Letters of a Young Man
[i]
‘What shall be my character?’ Thomas asked himself. ‘I have been thinking this afternoon – wild – impetuous – splendidly sublime? dignified – melancholy – gloomily sublime? or shrouded in mystery – supernatural – like the “ancient mariner” – awfully sublime.’1 These musings, recorded in a diary that he kept from April through June of 1803, place Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the centre of his thoughts in the months immediately following his London ordeal, and show Thomas already patterning his self – or, more especially, his potential self – on Coleridge.2 At the time of these speculations, Thomas was living at Mrs Best’s cottage in Everton, where he had been shunted after returning to the Priory, for his mother had once again decided that she was not prepared to live in the same house with her truant son. Three weeks later, Thomas was out socializing when he met a Mrs Barcroft and a Mr Bree, both of whom lived in the Lake District near Coleridge. She told him that ‘Coleridge is very absent – frequently walks half a mile (to her uncle’s, I think she said) without being sensible that he has no hat on … Mr Bree surprises me by telling me that Coleridge intends to astonish the world with a Metaphysical work … on which he intends to found his fame.’ Thomas listened with great excitement to these gossipy neighbours, and then walked home ‘thinking of Coleridge; – am in transports of love and admiration for him … I begin to think him the greatest man that has ever appeared and go to sleep’.3
Dreams of Coleridge profoundly engaged him, but they were one of the few bright spots during a time in which he was often dispirited and remote. As had been the case both one and two years earlier, he had gone to Everton in search of rejuvenation, and to some extent he found it. Thomas spent a good deal of his time walking, to the circulating libraries, the bookstores, the new botanical gardens, the concert-rooms, and the theatre, where one evening he saw Charles Mayne Young in Hamlet.4 He lounged on the pier, went to tea-parties, stopped at Everton’s famous toffee house, and on Sundays attended church, though he was not always impressed by the quality of the sermon: ‘went to St Ann’s; – heard an ass preach’.5
On several of his rambles he talked to strangers: a poor woman, a lass who wanted money for some sweets, a man who took shelter with him under a hedge during a downpour. His most striking encounter, however, was with ‘a fellow’ he met in ‘the lanes … who counterfeited drunkenness or lunacy or idiocy; – I say counterfeited, because I am well convinced he was some vile outcast of society – a pest and disgrace to humanity. I was just on point of hitting him a dab on his disgusting face when a gentleman (coming up) alarmed him and saved me trouble.”6 So much for Thomas’s oft-proclaimed sympathy for outsiders! His virulent condemnation of this ‘vile outcast’ serves as a salutary reminder that there is an often stark difference between the highly crafted accounts of his experience that he produced for public consumption, and the heated outbursts of anger and disgust that he confided to his private letters and diaries. Thomas wrote passionately on behalf of the vulnerable and the abused, and he often acted in their interests, but his concern for them was not as steadfast or as inclusive as he liked to claim.
Over the course of these weeks, he spent a good deal of time with two Everton men: Mr Cragg, a merchant and apparently an old family friend; and James Wright, a partner in the Liverpool publishing and bookselling firm of Merritt and Wright.7 Thomas dined often at Cragg’s, and afterwards played whist, or engaged in conversation with Wright and Cragg, their wives and friends, and any chance visitors. On one occasion the company talked ‘of free-will’, the ‘origin of evil’, the ‘association of ideas’, and the ‘incompatibility of eternal punishment – first with God’s justice and secondly with his mercy’. On another, Thomas assented to John Merritt’s opinion that there was ‘no harm in sexual intercourse between a brother and sister (commonly termed incest)’.8 Thomas drank at several of these gatherings. On 10 May he ‘got tipsy (or rather elevated)’. Nine days later he had two glasses of madeira at dinner, ‘and five or six after it’. Most memorably, in early June he took part in a ‘debauch’ before falling asleep on the sofa in Wright’s parlour.9
These weeks were also marked by an enormous amount of reading. Thomas ranged from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic, Mary Robinson’s Memoirs, and Thomas Holcroft’s Caroline of Litchfield, through the Bible and a series of German writers in translation, to a host of contemporary poets, including William Cowper, Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, and Charlotte Smith, whose ‘Ode to the Poppy’ he found ‘particularly’ notable, perhaps for its descriptions of the miraculous and ‘soul-soothing’ powers of opium.10 At the same time, he was devouring Gothic fiction, especially by women writers such as Mary Pilkington, Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, and Anne Bannerman, whose Tales of Superstition and Chivalry he much preferred to Matthew (‘Monk’) Lewis’s Tales of Wonder. Sophia Lee’s The Recess made him cry. Jane West’s Infidel Father contained descriptions of opium hallucinations that may well have heightened his curiosity about the drug.11 Thomas also read to others on several occasions. At the Wrights’ on 6 May, he entertained their guest Mrs Edmunds in the pre-dinner hour by reading her Burns’s ‘Ode to Despondency’ and Robert Southey’s ‘Lord William’. A week and a half later, again at the Wrights’, he began to read Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale to the ladies, and over the course of the next two evenings they listened to him as he completed the entire play aloud.12 For Thomas, reading was both a private pleasure and a social practice.
