SEVEN

The Road of Excess

[i]

Perhaps he was predisposed to an abuse of opiates: ‘I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I am too much of an Eudaemonist: I hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others: I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness.’ Perhaps eight years of self-medication and recreational use had made him far more reliant on the drug than he realized: commercial medicines containing opium were available everywhere, and ‘under such treacherous disguises’ many consumers only detected ‘the chain of abject slavery’ when it had already ‘inextricably wound itself about the constitutional system. Perhaps the afflictions of his childhood made it almost inevitable: certainly recent studies indicate that parental loss in one form or another – death, separation, desertion – is near the norm amongst opiate habitués. Or perhaps he just enjoyed the drug too much: ‘I am a Hedonist; and, if you must know why I take opium, that’s the reason why.’1 It is notoriously difficult to determine what causes addiction, but in whatever measure any or all of these factors contributed, there can be little question that his dysphoria and physical misery following the death of Catharine Wordsworth pushed him over the edge, and in 1813 he became ‘a regular and confirmed (no longer an intermitting) opium-eater’.2

Opiates are now understood very differently than they were two hundred years ago. In the terminology of De Quincey’s day, he had an opium ‘habit’, not an opium ‘addiction’, for medical professionals did not begin to develop modern ideas of drug addiction until the second half of the nineteenth century.3 Then, it was a moral issue, a question of character. Today, the moral argument persists, but it is vigorously challenged by those who see addiction as a medical concern, a ‘disease of the brain’ rather than a ‘disease of the will’.4 At the turn of the nineteenth century, doctors rarely wrote on the habituation of opiates, and when they did, it was as the regrettable but relatively infrequent consequence of the salutary use of a crucially important tranquillizer and analgesic. Indeed, so little was known about opiates that De Quincey was regarded as an ‘expert’ on the subject down the nineteenth century and beyond, at least by the non-medical public. Now, ‘addiction’ is widely understood to refer to the psychological, physiological, and social effects associated with the habitual use of certain substances, including opiates.5

In many ways De Quincey – like millions of other nineteenth-century addicts – hardly stood a chance. The drug was socially acceptable, the first and last resort for scores of ailments, and administered by the mouth, so that the supervision of medical professionals was unnecessary. When withdrawal symptoms manifested themselves between doses, most consumers naturally interpreted them as a separate illness and quickly returned to opium as the most obvious ‘cure’, thus silently reinforcing the downward spiral of addiction without even knowing it. De Quincey was criticized by family and friends for his dependence, while he himself often acknowledged a guilty sense that his addiction was driving him to sin against himself and against his family, but these were the only barriers between him and the drug, and they were never enough to keep him from it. There were no rehabilitation centres, no social programmes, no real medical insights, no legal obstacles, and very few financial ones, given the cheapness of the drug.6 In common with the vast majority of nineteenth-century opium eaters, once De Quincey got addicted, he stayed addicted.

His ingestion levels varied widely over the long course of his opium career. One grain of opium was the equivalent of about twenty-five drops of laudanum, though it is difficult to translate these quantities into actual dosages of opiates, as different chemists used different methods of preparation, and different lots of raw opium differed considerably in their concentrations of constitutive alkaloids.7 At the depths of his addiction, De Quincey claimed that his daily ration was as much as 480 grains of opium, or twelve thousand drops of laudanum, an astonishing amount, and especially for a man who was slightly built and under five feet tall. More commonly, De Quincey seems to have consumed around 300 drops of laudanum a day, though this total could rise or fall dramatically depending on his circumstances.8 On the one hand, if he was trying to cope with inordinate amounts of stress, he almost invariably resorted to larger quantities of the drug. Or if he needed to get work done, he often binged, as he believed opium gave him energy and focus. On the other hand, if he had determined to control his intake, or renounce the drug altogether, his consumption levels could fall to zero for a number of days or even weeks. But he always relapsed. On numerous occasions he assured friends and employers that he was free of the drug. He was not. At four points in his career he engaged in particularly fierce attempts to overcome his addiction. All four attempts failed.9

