SIX

Lives of the Poets

[i]

De Quincey loved to travel on the mail-coaches. They fired his imagination in at least five different ways: ‘first, through velocity, at that time unprecedented’; ‘secondly, through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads’; ‘thirdly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class of horses selected for this mail service’; ‘fourthly, through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances, of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation in a national result’; and finally, through the ‘awful political mission’ which they ‘at that time … fulfilled’, for the ‘mail-coaches it was that distributed over the face of the land … the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo’.1

When he boarded these mail-coaches, De Quincey was much more than a passive observer. For many years, people had assumed that the genteel place to ride was inside the carriage. The Oxford sparks of De Quincey’s day, however, effected a revolution when they announced their preference for riding on the outside, where they could enjoy ‘the air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat’, and ‘above all, the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving’. De Quincey himself relished such opportunities, for at no other time did he feel more intimately connected to the grandeur of Britain’s social machinery. Yet these mail-coaches also filled him with ‘an under-sense, not unpleasurable, of possible though indefinite danger’, for their fixed schedules and powerful horses meant they sometimes caused accidents on the road which they had no time to pause and remedy.2

De Quincey enjoyed riding the mail-coaches for one final reason: journeying from London down the Bath Road to Clifton, he met Fanny, ‘the loveliest young woman for face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have beheld’. Fanny lived at a mile’s distance from the Bath Road, ‘but came so continually to meet the mail, that I on my frequent transits rarely missed her’. At her stop, De Quincey had only about ‘four hundred seconds’ to speak with her before the coach moved off again, but he used these moments to flirt and admire. ‘Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous girl.’3 Fanny also had a grandfather, who made an even more indelible impression. He was a coachman on the mail, and reminded De Quincey of a crocodile, as his broad back and stiffening legs meant that he had a ‘monstrous inaptitude’ for turning round. No single image tortured De Quincey like the crocodile. It brought out his worst fears of self-division and otherness. Fanny filled his dreams. Then her grandfather. Then the crocodile, which in turn awakened ‘a dreadful host of wild semi-legendary animals’ that swarmed and reviled him. As was so frequently the case, De Quincey in his nightmares found terror residing at the very heart of beauty and pleasure, as the intensely associative qualities of his dreaming mind forced ‘horrid inoculation’ upon opposite natures.4 Dreams of this kind tormented him for decades.

[ii]

He was in Clifton in the summer of 1807 when thrilling news arrived. Coleridge was staying with his close friend Thomas Poole not more than a day’s journey away in Nether Stowey. De Quincey immediately contacted Cottle in the hope of obtaining from him a letter of introduction to Poole, and on 26 July Cottle happily complied with his request. ‘The bearer, Mr De Quincey,’ he explained to Poole, ‘a Gentleman of Oxford, a Scholar and a man of Genius, feels a high admiration for Coleridge’s character, and understanding that he was either with you or in the neighbourhood, Mr De Quincey felt disposed to pay him a passing visit.’5 Earlier in the year, the thought of presenting himself to Wordsworth and Coleridge in London had paralysed De Quincey, but Coleridge on his own was a possibility. Wordsworth was a father figure. Coleridge was like a favoured older brother, and De Quincey already sensed he had much more in common with him.

That same day, he bent his way south on horseback, crossed the River Bridgwater on a ferry, and presented himself at Poole’s ‘rustic old-fashioned house’ in the evening, only to find that Coleridge, his wife Sara, and their three children were no longer staying with Poole, but had moved on to another friend’s house in the area, and may even at that point have been ‘on the wing’ to a third friend’s home in Bridgwater. De Quincey was disappointed but determined, and he eagerly accepted Poole’s kind offer to stay with him until they could locate Coleridge. Over the next few days, as they sent out enquiries into the neighbourhood, De Quincey greatly enjoyed the company of this ‘polished and liberal’ farmer, whose library was ‘superbly mounted in all departments bearing at all upon political philosophy’, and who was more than happy to share his extensive knowledge of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their time in and around Nether Stowey.6

On or about the fourth morning, De Quincey and Poole received word that Coleridge was almost certainly in Bridgwater staying with the magistrate and merchant John Chubb and his family. Armed with directions on how to find the house, De Quincey quickly rode the eight miles to Bridgwater, where he passed down one of the main streets until he noticed ‘a gateway corresponding to the description’ he had been given at Poole’s. Under it was standing a man who seemed to be about five feet eight; ‘his person was broad and full’; ‘his complexion was fair’; his hair was black; ‘his eyes were large and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess … that I recognized my object’. De Quincey dismounted, steadied himself by making ‘two or three trifling arrangements’ to his dress, and then advanced. ‘This was Coleridge.’7

He introduced himself. Coleridge started. Lost in a ‘deep reverie’, he had not seen De Quincey approach, but he soon awoke to himself and received his young admirer ‘with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be called gracious’. The two went inside the Chubb house, where Coleridge evidently felt very much at ease, as he ‘rang the bell for refreshments’, and extended to De Quincey an invitation to a ‘very large dinner party’ at the house that evening, which De Quincey quickly accepted. Then, summoning his courage, De Quincey gave Coleridge a gift which he had carried with him from Clifton: ‘a scarce Latin pamphlet, De Ideis’, written by the physician and philosopher David Hartley. In return, De Quincey undoubtedly hoped that Coleridge would be inspired to deliver one of his famous monologues. He was. ‘Coleridge, like some great river … that had been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, and suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music, – swept at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive.’ De Quincey ‘seldom sought to interrupt’ him during this remarkable, three-hour demonstration, but Coleridge did pause at one point when the door opened and a woman entered. ‘Mrs Coleridge,’ he said frigidly. De Quincey bowed and ‘the lady almost immediately retired’. From this ‘ungenial scene’, De Quincey surmised what he soon came to know: ‘Coleridge’s marriage had not been a very happy one.’8

That evening, Coleridge ‘knew that he was expected to talk, and exerted himself to meet the expectation’, but De Quincey could see plainly that he was labouring under ‘the weight of dejection’, and that the ‘restless activity’ of his mind ‘in chasing abstract truths’ was ‘in a great measure, an attempt to escape out of his own personal wretchedness’. After a few hours Coleridge and De Quincey left the party to take a walk, during which De Quincey was astonished at the number of people who interrupted them ‘to make personal inquiries’ after Coleridge’s health. At one point, De Quincey mentioned that he had taken laudanum to relieve the pains of a toothache. Coleridge, he claimed, immediately confessed that he was ‘under the full dominion of opium’, and expressed ‘horror at the hideous bondage’. De Quincey already knew as much. He had learned of Coleridge’s drug problem from Poole – if he had not heard of it earlier from Cottle – and he may even have introduced the topic of laudanum as a way of eliciting some comment from Coleridge.9 Whether Coleridge would have taken De Quincey so quickly into his confidence may be doubted, but if he did not confide in him on their first meeting, it was not long before he did.

The two parted at about ten o’clock, and De Quincey rode out of Bridgwater. After the excitement of the day, he knew he would not sleep, and so he determined to travel the forty miles back to Bristol ‘through the coolness of the night’. The roads were ‘quiet as garden-walks’, and De Quincey seemed to himself ‘in solitary possession of the whole sleeping country’. Coleridge filled his imagination – his words, his appearance, his ‘powers so majestic already besieged by decay’ – and De Quincey planned what he might do next to consolidate their acquaintance and assist this ‘extraordinary person’.10

In August he travelled to Everton for a holiday, but he was back in Clifton by early September, and soon learned that Sara Coleridge and the children – Hartley (aged ten), Derwent (aged six), and Sara (aged four) – had moved into Bristol, while Coleridge himself was back in Nether Stowey with Poole.11 De Quincey called often on Sara, and spent a great deal of time playing and walking with the children. ‘Hartley Coleridge dined with me a few days ago; and I gained his special favour, I believe, by taking him … through every dell and tangled path of Leighwood,’ De Quincey wrote to his sister on 15 September. ‘However, Derwent still continues my favourite.’12 De Quincey undoubtedly talked to both boys about Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in at least one instance his high expectations ended in bathos. On learning that Hartley ‘had recently been travelling with his father and Mr Wordsworth’, De Quincey asked whether he could recollect any of Wordsworth’s remarks. ‘Yes,’ the boy replied, after a long pause. What did Wordsworth say? ‘Why, when we came to Uxbridge,’ Hartley answered, ‘Mr Wordsworth observed, that what they had the presumption to call buttered toast, was in fact dry toast dipped in hot water.’13

Coleridge joined his family in Bristol some time late in September. Earlier in the month he had accepted an invitation from his old friend, the chemist Humphry Davy, to give a winter course of lectures for the Royal Institution in London on the ‘Principles of Poetry’, and he was increasingly consumed with the preparations. De Quincey visited him often, and the two undoubtedly discussed the lecture series at length, as well as other shared interests, including classical scholarship and Kantian metaphysics. Opium, too, appears to have formed a topic of discussion, or perhaps Coleridge simply noticed in De Quincey the telltale signs of laudanum consumption. Certainly an October entry in his Notebooks suggests that De Quincey was using the drug during these weeks, and that Coleridge already recognized the unnerving extent to which his young devotee was also his doppelgänger. ‘Two faces, each of a confused countenance … in the eyes of the one muddiness and lustre were blended, and the eyes of the other were the same.’14

De Quincey was a guest in the Coleridge home often enough to recognize how serious a problem laudanum was. And he soon realized that debt was also causing a great deal of tension, as Cottle confirmed when he made tactful enquiries. Might Coleridge accept a loan from De Quincey? Cottle agreed to sound him out, and in early October he wrote to Coleridge to tell him that ‘an opulent friend’ wished to make him ‘an offer of three hundred pounds’, though upon the stipulation that ‘his name should be concealed’. When Cottle put the idea to Coleridge in person a short time later, Coleridge ‘appeared much oppressed … and, after a short silence, he … said, “Cottle I will write to you. We will change the subject”’.15 In a letter of 13 October, Coleridge told Cottle that he would accept the money ‘as an unconditional Loan’, provided that his ‘unknown Benefactor is in such circumstances, that in doing what he offers to do, he transgresses no duty, of morals or of moral prudence’.16

Cottle communicated the news to De Quincey, who promptly offered to increase the amount to five hundred pounds, or one quarter of his remaining patrimony. ‘Can you afford it?’ Cottle asked. ‘I can,’ replied De Quincey. Cottle gently remonstrated. ‘A spirit of equity compels me to recommend you, in the first instance, to present Mr C. with a smaller sum, and which, if you see it right, you can at any time, augment.’ De Quincey then replied, ‘Three hundred pounds, I will give him, and you will oblige me by making this offer of mine to Mr Coleridge.’ He then contacted John Kelsall, his father’s former clerk who was still managing parts of the Quincey estate from Manchester, requesting that he advance him three hundred pounds from his patrimony. The money duly arrived, and was soon in the hands of Coleridge, who on 12 November 1807 sent a receipt: ‘Received from Mr Joseph Cottle, the sum of Three Hundred Pounds presented to me through him by an unknown Friend.’17

Cottle had done his best to keep the financial arrangements a secret, but within a few months he informed De Quincey that he was satisfied Coleridge entertained ‘no doubt of the source whence the money was derived’.18 De Quincey probably greeted this news with both pleasure and embarrassment, for he was keen that Coleridge realized how much he admired him, but he did not want a sense of gratitude to strain their friendship. The offer was of course far more than De Quincey could afford, and it provides a telling example of his humility and generosity. Perhaps more than any other contemporary, De Quincey appreciated what Coleridge had already achieved, especially as a poet and metaphysician, and when he learned of his difficulties, he did all he could to make it possible for him to write and think.