Politics, too, deepened their hold on him. In the middle of May, the Peace of Amiens was broken and France returned to war with Britain. On the French side of the equation, Thomas’s attitude was straightforwardly aggressive. He loathed Napoleon. ‘Of that gilded fly of Corsica … I said just now … “May he be thirsty to all eternity – and have nothing but cups of damnation to drink.”’ On the British side, his attitude was far more mixed. On 23 May, Cragg asked him which ‘character of the present day (in public life)’ he most admired. ‘As a moral one’, Thomas replied, Charles James Fox, the Whig leader of the opposition and a famous champion of liberty. Cragg objected to Fox’s ‘gaming and adultery, neither of which, Thomas observed, at all lessened his opinion of him. In a letter to his mother only a week later, however, Thomas also spoke up in favour of Fox’s arch-adversary, the former Conservative prime minister William Pitt, who had led Britain during its previous battles with Napoleon, and who had recently ‘awakened from his long slumber like a giant refreshed with sleep and (no doubt) with wine’.13
Thomas’s experience of politics and the war effort went beyond talk, though. Liverpool was a hub of military activity, and he could see evidence of the hostilities all around him, from warships in the Liverpool harbour to the French prison in Great Howard Street, which he passed on his walks, and which housed French prisoners of war in terrible circumstances.14 More dramatically, one day on returning from Bootle, he witnessed first-hand the horrors of a British press gang as it made its way back to the docks after a successful sweep through the Liverpool streets. Among the men the ‘pressers’ had captured was one who ‘hid his face to conceal his emotions: his two sisters stood on the pier among the crowd – weeping and telling his story to the spectators’.
Immediately a general exclamation ran along – ‘Ay, that’s poor Jack – the boatman’ – Who is he? I said. Ay! bless him! he’s neither father nor mother; – he’s quite desolate.’ On this general tribute of sympathy and affection, the poor fellow, who had hitherto hid his face to stifle or conceal his grief, could bear it no longer; but, sobbing aloud, lifted up his eyes and fixed them with such mingling expressions of agony – gratitude – mournful remembrance on his friends – relations – and his dear countrymen (whom very likely he was now gazing at for the last time) as roused indignation against the pressers and pity for the pressed in every bosom.15
Thomas felt an enduring enthusiasm for the war against Napoleon, but at this moment he came face to face with the human cost of the conflict.
He now had a kind of sex life. On seven different occasions, and in a sort of Latin and Greek code, he confided to his diary that he was masturbating. Fascinated by the workings of his body, and a meticulous analyst of his own guilt and excitement, Thomas kept strict track of these episodes, but in a form that could not be deciphered by the servants, his mother, Mrs Best, and so on. ‘Effusio ante ωραυ 7th’ (‘orgasm before the 7th hour’) he writes on Monday, 9 May. A week later, he records an ‘Eφ. ante ωραυ octodecateen’ (‘orgasm before the eighteenth hour’). On 30 May, he notes simply ‘εϕ.σπ.’ (‘orgasm’).16 He was also visiting prostitutes. After masturbating on the morning of 10 May, he got a little boozy at lunch, and then whored in the afternoon, though his record of the encounter is disjointed and clearly censored: ‘seized with the delicious thought the of the girl give her 2 shillings’. After church on Sunday, 22 May: ‘enjoy a girl in the fields for IS and 6d’. After a shopping excursion with the ladies on 26 May: ‘go home with a whore to Everton I give all the change I have; IS 2d’. After a wander through the churchyard on 4 June: ‘go to the same fat whore’s as I was at the last time; – give her IS and a cambrick pocket hand-kerchief; – go home miserable’.17 Thomas’s energetic, if furtive, pursuit of these liaisons was driven by his sexually ‘delicious thought’. Yet he paid a steep price afterwards, for his strict Evangelical upbringing no doubt exacerbated the shame he felt at these encounters, a shame that is evident in his account of the ‘women of the town’ in Manchester, that suffuses his relationship with Ann of Oxford Street, and that now brings him home ‘miserable’ in Everton.
He was by this time committed to becoming a writer, and planned to work in a number of different genres. ‘I have besides always intended of course that poems should form the corner-stones of my fame,’ he declared confidently, though the few excerpts of his original verse in the diary are remarkably undistinguished:
The moon in her delightful some diviner mood was shining
And pouring radiance on the ocean’s breast …
Her course the while in gentle roll inclining
Towards the northern where are placed the chambers of her rest,
– I make her sweetly-swelling breast
My one dear refuge in adversity.
As a playwright, he had three dramas in mind, including one entitled Yermak the Rebel. In prose, he planned to write lives of Cataline and Julius Caesar; essays on poetry, character, pathos, and the French and English character; two pathetic tales, one of which featured a ‘black man’ as the hero; and a novel in which the heroine expires ‘on an island of a lake, her chamber-windows (opening on a lawn) set wide open – and the sweet blooming roses breathing their odours on her dying senses’.18
On 28 April, Thomas listed the ‘sources of Happiness’ as ‘1. Poetry; – 2. Pathos; – 3. Glory; – 4. Love; – 5. Benevolence; – 6. Music’, but no combination of these factors relieved his melancholy. He was quick to sense slights, and ‘piqued at … apparent indifference’. Sometimes he dined with Cragg and uttered ‘not above a sentence or two’, or sat in company and said not ‘one word to anybody’.19 On other occasions, he spoke out with a haughtiness that approached contempt. One evening, Cragg asked him if he liked ‘the Odyssey which he himself thought mightily entertaining’. Thomas replied that he ‘could not bear it; and, as a reason, observed that, independent of the insipidity of the story, there was no character in it: “What? not Telemachus?”, said C. “No”, said I coolly.’ On another evening, Wright said he thought that seeing a play well performed was the greatest pleasure human nature was susceptible of. ‘Do you think so, Sir?’ Thomas asked snidely. ‘Yes, Sir, indeed,’ Wright rejoined. Thomas ‘made no farther remarks’, but walked home near midnight ‘in a state of exquisite misery’.20
Certainly aware of his intellectual advantage, the men seem to have put up with him rather than to have retaliated against him. But he was also in the company of the ladies a good deal, and they chose to handle him in two very different ways. One of their strategies was simply to shun him, either directly – ‘neither of the ladies asks me to accompany them’ – or indirectly, such as when they sent down a servant to tell him that they had gone into the country, when in fact he discovered later that same day that they had been at home. Their other main tactic was to make his moroseness an object of their fun. ‘I amuse the ladies by saying that I wish there was some road down to hell by which I might descend for a short time.’ Two weeks later, he made them smile when he told them that it was not ‘misery’ that stalked him, but ‘apathy and dulness’. ‘I wish I could look into your mind,’ said Mrs Wright, but when Thomas proudly replied that he wanted to keep his thoughts ‘shrouded from any penetration’, she archly asked him ‘why? … is it because you look down on us with contempt as inferior beings?’ Her questions clearly caught him off guard, for he interrupted her and ‘wondered that she should impute’ his ‘concealment to self-elevation’.21 To them, Thomas was an oddity, intellectual but arrogant. To him, they were company, but not companionship. He did not understand their irritation. They could not fathom his despondency.
