneylender named Mr Dell. He had arrived thinking that the process of obtaining a loan was quite straightforward. It was not long before he learned that he was wrong. Dell’s first rule of business was that he ‘never granted a personal interview to any man’. In order to prosecute the negotiations, Thomas needed to engage an attorney. Dell’s office recommended a man named Brunell, who for shady purposes of business also went by the name of Brown, and who lived at 38 Greek Street, a corner house that stood partly in Soho Square, and that has long since been demolished.68 Thomas headed immediately to the house, which he found to be ‘not … at all disrespectable’, though it had been neglected for many years, and was invested with a ‘deep silence’ from the ‘absence of all visiters’. ‘Mr Brown-Brunell’ was a ‘big, hulking’ man who came to the front door, inspected Thomas through a narrow side window, admitted him cheerfully, and conducted him to an office at the back of the house. ‘From the expression of his face, but much more from the contradictory and self-counteracting play of his features, you gathered in a moment that he was a man who had much to conceal, and much, perhaps, that he would gladly forget.’ He had, however, in Thomas’s eyes one central redeeming feature: an ‘unaffected love of knowledge, but, above all, of that specific knowledge which we call literature’.69

Thomas outlined his situation for Brunell and then left the matter in his hands, while he checked himself into very sparse lodgings, and waited over the next several weeks for his loan to come through. But his loan did not come through. Brunell was ‘continually refreshing my hopes with new delusions, whiling me on with pretended preparation of deeds, and extorting from me … as much as possible for the purchase of imaginary stamps’.70 At Christmas a year earlier Thomas had stood in front of his peers at Manchester Grammar School and recited Latin verses before going to sit down beside Lady Carbery. This Christmas he sat, alone in London, cut off from family and friends, in penurious circumstances, and treading perilously close to the kinds of bodily suffering that he had already endured in Wales. More than two years ago, in Ireland, and at Eton and Laxton, he had greatly enjoyed fashionable life and fashionable society. But churning just below the surface was his deep sense of loss and alienation. For many years he had felt like a pariah. Now he seems to have determined to become one.

Shortly after Christmas, he was desperate enough to put himself in touch with Hall – almost certainly in a letter sent via Mr Best in Everton – in an attempt to find some grounds for reconciliation. Hall’s response to him was cold. ‘Sir,’ he began curtly,

As you have thought proper to revolt from your duty on a point of the utmost importance to your present interest and future welfare – as you have hitherto persisted in rejecting the wishes of your guardians, who could be governed by no motives but those of promoting your real benefit, you cannot be surprised to hear that they have no new proposition to make. But, notwithstanding all that has passed, if you have any plans in agitation that seem entitled to notice, they are willing to pay them every degree of consideration.

They trust that by this time you are convinced that it was (to speak the least of it) a rash step for a young man of seventeen to throw himself out of the protection of his friends and relations into the wide world, and to have nothing to trust to but the charity or compassion of strangers; and they still cherish the hope that you will renounce your errors, and endeavour to remove the impression of former misconduct by correct and proper behaviour for the future. – I am, Sir, your very humble servant,

Samuel Hall.71

Such a letter seems unlikely to have encouraged Thomas to reconsider his behaviour. He appears not to have replied to it, and thereafter communication between the two camps ceased.

By the end of January his circumstances were dire beyond anything he had known in Wales. He was down to his last half-guinea, which he needed to put towards the ‘urgent interest of finding daily food’, and which meant there was no money left for lodgings. One day, in desperation, he asked Brunell if he could ‘make use of his large house as a nightly asylum from the open air’, a request that Brunell granted so readily that Thomas was filled with remorse that ‘at a much earlier period’ he had not applied ‘for this liberty; since I might thus have saved a considerable fund of guineas’. At nightfall on that same day, Thomas arrived in Greek Street to take possession of his new rooms, only to discover that the house ‘already contained one single inmate, a poor, friendless’ ten-year-old girl who was overjoyed to learn that he was to be her companion, as she had for some time been waging a solitary battle against the ‘echoing loneliness’ of the house, the ‘prodigious uproar’ of rats on the staircase, the ‘real fleshly ills of cold and hunger’, and – worst of all – the ‘self-created’ terror of ghosts. She ‘was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners’, and Thomas was unsure if she was an illegitimate daughter of Brunell’s, or simply a ‘menial servant’.72 But he felt great affection for her, and undoubtedly her plight reminded him of Sarah and Mary Hall’s desperate life of servitude.