The gift – or ‘loan’ as De Quincey was later forced to insist – was not the only way in which he supported Coleridge during this autumn. For several weeks the poet had been planning to send his family north to the Lakes, where they were to resume living at Greta Hall in Keswick, which they now shared with the family of the historian, essayist, and future poet laureate Robert Southey, whose wife was Sara Coleridge’s younger sister. De Quincey volunteered to serve as an escort, for he instantly saw his opportunity to meet Wordsworth, not as a teenage fugitive, or a Lakeland sightseer, but as the trusted companion of the Coleridge family. His offer was readily accepted, and the party set off at the end of October. Four days later they arrived in Liverpool, where De Quincey took up quarters in the Liverpool Arms Hotel, and Coleridge, Sara, and the children stayed with John Theodore Koster, a ‘gold merchant of celebrity’, and a good friend of Southey’s.19 On the first day Coleridge wrote to tell De Quincey to expect a call from Koster, and on the second to ask if he would like ‘to go to the Concert’ that evening. Shortly thereafter, De Quincey dined at the Koster house, where he met the Italian soprano Angelica Catalini, whom he had heard repeatedly in London, as well as Roster’s daughters, who displayed remarkable abilities in several different languages, and who did not ‘shrink, even in the presence of the mighty enchantress and syren, from exhibiting their musical skill’.20

At the end of four days in Liverpool, Coleridge returned to Bristol to work on his lecture series, while De Quincey, Sara, and the children headed north to Grasmere, ‘travelling all the way in Chaises, and under the protecting wing of kind Mr de Q’, as Sara put it.21 He continued to get on marvellously well with the children. Many years later Derwent recollected how at one point on the trip De Quincey had to climb out by the front window of the chaise ‘to take the place of a tipsy driver’, while Sara recalled that on this same journey De Quincey ‘jested with me … and declared I was to be his wife, which I partly believed. I thought he behaved faithlessly in not claiming my hand.’22

The five travellers spent the night at Lancaster, and pushed on the following day through Kendal to Ambleside and then further towards Town End, the small hamlet on the southern edge of Grasmere where Dove Cottage is located. As they followed the road up the hill to White Moss Common, the ‘weariness of moving so slowly caused De Quincey and the two Coleridge boys to alight. They gained the summit on foot, and then ran down the steep slope on the other side, where near the bottom they followed an abrupt turn in the road and came ‘in sight of a white cottage, with two solemn yew-trees breaking the glare of its white walls’. De Quincey stopped. A ‘sudden shock’ seized him.23 He was now standing just a few yards away from Dove Cottage.

Figure 2: Amos Green’s picture of Dove Cottage, 1806

His ‘old panic’ returned. But before he could reconsider or retreat, Hartley bounded in through the garden gate, and the chaise carrying the two Saras came rattling furiously down the descent and pulled into view. De Quincey was literally trembling. ‘This little cottage was tenanted by that man whom, of all the men from the beginning of time, I most fervently desired to see.’ His duty was to wait for the ‘coming up of the chaise, that I might be ready to hand Mrs Coleridge out’. Yet given the intensity with which he had anticipated this meeting, it is not surprising that he forgot. For had ‘Charlemagne and all his Peerage been behind me, or Caesar and his equipage, or Death on his pale horse, I should have forgotten them at that moment of intense expectation’. Following Hartley from the road through the gate and towards the cottage, De Quincey was ‘no longer clearly conscious’ of his own feelings. And then, ‘I heard a step, a voice, and, like a flash of lightning, I saw the figure emerge of a tallish man, who held out his hand, and saluted me with … the warmest expression of friendly welcome that it is possible to imagine.’ De Quincey had done it. He had introduced himself to Wordsworth. He had shaken his hand. Stunned, he ‘mechanically went forward into the house’.24

Two women greeted him. The first was Mary Wordsworth, the poet’s wife of five years, and now the mother of three young children: John, Dora, and Thomas. Curtseying slightly when De Quincey entered, she advanced towards him with an extended hand and ‘so frank an air’ that all his ‘embarrassment … fled in a moment’. She was ‘neither handsome nor even comely’, but she exercised ‘all the practical power and fascination of beauty, through the mere compensatory charms of sweetness all but angelic, of simplicity the most entire, womanly self-respect, and purity of heart’.25 The other woman in the room was the poet’s thirty-five-year-old sister Dorothy, who was less at ease than her sister-in-law, but who clearly surpassed her in vitality and intelligence. ‘Rarely, in a woman of English birth, had I seen a more determinate gipsy tan,’ De Quincey recalled.

Her eyes … were wild and startling … Her manner was warm and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which, being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irrepressible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked, in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age, and her maidenly condition … gave to her whole demeanour and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment and even of self-conflict.

De Quincey was used to celebrating the pale and aristocratic beauty of Lady Carbery, or the varied accomplishments of Mr Koster’s daughters. Dorothy was altogether different. ‘She did not cultivate the graces which preside over the person and its carriage,’ he candidly acknowledged. ‘But, on the other hand, she was a person of very remarkable endowments intellectually.’ He had not arrived at Dove Cottage prepared to encounter her. She intrigued him from the start, though, and he soon came ‘heartily’ to admire her.26

Wordsworth and the two Saras entered the cottage a few moments later, and De Quincey got his first good look at the poet. Given his concerns about his own physical appearance, he was undoubtedly relieved to discover that Wordsworth’s physique was nowhere near as impressive as his poetry. Granted, he was ‘of a good height, just under five feet ten’, but upon the whole he was ‘not a well-made man’. His legs were a problem: they were serviceable, but the contour was bad and they had been ‘pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs’. Worse was the bust: ‘there was a narrowness and a droop about the shoulders which … had an effect of meanness’. De Quincey conceded, however, that Wordsworth’s face ‘made amends’ for these defects, for it was ‘certainly the noblest for intellectual effects’ that he had ever seen: the mouth firm; the nose ‘a little arched, and large’; the eyes exhibiting ‘a light radiating from some far spiritual world’; and the forehead notable for its ‘breadth and expansive development’.27

At half past five that afternoon everyone gathered upstairs about the teatable for the principal meal of the day ‘under the simple rustic system of habits’ which the Wordsworths cherished. De Quincey was far too shy to speak, but he listened with delight to the conversation, ‘superior by much, in its tone and subject, to any which I had ever heard before – one exception only being made, in favour of Coleridge’. At around eleven o’clock the party broke up, and De Quincey was shown into a pretty bedroom that he feared ‘might turn out the best room in the house; and it illustrates the hospitality of my new friends to mention that it was’.28

Early the next morning, Thursday, 5 November 1807, he was awoken by a small voice issuing ‘from a little cottage bed in an opposite quarter’ of the room. It was Wordsworth’s oldest son, four-and-a-half-year-old Johnny, ‘soliloquizing’ in a low tone: ‘Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried.’ De Quincey listened quietly while the boy finished reciting his creed, and then got up and dressed. As the son of a merchant, and as someone who had grown up ‘in the midst of luxurious … display’, he was used to the morning meal as a rather grand affair, but as he made his way into the sitting room he was once again struck by the rural simplicity of the Wordsworths’ lifestyle, for here was Dorothy preparing breakfast with no servant, ‘no urn’, and ‘no glittering breakfast service’. Far from turning up his nose, however, De Quincey thought immediately of Wordsworth, and ‘contrasting the dignity of the man with this honourable poverty, and this courageous avowal of it … I felt my admiration increase to the uttermost by all I saw’.29 Later that day, Sara Coleridge and the children set off in the rain for their thirteen-mile journey north to Keswick, but not before inviting De Quincey to visit them there.

On his third morning at Town End, De Quincey was in for yet more surprises. Wordsworth had proposed that they pay a visit to Keswick in order that De Quincey might meet Southey. The plan, however, was not to travel by a direct route, but ‘by way of Ulleswater’, for Wordsworth needed to attend to some business in Penrith. Dorothy would accompany them as far as Ambleside, and Mary as far as Eusemere.30 De Quincey, having heard nothing of horses, assumed that they were going to walk the circuit of forty-three miles, but as they prepared to leave, a common farmer’s cart driven by ‘a bonny young woman’ made its appearance in front of Dove Cottage. Never in his life had De Quincey seen such a vehicle used to transport people. But, as he boldly put it, ‘what was good enough for the Wordsworths was good enough for me’. All four passengers climbed aboard, and as they trundled south towards Ambleside, De Quincey was much relieved to discover that their ‘style of travelling occasioned no astonishment’. Dorothy often exchanged ‘flying colloquies … with stragglers on the road’, while De Quincey himself found his attention riveted by ‘the liberal manner of our fair driver, who made no scruple of … seating herself dexterously upon the shafts … of the cart’.31

At Ambleside, they turned northward and began to ascend the famous Kirkstone Pass, but it soon grew so steep that they had to climb down from the cart and walk to the top. From here they descended rapidly to Brothers’ Water, and then travelled into the vale of Patterdale, where they left their cart at an inn, and set off on horses. Riding ‘through those most romantic woods and rocks’, they saw ‘alternately … the most grotesque and the most awful spectacles … whilst, at every angle of the road, broad gleams came upwards of Ulleswater’. After four miles in this beautiful and solemn landscape, they reached the foot of the lake and ‘a house called Ewsmere’, where they passed the night.32

The next day, Wordsworth and De Quincey departed for Penrith, walking and talking and getting to know one another as they made their way through the woods. At some point during the journey, they paused and Wordsworth read to De Quincey his new poem, The White Doe of Rylstone.33 Towards evening they dined at Eamont Bridge, and then walked into Penrith, where Wordsworth left De Quincey in the house of his cousin, Captain John Wordsworth. The business that had brought him to the town occupied him that night and throughout the following day, leaving De Quincey to make his way to Keswick by himself. With his head no doubt whirling from the Wordsworths’ conversation and generosity, he walked the road to Keswick at a leisurely pace, stopping to dine at a little public house in Threlkeld, and not completing his journey until two hours after dark. Greta Hall stood a few hundred yards out of the town, and it was about seven in the evening before ‘the arrival of a stranger occasioned a little sensation in the house’.34

Sara Coleridge came to the door to greet him, as did a gentleman De Quincey knew instantly to be Southey. In person, he was ‘somewhat taller than Wordsworth … and, partly from having slenderer limbs, partly from being more symmetrically formed about the shoulders than Wordsworth, he struck one as a better and lighter figure … he wore pretty constantly a short jacket and pantaloons, and had much the air of a Tyrolese mountaineer’. De Quincey spent the night at Greta Hall, and Wordsworth arrived the following day. He and Southey, De Quincey realized at once, ‘were not on particularly friendly, or rather, I should say, confidential terms’, though he added that a ‘mutual esteem’ prevented them from quarrelling.35

On the following morning the three men breakfasted together and then retired to Southey’s beloved library to talk politics. De Quincey had been surprised by much of what he had seen and heard over the past few days. This conversation proved no less unsettling. He was still far too diffident to speak up himself, but his aristocratic attachments were hit hard when the two poets launched an attack on the ‘monarchical form of government’, and agreed that ‘no good was to be hoped for, as respected England, until the royal family should be expatriated’. De Quincey responded to their radicalism with ‘an emotion of sorrow, but a sorrow that instantly gave way to a conviction that it was myself who lay under a delusion’. In De Quincey’s eyes, Wordsworth was ‘a person charmed and consecrated from error’. If he despised the reigning family, perhaps De Quincey should too? After this rousing discussion, Wordsworth and De Quincey set off, Southey walking with them as far as the ‘sweet solitary vale of Legberthwaite’, and then leaving them to complete their journey back to Grasmere.36

On a wet gloomy evening shortly thereafter, De Quincey and Dorothy took a walk to Esthwaite Water, and were returning to Town End through the blinding rain when suddenly Dorothy said, ‘Pray, let us call for a few minutes at this house.’ They walked through a gate and into a little shrubbery, from where De Quincey gazed up a narrow gravel road towards Low Brathay, the large home of the poet and author Charles Lloyd, whose epistolary novel Edmund Oliver (1798) contained a remarkable portrait of Coleridge quaffing laudanum. A few minutes later De Quincey and Dorothy found themselves seated in a small comfortable drawing-room, where Lloyd and his wife Sophia joined them for some hours of pleasant conversation, before Dorothy and De Quincey bade them good night and walked back to Dove Cottage. On this first visit, De Quincey saw enough to interest him in both Charles and Sophia. Later he came to regard Lloyd himself as ‘amongst the most interesting men I have known’, in part perhaps because of Lloyd’s opium habit.37