Chatterton served him as a model once again. In early April, his ‘Chattertonian’ melancholia ‘returned for the 1st time this … two years’. Later, and much more vividly, he closed his eyes and imagined ‘Chatterton in the exceeding pain of death! in the exhausted slumber of agony I see his arm weak as a child’s – languid and faint in the extreme … stretched out and raised at midnight – calling and pulling (faintly indeed, but yet convulsively) some human breast to console him whom he had seen in the dreams of his fever’d soul.’22 Thomas is undoubtedly reading himself into these lines, and fantasizing about his own suicide. His despair and ennui, however, were not pushing him in that direction. As was so often the case even in the middle of much deeper miseries, he was determined to shape the course of his own life.
[ii]
It was 13 May. He sat before his diary and summoned all his courage. ‘Sir,’ he began, ‘I take this method of requesting …’ No. Too formal. Too dull. He crossed the words out and started again. This time he did much better. The words were warmer, more arresting. ‘What I am going to say, I know, would seem strange to most men; and to most men therefore I would not say it; but to you I will, because your feelings do not follow the current of the world.’ He paused, read this over with pleasure, and then began his second paragraph. ‘From the time when I first saw the “Lyrical Ballads” I made a resolution to obtain (if I could) the friendship of their author.’23 Thomas was drafting a letter to William Wordsworth. It was something he had been thinking about for nearly four years.
Wordsworth’s poetry, as always, had been on his mind. In the opening instalment of the diary, Thomas quoted from ‘Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening’. On 12 April, he compiled a list of his twelve favourite poets, beginning with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, passing up through Thomson, Collins, Chatterton, Beattie, Burns, and Penrose, and climaxing with ‘Robert Southey; S. T. Coleridge; William Wordsworth!!!’ In early May, when brooding on the nature of poetry and drama, he affirmed that there was ‘no good pastoral in the world but Wordsworth’s “Brothers”; and that enchanting composition has more pathos (ah! what pathos!) than poetry in it’. And now, these various references coming to a head, Thomas turned from thinking of Wordsworth to writing to him. He finished his second paragraph, and added a third one, cancelling and recasting several more lines as he went, before signing himself ‘Your’s for ever and ever, Thomas de Quincey’.24
He may have copied this letter out of his diary and on to separate sheets, but he did not send it off to Wordsworth. Caution was required. Better to let it sit for a few weeks and then see how it sounded. Thomas did not want to be too forward, too laborious, too humble, too revealing. Over the course of the ensuing days, he no doubt went back to the letter on numerous occasions, and with increasing dissatisfaction. It needed to be more elaborate, more confident. Gradually, he rewrote it, and finally, on the afternoon of 31 May, he completed an augmented and, in parts, thoroughly revised version. Copied and sealed by twenty minutes before 4 o’clock, Thomas took it straight to the post office and mailed it to Wordsworth care of his publisher Longman in Paternoster Row, London.25
In its final form, the letter is a remarkable document that dramatically altered the course of Thomas’s life. Its main objective – as had been the case from the first draft onward – is to try and obtain Wordsworth’s friendship, and Thomas expresses himself with an earnestness that approaches desperation. Young and unknown as he is, he recognizes that Wordsworth can hardly be moved by applause as ‘feeble and insignificant’ as his. Yet he needs this friendship, and he works hard to prove to Wordsworth that his devotion and his insight make him worthy of it. In the midst of the ‘many many bitter recollections’ that have shadowed him over the past two years, the possibility of the poet’s regard has been his ‘only refuge’. He does not want to live with the thought that a lack of effort on his part meant that he missed out on a gift, ‘without which what good can my life do me?’26
Like Wordsworth, he is a poet. ‘What claim then can I urge to a fellowship with a society such as yours … beaming (as it does) with genius so wild and so magnificent? I dare not say that I too have some spark of that heavenly fire which blazes there.’ Yet at the same time Thomas recognizes that he is very different from Wordsworth. His own poetic genius ‘has not yet kindled and shone out’, while the 1800 Lyrical Ballads are a matchless achievement. ‘I may say in general, without the smallest exaggeration, that the whole aggregate of pleasure I have received from some eight or nine other poets that I have been able to find since the world began … falls infinitely short of what those two enchanting volumes have singly afforded me.’ Indeed, how could anyone study Wordsworth and not long to know him? Thomas must share his wish with ‘every man, who has read and felt the “Lyrical Ballads”’.27
Having presented his motives for contacting the poet over the first two-thirds of the letter, Thomas then moves to a series of ‘negative reasons why you may suffer me, if but at a distance, to buoy myself up with the idea that I am not wholly disregarded in your sight’. One, ‘my life has been passed chiefly in the contemplation and altogether in the worship of nature’ (not strictly true of someone who had spent a good deal of time in the city, and who was at least as interested in Gothic fiction as he was in nature). Two, ‘I am but a boy and have therefore formed no connections which could draw you one step farther from the sweet retreats of poetry to the detested haunts of men’ (again, not strictly true of a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old who seems to have formed at least a few unsavoury connections during his recent months in London). Three, ‘no one should ever dare, in confidence of any acquaintance he might have with me, to intrude on your hallowed solitude’. Four, ‘you would at any rate have an opportunity of offering to God the pleasant and grateful incense of a good deed … by blessing the existence of a fellow-creature’. And five, ‘as to all external points, I believe that there is nothing in them which would disgrace you’ (Thomas was as sensitive as ever about his height).28
