High Culture
[i]
Bodily torment, he said, drove him to it. Down in London in the autumn of 1804, almost certainly in an attempt to finalize his £250 loan from Dell, De Quincey was suddenly seized with a toothache, which he tried to alleviate one night by jumping out of bed and plunging his head into a basin of cold water. ‘The next morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite for about twenty days.’1 On the twenty-first day, a rainy Sunday in early October, he tried to take his mind off the agony by roaming the London streets, where he accidentally met a Worcester College acquaintance who recommended opium. On his way home, De Quincey dropped into a druggist’s shop in Oxford Street, bought a tincture of opium, and returned with it to his lodgings.
One dose changed everything. ‘I took it’, he recalled:
and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: – this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me – in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea … for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.2
De Quincey had many pleasurable experiences on opium, but no high seems ever to have matched this first one. In a marked degree, he was hooked from the start.
Opium is perhaps the oldest drug known to humankind, and is derived from the milky sap found within the unripe seedpod of the poppy plant, Papaver somniferum.3 In Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was an unremarkable part of daily life. Highly prized by doctors as an analgesic, it was also used ubiquitously by people of every class and age for self-medication in much the same way as aspirin is used today. It was cheap: people who could not afford ale or spirits could afford the drug. It was legal: there was no effort to restrict its sale until the Pharmacy Act of 1868. It could be purchased in a vast range of commercial cure-alls: Batley’s Sedative Solution, Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, Dalby’s Carminative, Godfrey’s Cordial, the Kendal Black Drop, McMunn’s Elixir, and Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup, to name only a few. It was used to treat all manner of major and minor ailments: bronchitis, cancer, cholera, depression, diabetes, gout, malaria, pneumonia, sciatica, tetanus, ulcers, and much else. It was available everywhere: chemists and pharmacists sold it, as did bakers, grocers, publicans, tailors, rent collectors, and street vendors. Laudanum – De Quincey’s drug of choice – was a tincture prepared by dissolving opium in alcohol (making De Quincey, technically speaking, a ‘laudanum drinker’ rather than an ‘opium eater’). In De Quincey’s day, Britain imported almost all of its opium from Turkey.4 Morphine, which is the principal active agent in opium, was isolated in 1803, and commercially available by the early 1820s. With the introduction of the hypodermic syringe in the mid-1850s, the ‘morphia solution’ became widely known for its unparalleled efficacy in dealing with severe pain.5 Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the drug has been better known in the form of one of its chief derivatives: heroin.
At the time of his first explosive encounter with opium, De Quincey claimed that he had heard of it ‘as I had of manna or of Ambrosia, but no further’.6 This seems unlikely. He was almost certainly given the drug as a young child suffering from ague. He had read several descriptions of its powers in works such as Charlotte Smith’s ‘Ode to the Poppy’ and Jane West’s Infidel Father.7 The drug may well have come up as a topic of conversation between him and Lady Carbery, whose father, Henry Watson, successfully smuggled vast quantities of Bengal opium into China, and whose entire fortune of £300,000 went directly to Lady Carbery at his death in 1786.8 Further, opium was undoubtedly a matter of debate between De Quincey and his uncle Penson, for he was an officer in the military service of the East India Company, whose key commercial interest was opium. Penson was ready to agree with his sister that Britain should abandon its imperialist agenda in India. De Quincey thought otherwise, and rigorously attacked their position.9 In such a context, the lucrative opium trade must frequently have been a focal point of discussion.