On 12 November, after a week with the Wordsworths, De Quincey prepared to return to Oxford in time to keep the winter term. On the evening of his departure, William and Dorothy kept a longstanding arrangement to dine at the house of a ‘literary lady’ who seems most probably to have been their Ambleside neighbour Mrs Green.38 De Quincey too needed to travel to Ambleside, and so Dorothy proposed that, rather than have him wait at an inn by himself, he should join them at the dinner party, after which they would walk him to his chaise. De Quincey agreed to the idea, but when they arrived at Mrs Green’s, it was clear that she looked upon him ‘as an intruder’. It was an awkward start to an extraordinary evening. With De Quincey, the party consisted of six people, including a stranger and ‘a pretty timid young woman’. The dinner was ‘the very humblest’ he had ever seen, ‘but also … flagrantly insufficient in quantity’. One of the courses was ‘a solitary pheasant’. The guests (with the exception of the young woman) were offered a portion, but were too polite to take one, whereupon Mrs Green served herself and happily ate the whole bird! Afterwards Dorothy laughed ‘with undissembled glee; but Wordsworth thought it too grave a matter for laughing … and said repeatedly, a person cannot be honest, positively not honest, who is capable of such an act’.39

Brother and sister put him into an Ambleside chaise at around ten that evening, and then returned to Dove Cottage. De Quincey, it is clear, had made a very favourable impression upon Dorothy. ‘He is a remarkable and very interesting young man,’ she assured her correspondent; ‘very diminutive in person, which, to strangers, makes him appear insignificant; and so modest, and so very shy that even now I wonder how he ever had the courage to address himself to my Brother by letter. I think of this young man with extraordinary pleasure, as he is a remarkable instance of the power of my Brother’s poems, over a lonely and contemplative mind.’40

De Quincey, meanwhile, wound his way out of Ambleside listening with delight to the beautiful whistling of his driver, who during ‘the whole of the long ascent up Orrest Head … made the woods of Windermere ring with the canorous sweetness of his half flute half clarionet music’. A dim presentiment fell upon him. Perhaps he was now travelling on roads that at some point he would travel daily. Perhaps he might ‘traverse them in company with faces’ that he had not even seen, but that in future years would be dearer to him than any that he yet had known.41 Perhaps he might live here someday, near Wordsworth and his sister, near the Coleridges and Southeys and Lloyds, near these woods and towns and lakes? Perhaps he even belonged here. De Quincey arrived in Kendal well before midnight and climbed aboard the mail-coach heading south, his mind still ringing with possibilities.42

[iii]

His tutor Jones and a friend named John Millar had been putting considerable pressure on him to read for Honours, which in De Quincey’s day meant a wide-ranging public examination based essentially on the classics, and including questions on religion, philosophy, mathematics, logic, and algebra.43 De Quincey did not respond to their requests with much enthusiasm, for he looked upon the examinations as ‘so much a farce, & so unfair a standard to try a person’s general ability & proficiency, that he had determined not to attempt to gain distinction or even to take a degree’. But Jones and Millar persevered and ultimately De Quincey consented, in part because of ‘his wish to serve his tutor’, and also because the university had recently given an order that ‘the answers in the Greek examinations should be given in Greek’, a decision that delighted De Quincey, for it gave him a genuine opportunity for intellectual display, and turned the Honours degree into a prize worth winning.44

Students sitting these exams were expected to submit in advance a list of the classical books on which they were prepared to be examined, and usually offered about fifteen in total, with the entire work of an author counting as a single ‘book’. De Quincey decided that he could do much better than simply what was expected, though, and ‘instead of giving in any particular books’, he later claimed he offered up ‘Greek literature generally’. It was a reckless decision that gave him only until May to plough through an enormous amount of work, but he felt conscious of going through triumphantly.45

When he arrived back in Oxford on 13 November 1807, however, his plans for study hit a road block, as he fell seriously ill with what he called ‘a determination of blood to the head’, a condition that had bothered him before he left for Grasmere, and that was no doubt aggravated by – if not a description of – the pressure he felt over exams.46 He got through term as best he could and then returned to 5 Northumberland Street in London, where he consulted an ‘able surgeon’ – almost certainly the famed John Abernethy – who made two recommendations: drink no wine, and do not bend the head downward. Over the course of the next two months, De Quincey followed these instructions and steadily recovered.47 Staying away from Oxford undoubtedly helped, as did the chance to spend time with Coleridge, who had now installed himself at 348 Strand (above the offices of The Courier newspaper) in preparation for his lecture series. Before leaving Grasmere, De Quincey had promised Dorothy that he would ‘take down the heads of the whole course of Lectures’. He missed Coleridge’s first performance on 15 January, but met up with him shortly thereafter.48

Coleridge was sinking. The first lecture had been a disaster. He was taking ‘more than ordinary doses of opium’. His health was so bad that he was frequently unable to rise from his bed. He was finding it difficult to concentrate in rooms that were small and noisy. And his only attendant was a woman memorably named Mrs Brainbridge, who lived in the basement of the building. De Quincey visited daily, and often saw Coleridge ‘picturesquely enveloped in night caps, surmounted by handkerchiefs endorsed upon handkerchiefs, shouting from the attics … down three or four flights of stairs … “Mrs Brainbridge! I say, Mrs Brainbridge!”’ On 5 February, Coleridge delivered his second lecture under considerable duress. ‘His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and over-mastering illness,’ De Quincey reported; ‘… and in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole course of his lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.’49

In such circumstances, De Quincey served Coleridge as an invaluable aid. He recommended medical help, assisted him with the lectures, and on at least one occasion took him out for a walk through his favourite ‘Book Haunts’.50 Coleridge talked to him at great length. It was probably during these weeks that De Quincey looked into Giovanni Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, while Coleridge, who was standing nearby, described to him another ‘set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams’, which record ‘the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever’. The two men also undoubtedly discussed key questions in theology, though not always to De Quincey’s satisfaction. ‘Frightfully perplexed I am … as to what constitutes the so-called appropriation of the benefits of Christ’s death. Never could I get any one to clear it up to me. Coleridge … talked all about it and about it, but never talked it out, that I could discover.’51 On his side, Coleridge came quickly to value De Quincey’s opinion. ‘I do therefore earnestly ask of you as a proof of Friendship, that you will so far get over your natural modesty & timidity, as without reserve or withholding to tell me exactly what you think and feel on the perusal of any thing, I may submit to you.’ More disturbingly, Coleridge seems also during these weeks to have grown convinced that De Quincey’s use of opium had already turned to abuse. ‘I pleaded with flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning,’ he recalled. De Quincey ‘utterly denied it, but I fear that I had even then to deter perhaps not to forewarn’.52

In late February, Wordsworth came down to London after receiving alarming reports that Coleridge was near death. His fears were soon mollified. Coleridge suffered from ‘no appearance of disease which could not be cured, or at least prevented, by himself’, was Wordsworth’s pithy diagnosis.53 Nevertheless, he loyally stayed in London for a month to try and buoy Coleridge’s spirits. De Quincey saw Wordsworth regularly, and had the pleasure once again of hearing him read The White Doe. On 3 March, there was a tea party in Coleridge’s rooms which brought together Wordsworth, De Quincey, Southey, Lamb, William Godwin, and Daniel Stuart (the editor of The Courier). But between illness, indisposition, fatigue, and reverence, there was very little talk, and entertainment for the evening fell to Lamb, whose wit and candour began to win De Quincey over after the friction of their first meeting three years earlier.54

Two days later De Quincey returned to Oxford. He had not been able to study during his months in London, and his exams were now only eight weeks away. Yet the more the pressure mounted to study, the more surely he descended into ‘a state of palsy as to any power of exertion’, a state that reminded him very much of those terrible dreams from his childhood, when he was ‘chaced by a lion and spellbound from even attempting to escape’. His mother helped him enormously when she sent him a reading stand ‘very ingeniously constructed’ to enable him to read and write ‘with advantage to my head from the necessity of looking up’. On 25 March he wrote to Dorothy and outlined a highly demanding schedule that included reading thirty-three Greek tragedies in one week. Yet at the same time he was finding ‘the motives to all this labour … inadequate; for the difference between success and non-success are the being placarded on all the college walls as the Illustrious Mr A.B.C. or 2ndly. as the Praiseworthy Mr A.B.C. or 3rdly. the not being placarded at all’.55

Five weeks passed and he remained similarly divided, at least according to the gaps between a contemporary account and a later recollection. On the one hand, he told Dorothy in a letter written just six days before his first exam that he was working extraordinarily hard: ‘I am now reading every day for 18 hours out of the 24 – and never go at all to bed but only fall asleep on a sofa when I can keep awake no longer.’ On the other hand, he told a friend several years later that an unexpected change in exam policy meant that he virtually stopped studying during the week before his exams began: he had been expecting to answer the Greek questions in Greek, but the university rescinded its decision and directed that the Greek questions were to be answered in English, a reversal that ‘completely destroyed all stimulus’ in his mind. ‘He no longer cared to go through an examination which would only shew that he in common with others had acquired knowledge of a particular description, but would not leave him room to shew his general proficiency. He thought of declining to go up, & it was only the earnest wishes of his friend (Millar) & his tutor that induced him so to do.’56

During these weeks, opium almost certainly heightened both his desire to perform well, and his aversion to the entire process. The recent example of Coleridge at the lecture podium, feverish and disorganized, might have been expected to act as a caution, and perhaps it did prevent him from ingesting to excess. But at some level De Quincey also associated the drug with imaginative insight and vast intellectual exertion, and he probably resorted to it more frequently at this time to ease the stresses of high expectations, and to rejuvenate himself for study. What is more, the knowledge that Coleridge needed the drug, and that he had written and spoken great things while on it, undoubtedly made it more attractive, and De Quincey may even have increased his dosages in an effort to bring himself closer to Coleridge, to make himself more like his idol. Opium had been with him for most of his Oxford career, but perhaps it now began its insidious ascent from recreational device to daily necessity. ‘So early even as his Oxford days,’ wrote Cotton, ‘De Quincey, we are told, was incapable of steady application without large doses of opium.’57

His exam was in two parts: Latin on Saturday, 14 May; Greek two days later. The first exam went extremely well. De Quincey was asked ‘to translate Latin into English, & afterwards to render English, at sight, into Latin. And he could perceive from the whispers, the silence & various other indications, that he was … likely to pass a splendid examination.’ That evening one of his examiners, Edmund Goodenough of Christ Church, went down to Worcester, where he said to a gentleman well acquainted with De Quincey, ‘You have sent us to-day the cleverest man I ever met with; if his vivâ voce examination to-morrow correspond with what he has done in writing he will carry everything before him.’ Disconcertingly, the gentleman replied that ‘he feared De Quincey’s vivâ voce would be comparatively imperfect, even if he presented himself for examination, which he rather doubted’.58

So it proved. At some point late on the Saturday, or early on the Sunday, De Quincey bolted. He was already in a fragile state from weeks of study and poor health. Then, ‘his contempt for his examiners, the thought of the possibility of failing from the unfair mode of examination’, and his frustration over changes ‘in the Greek Examination … came upon him’.59 Perhaps, too, as he brooded over his performance, he decided that he had not done as well as he had hoped. Or perhaps it was just the opposite. Having shown himself to be ‘the cleverest man’ in Oxford, he may well have felt overwhelmed at the thought of having to live up to such a reputation. In any event, some or all of these factors badly shook his resolve, and when the examiners summoned him on Monday, he was nowhere to be found. His name was not removed from the Worcester books until 20 December 1810, and he could presumably have returned at any point up until that time to re-sit the exams.60 But once again he made a rash decision and stuck with it. His Oxford career was over.