Brunell, he soon learned, did not actually reside in Greek Street. His unscrupulous practices as an attorney drove him each night to seek lodgings in different quarters of London. Some mornings he arrived back at Greek Street very early, some mornings not until ten, and some mornings not at all. When he entered the house, the young girl went below stairs to brush his shoes and coat, while he retired to his office, where he breakfasted on a roll or a few biscuits. Thomas generally contrived a reason for drifting in at this time, and ‘with an air of as much indifference’ as he could assume, took up such fragments of food ‘as might chance to remain’.73 On many days, a half-eaten roll from Brunell’s breakfast table seems to have been his only meal.

Thereafter, he left the house, and filled the time as best he could. He sat in parks. He roamed the streets. He dozed. In one instance, he recalled standing in front of a baker’s shop, and surveying some rolls ‘with an eagerness of desire which it was humiliating to recollect’. For hours on end, Wordsworth filled his thoughts, and he ruminated intently on the power of his writings and, more tantalizingly, the possibility of his friendship. ‘My consolation was … to gaze from Oxford Street up every avenue in succession which pierces northwards through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and the woods; for that, said I, travelling with my eyes up the long vistas which lay part in light and part in shade – “that is the road to the north, and therefore”’ to the poet’s home at Grasmere. Each day Thomas stayed out in the city until the approach of twilight, at which point he began his walk back to Greek Street, where his welcome knock on the front door brought the girl’s ‘little trembling footsteps’ up to greet him.74

The days were long but the nights were even more difficult. Thomas and the girl had assembled what comforts they could to protect themselves from the nightly invasions of damp and cold. They made a bed upon the floor with a bundle of law papers for a pillow, and a horseman’s cloak, a large sofa cover, a small piece of rug, and ‘some fragments of other articles’ for blankets. As the night closed in, the girl huddled close to him, both for warmth ‘and for security against her ghostly enemies’, and when he was not more than usually ill, he took her in his arms, so that she was tolerably comfortable and often went off to sleep.75

Thomas was not so fortunate. He lay awake on many nights, and when he did finally fall asleep, tumultuous dreams ensured that he only received ‘what is called dog-sleep; so that I could hear myself moaning; and very often I was awakened suddenly by my own voice’. About this time, too, ‘a hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as I fell into a slumber, which has since returned upon me, at different periods of my life – viz., a sort of twitching (I knew not where, but apparently about the region of the stomach), which compelled me violently to throw out my feet for the sake of relieving it’. As the weeks wore into February Thomas was caught in a cruel cycle of physical misery. ‘A more killing curse there does not exist for man or woman, than that bitter combat between the weariness that prompts sleep, and the keen, searching cold that forces you from the first access of sleep to start up horror-stricken, and to seek warmth vainly in renewed exercise, though long since fainting under fatigue.’ Of all the terrors that human flesh is called upon to face, ‘not one – not even hunger’ – was in his experience comparable to the ravages of cold. He had learned something of this ‘on the wild hill-sides in Wales’.76 But in London the horrors of the winter air cut even more deeply into him.

The young waif of Greek Street was Thomas’s ‘partner in wretchedness’, but she was not his closest companion during these weeks of deprivation. There was another, older girl – Ann of Oxford Street, ‘O noble-minded Ann’ – whose hold on Thomas was far stronger. Ann was a prostitute, ‘one of that unhappy class who belong to the outcasts and pariahs of our female population’. Thomas felt ‘no shame’ in avowing that he was ‘then on familiar and friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate condition’, for he liked to claim – in defiance of some of his own deep-seated bigotries – that at no time in his life had he ever been a person who thought himself ‘polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a human shape’. He had many reasons to be grateful to these women. Some of them took his part against watchmen who wished to drive him off the steps of houses, while others protected him ‘against more serious aggressions’. But to Ann he owed an even greater debt. In her ‘bounty and compassion’, she ministered to his ‘necessities when all the world stood aloof from him. For many weeks he walked with her up and down Oxford Street, resting with her ‘under the shelter of porticos’, and deriving solace with her from ‘airs played on a common street-organ’. Just fifteen years old, Ann was ‘timid and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young heart’. She had been victimized by a ‘brutal ruffian’ who had ‘plundered her little property’. Thomas was sure that he could help her. He would accompany her to a magistrate, and plead her case for her. English justice, he assured her, did not care if she was poor, and would ‘speedily and amply avenge her’ for the wrongs she had suffered.77 He would see to it.