Opium battered De Quincey. Once he was habituated to the drug, he no longer experienced anything approaching the euphoria he used to luxuriate in as an occasional user, while at the same time his addiction began to inflict various pains, the most severe of which was chronic constipation, a condition that affects most opiate addicts.10 When he tried to come off the drug, what he called ‘nervous misery’ marked the onset of withdrawal.11 If he attempted to fight through it, he was hit by nausea, vomiting, alternating chills and sweats, increased sensitivity to pain, aggression, irritability, and depression.12 Sometimes he battled hard against these miseries, but then his resolution faltered, and he returned to opium. His intake levels climbed gradually upward. He determined on temperance. The grim cycle began again. For almost fifty years De Quincey’s addiction imposed highly predictable patterns on a life that frequently descended into chaos.

In one crucial respect, however, De Quincey’s profile does not match current medical knowledge about opiate addiction. By common consent, the pain of opiate withdrawal usually lasts less than a week, and is like having a very bad flu. It is unpleasant, but not life threatening.13 This is not the picture De Quincey paints. After an illusionary early triumph over the drug, he emphasizes that his withdrawal miseries were severe and persistent: ‘Think of me as of one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered; and much, perhaps, in the situation of him who has been racked.’ Some twenty-five years later, he cut back on his opium intake and brought on symptoms so terrible that he felt his condition tending towards suicide. ‘For six months no results; one dreary uniformity of report – absolute desolation; misery so perfect that too surely I perceived, and no longer disguised from myself, the impossibility of continuing to live under so profound a blight.”14

Why is there such a gap between De Quincey’s experience of opiate withdrawal and established pharmacology? To some extent, the discrepancy can be explained by the fact that on several occasions De Quincey knowingly exaggerated his pains in order to garner sympathy, or create a diversion, or heighten a literary effect. He also undoubtedly suffered in varying degrees from what is now known as ‘protracted withdrawal syndrome’, where withdrawal can last for up to six months, though in forms far more muted than the agonies De Quincey recounts.15 Another possibility – wide ranging in its implications – is that De Quincey was also an alcoholic, so that his withdrawals were repeatedly complicated by the fact that he was fighting, not just opium, but a toxic blend of opium and alcohol.

Although he sometimes denied it, De Quincey was a great lover of wine, which he began drinking as a very young boy, and which he continued to consume throughout his life.16 On many occasions in his adulthood he drank to excess, and there are months and even years when alcohol – especially brandy – was clearly an established part of his daily routine. These indulgences, however, make up only a small part of De Quincey’s vast total consumption, for his primary source of alcohol was of course all the laudanum he was drinking. He himself insisted that opium did not intoxicate, but he acknowledged that laudanum did, as it was composed of proof spirits that contained anywhere from 45 to 60 per cent pure alcohol.17 Given De Quincey’s heavy reliance on laudanum over nearly five decades, a ‘poly addiction’ – that is, an addiction to both alcohol and opium – seems almost inevitable. Even at the lower percentage of 45 per cent proof spirits, and when he had his habit under some kind of control, his weekly consumption of alcohol was considerable, while during the periods of his worst excesses he drank the equivalent of between one and two pints of whisky per day.18

Withdrawal from alcohol is a much more serious matter than withdrawal from opiates, as it is typically more protracted, and potentially life threatening. It begins with vomiting, sweating, anxiety, and nausea, and in acute or chronic cases can escalate into fever, hallucinations, black-outs, and delirium tremens.19 There is no way of knowing exactly what role it played in De Quincey’s addiction – where opium’s influence ended and alcohol’s began – and certainly neither substance produces the kinds of enduring withdrawal pains that De Quincey describes. But there can be little doubt that alcohol confused and deepened miseries that he almost exclusively conceived of as related to his abuse of opium, and that it was a crucial factor in both his spiritual despair and his physical suffering.

Laudanum dragged De Quincey through hell, forcing him to practise ‘habitual and complex dissimulation’, and overwhelming him on countless occasions. Yet like many addicts, in the nineteenth century and far beyond, the severity of his addiction did not prevent him from functioning at very high levels for decades.20 In many instances, he was able to fight through distressing circumstances. In others, vulnerability and collapse bestowed upon him an odd kind of agency that he turned to striking artistic effect. In 1813, De Quincey went from consuming laudanum to being consumed by it. But his addiction was a prison, not a death sentence. Though it often brought out the very worst in him, it never finally defeated his resolve or his creativity.