The letter concludes with a passionate plea for recognition. Wordsworth, Thomas hopes and believes, is the creative and supportive adult who has so long been missing in his life. Deferential in the extreme, he ‘bends the knee’ before the poet, and promises to ‘sacrifice even his life … whenever it could have a chance of promoting your interest and happiness’. At the same time, Thomas is very proud: ‘I will add that, to no man on earth except yourself and one other (a friend of your’s), would I thus lowly and suppliantly prostrate myself – the ‘friend’ of course being Coleridge. And with that, he closes: ‘Dear Sir! Your’s forever, Thomas de Quincey’.29
It was a letter that he needed to write, and it is unquestionably an expression of deep and genuine admiration. Yet at its heart is a very dangerous assumption. In his approach to Wordsworth, Thomas seems to imagine that there is no substantial difference between the man and the poet, that what Wordsworth is and what Wordsworth writes are one and the same. Thus the moral enthusiasm he feels for the poems leads him to praise Wordsworth’s ‘moral character’, and the poetic descriptions of genial feelings that he finds in the Lyrical Ballads compel him to assume that Wordsworth will display those same genial feelings in his private friendships.30 The conviction is understandable in a boy as imaginatively astute and as emotionally starved as Thomas. And, after all, it is not entirely unreasonable of him to assume that in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth means what he says. But Thomas had very high expectations of the poet right from the start, and they never ceased to burden his relationship with him.
Two long months passed without a response. Thomas began to despair. And then, on 2 August 1803, the day before he was to leave Everton, a letter from Wordsworth arrived. Thomas’s excitement must have been almost overwhelming. What the poet said to him was kind and wise.31 Longman had been very remiss in forwarding Thomas’s letter, and Wordsworth had not even received it until 27 July. ‘I am much concerned at this as … my silence must needs have caused you some uneasiness,’ he wrote just two days later, mindful of how long Thomas had already been waiting. Wordsworth, it is clear, had been impressed by Thomas’s letter. ‘The main end which you proposed to yourself in writing to me is answered,’ he assured him, ‘viz. that I am already kindly disposed towards you’, though he added a caveat: ‘My friendship it is not in my power to give: this is a gift which no man can make.’ The letter then moves on to a series of other topics. Wordsworth is concerned that Thomas has set too great a value on the Lyrical Ballads, at the risk of undervaluing ‘the proper influence of other writers’. He describes himself as ‘the most lazy and impatient Letter writer in the world’. In a few days he will set off on a tour into Scotland for six weeks or two months with his friend Coleridge and his sister Dorothy. Finally, he would derive ‘great pleasure’ from seeing Thomas in Grasmere should he ‘ever come this way’. Then, worried that his invitation sounded too perfunctory, he appended a postscript in which he reissued it in friendlier language: ‘I shall indeed be very happy to see you at Grasmere … I should, I repeat it, be very happy to see you.’32
Thomas did not sleep that night. The honour of ‘a long answer from Wordsworth’ kept him awake ‘from mere excess of pleasure’.33 On the following day he travelled from Everton back to his mother’s home at the Priory, where he sat down on the morning of 6 August and wrote his response. To obtain an answer after he had almost ‘ceased to expect it’ was a ‘happiness which falls to the lot of few men’. Wordsworth’s letter has afforded him ‘great and lasting pleasure’, and perhaps even more significantly for the lonely teenager, it has made him ‘rise’ in his ‘own estimation’. The poet’s caveat about his friendship not being in his power to give, however, has clearly caused Thomas some concern, for he now backs quickly – and not very convincingly – away from the very reason he had written to Wordsworth in the first place. ‘What foolish thing I said of friendship I cannot now recollect,’ he claims: ‘but, if (as I gather from your remarks on it) I asked for your friendship, I must have written without consulting my understanding.’ He responds to Wordsworth’s concern about the due influence of other poets by assuring him that from his youth onwards he has revered ‘Spenser – Shakespeare – Milton – Thomson (partially) – and Collins’. But, he adds, ‘it would be mere hypocrisy in me to say’ that the works of any of these writers ‘are so “twisted with my heart-strings” as the Lyrical Ballads’. He expresses joy at Wordsworth’s kind invitation to him to visit the Lakes – ‘I believe that the bowers of paradise could hold out no such allurement’ – and states that he plans to travel to Grasmere next summer. Emboldened by Wordsworth’s mention of Coleridge and Dorothy, he closes by wondering if he might please take a liberty, and ask Wordsworth to convey to both of them his ‘most sincere and respectful good wishes’.34 His initial fan letter had done the trick. Thomas was inching closer and closer to his idols.
[iii]
The end of the Peace of Amiens had created a great stir at the Priory. Thomas’s uncle Penson, still on leave from India, was a man of formidable energies and, using the Priory as his headquarters, he worked together with three other men to raise a volunteer cavalry in Chester, fuelled by the belief that Napoleon’s ‘very existence depended upon war’, and that every conceivable measure must be adopted in order to stop him.35 Thomas, meanwhile, lolled about the house with no fixed plans for the future. His mother had agreed to let him stay, but she and her brother still regarded him as a ‘boy, nay, a child … in disgrace’, while he treated them with the same intellectual disdain that had irritated Wright and Cragg in Everton only a few months earlier. The simmering tensions between them boiled over one day when Thomas was reading Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier to his uncle, who had been laid up by a riding accident. Thomas disliked the book. Penson ‘had an old craze in behalf’ of it. Thomas dismissed its accounts of the Parliamentary War as ‘unfair’ and ‘most superficial’. Penson opposed him with asperity. The argument escalated. Penson asked Thomas, ‘in a way which I felt to be taunting, how I could consent to waste my time as I did’. ‘I explained that my guardians, having quarrelled with me, would not grant for my use anything beyond my school allowance of £100 per annum.’ Was it possible to live as a student in Oxford on that sum? ‘From what I had heard, very probably it was. Would I undertake an Oxford life upon such terms? Most gladly, I said.’36 Penson spoke to Mrs Quincey and an agreement was soon struck. Seven days later, Thomas was on his way to Oxford.