Before the two had a chance to visit a court, however, an incident occurred which haunted Thomas for the rest of his life. He and Ann were pacing slowly along ‘the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street’ at the end of a day on which he felt ‘unusually ill and faint’. At his request, they turned off into Soho Square, where they sat down on the steps of one of the houses. Suddenly, as they rested, Thomas grew much worse.

I had been leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I sank from her arms, and fell backwards on the steps. From the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of the liveliest kind, that, without some powerful and reviving stimulus, I should either have died on the spot, or should, at least, have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all re-ascent, under my friendless circumstances, would soon have become hopeless. Then it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor orphan companion, who had herself met with little but injuries in this world, stretched out a saving hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment’s delay, she ran off into Oxford Street, and in less time than could be imagined, returned to me with a glass of port-wine and spices, that acted upon my empty stomach (which at that time would have rejected all solid food) with an instantaneous power of restoration; and for this glass the generous girl, without a murmur, paid out of her own humble purse, at a time, be it remembered, when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare necessaries of life, and when she could have no reason to expect that I should ever be able to reimburse her.78

Thomas never ceased to believe that Ann had saved his life.

Soon after his collapse in Soho Square, he met in Albemarle Street ‘a gentleman of his late Majesty’s household. This gentleman had received hospitalities, on different occasions, from my family; and he challenged me upon the strength of my family likeness.’ Thomas did not attempt to disguise his identity, and when the gentleman promised to keep his secret from his guardians, he gave him his address in Greek Street, where the next morning a letter arrived. Brunell suspected it contained money, but he turned it over ‘honourably, and without demur’. Inside Thomas found a ten-pound bank note.79

The windfall seems to have prompted him to renew his efforts to secure the loan that had brought him to London in the first place. To his undoubted relief, he learned that matters were moving. Dell, and ‘other advertising money-lenders’ to whom he had introduced himself, had determined that the second son of Thomas Quincey did indeed ‘have all the claims (or more than all)’ that Thomas had described to them. But one question remained: was Thomas the second son of Thomas Quincey? ‘This doubt had never occurred to me as a possible one,’ he declared; ‘I had rather feared … that I might be too well known to be that person, and that some scheme might be passing in their minds for entrapping me and selling me to my guardians.’80

Anxious ‘to satisfy their scruples’, he pulled from his pocket a series of letters that he had received whilst in Wales, most of which were from the Marquis of Sligo, and his son, the Earl of Altamont. That got Dell’s attention, for the Earl’s ‘great expectations were well known to him’, and after reading the letters he agreed to loan Thomas two or three hundred pounds, provided that Altamont guaranteed the payment. Delighted, Thomas immediately made plans to visit Eton, where Altamont was still a student. From his ten pounds, he turned over three guineas to Dell, and a smaller sum to Brunell. A further fifteen shillings went on ‘re-establishing (though in a very humble way)’ his dress. Of the remaining four guineas, he gave one to Ann, and kept three for his travel expenses, on the understanding that when he returned he would divide with her whatever sum remained.81

On the dark winter evening of his departure, he and Ann set off towards Piccadilly in plenty of time to catch the coach at the Gloucester Coffee-house. When they reached Golden Square, they sat down and discussed their plans. Thomas was full of hope, but Ann was cheerless and racked by a violent cough. He told her that he expected to return within a week, and they agreed that five nights from that night, and every night thereafter, she would wait for him at six o’clock near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street. He kissed her. She put her arms about his neck, ‘and wept, without speaking a word’. Near eight o’clock they parted, and Thomas walked towards the ‘tumult and blaze’ of Piccadilly, where at quarter past eight he mounted the outside of the Bristol Mail and rode out of London.82