[iv]

He headed back to his Northumberland Street bolt-hole, and over the next several weeks took solace in opium, socializing, and book-buying. By now his library contained three or four thousand volumes, and he was taking requests from his family, and from Wordsworth and Coleridge, to look out for specific books.61 On 8 June, he was in the audience as Coleridge delivered his final lecture of the Royal Institution series.62 At around this same time he met the Scottish poet and essayist Anne Grant, who recalled she spent ‘an idle half day talking with him’. De Quincey, too, recollected their meeting, for Grant was kind to him and her notice ‘particularly flattering’, though when she learned of his ‘profound veneration’ for Wordsworth, she put a question to him which he failed to answer to his own satisfaction (or, he felt, to hers).63 De Quincey also tracked down the eccentric philosopher John ‘Walking’ Stewart, whom he had first seen in Bath a decade earlier, and whom he now visited repeatedly in his Sherrard Street lodgings.64

To the Wordsworths De Quincey appears to have reported that he was too ill to complete his Oxford exams, for in early July Dorothy wrote of their ‘sorrow for your illness’, and their thankfulness that he had now recovered. Two months earlier the entire family had moved from Dove Cottage to nearby Allan Bank, and Dorothy now invited De Quincey to visit at any time.65 But he could not yet pull himself away from London, and when at last he did, it was to travel to Mrs Best’s for some weeks among ‘the fair cottagers at Everton’.66 Finally, in late October, De Quincey confirmed his plans to revisit Grasmere, though by this time Allan Bank had become so crowded that Wordsworth wrote to say that, while they would be very happy to see him, they could not accommodate him with a bed. When he arrived a few days later, however, the family kindly made room, apparently by letting him share a bed with young Johnny.67

Allan Bank, De Quincey reported, was ‘a modern house … standing under a low screen of woody rocks which descend from the hill of Silver How’ on the western side of Grasmere Lake. It had a ‘breakfasting-room’ on the ground floor which commanded ‘a sublime view of the three mountains, Fairfield – Arthur’s Chair – and Seat Sandal’. Yet it also had some ‘capital defects – it was cold, damp, and, to all appearance, incurably smoky’.68 The Wordsworths had moved in to give themselves more room, and currently their bustling household was made up of at least a dozen people, including servants and guests. Mary had recently given birth to a fourth child, a girl named Catharine. Coleridge was there, hoping to rescue his fortunes by launching a weekly newspaper to be called The Friend. Sara Hutchinson, Mary’s sister and Coleridge’s longstanding love interest, was assisting him as goad and amanuensis. Sara Coleridge often came over from Keswick, fetching the three children back and forth on visits to their father.

Meanwhile, Wordsworth had immersed himself in contemporary politics. Napoleon’s intervention in Portugal and Spain had recently touched off the Peninsular War. British forces under Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) landed in Portugal in early August 1808, and three weeks later defeated the French at Vimeiro, But before Wellesley could pursue his advantage, Sir Harry Burrard and Sir Hew Dalrymple arrived to take over the army from him, and they preferred to negotiate with the French. The result was the Convention of Cintra, the terms of which allowed the French troops and their loot to be transported back to France in British ships. News of the treaty reached Britain in mid-September, and was widely denounced as a cravenly betrayal of the Portuguese and the Spanish. ‘We are all here cut to the heart by the conduct of Sir Hew,’ Wordsworth wrote on 27 September.69 A month later he began to channel his indignation into a long essay on The Convention of Cintra.

De Quincey did his best to fit in around the projects and tensions of Allan Bank. He bonded quickly with the children, and spent hours playing with them. He enthusiastically embraced The Friend, and set himself the task of recruiting as many subscribers as possible, taking five copies for himself, persuading his mother to take another two, and eventually recruiting friends such as the Kelsalls in Manchester and John Millar at Oxford.70 He also addressed himself to solving one of Coleridge’s bigger problems: where was The Friend to be printed? There was no press in the immediate area, and going as far afield as Penrith or Kendal was bound to cause problems in terms of meeting deadlines and checking proofs. De Quincey’s solution? He would establish ‘the Grasmere Press’ which, in addition to producing The Friend, would print ‘immaculate Editions’ of English and Greek classics, as Coleridge happily explained it to Stuart.71 It sounded like an ideal answer, for Coleridge did not yet understand that De Quincey was as capable as he was of projecting big and impractical schemes. Before long the idea was dropped, and Coleridge came to terms with a printer in Penrith.

De Quincey became equally involved in Wordsworth’s project, discussing the Cintra essay with him at length, and at one point agreeing to produce a note for it. Wordsworth, obsessed with the topic and anxious for news, would sometimes walk out of Grasmere and up Dunmail Raise towards Keswick at around midnight in the hope of meeting the carrier who brought with him Southey’s copy of the Courier. De Quincey usually accompanied him on these walks of three or four miles, for it was a chance to speak to Wordsworth without interruptions, to absorb his views on politics and poetry, and perhaps to move beyond the poet’s habitual reserve. On one particularly memorable night, Wordsworth and De Quincey sat for at least an hour on a huge block of stone waiting for the carrier to appear, with Wordsworth at intervals stretching himself upon the road, and ‘applying his ear to the ground, so as to catch any sound of wheels that might be groaning along at a distance’. Once, when he was

slowly rising from this effort, his eye caught a bright star that was glittering between the brow of Seat Sandal and of the mighty Helvellyn. He gazed upon it for a minute or so; and then, upon turning away to descend into Grasmere, he made the following explanation: ‘I have remarked, from my earliest days, that, if … the attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation, or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object … falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances. Just now … at the very instant when I raised my head from the ground … the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances.’72

For almost ten years, De Quincey had been fascinated by the sources of insight in Wordsworth’s poetry. Now, as he walked back down the hill with him into Grasmere, he had those insights brought to life – he had them literally spoken into his own life.

About three weeks after his arrival at Allan Bank, De Quincey walked one evening into Coleridge’s ground-floor study to discover Wordsworth in conversation with a young man ‘in a sailor’s dress, manifestly in robust health … and wearing upon his countenance a powerful expression of ardour and animated intelligence, mixed with much good nature’.73 This was John Wilson, a neighbour who lived above the town of Bowness on the beautiful estate of Elleray. De Quincey liked him immediately. The two young men had a good deal in common: both their fathers were prosperous merchants; in 1802, Wilson wrote a fan letter to Wordsworth that was equally discerning – and less reverential – than the one De Quincey sent a year later; both attended Oxford; both had literary ambitions, Wilson initially as a poet; and both were drawn to the Lake District by what De Quincey called ‘the deep deep magnet … of William Wordsworth’.74 Yet the differences between them were perhaps even more pronounced. Wilson was proudly Scottish. He was about six feet high.75 He was athletic, exuberant, and instinctual – a far cry from bookish, introverted, and elegant De Quincey. But in this instance opposites attracted. De Quincey later told different – and much less idealized – stories about how they first became acquainted, including one version in which they met in Wales after Wilson had flirted with ‘a country girl’ at a theatre, and was then ‘waylaid … & most ignominiously mauled’ by her ‘lover & his friends’76 Whatever the circumstances, certainly they were in each other’s company by the end of November, when Wordsworth and De Quincey accepted Wilson’s invitation to dine at Elleray.77 Many years later De Quincey movingly described Wilson as ‘the only very intimate male friend I have had’.78

During his stay at Allan Bank, De Quincey struck different members of the Wordsworth circle in strikingly different ways. His harshest critic was Joanna Hutchinson, Sara’s sister, who wrote him off as ‘helpless’ and ‘dissipid’. Sara herself disagreed. To be sure, De Quincey was ‘very shy’, but she found him a ‘good tempered amiable creature & uncommonly clever’.79 Southey, who hosted him on at least one occasion at Greta Hall, complained of De Quincey’s size as though it were his fault. ‘I wish he was not so little, and I wish he would not leave his great coat always behind upon the road.’ But he was also quick to acknowledge that De Quincey had ‘a head brimful of information’.80 Perhaps not surprisingly, Dorothy was the most positive about him, though even she shared Southey’s reservation. ‘Mr De Quincey, whom you would love dearly, as I am sure I do, is beside me, quietly turning over the leaves of a Greek book,’ she wrote to Catherine Clarkson on 8 December. ‘… We feel often as if he were one of the Family – he is loving, gentle, and happy – a very good scholar, and an acute Logician – so much for his mind and manners. His person is unfortunately diminutive.’81

By the middle of December, Wordsworth had made good progress on his Cintra essay. He published the first section of it in the Courier on 27 December, and the second on 13 January, before deciding that the better approach was to move as quickly as possible to issue the entire piece as a pamphlet, as it was too large for regular insertion in the Courier, and the story of the Convention was already starting to go cold.82 With the assistance of Stuart, Wordsworth soon came to terms with a printer (Baldwin) and a publisher (Longman). That left only the issue of who would shepherd the pamphlet through the press. De Quincey was the obvious choice. He had been discussing the subject with Wordsworth for weeks, and he was only too happy to relocate to London for a few months in order to be on the spot for the supervising and proofreading – or, as he put it rather more grandly – for the ‘editing’ of Wordsworth’s pamphlet.83

De Quincey was also well suited to the task because he was a much better prose writer than Wordsworth, as Wordsworth himself confessed. ‘As the subject of punctuation in prose was one to which I had never attended and had of course settled no scheme of it in my own mind’, he wrote to Poole, ‘I deputed that office to Mr De Quincey’, who assured Wordsworth that he had given the subject a great deal of thought, and who believed that punctuation should serve as ‘a representation of the logical divisions – and a gamut of the proportions and symmetry of the different members – of each sentence’.84

Coleridge was sceptical from the start. ‘I believe, you have seen Mr De Quincy at the Courier office with me,’ he wrote to Stuart on 8 February. ‘Ho! – He was the very short & boyish-looking modest man, whom I introduced to you in Cuthell’s Shop … Besides his erudition, he has a great turn for manual operations, and is even to something of old batchelor preciseness accurate, and regular in all, he does.’ That ‘Ho!’ has a very unfriendly sound to it.85 Coleridge clearly thought De Quincey was too fastidious to do a good job of proofing the Cintra pamphlet, and his size made it even easier to mock him as unsuitable for the task. Coleridge was also jealous. De Quincey had been stepping on his toes within the Wordsworth circle, especially with William and Dorothy, while with the children – even with Coleridge’s own children – he was a runaway favourite. What is more, Coleridge was finding it increasingly difficult to be grateful to De Quincey; the £300 loan made it hard enough, but De Quincey was still working industriously to find subscribers for The Friend, and this after he had put himself down for five copies. Five copies! It all felt irritatingly like charity, and Coleridge shot back.

Before De Quincey left Allan Bank for London, Dorothy volunteered to lease Dove Cottage for him, and to organize the furnishings. De Quincey eagerly accepted her offer, and took the house on a six-year lease. He had by this time decided that he would settle somewhere in the area. He liked the appearance of Dove Cottage – ‘lovely’ rather than ‘picturesque’, as he put it – and it suited him in terms of cost, location, and size. But of course the primary reason he wanted to move in was because its rooms had been ‘hallowed’ by Wordsworth, and he saw it as yet another way of interweaving his life with the poet’s.86 On around 20 February, he left Allan Bank for the south, stopping in Liverpool, and then setting off again on 23 February.87 He was anxious to get to London, and to execute his commission for Wordsworth. But soon he would be back in the north, and Grasmere would be home.