He arrived late one December evening in the middle of a snowstorm, winding ‘through the long northern suburb’ of the town on a slow Birmingham coach that finally pulled into the Corn Market in front of a shabby inn called the Golden Cross.37 ‘Business was out of the question at that hour,’ but the next day Thomas assembled the acquaintances he had in the university, most of whom were presumably former students from Bath, Winkfield, or Manchester Grammar School. He wanted their advice on the two crucial questions facing any student seeking admittance to the university. Should he enter as a ‘gentleman’ or a ‘gentleman commoner’? And which college should he go to? Money quickly settled his first question. Gentleman commoners paid much higher fees than he could afford. He would enter simply as a gentleman. As to a college, he wanted one with both a large population (because of the anonymity it would offer), and a ‘full cathedral service’ (because of the daily opportunities it would provide him for listening to beautiful music). Christ Church, he was told, best fulfilled both of these conditions: its student body was the ‘most splendid … in numbers, rank, wealth, and influence’, while its chapel was the cathedral of the diocese. Thomas immediately prepared to call on the Dean of Christ Church, the redoubtable Cyril Jackson.38
Arriving at the college, he was shown into a ‘spacious library or study, elegantly, if not luxuriously furnished’, and was ‘really surprised’ when Jackson rose graciously at his entrance. The two began a ‘very long conversation of a general nature upon the course’ of Thomas’s studies, before coming at length to the particular purpose of his visit, at which point Jackson ‘assumed a little more of his official stateliness’, and ‘condescended to say, that it would have given him pleasure’ to reckon Thomas ‘amongst his flock’. ‘But, sir,’ he said, with some sharpness, ‘your guardians have acted improperly. It was their duty to have given me at least one year’s notice of their intention to place you at Christ Church. At present I have not a dogkennel in my college untenanted.’ Thomas hastily acquitted his guardians of any fault, ‘they being no parties’ to his ‘present scheme’, and apologized for having taken up so much of Jackson’s time. The dean seemed about to bend his own rule in Thomas’s favour and allow him a place at the college, when their meeting was interrupted by the ‘thundering heralds of … some man of high rank’. Apparently ‘distressed for a moment’, Jackson then recollected himself and bowed in a manner that indicated to Thomas that he was dismissed. ‘And thus it happened that I did not become a member of Christ Church.’39
The next few days were passed in what Thomas described as ‘thoughtless indecision’. He had brought about fifty guineas with him to Oxford, but he was paying for his rooms at the Golden Cross, and he was also providing ‘almost daily entertainments to young friends’, which presumably means that he was picking up many of the bills when they went out seeking fun in Oxford. Soon he had cut so deeply into his funds that he worried that he would not be able to afford the payment for ‘caution money’; that is, the ‘small sum … demanded of every student’ entering the university, ‘as a pledge for meeting any loss from unsettled arrears’. In most colleges this fee amounted to £25, but at Worcester College, he learned, it was considerably less. In addition, Worcester was of interest to him because it had a reputation for relaxed discipline, leading him to hope that if he entered the college he could spend his time pretty much as he wanted. True, there was no organ at Worcester, and no musical service, but having assured his mother and his uncle that he could live in Oxford on £100 a year, he ‘could not find nerves to face’ writing to them to ask for more money. He had only left home a week or so earlier! Worcester it was. He matriculated on 17 December 1803.40
The routines of Oxford were soon familiar. Students began their day with attendance at chapel and then breakfast, followed by a study period that commenced about ten and ran for three hours. The classics were at the heart of the curriculum, along with mathematics and divinity. In the afternoon students devoted themselves to leisure, and then congregated in the college hall for dinner, a ceremonial occasion at which they were required to dress formally, and arrange themselves at table according to their year and status. A second chapel service took place in the early evening, after which tea and supper were served. Students could then study, or go out into the town, though there were strict rules about when they had to be back within the college gates. Gambling, boating, riding, and walking were popular, as were private parties, coffee-houses, and the taverns. Prostitution – in both Oxford and the surrounding villages – was common.41
Thomas’s first set of rooms were charged at the very cheap rate of four guineas a year, but they were ‘small and ill-lighted, as part of an old Gothic building’, and before long he exchanged them ‘for others a little better’. These were almost certainly his rooms ‘on Staircase no. 10 in the front quad, up one pair of stairs to the right’. This is where he lived for most of his Oxford career, at a cost of six guineas a year.42 His other expenses in the first year included ‘furniture and the fittings up of these rooms’ (£25), the cost of a tutor (£10.10s.), the cost of servants (Thomas overpaid at £5.5s.), ‘meals, excepting only tea, sugar, milk, and wine’ (just over £1 a week), washing (£6.6s.), candles (£2.5s.), coals (£5.5s.), and groceries (£10.10s.). As these figures make clear, on the strictest economy, it was possible to live in Oxford for under £100 a year, and in Thomas’s case the possibility was even greater because Worcester allowed for what were called ‘short terms’, which meant that he only had to be in Oxford for thirteen weeks a year.43 Records in the college archives show that during the first three months of 1804 Thomas’s expenses were average for an undergraduate.44
Yet – characteristically – while he was at first able to keep his college expenditures roughly on budget, he was incurring other, extracurricular costs that were steadily pushing him into deficit. The most prominent of these was book buying, which he now began in earnest.45 Shortly after moving into Worcester, he went out one morning and bought a copy of Charles Lamb’s play John Woodvil (1802) and Walter Savage Landor’s jacobinical poem Gebir (1798), which astonished him ‘by the splendour of its descriptions’. Thomas brought the ‘two most unpopular of books’ back to his Worcester rooms and placed them ‘on the same shelf with the other far holier idols of my heart, the joint poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge as then associated in the “Lyrical Ballads” … I could not but smile internally at the fair prospect I had of congregating a library which no man had read but myself.’46 In the months that followed, his servant, Joe Preston, recollected how Thomas was ‘always buying fresh books and was sometimes at a loss how to find money for them. In those days men dressed for Hall: and [Thomas] having one day parted with his one waistcoat in order to purchase some book or other went into Hall hiding his loss of clothing as best he could’, but the concealment was detected, and Thomas was fined for the breach of etiquette, though this did not change his habits. He was entirely indisposed to ‘spend upon a tailor’, what he had ‘destined for a bookseller’.47 It was a trend that continued for the rest of his life.