[ii]

At seventeen years old, Margaret Simpson was – in De Quincey’s eyes ‘a beautiful girl’.21 Her grandfather, William Park, was a Westmorland ‘Statesman (from ‘Estateman’, meaning a small farmer who owned his land), and reportedly obstinate, even occasionally violent, in temper. His son, William junior, was mentally handicapped. His daughter Mary inherited at least some of her father’s wilfulness, and was given to ‘seeking scandal, village rumours, &c’. She married John Simpson, who was well read in ‘the best literature of the country’, and ‘a rank Jacobin; not from any delusion of his judgement, but as a pure malignant towards the nobility – gentry – clergy – magistracy – and institutions of the land’.22 The couple had six children. Margaret was their eldest daughter.23 The entire family lived at The Nab, a long, low, and handsome farmhouse of 1702 that is set just back from the road between Rydal and Grasmere, with Rydal Water and then Loughrigg Fell in view from the front, and Nab Scar lowering behind. Today it still looks very much as it did in De Quincey’s time.

Margaret’s family had farmed The Nab since 1332, so she came from venerable Westmorland stock, but in terms of social rank, she was decidedly below De Quincey’s own standing as a ‘gentleman’.24 De Quincey, it seems, did not care. Had not Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads chosen ‘low and rustic life’ as his ‘principal object’? Had he not enthused about how ‘in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity’; how ‘in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’?25 In falling in love with Margaret, De Quincey was following good Wordsworthian lore, for not only had she lived always amidst ‘the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’, but in choosing her De Quincey placed genial feeling and ‘the essential passions of the heart’ far above societal expectation.

Of course several other factors also shaped his desire for her. De Quincey liked Margaret because he disliked the courtship rituals of the upper classes, as he was convinced that they promoted ‘that vicious condition in which trifling takes the place of all serious love, when women are viewed only as dolls, and addressed with an odious leer of affected knowingness as “my dear”, wink, etc’ Further, though smitten with aristocratic women such as Lady Conyngham and Lady Carbery, De Quincey had always been attracted to women from a lower social rank, and he may even have found Margaret’s allure heightened by the radicalism in her family, though he claimed that in his many political discussions with them he tried repeatedly to turn them towards the ‘better feelings’ of his own Toryism, for despite his own rebelliousness, De Quincey was a determined advocate of the status quo.26

In terms of education, De Quincey looked down upon Margaret, and was drawn to her for that reason: ‘I could not, perhaps, have loved, with a perfect love, any woman whom I had felt to be my own equal intellectually.’ Indeed, when he gave her a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s sentimental novel The Vicar of Wakefield and she took the entire story as fact, it only deepened his affection for her.27 Morally and emotionally, however, De Quincey exalted Margaret, for he saw her as in possession of the innate nobility that he frequently associated with the lower classes: ‘a beautiful young woman, in the very poorest family … so long in fact as she stays under her father’s roof, is as perfectly her own mistress … as the daughter of an earl. This personal dignity … and the feminine gentleness of her voice and manners … oftentimes combine to make a young cottage beauty as fascinating an object as any woman of any station.’28 Finally, though, De Quincey chose Margaret because he insisted on the grandeur of a love in which a man and woman regard themselves as equals: ‘what an awful elevation arises when each views in the other a creature capable of the same noble duties – she no less than he a creature of lofty aspirations; she by the same right a daughter of God as he a son of God; she bearing her eyes erect to the heavens no less than he!’29