[v]

Flames were consuming the famous Drury Lane theatre when De Quincey arrived in London on the evening of Saturday, 25 February 1809. He went first to Northumberland Street, where he learned that his former lodgings were occupied, and then to Old Hummums, a hotel in Covent Garden, which was also full, but from where he ventured out to watch the ‘very fine spectacle’ of the fire as it reduced the theatre to what looked like an ancient ruin. That evening he slept in ‘a truly Cimmerian hole’ at Charing Cross, before moving shortly thereafter into lodgings at 82 Great Titchfield Street, Cavendish Square, near where he had agreed to meet Ann on that ill-fated evening six years earlier.88

De Quincey’s work on the Cintra pamphlet got off to a reasonably good start, and by the end of his second week in London he could not ‘detect a single error’ in the ninety-six pages that had been ‘finally struck off’. Yet even at this early stage there were worrying signs. The printers were often occupied with other business, and seemed to have a habit of getting drunk.89 Perhaps more disconcerting, however, was the barrage of letters – seven in one week – that Wordsworth was firing off from Grasmere. ‘You know he never likes to trust anything away fresh from the Brain,’ Dorothy wrote. ‘He is now engaged in making an addition to one Paragraph, which is to be transcribed on the other side of this sheet.’ But a few hours later Wordsworth announced that he could not make the transcription in time for the Keswick post, and requested that De Quincey ‘Stop the Press’ until the addition arrived. ‘I hope,’ Dorothy closed somewhat sheepishly on 7 March, ‘your troubles and perplexities in this affair will end with this.’90

They did not. Indeed, they were just beginning. In mid-March a new compositor was assigned to the project, and his work was ‘filled with such monstrous errors’ that De Quincey was obliged to insist on ‘a second proof’, and then ‘a 3rd proof’, and ‘I believe, the compositor thinks that I shall soon after want a dozen’. De Quincey also grew anxious about the timeliness of the project, so that when news reached London of France’s victory at the Battle of Saragossa, De Quincey wrote and inserted a lengthy footnote to bring the pamphlet up to date. By the end of the month Wordsworth himself was concerned about the ‘vexation that has accompanied this business’, but he could not help bombarding De Quincey with four more letters filled with requests for clarification and information.91 There was a ‘great body of additions’ that needed to be inserted after ‘some expression’ that Wordsworth could neither quite recollect nor find in his manuscript. If De Quincey deemed it advisable, would he ‘add any remarks in the Appendix upon the … infernal Bulletin of the French’. Was Norway still an independent country, or had it fallen to Denmark? Sir John Moore, one of Wellesley’s successors as Commander-in-Chief of the British army in Portugal, had been killed in January: would De Quincey write a review of his recently published letters? If any of the quotations from the Board of Inquiry ‘should be grossly inaccurate … pray correct’. De Quincey’s footnote on the Battle of Saragossa was unnecessary, as Wordsworth did not agree with his assessment, and had in any event already updated the pamphlet with additions and revisions of his own. And so on. ‘This Letter is a miserable jumble, and my head a perfect chaos,’ Wordsworth rightly observed on 26 March. However, that still left De Quincey with the onerous task of trying to sort it all out.92

He began to protest. Wordsworth’s vague and sometimes contradictory instructions were making it very difficult to ensure accuracy, and De Quincey did not want to be blamed for mistakes that he had done all he could to prevent. But it was the cancellation of his note on Saragossa that really irritated him. ‘I meant to have written to-day to Mr Wordsworth to complain a little of the very great injustice which he has done me in what relates to Saragossa,’ he told Dorothy with unexpected frankness on 1 April. In part he was upset that his labour had been simply – and tactlessly – thrown away, but he was ‘a great deal more hurt that it should be thought possible’ that his opinion on Saragossa was different from Wordsworth’s. That was not the case at all. Had Wordsworth read what he had written? De Quincey was going to mail the cancelled sheet to Dorothy ‘that you may see what I really did say of Saragossa’.93

Wordsworth apologized. ‘It gives me great concern to find that after all your fatigue, confinement, and vexation, you should have suffered such mortification as you express from such a quarter.’ He explained at length why he had cancelled the note, and assured De Quincey that he was certain their opinions on Saragossa were ‘coincident’. That said, he ‘quit the subject’, as his penmanship was very bad, and his head ached miserably. Dorothy, too, responded to De Quincey, but with a good deal more warmth. ‘You have indeed been a Treasure to us … We are very grateful for your kindness.’94 De Quincey was mollified and continued to work hard on the pamphlet. On 5 April he agreed to Wordsworth’s request to write a review of Sir John Moore’s letters, though by this time he may well have recognized that the assignment furnished ‘new matter for misconception on both sides’.95

Fortunately, he had other interests which at least partially took his mind off the troubles of the Cintra pamphlet. De Quincey spent a good deal of time reading contemporary literature, including Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife, as well as poring over the most popular magazines and reviews, such as Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, William Cobbett’s Political Register, the Edinburgh Review, and the first number of the Quarterly Review.96 He ate and socialized regularly with ‘coffee-house friends’. On one occasion he dined at the home ‘of a London acquaintance’; on another the Wordsworths’ friend Robert Jameson spent the whole night visiting in his rooms. The city captivated him with its sights and sounds, from ‘a bill advertising “Artificial Ears”’ to ‘2 evenings or 3 … spent at an Oratorio and a concert’, where his enjoyment of the music was no doubt enhanced by his ingestion of opium.97 ‘Walking’ Stewart was his favourite companion during these weeks, and the two discussed a wide variety of topics, including ‘female prostitution’. Somewhat unexpectedly – perhaps even somewhat guiltily – De Quincey spoke out vehemently against ‘the afflicting spectacle … for I could not but view it as a greater reproach to human nature than the slave-trade or any sight of wretchedness that the sun looks down upon’.98 De Quincey told Dorothy that he was spending virtually all of his time ‘in utter solitude’, but he was out enjoying London much more than he liked to let on.99

Production on the pamphlet slowed down dramatically over the Easter break, and then a snap of extremely cold weather brought on all De Quincey’s ‘old rheumatic pains’ about the head and face, which he treated by putting ‘cotton soaked in laudanum’ into his mouth.100 On 22 April, Stuart wrote to De Quincey to say that the press was reporting to him that the publication of the pamphlet had been repeatedly delayed because of De Quincey’s insistence upon a ‘multitude … of corrections’. Anxious that Wordsworth would receive reports of this nature without the proper context, De Quincey wrote directly to Dorothy to explain. Yes, it was true that he had troubled the compositors with numerous corrections, but that was because they had troubled him with numerous errors. Last week, for example, ‘out of the six days, the man attended two; and must then undoubtedly have been drunk from the absurd blunders and omissions which he made: – and they will not (they say, can not) put any other compositor to the work’.101 Increasingly exasperated, Wordsworth wrote immediately to Stuart to request that he would call at the printing office, and use his ‘exertions to procure the immediate finishing of the work, which has been most shamefully and injuriously delayed by a drunken compositor whom Mr De Quincey cannot get changed’.102

Coleridge – now residing for a time with his wife and children at Greta Hall – heard of these difficulties from Stuart, and could not resist a certain ‘I told you so’ tone when he replied, though his assessment of the situation, and his insights into both De Quincey and Wordsworth, are characteristically illuminating. ‘I both respect and have an affection for Mr De Quincey’, he wrote on 2 May;

but saw too much of his turn of mind, anxious yet dilatory, confused from over-accuracy, & at once systematic and labyrinthine, not fully to understand how great a plague he might easily be to a London Printer, his natural Tediousness made yet greater by his zeal & fear of not discharging his Trust, & superadded to Wordsworth’s own Sybill’s Leaves blown about by the changeful winds of an anxious Author’s Second-thoughts.

To some extent, Coleridge was seeking in this account to justify his own circumstances, for he was encountering many obstacles in trying to launch The Friend, and it was gratifying to him to learn that Wordsworth and De Quincey were struggling to get Cintra into print. But more than this, he sensed deceit in De Quincey’s replies. Could a well known and successful printer like Baldwin really afford such low production standards, and such drunkards on his staff? It seemed much more probable that De Quincey was simply in over his head: ‘I can never retract my expressions of vexation & surprise, that W. should have entrusted any thing to him beyond the mere correction of the Proofs.’103 Comments such as these seriously undermined De Quincey’s position with both Wordsworth and Stuart, and placed his movements and explanations under a darkening cloud of suspicion.

Despite all the delays, the printing of the Cintra pamphlet was nearing completion when, in early May, Wordsworth suddenly threw a brand-new spanner in the works. What if parts of the pamphlet were libellous? In particular, he was concerned about his statement that Wellesley and the other Convention generals had ‘brought upon themselves the unremovable contempt and hatred of their countrymen’.104 Stuart and De Quincey consulted with Baldwin and discovered that the passage could easily be cancelled, but now Wordsworth decided that the entire pamphlet needed to be reviewed for potentially libellous statements. Sara Hutchinson thought the matter laughable: ‘We Females shall be very sorry to find that the pamphlet is not published for we have not the least fear of Newgate,’ she told De Quincey. Wordsworth, however, was not laughing, and on 10 May he wrote again to request that De Quincey ‘procure an interview with Mr Stuart immediately in order, that by your joint efforts every thing may be done which is necessary’. Ironically, after three months of urging the work on, Wordsworth now found that his ‘anxiety to have it out’ was ‘much abated’!105

It was De Quincey’s turn to be exasperated. But he did what he was asked. On Saturday, 13 May he ‘read through the whole pamphlet – marking every passage’ about which there could be a doubt concerning libel. Then, on Monday morning, he and Stuart met to compare notes. Stuart was sure one section on the Army was actionable, but De Quincey convinced him that it did not pose a serious risk, and the passage was allowed to stand without alteration. Two days later at noon De Quincey went to the press, made the final few corrections to the last set of proofs, and then extorted a promise that four copies of the pamphlet would be struck off that evening. He left in ‘a paroxysm of joy’, returned after five o’clock to find four unstitched copies waiting for him, and promptly posted them off to Grasmere.106

Predictably, Wordsworth was dissatisfied with the result, and when he tried to thank De Quincey, the best he could do was to give praise with one hand and instantly take it back with the other. ‘Last night we received the pamphlet,’ he began in a letter of 24 May;

I have not read the whole, but Miss Hutchinson will transcribe, on the opposite leaf, the most material errors which I have noticed … I am quite satisfied with your note upon Moore, which is very well done; but had I seen his last Letter before I entreated you to be so gentle with him, I should not have been so earnest upon that point … As to the passage about the army I hope and believe it is no libel, but certainly Mr Stuart’s opinion … it would have been safe to abide by.

Wordsworth managed to give De Quincey ‘sincere thanks for all the trouble’ he had undergone, but on the following day he wrote to Stuart to vent his frustration, especially on the question of the libel: ‘I learned with great concern from Mr De Quincey that a passage you deemed libellous was not cancelled; this was in direct opposition to my earnest request conveyed in a Letter which I desired him to read to you; in which Letter I expressly said that … I referred to you entirely to decide upon what was libellous, and what was not.’107

The coldness of Wordsworth’s reply undoubtedly aggravated – or rather reaggravated – De Quincey, but he had a somewhat unexpected ally in Mary Wordsworth, who read her husband’s first letter and scolded him for not being more enthusiastic. So on 26 May Wordsworth wrote to De Quincey again, determined this time to ‘use stronger language of approbation’. But even on this second occasion he fell back into the same pattern of approval and censure. Certainly De Quincey was a ‘master of the subject’, but ‘I wish you could have contrived to say something handsome of Frier … I am glad that you treated Moore with so much gentleness and respect – I could not have done so myself … The punctuation pleases me much; though there are here and there trifling errors in it.’ Most damningly, the pamphlet was ‘very correctly printed’, but he was ‘sadly grieved about that error … in the Mottoe’, and he regretted that the work had not been sent to him in proof so that he could have reviewed it himself before publication – the very reason that De Quincey had gone to London in the first place!108

With publication now so near, Wordsworth must have thought that the worst was over. But more bad news was already on its way to Grasmere. In a letter of 24 May, De Quincey informed Dorothy that two days after he sent the four unstitched copies to Allan Bank, Baldwin agreed to give Stuart notice before printing the final version of the text, in order that he might have one last ‘opportunity of seeing whether there was anything libellous in it’. The following morning, however, Baldwin contented himself with simply notifying Stuart that the printing was going ahead, and then promptly striking off ‘the whole 500 copies’, so that there was no opening for Stuart to make a final check.109 If anything in the pamphlet was in fact libellous, it was too late now to stop it from appearing. De Quincey took a deep breath and wrote to Wordsworth. He was furious. ‘It is an act of great disrespect to you, and may prove of most serious injury to me,’ he stormed to Stuart on 28 May. ‘… I have kept my temper till last night, but I must say that Mr De Quincey’s letter … ruffled me not a little.’ Further, when ten copies of the published pamphlet reached Allan Bank in early June, Wordsworth discovered yet another reason for distress, as two of the ten copies contained the passage on the Convention generals deserving ‘the unremovable contempt and hatred of their countrymen’ that he was certain was libellous, and that De Quincey had assured him had been cancelled. How on earth could that passage have made its way into the published work? And how many copies that had already been sold contained it? ‘This is a most culpable inattention on the part of some one,’ and ‘it has mortified me more than I can express,’ Wordsworth snapped.110