Thomas liked to portray himself as a solitary, and at Oxford he contended that he kept very much to himself. The chief reason for this decision was unhappiness. ‘Suppose the case of a man suspended by some colossal arm over an unfathomed abyss – suspended, but finally and slowly withdrawn – it is probable that he would not smile for years. That was my case’ at Oxford.48 Heightening the sorrows of his past were distresses in the present, the most urgent of which concerned his younger brother Pink, who had recently run away from school after being repeatedly flogged by his headmaster. His mother and his uncle Penson sent him letters trying to convince him to return home. But he ‘absolutely’ rejected all of their offers, and after several weeks of failed negotiations, he signed on as a cabin boy in a South Sea whaler, and left England. Was this not precisely what Mrs Quincey had worried about? The eldest son raised ‘the standard of revolt’, and the second son emulated his actions. Thomas believed that his brother had ‘the soul of a hero’, and was right to reject the ‘unjust pretensions of authority’, but he also felt terrible guilt at the thought that his example had put Pink in harm’s way. What if he was killed at sea? What if he never returned? The incident poisoned ‘the tranquillity of a whole family’ for several years.49
Thomas listed the poor intellectual climate at Oxford as another reason why he chose to spend so much time alone. There were ‘no very good tutors’, and the students were ‘generally low in point of attainment’, especially when it came to a knowledge of modern literature, where their ignorance was so ‘intolerable and incomprehensible’ that Thomas ‘felt it to be impossible’ that he should ‘familiarly associate’ with them. Indeed, he ‘could not even bring himself to mention’ Wordsworth by name ‘for fear of having to encounter ridiculous observations, or jeering abuse of his favourite (who was laughed at by most of the Oxonians)’.50
A final reason for his solitude, remarkably enough, was his poor eyesight. Thomas suffered from myopia, which by the time he went to Oxford was so marked that he was rumoured to be ‘a bit of a Jacobin because he failed to “cap” the Master’, Dr Whittington Landon, from his ‘sheer inability to recognize him by sight’. Later, Thomas computed that during the first two years of his residence at Worcester, he ‘did not utter one hundred words’.51
Such a claim is, to say the least, an exaggeration. Thomas had private reasons for sorrow, and he may well have remained awkward or scornful in company. But there were gregarious and libidinous sides to him as well, and he seems far more likely to have picked up in Oxford where he left off six months earlier in Everton, rather than to have retreated into isolation and almost total silence. He declared at one point that during his time at Worcester he ‘allowed for no wine parties’.52 In another, contradictory account, however, he acknowledged that when he first moved into college ‘he was invited by many of the men of his own standing to their parties, which he joined – but he found them to be a drinking, rattling set, whose conversation was juvenile, commonplace, & quite unintellectual. He … invited them once or twice in return, & then dropped the intercourse’, though not the wine-drinking.53 Preston, his servant, used to say that Thomas ‘did not mix much with the other men, who in their turn resented some of his peculiarities’. Richard Lynch Cotton, the future provost of Worcester, heard that Thomas ‘did not frequent wine parties, though he did not abstain from wine’, and went on to praise him ‘for his rare conversational powers, and for his extraordinary stock of information upon every subject’. Thomas himself recorded making occasional ‘appointments to drink a glass of wine’ with a former Manchester Grammar School classmate. ‘I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who, upon my first entrance at college, was nearly falling into a deep melancholy … was sufficiently aware of these tendencies in my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them … and the remedies I sought were to force myself into society.’54
The most notable diversion during Thomas’s first term at Oxford was the trial, in March, of Rachel Lee, the ‘female infidel’ who had visited Greenhay nine years earlier and stunned Mrs Quincey and Hall with her frank professions of atheism. Time had not made her more cautious, and she had ended up embroiled in a case of abduction involving two brothers, Loudon and Lockhart Gordon, both of whom were Oxford graduates. Her version was that the brothers had kidnapped her. Theirs was that she had consented to an elopement. Thomas, fascinated as always by crime and secret guilt, determined to attend her trial. Dressed in his academic gown and at the courthouse by eight in the morning, he joined a throng of students who were besieging ‘the doors for some time before the moment of admission’. At nine the crowd was allowed in and the trial began. Lee’s servants were examined and then, around eleven, Lee herself was called, though she ‘was not long exposed to the searching gaze of the court’, for when the judge asked her if she ‘believed in the Christian religion’, she replied ‘No’, with the result that the trial was called to a halt, and the brothers ‘instantly acquitted’. Thomas went to her lodgings that afternoon, but was told she would see no one until the evening. He returned at dusk to find a mob assembled, and a lady issuing from the front door, ‘muffled up, and in some measure disguised’. It was Lee. A post-chaise was waiting in the adjacent street, and she was making her way steadily towards it. ‘Before she could reach it, however, she was detected’, and ‘a rush made to seize her’. Fortunately, a body of students formed a ring around her, ‘put her rapidly into the carriage’, and ‘then, joining the mob in their hootings, sent off the horses at a gallop’.55
At the end of his first term, Thomas vacated his Worcester rooms and took up residence about two and a half miles south-east of Oxford in the village of Littlemore, where he stayed with an honest but dull farmer and his five daughters, who ‘said more in an hour than their father in a month’. Far from being a recluse, Thomas was ‘in those days’ a ‘giddy thing’ who would often laugh with them through a whole morning, ‘whilst the mild unmurmuring lord of the premises sate neglected by us all!’56 One of the chief tasks he had set himself on this holiday was to write again to Wordsworth, as over seven months had passed since he had last contacted him, and – worryingly – he had not yet received a reply. On 14 March, Thomas pulled himself away from all the female attention of Littlemore to compose the letter, transforming himself in the process from excitable teenager to reverent admirer.