Within the first four or five miles of leaving the city, the ‘fine fluent motion’ of the mail-coach put him to sleep, with the result that he began to annoy a fellow-passenger ‘by occasionally falling against him when the coach gave a lurch’. The man complained heavily of the inconvenience. Thomas apologized, and briefly explained something of his recent sufferings. The man’s demeanour changed in an instant, and when Thomas unavoidably fell asleep again, he awoke to find that the man had put his arm around him to prevent him from falling off. Further, ‘upon the sudden pulling up’ of the mail-coach, Thomas discovered that he had slept so soundly that he had travelled six or seven miles beyond his intended stop. As he alighted, his ‘friendly companion’ entreated him ‘to go to bed without delay’. Later Thomas reflected on ‘how easily a man, who has never been in any great distress, may pass through life without knowing in his own person … the possible goodness of the human heart, or, as unwillingly I add, its possible churlishness’.83

It was already within an hour of midnight when he began backtracking towards Eton. His route took him across Hounslow Heath, and as he walked slowly along he remembered that a murder had recently been committed there. If he had been Altamont, and heir to a reputed fortune of £30,000, ‘what a panic’ he should have been under at that moment for his throat! But as it was, ‘being little better than an outcast’, he reassured himself that he was too poor to be of interest to a murderer. Finally, at about four o’clock, he succumbed to weariness and the cold air, and fell asleep on the road between Slough and Eton, where he was roused at dawn by the voice of a man standing over him. Thomas was unable to determine what the man wanted, but he was glad of the disturbance, for it enabled him to slip through Eton ‘before people were generally astir’, and to take refuge in a little pub in Windsor, where he washed himself, and as far as was possible, adjusted his dress.84

At eight in the morning, roughly twelve hours after he had left London, Thomas went down towards the precincts of Eton to seek Lord Altamont. On the way he met some junior boys, who gave him very bad news. Altamont was no longer at Eton. He had left to go to Jesus College, Cambridge. This was a disaster: all that effort and money thrown away! Thomas calmed himself down by bringing to mind the fact that he had other aristocratic friends at Eton. What about John Otway Cuffe, Viscount Castle-Cuffe? He and Altamont were cousins, and Thomas had met him some years earlier, perhaps at Bath, or when he had first visited Eton, or during his holiday in Ireland. Yes, he was told, Castle-Cuffe was still at Eton. Thomas called on him, was received kindly, and asked to breakfast. But when the ‘luxuries’ of the table were placed in front of him, he could not eat them.85 It had been so long since he had enjoyed a proper meal that he had lost his appetite.

Briefly he explained his troubles to Castle-Cuffe, and then made a request. Might he have some wine? He had ‘at all times a craving for wine’. Castle-Cuffe expressed ‘deep sympathy’ with him, and duly granted his request. ‘This gave me instantaneous relief and immoderate pleasure; and on all occasions, when I had an opporrunity, I never failed to drink wine.’ Thomas’s thoughts then turned to the reason for his visit to Eton. He was conscious that his claims on Castle-Cuffe were not really sufficient for the request he was about to make, but unwilling to lose his journey, and no doubt a little flushed by the drink, he asked his question. Castle-Cuffe faltered a little, and ‘acknowledged that he did not like to have any dealings with moneylenders’, though eventually ‘he promised, under certain conditions … to give his security’.86

Thomas stayed another two days – ‘I hope that it was not from this love of wine that I lingered in the neighbourhood of my Eton friends’ – and then returned in a Windsor coach to London. He took Castle-Cuffe’s conditions to Dell, who promptly rejected them, sending him back virtually to square one. Time passed on. There were more delays. Thomas’s remaining money disappeared, and he began to relapse towards his ‘former state of wretchedness’. ‘Suddenly, however, at this crisis, an opening was made, almost by accident’, for reconciliation with his guardians.87

Details of the negotiations are not known, but clearly the two parties found some common ground. During his time in London, Thomas had become convinced that if he was reclaimed by his guardians, they would force him to return to Manchester Grammar School.88 Plainly they promised him that they would not do so (if, indeed, that had ever been their intention, for they had been happy enough eight months earlier to let him wander through Wales). His guardians must also have agreed to let him spend the spring and summer at Everton, away from his mother and with a sufficient allowance. Finally, and less contentiously, when he turned eighteen, Thomas was to be allowed to go to Oxford, though the details of his annual allowance had yet to be worked out.