Yet while De Quincey probably came to the drug with more knowledge than he cared to admit, he was almost wholly unprepared for its various and profound impact upon him. Throughout the age, there was a heated debate in the medical community about whether opium should be classified as a sedative or a stimulant. For De Quincey – and for millions of others – it was both. As a sedative, the drug helped him to cope with recurrent bouts of physical suffering, and his ongoing worries about family, money, past griefs, and the future.10 Most users report that the action of an opiate is oddly paradoxical: once under its influence, their pain is still present, but they feel more comfortable.11 So it was with De Quincey. Opium made his persistent problems seem lighter and smaller. It drained anxiety. It provided insulation. Amidst the demands of Oxford, and the stresses of modern life, the time and solitude that might have healed him were hard to find. Opium, however, was everywhere, and once he had dosed himself with it, he stood ‘aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended’.12
More strikingly, De Quincey was convinced that the drug was his best protection against tuberculosis. ‘At the commencement’ of his ‘opium career’, he was ‘pronounced repeatedly a martyr elect to pulmonary consumption. Out of eight children, he was ‘the one who most closely inherited the bodily conformation of a father who had died of consumption at the early age of thirty-nine’. Further, he exhibited at a glance ‘every symptom … broadly and conspicuously developed’, including ‘the hectic colours on the face, the nocturnal perspirations, the growing embarrassment of the respiration, and other expressions of gathering feebleness under any attempts at taking exercise’. And finally, the physicians who examined him ‘were thoroughly experienced in diagnosing the disease’.13 More than half a century later, De Quincey remained convinced that laudanum staved off tuberculosis, and had saved him from an early grave.
Of course De Quincey did not consume the drug for medical reasons alone; there were other, more exciting, benefits as well. Once ingested, opium brought about not only a surcease of pain and anxiety, but an increase in intellectual activity, and an overwhelming sense of euphoria. It was a decisive answer to the ennui that had plagued him: ‘the primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system’, he declared. When he first began to take the drug, its pleasurable action ‘always lasted … for upwards of eight hours’ as ‘a steady and equable glow’, while in later years it often sustained him through twenty-four consecutive hours of ‘extraordinary exertion’. The common perception was that – like wine – opium produced intoxication, but this was not the case. Wine volatilizes and disperses ‘the intellectual energies’. Opium introduces ‘amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony’. Wine ‘robs a man of his self-possession: opium greatly invigorates it’. Wine ‘calls up into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal’, part of our nature, whereas opium is transcendent. When taken properly, it elevates the ‘moral affections’ to a ‘state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect’.14
He began to experiment. About once every three weeks he left the grind of studying at college and slipped down to London, where he treated himself to ‘a debauch of opium’.15 His various recollections of these experiences have had an enormous influence on literature and art from his time to our own. In knitting together drugs, intellectualism, unconventionality, and the city, he maps in the countercultural figure of the bohemian. Decades before Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, he emerges as the first flâneur, high and anonymous, graceful and detached, strolling through crowded urban sprawls trying to decipher the spectacles, faces, and memories that reside there. As ‘the Pope’ of ‘the true church on the subject of opium’, he initiates the tradition of the literature of intoxication, and crafts a portrait of himself as the first modern artist, at once saint and exile.16
The opera house was a favourite resort on Tuesday and Saturday nights. Sitting amongst the wealthy and civilized, and saturated with laudanum, De Quincey listened in raptures as the Italian contralto Josephina Grassini ‘poured forth her passionate soul’. He had always loved music, but ‘now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally’, increased of necessity its ability ‘to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure’. In such a state, ‘a chorus … of elaborate harmony’ turned his thoughts inward, where he saw displayed, ‘as in a piece of arras work, the whole of [his] past life – not, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed’.17
As agreeable as these opera evenings were, De Quincey had another prized diversion that ‘could be had only on a Saturday night’, and that caused him to struggle with his love of the opera. ‘I used often … after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages.’ At this point in his life, De Quincey had a good deal more money than these workingclass Londoners, but he seems to have enjoyed pretending to be like them. ‘Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion.’ If wages were a little higher, or the price of food was a little lower, De Quincey was glad on their behalf. Yet if the opposite was true, he fell back rather disingenuously – on opium as a means of solace, for it had the power to ‘overrule all feelings into a compliance’ with a serene master key.18 On these long, rambling nights amongst London’s working class, De Quincey enjoyed the drugged bliss of both sympathy and separation.