After explaining at the outset that he had been prevented from writing until now by the ‘painful employments’ and ‘little … unknown cares’ which attend leaving home and starting at university, Thomas moves to a much more central concern that has clearly been gnawing at him as a possible explanation of the poet’s silence. Had his ‘hyperbolical tributes of admiration’ roused Wordsworth’s suspicions? Had they offended him?57 Thomas sincerely hopes not. There has been, he promises the poet, no exaggeration in his accounts of the impact the Lyrical Ballads have had upon him, as he goes on to detail in a remarkable narrative in which he figures himself as a lost soul who is saved by the redemptive nature of Wordsworth’s writing. In 1799, he read ‘We are Seven’, but ‘a long time intervened’ before he discovered that the poem was part of a collection called the Lyrical Ballads. During this interval he fell under a Gothic spell, and
from frequent meditation on some characters of our own, & some of ancient story, & afterwards on some of the German Drama, I began to model my conduct & my aims on theirs: by degrees, being dazzled by the glory thrown on such objects by the voice of the people, & miserably deluding myself with the thought that I was led on by high aims, & such as were most worthy of my nature I daily intoxicated myself more & more with that delirious & lawless pleasure which I drew from the hope of elevating my name in authority & kingly splendour above every name that is named upon earth.
In the midst of this ‘temporary frenzy’ of sensualism and vanity, however, ‘it was not possible’ that Thomas, maintained from his infancy ‘in the Love of Nature, should not, at times relent & resign’ himself to a ‘confused feeling of purer & more permanent pleasure flowing from other sources’. Gradually, as he weaned himself from these ‘feverish & turbulent dreams’, he looked around ‘for some guide who might assist to develope & to tutor’ his new feelings. Then it was that he recollected Wordsworth’s poetry, and knew that he needed to seek direction from him.58
Thomas’s account here is not strictly in line with his other versions of these same events. Wordsworth, for example, seems never to have been crowded from his thoughts in the way that he describes in this letter. On the one hand, there can be no question that Thomas viewed Wordsworth’s poetry as embodying new and authentic forms of conduct and feeling, and that he regarded his experience of it as salvational.59 Yet on the other, Thomas was already highly adept at tailoring his experience in order to please his audience. In his famous ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth declared that he hoped his poems would counteract the degrading influence of ‘stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’.60 In the letter, Thomas presents himself to the poet as living proof that he has succeeded in his aim. After succumbing to the ‘undue influence’ of ‘ancient story’ and ‘the German Drama’, the Lyrical Ballads have restored him to his better self, with ‘every principle of good’ within him ‘purified & uplifted’.61
Before leaving Worcester, Thomas had given directions that all his mail was to be forwarded on to him at Littlemore. But when some weeks passed without receiving anything, he sent in a servant to check on the situation.62 Waiting for him there were two letters from Wordsworth. In the first, dated 6 March 1804, the poet is warm and candid. He allays Thomas’s fears about his silence by assuring him that his own procrastination has been to blame, and that he has thought of Thomas very often’. He speaks as the father figure Thomas clearly wants him to be: ‘I need not say to you that there is no true dignity but in virtue and temperance, and, let me add, chastity; and that the best safeguard of all these is the cultivation of pure pleasures, namely, those of the intellect and affections.’ At present, Wordsworth explains, he is hard at work on ‘a Poem on my own earlier life’ (which, over the next several months, grew to become his autobiographical masterwork, The Prelude). He has just finished Book III, which concerns his own undergraduate years at Cambridge. ‘It would give me great pleasure to read this work to you at this time,’ he tells Thomas. ‘As I am sure, from the interest you have taken’ in the Lyrical Ballads that ‘it would please you, and might also be of service to you.’ Finally, having cautioned Thomas in his first letter that his friendship was not in his power to give, Wordsworth concludes his second by signing himself ‘your very affectionate Friend’.63
The other Wordsworth letter waiting at Worcester was dated 19 March, and was much shorter. In it, the poet expressed concern that Thomas had not yet responded to his letter of 6 March. Wordsworth had, however, by this time received Thomas’s letter of 14 March, and he replied with genuine gratitude. Public perception of his work had been heavily influenced by the tarring he had received at the hands of the Edinburgh Review in its infamous October 1802 attack on the ‘Lake School of Poetry’, and the ‘splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society’ that ‘seems to be at the bottom of all’ Wordsworth’s verse.64 But here in Thomas De Quincey was someone who understood, someone young and ingenuous who could see far beyond the fatuousness and belligerence of the critics. ‘I cannot express to You how much pleasure it gave me to learn that my Poems had been of such eminent service to you as you describe,’ Wordsworth confided to him. ‘May God grant that you may persevere in all good habits, desires, and resolutions.’65