In early 1813, De Quincey’s relationship with Margaret was in its inchoate stages, but already it was probably his best consolation for his burgeoning dependence on opium, his distressing financial situation, and the decline of his relationship with the Wordsworths. When he returned to Dove Cottage in January following his time in Clifton, he put himself back in touch with the family, and for a few weeks both sides seem to have tried for a continuation of the warmer feeling that had infused their correspondence in the weeks following Catharine’s death. But it was no good. He was nowhere near as eager to please them as he had once been, and their faith in him continued to fall. On 1 February, Dorothy wrote with disdain that nine-year-old John Wordsworth ‘now goes to Mr de Quincey for a nominal hour every day to learn Latin upon a plan of Mr de Quincey’s own “by which a Boy of the most moderate abilities may be made a good latin scholar in six weeks!!!” This said nominal hour now generally is included in the space of twenty minutes; either the scholar learns with such uncommon rapidity that more time is unnecessary, or the Master tires.’30

Dorothy did not stop there. Having brought out the knife, she went on later in the same letter to make even more derisive comments about De Quincey’s relationship with his housekeeper. ‘Mary Dawson talks in private to us of leaving Mr de Quincey’ as ‘she is tired’ of his ‘meanness and greediness’. Dorothy was being remarkably unfair. De Quincey had failings, but meanness and greediness were not among them – as his many gifts to the Wordsworth children might have reminded her. Three months after she wrote these remarks, De Quincey generously loaned Wilson a large sum of money that pushed him far beyond his financial means. ‘Will 200£ be enough?’ he asked. ‘If you are in immediate want of the money – could you not draw upon me at a short date?’ Then, in August, when Charles Lloyd fell ill, De Quincey graciously urged Sophia Lloyd to avail herself of Dove Cottage. ‘If Grasmere can be considered a change of scene to Mr Lloyd – I trust that you will not scruple to make use of my house.’31 Mary Dawson, De Quincey later observed, was an ‘ignorant old maid’, who prided herself upon her position at Dove Cottage, and who attributed rules to him in his absence which enabled her to act in her own self-interest, including on one occasion when she seems to have told the Wordsworths that her ‘Master’ had left ‘such and such directions’ forbidding them from using the cottage, in order that she and her lover might enjoy it for themselves.32 What hurt most, though, was that Dorothy believed Mary without ever consulting him.

De Quincey spent parts of the spring and summer in London, ostensibly to pursue his study of the law. He and Coleridge were often together. ‘I remember one party at which we met Lady Hamilton – Lord Nelson’s Lady Hamilton – the beautiful, the accomplished, the enchantress!’ On another evening in Berners Street, De Quincey was enjoying tea and toast with Coleridge, while listening to him hold forth on the Roman philosopher Plotinus, when suddenly a cry arose of ‘Fire – fire!’ and the two rushed out of the house and into Oxford Street, where a pianoforte maker’s shop was ablaze.33 In the autumn De Quincey visited his family at Westhay, and it was almost certainly during these weeks that he had the chance to observe the French-Swiss novelist and essayist Madame de Staël at a party. She made a vivid impression. ‘Her black hair, floating in masses about her temples, her fierce eyes, and her impassioned gestures, gave her, when declaiming, the air of a Pythoness.’34

Back in Grasmere by early October, De Quincey received a warm note from Dorothy, apparently written from the Wordsworths’ new home at Rydal Mount. ‘We are very sorry to hear that you have been so poorly,’ she tells him. ‘Pray if you are well enough to come tomorrow bring yourself a pair of slippers and stockings that you may not have to sit with wet feet.’35 De Quincey probably called as invited, for affection still remained between him and the family, and direct intercourse among them was often cordial enough, the recurrent backbiting on both sides notwithstanding. The more pressing news which greeted him upon his return was that Mary Dawson was pregnant, which meant that he needed to hire a new housekeeper. Who he chose for the post is unclear, but it may well have been Margaret Simpson. ‘Q. has got a new servant’, Mary Wordsworth remarked, ‘– but I will not enter into the wonderful events of Grasmere – disgraceful to be sure they are.’36 Part of the disgrace was that Mary Dawson seems to have been unmarried, but perhaps, too, Mary Wordsworth was alluding to the fact that De Quincey had hired a young woman with whom he was thought to be romantically involved. Certainly the gossip in London a few years later was that he had ‘married his housekeeper’, and more than forty years on the same rumour persisted in the Lakes.37