Given all the hold-ups and second guesses, it is perhaps not surprising that Cintra did not sell well. The odds were against it from the start, for De Quincey had been told at Longmans that only one in twenty political pamphlets made money – and at a final total of 216 pages, Cintra was much closer to a small book.111 Wordsworth, however, was not interested in these numbers. As far as he was concerned, De Quincey was the primary reason for the troubles that attended Cintra’s publication. ‘That he has failed is too clear,’ he sighed to Stuart, ‘and not without great blame on his own part (being a man of great abilities and the best feelings, but as I have found, not fitted for smooth and speedy progress in business).’ Wordsworth now cited De Quincey’s insistence on his own system of punctuation as a major reason for the delays. ‘He had been so scrupulous with the Compositor, in having his own plan rigorously followed to an iota, that the Man took the Pet, and whole weeks elapsed without the Book’s advancing a step,’ he explained to Poole.112 Coleridge heard similar reports and was only too happy to agree, though he went a step further and claimed that De Quincey’s ‘strange & most mistaken System of punctuation’ had also damaged Cintra’s readability. ‘Never was a stranger whim than the notion that, ; : and . could be made logical symbols expressing all the diversities of logical connection,’ he tut-tutted. Southey, too, joined the chorus of disapproval. Wordsworth’s ‘long and involved’ sentences had been rendered ‘more obscure’ by De Quincey’s ‘unusual system of punctuation’, he reported to Walter Scott.113

De Quincey may not have heard any of these criticisms directly, but he definitely sensed that his efforts were being condemned, and he resented it. There is – it need hardly be said – nothing wrong with the punctuation of the pamphlet, and it is highly unlikely that it did anything to damage the sales. Wordsworth was right to say that De Quincey was not well suited to smooth progress in business, and it is almost certainly the case that his procrastination and over-zealousness caused delays. But Wordsworth had made a difficult job much worse with his arrogance and insensitivity, to say nothing of his eleventh-hour introduction of the question of libel. That De Quincey felt himself in the dock for what had happened is clear: ‘about the supposed libel … I am anxious to be acquitted on this point – on which I really am not at all in fault’.114 He had worked very hard in the face of refractory printers, an avalanche of directives from Wordsworth, and an unlooked-for partnership with Stuart in which it was never quite clear what their respective roles were meant to be. De Quincey’s postscript on Moore’s letters is a telling indication of the amount of work he put in to try and give Wordsworth what he wanted, for the ten pages it occupies in the published pamphlet are the result of seventy-four pages of manuscript.’115 De Quincey had hoped his labour in London would consolidate his position as a friend of Wordsworth’s. Instead, it only confirmed the poet in his wariness towards him, a wariness that Wordsworth never overcame and that De Quincey finally accepted with both bitterness and despair.

[vi]

The Cintra ordeal opened his eyes to some of the less palatable features in the characters of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but it did not change his future plans. Grasmere had been continually in his thoughts over the course of these long London months, and while Wordsworth had grown more and more dissatisfied with him, the women of Allan Bank had done their best to smooth the tensions between the two men, and to advocate on De Quincey’s behalf, while the children of the household retained their great affection for him. In late March, De Quincey wrote a long letter to Johnny in which he described the presents he had bought for him (‘I have sent you a few pictures … There is one that is meant for angels or geniuses – I do not know which’), his business routine (‘I go very often to talk to a man who lives at a house where they print books’), and the sights of London that he thought would especially interest a young boy (‘there is a great park which is called Hyde Park … and I saw in it hundreds and hundreds of soldiers marching up and down and learning to fight’).116 Dorothy looked forward to the day when De Quincey would renew his long conversations with Johnny, and Johnny himself worked hard throughout the spring to learn the ballad of ‘Chevy Chase’, so that he would be able to ‘say it all when Mr de Quincey comes home’. Of the three younger Wordsworth children, De Quincey was particularly close to baby Catharine. He was to be her teacher: ‘this promise Mrs Wordsworth once made me; and therefore I shall think it an act of the highest perfidy, if anybody should attempt to insinuate any learning into Catharine … to the prejudice of my exclusive privilege’.117

The women of Allan Bank also kept De Quincey regularly informed about the work being done on Dove Cottage in preparation for his tenancy. He had left the matter in Dorothy’s hands. ‘In all parts give directions as you would choose it to be,’ he told her. ‘There are only 2 things which I have any special affection for in furniture – viz. the colours of pink or white in bed-rooms; – and only one which I specially hate – viz. stuff in bed-hangings.’ Dorothy consulted with Sara and Mary, and by letter with Mrs Kelsall, who in late April ‘sent a very pretty carpet for your new home – but we are not at all satisfied with the colour and pattern of the Calico for Bed-curtains, etc.’ Five days later, the workmen began ‘in good earnest’ upon the renovations, though it was nearly two months before Dorothy could report that they were almost finished. ‘Your Cottage is painted, and I hope will be ready by the end of the next week or the beginning of the week after … Ned Wilson has made deal Bookcases.’118

Corresponding with Dorothy about the children and the cottage was a welcome distraction for De Quincey, and it brought the two of them closer together. ‘You must take it as a proof of my affection that my penmanship is so bad,’ she wrote to him in early May, ‘for in proportion as my Friends have become more near and dear to me I have always been unable to keep my pen in such order as to make it write decently.’119 For his part, De Quincey had been speaking of Dorothy to his sister Jane, who referred to her as De Quincey’s ‘favoured friend’, and who added that she should ‘much like to know Miss Wordsworth, and to see what sort of a woman you admire’. More intriguingly, Jane wrote in another letter that if De Quincey was ‘really going to … furnish a cottage … ought not that beautiful and wild-hearted girl to be consulted? She certainly must have taste, and is the best judge of what will please herself.’120 This may simply be a sister teasing her brother, and there is no indication that De Quincey thought of Dorothy as ‘beautiful’, but the epithet ‘wild-hearted’ fits her better than any woman De Quincey is known to have been acquainted with at this period, and Jane’s reference to her as ‘the best judge of what will please herself’ clearly accords with De Quincey’s request that Dorothy furnish Dove Cottage as she ‘would choose it to be’. There may never have been any romantic feeling between the two of them. But if there was, these weeks when he was away in London seem to have kindled it to life.

De Quincey’s attention during this hectic period was occupied by one final matter. On 10 March, his sister Mary had written to say that their brother Pink, it turned out, had joined the Navy, been taken captive by the Danes, and was now ‘on board the Superb, lying near Gothenborg’ waiting to come home to England as part of a prisoner exchange.121 De Quincey waited anxiously for updates on when his brother might return, but no new information arrived for more than two months. And then, in the middle of May, as he walked home one evening through the familiar territory of Greek Street, he unexpectedly bumped into John Kelsall. Pink, he now learned, was in England, and Kelsall ‘had accordingly immediately come up to London’ in order to verify his identity. The sailor soon made it clear, however, that he had no intention of meeting anyone, for he was ‘very much broken down’ in both body and spirit, and needed time alone to recover. Mrs Quincey promptly convinced herself that there was an impostor at work who was trying to make off with Pink’s inheritance, but De Quincey understood his brother’s desire for privacy after intense suffering, though the next morning he took the liberty of writing to him via a hotel address, and soon they were exchanging letters almost daily. De Quincey invited Pink to Grasmere, asked for details of his journeys, and told him about his exciting explorations of German literature. ‘It is a great satisfaction to me that my Feelings and actions are intelligible to you,’ Pink wrote back tenderly.122

Marooned by the recent purchase of ‘2 or 3 hundred books’, De Quincey stayed on in his Great Titchfield Street lodgings through the month of June, for he was so miserable at the thought of having to pack up and move everything that he kept ‘putting it off from day to day’.123 Finally, in early July he tore himself away from London and travelled down into the vale of Wrington in Somersetshire, where he joined his mother and sisters at Westhay, the new and elegant family home that Mrs Quincey and her daughters had designed, and that his uncle Penson had paid £12,500 to build on the understanding that he would live there when he retired from service in the East India Company.124 De Quincey arrived when construction was still far from complete, and for several weeks ‘workmen of every class’ forced the family to migrate ‘successively into a parlour of a neighbouring farm-house; – into a green-house with no floor; – into a room with a floor but no ceiling; – into a closet 6 feet by 6; – and finally … into our original sitting-room – with the library adjoining – completely finished’.125

In moving from Clifton to Wrington, Mrs Quincey had closed the distance between her home and More’s from fourteen miles down to within a single mile, a change that appears to have delighted both households.126 Indeed, when word spread through the neighbourhood that Mrs Quincey’s eldest son had arrived at Westhay, More and two of her sisters were his first callers. They had learned of his interest in the ‘infidel philosophy’ of Kant, and were anxious to speak to him about it. Descending to the drawingroom, De Quincey took his seat upon a sofa by More’s side, and his discussion of the great metaphysician seems to have charmed at least one of her sisters, who later referred to him as ‘the sweet young man, Dr Kantian’. But More herself would not be moved beyond the bounds of her strident evangelicalism, ‘and thus every avenue is shut up against gaining or communicating anything in her company’.127 Further, on return visits to More – for De Quincey ‘seldom suffered a week to pass without calling to pay [his] respects’ – he found her equally hidebound on other subjects. When one of her guests cited a poem in support of an argument, More rejoined, ‘“Poetry! oh! as to poetry, I forswore that, and I think everybody else should forswear it, together with pink ribbons”; meaning, I suppose, in youth.’ De Quincey managed to hold his temper, but was delighted when a young woman in the company ‘put in this unanswerable demurrer: – “Really, Mrs Hannah More, I could never presume so far as to look upon anything in the light of a trifle, which Milton had not disdained to spend his life in cultivating”’.128

Politics also put More and De Quincey at loggerheads. As the summer wore on, De Quincey grew increasingly vocal about the ongoing Peninsular War (his many conversations with Wordsworth and Coleridge had – he felt – conferred upon him expert status), and he could not stomach the ladies and gentlemen of More’s circle ‘battening on’ the liberal-minded Edinburgh Review, and extolling the military genius of Napoleon as though it were ‘a vain and hopeless speculation’ even to try and defeat him. ‘I have accordingly tormented them to the utmost of my power,’ he told Mary Wordsworth, ‘– and have the satisfaction of thinking that I have given extreme pain to all the refined part of the community here.’129 On one particularly memorable occasion, De Quincey and Cottle squared off over the imperfect British victory at the recent Battle of Talavera. De Quincey praised the behaviour of the Spanish. Cottle inveighed against ‘all who were so “unchristian” as to defend throatcutting’, but he eventually left the floor to De Quincey, not because he was convinced by his arguments, but because ‘really you’re so furious, there’s no talking with you’.130

Pink agreed to come to Westhay on 8 September. He had been away from home for more than seven years. It was an occasion of immense joy, and De Quincey listened in amazement as his brother detailed his capture by pirates, his secret return visits to England, and his incarceration in Denmark, an experience which so fascinated De Quincey that later he successfully taught himself Danish.131 But as the weeks slipped away, his friends in the Lakes began to press him to return. ‘When are we to see you?’ Mary Wordsworth asked him on 12 September. ‘All has been in readiness for you, and every one of us wishing to see you for a long long time.’ He answered her a month later. His eyes had been giving him trouble, and the entire family had been busy chatting to and making calls with Pink, but he confessed to her that the main reason for the delay was his ‘own intolerable procrastination’.132

Shortly thereafter, however, he gathered his belongings and forced himself north, first to Cottle’s for a brief stay, then on the mail-coach up through Birmingham, and finally to Dove Cottage on or about 20 October.133 For a few days the Wordsworths’ servant girl, Sally Green, came over to cook his breakfast, but he soon tired of this arrangement and moved back into Allan Bank, where he stayed until near the end of November, at which point the Wordsworths’ former servant, Mary Dawson, came to work for him in Dove Cottage as his permanent housekeeper. If there had been any awkwardness between Wordsworth and De Quincey over the Cintra affair, both had clearly decided to put it quietly aside. ‘Mr de Quincey … has been above a month with us’, wrote Dorothy on 19 November, ‘and is like one of our own Family.’134

For weeks cart loads and cart loads of books had been streaming into Town End, confirming neighbourhood rumour that De Quincey was a ‘far learn’d’ man.135 ‘You will judge that it is a great pleasure to us all to have access to such a library, and will be a solid advantage to my Brother,’ Dorothy observed to a correspondent. Coleridge, who had finally launched The Friend in June, often stopped in to browse the approximately five thousand volumes that soon came to cram every corner of the cottage, and carried so many of them back with him to Allan Bank ‘that sometimes as many as five hundred were absent at once’.136 At some point during these weeks De Quincey sat down at Elleray with Wilson, and Wilson’s good friend Alexander Blair, as they went to work on behalf of The Friend, composing ‘The Letter of Mathetes’, an essay in which a young idealist explores his need for a moral guide like Wordsworth. Blair recollected that De Quincey ‘may have given some suggestions’ for the article, and that ‘we certainly owed to him our signature’, which means ‘Learner’ or ‘Disciple’.137 Coleridge published the ‘Letter of Mathetes’ in the seventeenth number of The Friend for 14 December 1809. The ‘Letter’ marks the first production in the rich – if often complicated – literary partnership between De Quincey and Wilson. Wordsworth’s ‘Reply to Mathetes’ appeared in The Friends seventeenth and twentieth issues. The Friend itself collapsed after its twenty-eighth number.