He could, however, go even higher in his enjoyment of opium. The markets and theatres were exhilarating, but he candidly acknowledged that after a while the crowds became ‘an oppression’, and the music ‘too sensual and gross’. For De Quincey, opium was ultimately a drug of private realms, and the opium-eater naturally sought ‘solitude and silence’, for only under these ‘indispensable conditions’ could he enter into ‘those trances, or profoundest reveries’ which are the ‘divinest state’ of opium experience, and ‘the crown and consummation’ of what it ‘can do for human nature’. De Quincey fell often into reveries of this kind. Most famously, during summer nights when he was staying again at Mrs Best’s cottage in Everton, he dosed himself with laudanum, and then secluded himself away in a quiet room by an open window, where he sat motionless through the night gazing out at the sea and ‘the great town’ of Liverpool. ‘I shall be charged with mysticism,’ he declared, but ‘it has often struck me that the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place’ in these reveries. Liverpool ‘represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it.’ Tensions, angers, and opposites persisted, but opium transfigured them all into a harmony that was both dynamic and tranquil: ‘infinite activities, infinite repose’.19
De Quincey was awed by the power of the drug. To ‘the proud man’, it provided ‘a brief oblivion for ‘insults unavenged’. To ‘the guilty man, for one night’ it gave back ‘the hopes of his youth’. To ‘the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal’, it brought ‘an assuaging balm’. Opium stole away ‘the purposes of wrath’, and reversed ‘the sentences of unrighteous judges’. It burnished De Quincey. It convinced him that he could cope. Above all, it brought Elizabeth back before him, as it called ‘into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the “dishonours of the grave”’. During the opening years of his opium career, De Quincey managed to place a strict limit on the number of times he resorted to the drug. Nevertheless, its manifold attractions must often have impressed themselves upon him. ‘Thou only givest these gifts to man,’ he exclaimed; ‘and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!’20
The honeymoon lasted for eight years. Yet not all of De Quincey’s early experiences with the drug produced pleasure. Opium also played insidious tricks on him. As soon as he tampered with it, he began to have nightmares, as the agitations of his childhood ‘reopened in strength’, and ‘swept in upon the brain with power, and the grandeur of recovered life’. One of his most distressing ‘dream-echoes’ concerned the rumours of violence that surrounded the death of his sister Jane. ‘The nursery of my childhood expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed; and I was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and … smote me senseless to the ground.’ Then, the scene shifted, and De Quincey was forced to relive again the horror of Elizabeth’s death, only now the entire experience from bedchamber to graveside was ‘bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted into each other as in some sunny, glorifying haze’.21
At Oxford, too, De Quincey had opium-induced nightmares of a Roman goddess named ‘Levana’, who is in charge of childhood education, and who operates, not by ‘the poor machinery’ of ‘spelling-books and grammars’, but by ‘that mighty system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life’. Levana has three chief ministers, ‘The Sorrows’, each of whom presides over a different kingdom of grief. Two of these ministers De Quincey does not meet for several years, but the eldest of the three, ‘Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears’, he sees often in his Oxford dreams, and she torments him with talk of seduction and betrayal. ‘Through me did he become idolatrous,’ she reports; ‘and through me it was, by languishing desires, that he worshipped the worm, and prayed to the wormy grave.’22
To a certain extent, nightmares such as these would probably have beset De Quincey whether or not he ever took opium. He had what he once characterized as ‘a constitutional determination to reverie’. In childhood and adolescence, intense visions or hallucinations fell upon him often in moments of grief and trauma. A great deal of his dream imagery came from wide reading, and his inveterate habit of brooding on his own experience: of ‘Levana’ and her ‘Ladies of Sorrow’, he noted that ‘there is no great wonder that a vision, which occupied my waking thoughts in those years, should re-appear in my dreams’. Opium is a powerful substance, but it cannot make a dullard interesting. ‘If a man “whose talk is of oxen”, should become an Opium-eater,’ he insists, ‘the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all) – he will dream about oxen.’23
Yet despite his wish to credit the powers of his own mind for the splendour of his nightmares, De Quincey did not hold consistently to the claim that opium played no role in enhancing his dreaming faculty. Without the drug he would still have been an extraordinary dreamer, but with it the raw materials in his mind were profoundly altered, as he himself often conceded. ‘Some merely physical agencies can and do assist the faculty of dreaming almost preternaturally,’ he declared, and ‘beyond all others is opium, which indeed seems to possess a specific power in that direction; not merely for exalting the colours of dream-scenery, but for deepening its shadows; and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities.’ Traumatic childhood recollection alone did not produce his Oxford nightmares: opium ‘co-operated’ with his ‘nursery experience’ to create that ‘tremendous result’. ‘Eloquent’ and heroic, it ‘buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain’, drawing De Quincey down into a divine abyss, where his spectacular pleasures and bitter memories played out in nightmare and reverie.24 For several years, the pleasures of opium outweighed the pains. But all the while the drug was tightening its hold on him.