‘Meantime, what had become of Ann?’ Thomas went each night to the rendezvous point in Great Titchfield Street, but she was not there. He did not know, ‘or (as a matter of no great interest)’, had forgotten her surname, which he realized now was ‘the surest means of tracing her’. The road where she lodged he knew, but not the house, and in any event he remembered that recent ill-treatment by her landlord ‘made it probable that she had quitted those lodgings’ before they parted. Several more nights passed. Thomas felt certain that she must in some way have been prevented from keeping their engagement, or worse, that they were ‘sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London’. He ‘put into activity every means of tracing her’ that his knowledge of the city suggested, and the limited extent of his power made possible. But most people thought that the earnestness of his enquiries ‘arose from motives which moved their laughter or their slight regard’. At length, as a ‘despairing resource’ on his last day in London, he put his address at the Priory ‘into the hands of the only person who (I was sure) must know Ann by sight’. It was all in vain. ‘To this hour I have never heard a syllable about her,’ he wrote more than fifty years later. ‘This, amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction.’89

How plausible is Thomas’s account of his relationship with Ann? Certainly in his wanderings up and down Oxford Street he could have fallen into walking and talking with prostitutes, as the area was well known for soliciting. Some of these women – even women that were younger than him – may well have taken him under their wing: he liked female company, he had very little experience of London, and he would undoubtedly have welcomed their guidance or protection. It is even possible that he developed an especially close relationship with one of them, and that on a particularly bad night, he passed out from fatigue and she, or one of her friends, came quickly to his assistance.

Yet he left no contemporary record of his relationship with her. All his accounts of Ann – in fact, the only accounts of her at all – come in his reminiscences, the first of which was not written until nearly two decades after they met. Genuine experience no doubt played a role, but his portrayal of her seems decisively shaped by a number of other factors. He patterns her on the biblical figure of Mary Magdalen, a sinful but repentant prostitute, as well as on more recent portrayals of the suffering and nobility of the poor from the Lyrical Ballads, though he transposes Wordsworth’s rural scenes into vivid accounts of urban despair.90 He also idealizes her as a ‘benefactress’ and ‘saviour’ with whom he has a strictly platonic relationship, in part because he has no money, but also because of his strong desire to shield and comfort her, as several years earlier he had hoped to shield and comfort Elizabeth. Indeed, he loves Ann ‘as affectionately as if she had been my sister’, for at some level in talking about her, he is talking about Elizabeth. She shaped his affection for Ann, as Ann provided a way for him to relive his affection for Elizabeth.91 In his imagination, the two became conflated as intimate companions, suffering innocents, youthful victims.

Yet at the same time as he was fantasizing about saving Ann, Thomas may also have been having sex with her. In the long and plaintive letter he wrote to his mother just prior to his flight from Manchester Grammar School, he hinted broadly that he had already called on ‘women of the town’, and certainly a year later he was indulging in visits to Liverpool brothels. In between these two dates he was frequently in the company of London prostitutes, and at different points it seems probable that he was able to find the money to gratify his appetite for them. These sharply differing attitudes towards Ann – one brotherly, the other carnal – go a long way towards explaining the deep feelings of anxiety and remorse that he so clearly associates with her.92

Perhaps he did leave his Priory address with one of her friends, but he can hardly have expected that his mother would have been pleased to meet Ann if she had suddenly turned up on the Priory doorstep. Despite his London vagrancy, Thomas had very good social connections and he was on his way to Oxford. Powerfully drawn as he was to both aristocrats and exiles, he of course recognized that his friendships in these two very different worlds were utterly incompatible. He may have been unable to find Ann in the London streets, but he may also have given her the slip, for where he was going, she was not welcome. His representation of her is most probably a composite of different prostitutes and situations. More compellingly, she represents the collision of experience, sentimentality, literary antecedent, and sexual guilt in ways that at once fascinated and tormented him. After sixteen weeks living rough in London, he left the city in haste, passed up through Oxford, and returned to the Priory, deeply scarred by the miseries of the last four months.93 Though he claims he never saw Ann again, neither did he escape her. As intimate, outcast, saviour, and sibling, she haunted him far into the future.