The holidays were a time of great happiness. De Quincey spent Christmas at Elleray with the Wordsworths, while on New Year’s Day he played host at Dove Cottage to the Wordsworths and the Lloyds, and most probably to Wilson and Blair. There was a ‘display of fireworks at the Town end’ on 2 January at which ‘all the Children and middle aged in the Village were assembled. Mr de Quincey’s House was like a fair,’ Sara Hutchinson reported.138 His life at Dove Cottage had begun in laughter and community. For all the burdens of the past, he must have thought his future looked bright.

[vii]

Over the next few years, De Quincey divided his time among several friends. He had a cordial relationship with Southey, who in January 1810 described him as ‘singular … but better informed than any person almost that I ever met at his age’. The two took a number of walks together, on one occasion to Buttermere, and on another through ‘the sequestered valleys of Cumberland’.139 In December 1810 De Quincey hosted Southey for two nights at Dove Cottage. Four months later Southey returned the favour when he issued a warm invitation for De Quincey to visit him at Greta Hall – ‘Your chamber is not occupied by the boys, & it will be perfectly convenient to receive you’ – though he warned him about his proposed route, as ‘the walk thro Borrodale is a more formidable undertaking than you perhaps are aware of’.140 Their shared love of beautiful books was a talking point, though at times they spoke more frankly, as when Southey told De Quincey ‘that he highly disapproved both’ of Wordsworth’s poetic ‘theories and of his practice’.141

De Quincey saw a good deal of the Lloyds. Some visits were social. Their home at ‘Low Brathay was distinguished above every other house at the head of Windermere, or within ten miles of that neighbourhood, by the judicious assortment of its dinner parties, and the gaiety of its soirees dansantes’. Other calls were more personal. Sophia Lloyd and her mother used to come over ‘frequently … on summer evenings to drink tea’ with him at Dove Cottage, or he would walk ‘upon the darkest nights’ over to Brathay, where he and Lloyd would sit talking from about nine o’clock until one. Often they ventured out together into the Lakes. Several of their happiest moments were spent ‘by the side of the mountain river Brathay … listening to the … sound of pealing anthems, as if streaming from the open portals of some illimitable cathedral’. Yet already the depressive illness that was stalking Lloyd was beginning to manifest itself: ‘And once he said to me, when we were out upon the hills – “Ay, that landscape below, with its quiet cottage, looks lovely, I dare say, to you; as for me, I see it, but I feel it not at all.”’142

Wilson was a frequent companion. De Quincey did not care for many of his favourite pastimes – including hunting, fishing, sailing, and staging cock-fights – but the improbable pair walked together ‘for twenty years amongst our British lakes and mountains’. De Quincey loved to visit Elleray, for he considered the view from the terrace the most magnificent in all of England. He spent hours conversing with Wilson: sometimes they were in strong agreement (the genius of Wordsworth); sometimes they were decidedly at odds (Wilson admired Napoleon).143 De Quincey enjoyed Wilson’s sheer physical energy, as he danced at the Lloyds’ under the excitement of ‘lights, wine, and … female company’, or mounted on horseback and chased a neighbour’s bull with a fourteen-foot spear.144 Above all, he was fascinated by Wilson’s incomparable knowledge of Lake District wildlife, for ‘of all companions that a man could have had … in any chase after a natural phenomenon … none was equal to … Wilson’.145 In spending time with him, De Quincey must often have felt as though he was in the company of a much more benevolent version of his bullying older brother William.

Wordsworth called in regularly at Dove Cottage, for these were the years when De Quincey luxuriated in ‘daily nay hourly intercourse’ with him. In June 1810 he and Wilson became godfathers to the Wordsworths’ third son, William junior.146 Shortly before or thereafter, Wordsworth also allowed De Quincey to read in manuscript his yet unpublished autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude, a privilege which he accorded to very few outside his immediate family circle. De Quincey instantly recognized the poem’s importance, and seems to have gone so far as quietly to transcribe it into ‘five manuscript books’ in order that he might consult and enjoy it in the future.147 Further, it was at this time that he came to a much more expansive understanding of Dorothy’s role in shaping William’s poetry. For ‘whereas the intellect of Wordsworth was, by its original tendencies, too stern – too austere – too much enamoured of an ascetic harsh-sublimity, she it was … that first couched his eye to the sense of beauty – humanized him by the gentler charities, and engrafted, with her delicate female touch, those graces upon the ruder growths of his nature’.148

In the summer of 1810, De Quincey travelled to London, where he spent several weeks before moving on to Westhay for a holiday with his family.149 During his absence, he was especially missed by little two-year-old Catharine Wordsworth, who had been ill in the spring and now walked with a limp. She ‘still looks sharply round when your name is mentioned’, Mary Wordsworth wrote to him on 20 August, ‘and every day she is for a time kept quiet, while we are rubbing her, when we say that she shall “ride away to London to meet Mr de Quincey”’. He bought gifts for all the Wordsworth children, and delighted to hear news of them.150 But Catharine most fully reciprocated his affection, and she had become his favourite. She called him ‘Kinsey’. He called her ‘Kate’.151

In the autumn of 1811, Mrs Quincey, Mary, and Jane all came north to stay at Dove Cottage. The visit lasted two months and was a grand success. De Quincey hosted a number of gatherings at Dove Cottage. His mother and sisters made fashion statements that clearly underlined the family’s gentility. ‘I wish you saw the number of scarlet Cloaks & silk Pelisses assembled in the Church yard,’ Sara Hutchinson enthused to a friend: ‘the Norths – the Tillmans – de Qus – Crumps – Kings & Miss W’.152 There were a series of ‘enchanting’ excursions. ‘The Misses De Quincey have just called, and I must walk with them to the Waterfall at Ghyll-side,’ wrote Wordsworth in September, with perhaps slightly strained gallantry.153 A month later, Dorothy, Sara, and the De Quinceys took a trip to Yewdale, with the De Quinceys pushing on for a visit to Coniston, before meeting up with Dorothy and Sara to drink tea. Mary wrote to her brother a month after they had returned to Westhay: ‘tell Mary Dawson we continually long for her brown bread and nice mashed potatoes, and that we talk and think and dream of Grasmere without ceasing’.154

For all his visiting with friends and family, however, De Quincey chose often simply to be alone in the Lakes. He watched the fallow deer in Gobarrow Park and the red deer in Martindale. He rambled across ‘uninhabited ranges of hilly ground’, where ‘too often nothing is heard, except, occasionally, the wild cry of a bird’. He enjoyed ‘ascending Helvellyn; for … the swelling and heaving of the billowy scene of mountains around it and below it is truly magnificent’. Of all the Lakeland valleys, Easedale was his favourite: if one place ‘on this earth could deserve to be sealed up … against the intrusions of the world … this it is – this Easedale’.155

Yet perhaps because his nearsightedness made him ‘universally … a poor hand at observing’, De Quincey was in many ways a different kind of Laker.156 As absorbed as he was by Wordsworth’s poetry, he did not show much of an interest himself in waterfalls or sheepfolds or sunrises or daffodils. Instead, his interest in the area revolved around its people, its history, and its customs. He attended many private auctions, ‘whether of cattle, of farming produce, farming stock, wood, or household furniture’, for they brought together the people ‘of perhaps a dozen valleys’, and were highlighted by gossip and excellent ale. He was drawn to the legends of the district, such as those concerning the ‘wheat thrown into the river Ken at Kendal which we have heard from Westmorland butter-women when going to market’.157 He was fascinated by the Lake District dialect, and one day made a startling discovery about its Danish – actually, as it turns out, Old Norse – origins. ‘I do not mean simply that it has some affinity to the Danish,’ he emphasized. ‘… What I mean – is that all the words peculiar to the Lake district at least, and most of the names attached to imperishable objects (as mountains, lakes, tarns, &c.) are pure Danish.”158 Perhaps most of all, De Quincey loved to set out into the Lakes by himself at dusk, and ‘to trace the course of the evening through its household hieroglyphics … to see the blazing fires shining through the windows of houses, lurking in nooks far apart from neighbours; sometimes in solitudes that seemed abandoned to the owl, to catch the sounds of household mirth; then, some miles further, to perceive the time of going to bed; then the gradual sinking to silence of the house’.159

De Quincey’s relationship with the Wordsworth women flourished over the course of his first two years in Dove Cottage. In December 1811, however, he dealt a serious blow to their friendship when he decided to make some changes to his garden. ‘What do you say,’ fumed Sara Hutchinson, ‘to de Q’s having polled the Ash Tree & cut down the hedge all round the orchard – every Holly, Heckberry, Hazel, & every twig that skreened it – & all for the sake of the Apple trees that he may have a few more Apples.’ Under the terms of his lease, De Quincey was entitled to do as he wished in the garden, but Dorothy thought of him as the custodian of Dove Cottage, not the master, and she was ‘so hurt and angry’ at his alterations that Sara was sure ‘that she can never speak to him more’. How could he have done it? ‘He knew how much store they set by that orchard.’ Moreover, in the same letter, Sara makes it clear that he has also offended other women in the Wordsworth circle. ‘Quincey reads the newspapers standing, or rather stooping with Catharine on his back,’ she noted, ‘– he is very fond of her but yet does not like to be plagued with her … for he lives only for himself and his Books. He used to talk of escorting Mary into Wales but I do not believe that she will have his company.’160

Ultimately, of course, the storm over the orchard passed, but Sara and Mary were now on their guard, and while Dorothy did speak to him again, he was no longer ‘one of the family’. If De Quincey knew of their hostility – and he must have done – he said nothing. But his reasons for making changes to the garden almost certainly extended beyond his wish for more apples. De Quincey took great pride in his own intellectual abilities, and after four years in the Wordsworths’ company, he was undoubtedly growing tired of his role as a disciple. It seems probable that at some point during that autumn he came to the realization that the family was never likely to accord him the status of either equal or intimate. What is more, as his relationship with his mother and guardians had long since shown, below his mannered surface, he teemed with subversive desires that he was often prepared to act upon. What better way to assert his independence from the Wordsworths than by making his own mark on Dove Cottage?

December 1811 was also the month that news reached Grasmere of shocking crimes in London’s East End. Near midnight on Saturday, 7 December, a man entered Timothy Marrs’ lace and pelisse warehouse at 29 Ratcliffe Highway. Once inside he locked the door, and within a matter of minutes ruthlessly dispatched all four inhabitants, including an infant. The Marr’s servant girl Margaret Jewell was out at the time fetching dinner. When she returned, and her knocking brought only the stealthy approach of unknown footsteps, she sickened with fear and raised the alarm. Twelve days later, and only a few blocks away, the same man struck again, this time at the household of a publican named John Williamson. Three people were murdered. Two escaped. Several suspects were arrested in connection with these atrocities, including a sailor named John Williams, who was detained on 22 December and who was found hanged in his prison cell four days later, an apparent suicide. The court chose to hear the evidence against him, but the circumstances of his death were widely interpreted as a confession of guilt. On New Year’s Eve, his body was publicly exhibited in a procession through the Ratcliffe Highway and then driven to the nearest crossroads, where it was forced into a narrow hole and a stake driven through the heart. De Quincey became obsessed with these murders, and in particular with Williams, whom he regarded as both a ‘solitary artist’ and an ‘accursed hound’.161 In the years ahead, De Quincey returned again and again to these killings, stalking Williams as he had stalked his victims, and exploiting the details of the Ratcliffe Highway crimes in narratives that alternated unsettlingly between terror, pathos, and black humour.