[ii]
At nineteen years old, De Quincey enjoyed days of ‘radiant happiness’ in Oxford.25 He worked hard with Schwartzburg on his German pronunciation, though he insisted on learning everything else related to the language himself, a brave and prescient decision carried out in that ‘spirit of fierce (perhaps foolish) independence’ which governed most of his actions ‘at that time of life’.26 By the start of his second year he read the language with ease, and embarked on an extended study of authors such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jean Paul Richter, Friedrich Schiller, and Augustus and Friedrich Schlegel. Yet as significant as these authors were in shaping his views on irony, aesthetics, and literary theory, they were not the central object of his pursuit. For De Quincey, ‘the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden’ was ‘the new or transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant’ as articulated in his revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason.27
Initially, De Quincey was awe-inspired by Kant’s argument that the traditional way of viewing cognition needed to be reversed, so that instead of assuming that all our knowledge conformed to objects, we thought of objects as conforming to our knowledge, to our ways of knowing. Six weeks’ study, however, was sufficient to close De Quincey’s ‘hopes in that quarter for ever’. By insisting that we can only know an object through its appearance, and not as a ‘thing in itself’, Kant seemed to De Quincey to destroy the possibility of objective knowledge, for our perception of the world lay ‘ultimately in ourselves’, rather than in ‘any external or alien tenure’, as De Quincey himself put it. Yet he admitted that Kant’s ideas remained ‘painfully irritating to the curiosity’, and he came back to him over and over again throughout the course of his career, grappling with him especially when it came to theological issues. ‘Neither can I think that any man, though he may make himself a marvellously clever disputant, ever could tower upwards into a very great philosopher, unless he should begin or should end with Christianity. Kant is a dubious exception.’28
De Quincey’s fascination with Kantian and post-Kantian metaphysics was matched by his ongoing preoccupation with Coleridge, whose deep engagement with German philosophy galvanized his own interest in the subject. Shortly after Christmas in 1804, De Quincey angled for a meeting with Coleridge when he ‘obtained from a literary friend a letter of introduction’ to Charles Lamb, a twenty-nine-year-old clerk at India House, and one of Coleridge’s closest personal friends. Lamb was a generous man and brilliant wit with a genius for friendship, but he had also suffered acutely from personal misfortune. In 1795 he battled a six-week bout of madness, and a year later his beloved sister Mary fatally stabbed their mother in a fit of insanity. Lamb had published poetry with Coleridge, as well as A Tale of Rosamund Gray and a tragedy, John Woodvil, which De Quincey had purchased shortly after arriving in Oxford. The letter of introduction represented him to Lamb ‘in the light of an admirer’, but De Quincey later acknowledged with some embarrassment that he had sought Lamb’s acquaintance because of ‘the reflex honour he had enjoyed of being known as Coleridge’s friend’, rather ‘than for any which he yet held directly and separately in his own person’.29
Their initial meeting was auspicious. Presenting himself at India House, De Quincey was shown into a room with ‘a very lofty writing-desk, separated by a still higher railing’, within which sat ‘six quill-driving gentlemen … all too profoundly immersed in their oriental studies to have any sense of my presence’. With no servants nearby to announce him, De Quincey walked ‘into one of the two open doorways of the railing’, touched the arm of the clerk closest to him, and presented his letter himself. ‘The gentleman smiled; it was a smile not to be forgotten. This was Lamb.’30 He clambered amicably down from his perch, shook De Quincey’s hand, and invited him that evening to dine with him at 16 Mitre Court Buildings, Inner Temple, where he lived with Mary.