Sounding a good deal more self-assured, Thomas composed a long reply to both Wordsworth’s letters on Saturday, 31 March, and then concluded with a kind of postscript on Sunday morning. He is thrilled that Wordsworth has told him about his autobiographical poem, and he will wait ‘with great expectation for the advent of that day, on which I may hear you read it’. He deplores the assaults of the Edinburgh reviewers, and is Wordsworth’s staunch ally in his battle against them. ‘I have always felt any momentary indignation at their arrogance overbalanced by compassion for the delusions they are putting upon themselves.’ Worcester College is not to his liking. It is ‘singularly barren … of either virtue or talents or knowledge’, and he plans to pass no more of his time there than is necessary. On several occasions over the past few years, Thomas concedes that he has actively pursued licentious pleasures, but he is now at pains to assure Wordsworth that he guards vigilantly against them (though his typically drawn-out assurances partially conjure the guilt he is intent on suppressing). ‘I have been through life so much restrained from dissolute conduct by the ever-waking love of my mother,’ he declares rather surprisingly, ‘– and of late years so purified from dissolute propensities by the new order of pleasures which I have been led to cultivate that I feel a degree of confidence (not arrogant, I hope) that, even with greater temptations, I should not by my conduct at any rate make you repent the notice you have taken of me.’ Once again he extends his ‘warmest wishes’ to Coleridge and to Dorothy, and then, following the poet’s lead, signs himself ‘Your grateful and affectionate friend’.66
In April, he was back in Oxford, and it was probably at some point during his second term that – for the first and last time – he had a conversation with his tutor, a man he identifies only as ‘Jones’. ‘On a fine morning, he met me in the Quadrangle, and having then no guess of the nature of my pretensions, he determined (I suppose) to probe them. Accordingly, he asked me, “What I had been lately reading?” Now, the fact was, that I, at that time immersed in metaphysics, had really been reading’ Plato’s dialogue, the Parmenides. But certain that Jones would not know the work, and with no wish to embarrass him, Thomas lied and said William Paley, the Anglican priest and Utilitarian philosopher. ‘Ah!’ Jones exclaimed. An excellent author; excellent for his matter; only you must be on your guard as to his style; he is very vicious there.’ Tutor and student then bowed and parted. The brief exchange was enough to confirm for Thomas that Jones was a dunce, as his estimation of Paley was exactly backwards. As a philosopher, he ‘is a jest, the disgrace of the age’, Thomas snorted with the hauteur that so often defined his attitude towards his elders. ‘… But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master.’67
By this point, Thomas was studying hard as he both built on past interests and explored new ones. He ‘devoted himself principally to the society of a German named Schwartzburg, who is said to have taught him Hebrew’, and who also helped him to develop his skills in German. According to Cotton, Thomas’s ‘university studies were directed almost wholly to the ancient philosophy, varied by occasional excursions into German literature and metaphysics, which he loved to compare with those of Greece and Rome’. Thomas himself recalled that in 1804 he began consciously to read ‘in the same track as Coleridge, – that track in which few of any age will ever follow us, such as German metaphysicians, Latin schoolmen, thaumaturgic Platonists, religious Mystics’. His mother cautiously approved of his programme of reading, at least based on what he had told her. ‘Your studies under the name of Moral Philosophy cannot be objected to,’ she wrote to him on 5 June; ‘and as you have spoken only in general terms of your object, I conclude as I hope, that there is nothing objectionable either in the plan you are forming or the end you aim at.’68
Had she known of the debts he was running up as he pursued these studies, however, Mrs Quincey would have been seriously agitated. Within seven months of arriving in Oxford, Thomas had become ‘embarrassed’. Looking back, he believed that he should have candidly avowed his situation to his mother, ‘or to some one of the guardians, more than one of whom would have advanced me the £250 wanted (not in his legal character of guardian, but as a private friend)’. At the time, though, Thomas allowed a ‘movement of impatience’ to lead him in a ‘foolish’ direction, and he contacted Dell, the Jewish moneylender he had dealt with in London eighteen months earlier. ‘I applied again’ and now, as a member of a ‘respectable college, I was fortunate enough to win his serious attention to my proposals’. Voluminous negotiations followed, and ultimately Dell advanced him £250 on the outrageous but ‘regular’ terms of ‘paying seventeen and a-half per cent’.69 The steady erosion of Thomas’s patrimony was under way two years before he was even eligible to receive it.
He spent the summer term in Oxford, and then travelled north to Hinckley in south-west Leicestershire, where his mother had moved after selling the Priory, and where presumably he celebrated his nineteenth birthday.70 By early September, however, he was back down south in London, and in mid-October he returned to Worcester College to commence Michaelmas term.71 His initial months at Oxford had left him with profoundly mixed emotions. ‘From my boyish days’, he declared, ‘… I was engaged in duels of fierce continual struggle, with some person or body of persons, that sought … to throw a net of deadly coercion or constraint over the undoubted rights of my natural freedom.’ But by going to Oxford, practically he became his own master, and no doubt he exulted in being able to borrow substantial sums of money, spend his time as he saw fit, and deal with his mother and Hall on a much more equal footing. Yet Thomas also knew that his status as an undergraduate meant that his boyhood was over, and that the independence he had long sought came at the cost of ‘many duties and responsibilities’, in Oxford and far beyond. Badly fractured by his past, and living amongst the competing demands of the present, he was deeply unsure of the course ahead, but equally convinced that he possessed the intellectual gifts necessary to enable him to become ‘an object of notice to a large society’. No longer ‘absorbed into the general unit of a family, I felt myself… burthened with the anxieties of a man, and a member of the world’.72