[viii]

‘I never was better in my life than in the spring of 1812,’ De Quincey proclaimed. Laudanum was still giving him a good deal of happiness. He had been using it now for nearly eight years, but had avoided dependence because he continued to allow ‘sufficient intervals between every indulgence’.162 He had also – as always – been reading voraciously, and on a Saturday night he often combined the pleasures of books and drugs. In the year 1810 he amused himself ‘by reading, in their chronological order, the great classical circumnavigations of the earth’. A year later he began ‘to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy’. But chiefly he had been studying ‘German metaphysics, in the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, &c’, and inspired by their efforts, he began to formulate plans for a great philosophical opus of his own, to which he ‘presumed to give the title’ De emendatione humani intellectûs (On the Correction of the Human Intellect), after an unfinished work by the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. De Quincey may also, at this time, have been gathering notes for a full-scale examination of Christianity, and ‘the Relations of Christianity to man’.163

One of the unexpected consequences of this wide course of reading and speculation was his discovery that Coleridge had committed ‘a large variety of trivial thefts’ from several German authors. De Quincey found the situation inexplicable. Why, ‘with the riches of El Dorado lying about him’, would Coleridge condescend ‘to filch a handful of gold from any man whose purse he fancied’? Later, however, he came across more serious examples of Coleridge’s unacknowledged borrowings, including one instance of ‘bare-faced plagiarism … from Schelling’, though even these findings did not shake him from his belief that Coleridge was ‘as entirely original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man that ever has existed’.164

De Quincey’s various indulgences in Dove Cottage brought him physical pleasure and intellectual excitement, but they were not enough to block out an increasingly oppressive reality: he was running out of money. Well over half his patrimony was already gone, and it was now evident to him that he needed to earn an income in order to stabilize his situation. With considerable reluctance, he decided to pursue a legal career, and in March he journeyed down to London to make enquiries. Once reinstalled in his Great Titchfield Street rooms, he consulted with the barrister John Stoddart, who practised in Doctors’ Commons, and who gave him ‘all the information that was necessary’ to enable him to decide ‘on the Civil Law as a profession’. De Quincey had originally hoped to begin immediately by keeping the Easter term, but in the event he spent at least five weeks away from London – in Oxford, it seems, for at least part of the time – before returning to enter the Middle Temple on 12 June 1812 as ‘Thomas De Quincey, eldest son of Thomas De Quincey of Green Hay, Lancashire, Esq. dec’d.’165

During his weeks in London, De Quincey was constantly in the company of Coleridge, who now lived with John and Mary Morgan at 71 Berners Street, Soho.166 In the months following the demise of The Friend, Coleridge and Wordsworth had quarrelled as a result of some indiscreet comments by a mutual friend, Basil Montagu, who visited the Lakes with his wife in the autumn of 1810, and who offered to escort Coleridge down to London in order that he might seek medical help. Before their departure, however, Wordsworth took Montagu aside and quietly told him something of Coleridge’s habits. When they arrived in London, Montagu and Coleridge argued – about wine, De Quincey claims – and Montagu falsely told Coleridge that ‘Wordsworth has commissioned me to tell you … that he has no Hope of you,’ and that ‘for years past [you] had been an ABSOLUTE NUISANCE in the Family.’167 Coleridge was devastated by these comments and for months stopped all communications with Wordsworth, who was now in London seeking to patch things up. De Quincey did his best to stay clear of the animosity between the two friends, though his sympathies were almost certainly with Coleridge, and he no doubt heard him speak at length about his side of the sad story.

That De Quincey was smarting from his own relationship with the Wordsworths is plain from the reports of a visit he himself made to the Montagus’ at this time. In one version, he ‘fancied that something Montagu said was meant at him: And he got up on the Instant, went up to Mrs Montagu, & wished her good evening, & left the room without saying a word to any one else’. In another version, Mrs Montagu reported to Wordsworth that someone at the party mentioned to De Quincey something that Mary Wordsworth had said to him ‘about the possession of the house’, whereupon De Quincey ‘took fire … and retired from their House in great Indignation’.168 What Montagu said is unclear, though Mary’s comments presumably related to Dove Cottage (and perhaps the orchard?). In any event, De Quincey’s response was to stomp out of the Montagus’ house, as he had stomped out of his landlady’s home in Bangor a decade earlier when she made ill-judged comments about swindlers. ‘He is quite mad with pride,’ Wordsworth remarked curtly.

The antipathies and misapprehensions steadily eroding the friendship between De Quincey and the Wordsworths were at least temporarily set aside on 11 June when De Quincey received a letter from Dorothy. It was sealed with black wax and contained tragic news. Three-year-old Catharine Wordsworth had died. ‘My dear Friend,’ Dorothy began, ‘I am grieved to the heart when I write to you – but you must bear the sad tidings – Our sweet little Catharine was seized with convulsions on Wednesday night … The fits continued till ¼ after 5 in the morning, when she breathed her last.’169 De Quincey was staggered by this news. He had parted from her in cheerfulness, and with no misgivings, only a few short months earlier. And now she was gone. Wordsworth, along with the barrister and diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, called an hour or two after he had received Dorothy’s letter. De Quincey ‘burst into tears on seeing Wordsworth and seemed to be more affected than the father’.170

Figure 3: A watercolour miniature of a child tentatively identified as Catharine Wordsworth

He poured out his grief to Dorothy. ‘Oh that I might have seen my darling’s face once again! Oh what a heavy increase of affliction to me and to her parents is this!’ A day passed and he wrote again, this time at greater length and with a deepening sense of shock at what he had lost. ‘Nobody’, he told Dorothy on 13 June,

can judge from her manner to me before others what love she shewed to me when we were playing or talking together alone. On the night when she slept with me in the winter, we lay awake all the middle of the night – and talked oh how tenderly together: When we fell asleep, she was lying in my arms; once or twice I awoke from the pressure of her dear body; but I could not find [it] in my heart to disturb her. Many times on that night – when she was murmuring out tender sounds of endearment, she would lock her little arms with such passionateness round my neck – as if she had known that it was to be the last night we were ever to pass together. Ah pretty pretty love, would God I might have seen thy face and kissed thy dear lips again!

De Quincey closed this letter two days later by inserting himself at the very heart of the Wordsworth family. The ‘custom of the country’, he recognized, would oblige Dorothy ‘to let many idle gazers look at our darling’s face after she was dead’, but how terrible to think that ‘her mother, her father, and I should have been allowed to see her face no more!’171

De Quincey’s mood over the next week is difficult to determine. The famous sale of the Duke of Roxburghe’s magnificent library of an estimated 30,000 volumes was ongoing at the time, and would have been of great interest to him. Yet he later recalled that he was ‘disabled … by fever’ and unable to attend, though he sent a proxy who purchased for him some of the most cherished books in his collection.172 On 17 June, however, Crabb Robinson saw De Quincey, and it is apparent from his account of their meeting that, while weak and emotional, De Quincey was not ‘disabled’ by grief or fever. Indeed, as they dined together in the Middle Temple, De Quincey was ‘very civil to me, and invited me cordially to visit his cottage in Cumberland’, Robinson reports. He is,

like myself, an enthusiast for Wordsworth; his person is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner those of a sickly, enfeebled man. From which circumstances his sensibility, which I have no doubt is genuine, is in danger of being mistaken for a puling and womanly weakness … His conversation is sensible, and I suppose him to be a man of information on general subjects. His views in studying the law will never, I think, be realized … A man must be altogether or not at all a lawyer.173

Four days later De Quincey drafted a letter to Dorothy, then rewrote it, and then rewrote it again. The three versions do not necessarily vitiate the sincerity of his anguish, but they do suggest an attempt to stylize it. He worried that Catharine might have called out for him when he was not there. Every day his heart grew ‘heavier and heavier’. He had recently passed two evenings with Coleridge in an attempt to stave off dejection. ‘Oh that I could have died for her or with her! Willingly dear friend I would have done this.’174

In late June, De Quincey was back in Grasmere, where he was over-whelmed by a ‘fierce … convulsion of grief’, and his behaviour became decidedly odd. For the next eight weeks, he stretched himself every night upon Catharine’s grave in the Grasmere churchyard; ‘in fact, often passed the night upon her grave … in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning after neighbourhood to the darling of my heart’. His eyes became grief-haunted, and often in the afternoons when he was out on the hills, he saw Kate walking towards him, ‘always almost’ with a ‘basket on her head’. De Quincey did not attempt to resist this ‘senseless self-surrender to passion, but ‘clung to it as a luxury, (which, in the midst of suffering, it really was in part)’. At the end of August he was seized with a ‘nervous sensation’ that led to a revival of the excruciating stomach pains he had first experienced with Ann and the young waif in Greek Street during his terrible weeks in London, and that ‘yielded to no remedies but opium’.175

He decided to leave Grasmere and seek medical advice. But after consulting physicians in Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, and Bath, he arrived in Clifton without any improvement in his condition. Then, one night in November, ‘a peculiar sensation arose from the knee downwards’, which ‘went forwards through a space of about five hour’, leaving him ‘perfectly free from every trace of the awful malady’ which had possessed him, though so physically shattered that he left a few days later to recuperate in the hot sea baths at Ilfracombe. Two months later, De Quincey returned to Grasmere. He saw the snow upon Catharine’s grave, and the ‘pair of her red morocco shoes’ that Mary Wordsworth had left for him as a memento. But he felt no grief. Many years later, De Quincey diagnosed his six-month affliction over Catharine as ‘nympholepsy’ – a demoniac enthusiasm held by the ancients to overtake men who are bewitched by a nymph.176 It is a whimsical and half-hearted explanation, and one that revealingly turns away from the real sources of his anguish.

Catharine’s death hit him hard for a number of reasons. One, it temporarily restored his close relationship with Dorothy, who put her anger over the Dove Cottage garden away and wrote to him with a warmth that he had no doubt missed a good deal. Two, while he himself may not even have realized it, there was clearly a sexual element in De Quincey’s feelings for Catharine. There was nothing strange about him sleeping with her – these kinds of arrangements were commonplace in the Wordsworth household when beds were short. Further, De Quincey certainly thought of her as a child, for he would never have written to Dorothy that openly about an affection that he conceived of as in any way improper. De Quincey knew that sexual interest in the young girl was unthinkable, and he ‘always viewed her as an impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy’.177 But at the same time the possessiveness and self-pity he felt at her death were continually exacerbated by his thoughts of her ‘passionateness’, her ‘dear body’, and her ‘dear lips’, to say nothing of the two months he spent sleeping on top of her grave. Three, with Catharine’s intense, unquestioning love now gone, De Quincey saw only too plainly the vulnerability of his own position within the Wordsworth circle. Catharine was his strongest tie to the family, and he probably realized that with her death the gathering hostility against him would soon succeed in banishing him altogether. Tellingly, six months after her death, the Wordsworths lost their middle son Thomas to pneumonia. Wordsworth wrote immediately to De Quincey with the news, but he was largely unaffected.178 He had been fond of Thomas, but it was Catharine who mattered. When she died, so did his dreams of a cherished place within the family. Four, De Quincey resorted to increasingly heavy doses of laudanum to try and deal with the psychological and physical stress of the event. The drug brought him temporary relief, but it soon began to rebound upon him in the dreadful shape of nightmares and debilitating side-effects that laid siege to his health, and eroded his ability to cope. Finally, and most significantly, Catharine’s death devastated De Quincey because it was Elizabeth’s all over again. When his sister had died, De Quincey was only six years old, and for years he had done his best to keep his grief over her loss in check. When Catharine died, long pent-up despair over Elizabeth flooded out of him, as the adult tried to process what the child had suffered. De Quincey may only have been able to see his grief over Catharine, but losing the two young girls had melded into a single burden, and he buckled under its weight.