De Quincey arrived shortly after seven, and almost immediately betrayed the real reason for his visit, as he turned ‘the conversation, upon the first opening which offered, to the subject of Coleridge’. Mary answered all his questions ‘satisfactorily, because seriously’, but Charles was provoked. Sensing both the disingenuousness of the visit, and the faintly ludicrous intensity of De Quincey’s devotion to the poet, he could not resist the pleasure of goading him by ‘throwing ridicule’ upon Coleridge. Before long De Quincey was perspiring, and when Lamb began to berate ‘The Ancyent Marinere’, he could hold his tongue no longer. ‘But, Mr Lamb, good heavens! how is it possible you can allow yourself in such opinions? What instance could you bring from the poem that would bear you out in these insinuations?’ ‘Instances!’ snapped Lamb: ‘oh, I’ll instance you, if you come to that. Instance, indeed! Pray, what do you say to this – “The many men so beautiful, / And they all dead did lie”? So beautiful indeed! Beautiful! Just think of such a gang of Wapping vagabonds, all covered with pitch, and chewing tobacco.’ Lamb had no doubt a good deal more to say in this vein, but before he could go further De Quincey, ‘in a perfect rapture of horror’, raised his ‘hands – both hands – to both ears’ in order to shut out ‘Lamb’s impieties’, though when the diatribe ended and he lowered his hands, Lamb allowed himself one final salvo: ‘If you please, sir, we’ll say grace before we begin.’ De Quincey was unable to determine whether his host was ‘really piqued’ or just shamming, and he felt ‘greatly ashamed’ at his ‘boyish failure’ to resist the bait Lamb had set for him. Yet at the same time, the evening convinced him that Lamb was a ‘traitor’ to Coleridge, and De Quincey did not call on him again for some years.31 He had not yet learned to appreciate the wisdom in Lamb’s humour.
Weekend opium debauches and the opportunity to meet Lamb were not the only reasons drawing him from Oxford down to London. His book-buying continued unabated as he built up his library in a number of specific areas, including British history, German philosophy, Protestant theology, and ‘everything related’ to the poet Milton.32 He went often to the theatre, where he particularly enjoyed watching ‘the ever memorable and most excellent’ Dorothy Jordan, whose ‘laugh itself thrilled the heart with pleasure’, and the ‘immortal’ Sarah Siddons, ‘queen of the tragic stage’.33 De Quincey also insisted that he remained in unsuccessful pursuit of Ann. ‘During some years I hoped that she did live; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of the word myriad, I must, on my different visits to London, have looked into many myriads of female faces’, in the hope of meeting her. These searches no doubt assuaged his feelings of loss and guilt. But he ‘paid a heavy price’ for them ‘in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep’.34
In the spring of 1805, De Quincey went to visit his mother in her new home at No. 8, Dowry Parade, Clifton, a village near Bristol which Mrs Quincey had chosen in large measure because it was only fourteen miles from Wrington, in Somersetshire, where her dear friend Hannah More resided at Barley Wood with her four sisters. De Quincey apparently liked the house very much, and seems also to have been finding it easier to get along with his mother, for over the next few years he described himself as ‘continually resident’ in Clifton.35 Yet mother and son still disagreed over a good deal, including ‘Holy Hannah’, whom De Quincey condemned as ‘eaten up’ with the ‘cant’ of evangelicalism, and far too inclined to sit in luxurious saloons lecturing her ‘poor, hard-working fellow-countrymen upon the enormity of the blessings which they enjoy’.36 More undoubtedly sensed his disapproval, but conceded that he was a ‘clever young man’, and certainly delighted him in the early autumn when she introduced him to Joseph Cottle, the Bristol publisher of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads.37 Several interviews between the two men followed, as De Quincey plied Cottle for information about Coleridge and Wordsworth, and exhibited ‘talents’ in their conversations which convinced Cottle that ‘young Mr De Quincey’ would ‘shine’ in the future. De Quincey, for his part, called upon Cottle whenever he ‘passed through Bristol, simply as a man of letters; and I thought him a very agreeable companion’.38
He appears to have spent most of the next six months in Clifton, with perhaps intermittent visits to London or Everton to enjoy an opium debauch. Certainly he seems not to have returned to Oxford, for he is only batteled for one penny each week during the autumn and winter terms in order to keep his name on the books.39 It had now been several months since he had last communicated with Wordsworth, and in the spring of 1806 he decided to pay the visit that he had so long been contemplating.40 But after journeying all the way to ‘the Lake of Coniston, which is about eight miles from the church of Grasmere’, his nerves failed him and he retreated back down to Everton, where on 6 April he wrote to the poet seeking reassurance and detailing the reasons for his long silence: for the past two years he has been ‘struggling with an unconfirmed pulmonary consumption’ which he inherited from his father, and ‘which the sedentariness of a college life greatly aided’; and he has also had to deal with the ‘primal affliction’ of losing his brother Pink, ‘a boy of great promise who, in disdain of the tyranny exercised over him at school, went to sea’.41 It took some time for De Quincey’s letter to reach Wordsworth, who was in London, but on 5 May he responded with concerns over De Quincey’s health and kind promises that he remained as anxious as ever that they should meet.42 A month later, De Quincey was still in Everton, and wrote back to Wordsworth with the news that he was ‘in daily expectation of hearing some final account’ of Pink’s ship, the Cambridge, and that he could not commit to a visit to the Lakes until he heard ‘something’ which liberated him from his present indecision of purpose’.43 In the event, no news of the Cambridge arrived, and by the time this was clear, the opportunity to visit Wordsworth had slipped away.
Remarkably divided as always between determination and procrastination, De Quincey journeyed back up to Coniston again in August, and once more set his sights on calling at Dove Cottage. This time he advanced ‘to the very gorge of Hammerscar’ from where he could actually see Wordsworth’s ‘little white cottage gleaming from the midst of trees’. But his courage failed him again. De Quincey later remarked that he was prevented from advancing by both a ‘laughable excess’ of ‘modesty’ at his own pretensions, and an admiration for Wordsworth that was ‘literally in no respect short of a religious feeling’. After only a few short moments gazing down at ‘this loveliest of landscapes’, he turned and ‘retreated like a guilty thing’.44
De Quincey was in or near Coniston on 15 August, his twenty-first birthday, and a date he had long anticipated, for he was now legally free from his mother and guardians, and entitled to spend his patrimony as he wished. Perhaps as a way of commemorating the occasion, he sat down three days later at Coniston’s Black Bull Inn and wrote out what he called his ‘Constituents of Happiness’, a list of twelve items that was clearly shaped by the piety and introspection of his mother’s evangelicalism, his proximity to both Grasmere and Wordsworth, and a somewhat unexpected ethical idealism that may well be indebted to his reading of William Godwin’s radical Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.45
Not surprisingly, number one on De Quincey’s list is ‘a capacity of thinking – i.e. of abstraction and reverie’, though this is countered by ‘the cultivation of an interest in all that concerns human life and human nature’. Next follow ‘a fixed and not merely temporary residence in some spot of eminent beauty’, and ‘such an interchange of solitude and interesting society as that each may give to each an intense glow of pleasure’. Number five is ‘Books’ (he underlines it), number six ‘some great intellectual project’, and number seven ‘health and vigour’. Then, ‘the consciousness of a supreme mastery over all unworthy passions’, ‘a vast predominance of contemplation’, an ‘emancipation from worldly cares’, and ‘the education of a child’. Finally, and perhaps most revealingly, De Quincey lists ‘a personal appearance’ that is ‘tolerably respectable’. Now fully grown, he remained under five feet tall, a circumstance that never ceased to bother and embarrass him. Perhaps unconsciously, he notes later in this section that one of the best compensations for a small stature is to acquire ‘a high literary name’.46
He spent the next two months in Everton before travelling south to Oxford to begin his fourth year of studies.47 It was at about this time that some occasion demanded that ‘a declamation should be written & delivered in Latin by some one of his college – and it fell to him to do it’. Accordingly, De Quincey ‘composed & delivered the oration, and as he had written it with some care & was a tolerable master of the language, it excited considerable attention’. After he finished, ‘many persons high in the University came up, shook him by the hand, & congratulated him’, while in the days that followed ‘he found himself noticed by the head of the College & several of the Students’. De Quincey had not originally been impressed by the intellectual calibre of Oxford undergraduates, but following the triumph of his declamation, ‘he received invitations, & soon discovered that all the University men were not of the same description as those with whom he had at first associated’.48
Christmas holidays arrived, and his mother hoped that he would be at home in Clifton, as he had been last year. Instead, flushed as he was by his inheritance, De Quincey decided to take up lodgings in London at 5 Northumberland Street, Marylebone, in order that he might indulge in urban pleasures.49 At this point he could afford such a decision, though he had recently learned that the £2600 he inherited had already been reduced by £600 in order to cover his various debts. At least £250 went immediately to Dell. His mother and guardians saw to it that another £150 was deducted to cover all the expenses incurred by his sister Mary four years earlier when she went in pursuit of him in the Lakes after receiving word that he had absconded from Manchester Grammar School.50 The remaining £200 was probably comprised in the main of his debts to booksellers.
Fatally, De Quincey surveyed these losses with ‘philosophic indifference’. He was in better spirits than he had been in a long time, as ‘a Young Man of Fortune, and no common portion of Originality’, in Cottle’s crisp summary. In February he returned to Oxford, and established himself in a new set of rooms.51 A month later he rejoiced as the British Parliament passed the ‘great’ Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and ‘absolutely extinguished’ the ‘wicked commerce’. When term ended, he headed back to London, where he received a letter from his mother announcing that his uncle Penson had sent him a gift of £50, which she hoped he could enjoy while he was ‘among the Booksellers’.52
Yet not all was as De Quincey could have wished. Other letters from his mother and sister Jane confirmed that the family was still no closer to determining what exactly had happened to Pink, for their attempts to trace him were ‘perplexed and disappointed by a hundred different and contradictory accounts, given by a hundred different people’.53 Perhaps even more pointedly, both Coleridge and Wordsworth were in London in late April, and though Wordsworth wrote expressly to tell him that he would be ‘most happy’ to see him, De Quincey did not respond to his letter, and by the time he did venture down to London, both poets had left town. In the weeks that followed, Wordsworth no doubt began to wonder exactly what sort of person his young admirer was, while De Quincey felt a deepening sense of ‘self-contempt’ at his own ‘want of courage to face’ him.54 Committed as he was to their friendship, he was pinioned between two very different conceptions of the role he wished to play, for he was a humble admirer who hoped to be treated as an equal, and a disciple who wanted to be regarded as a champion.55 To date he had been able to convince himself that no opening had been just the right opening for their first face-to-face encounter. But impatience was growing on both sides: De Quincey needed to step forward before Wordsworth stepped back.