He spent Christmas at Town End. Wilson had hoped to be at Elleray for the holidays, but he had determined to become a member of the Scottish Bar, and in mid-December he wrote with regret to inform De Quincey that his studies would keep him in Edinburgh until the spring. He then went on to make a rather disconcerting request: ‘In about a fortnight it falls upon me to open a debate in the Speculative Society … on the question: “Has the Peninsular War been glorious to the Spanish nation?”’ The problem was, Wilson did not feel himself ‘so well able to discuss this question as I ought to be’. Could De Quincey help? Would he mind jotting down his thoughts on the matter, and then allowing Wilson to use them as his own? On the same night, moreover, Wilson had a second essay to deliver ‘on some political or philosophical subject’, and he again felt himself without the ‘ability to write one’.38 If De Quincey had anything on hand that might suit the occasion, would he please mail it to Edinburgh at his earliest convenience? It is not known whether De Quincey complied with either of these requests, but Wilson had a keen sense of his friend’s intellectual capabilities, and it was not the last time he called on him for assistance.

By early February, De Quincey had returned to London, and his legal studies at the Middle Temple. Pink was also in town, and the brothers were often in each other’s company. Most memorably, they attended ‘an exhibition of two large and splendid pictures’ by the Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa. After several minutes of gazing at the two works, De Quincey noticed Charles and Mary Lamb in the crowd. Lamb, seeing them, came over to shake hands, but paused as he reached them, for he could see that Pink was about to deliver his opinion of Rosa. ‘D——the fellow! I could do better myself,’ he cried, and then – good sailor that he was – he spat out a large lump of his chewing tobacco, which firmly attached itself to the frame of the picture. Some in the crowd ‘actually turned round in fright’, but Lamb was gleeful, for he ‘almost reverenced’ an ‘honest homely obstinacy’ that refused to be ‘enslaved by a great name’.39

De Quincey was frequently out with other friends as well. The future critic, dramatist, and judge Thomas Noon Talfourd and ‘I became acquainted … in the beautiful hall of the Middle Temple, whence … after dining together … we sometimes adjourned to our coffee’ in his chambers, ‘and enjoyed the luxury of conversation, with the élite of the young Templars’. De Quincey visited again with Crabb Robinson, who characterized him as ‘a dry, solemn man, whose conversation does not flow readily, though he speaks well enough and like a sensible man’.40 Coleridge had by this time moved with the Morgans from Berners Street to Ashley in Wiltshire, and De Quincey travelled out to call on him, ‘as it eventually proved, for the last time’. He did not, however, manage to visit with ‘Walking’ Stewart, for though he was in London, De Quincey during these weeks was ‘taking a great deal of opium, and never could contrive to issue to the light of day soon enough for a morning call’ upon the ageing philosopher.41

His annual summer visit to Westhay was highlighted this year by several meetings at More’s with the brilliant actress Sarah Siddons, whom De Quincey had often seen on the London stage. When she read Shakespeare, he heartily admired her, but when she read Milton, ‘her failure was distressing; almost as distressing as the sycophantic applause of the surrounding company – all lost, of course, in nearly speechless admiration’. Later, at More’s request, De Quincey read to her ‘some of Lord Byron’s most popular works’, and got her to acknowledge that ‘perhaps the style of Mrs Siddons’s reading had been too much determined to the dramatic cast of emphasis’.42

That same summer, De Quincey also hoped that the distinguished American painter and poet Washington Allston would pay a visit to Westhay, for he was staying nearby in Bristol, and the two had clearly met earlier in London. ‘Mr Walters, the gentleman who will deliver this note to you … is very desirous of seeing your great picture,’ De Quincey wrote to Allston on 21 July 1814: ‘I have therefore ventured to assure him, from my own repeated experience of your kindness, that you will readily allow him this gratification.’ Added De Quincey: ‘it would give us great pleasure to see you here, if your engagements should leave you time to come over’.43 At Westhay, he enjoyed an elegant and remarkably cultured lifestyle that undoubtedly bolstered his sense of his family’s status and his own worth. In the years ahead, these days both sustained him, and marked a sharp contrast to the hell that was already starting to shadow his steps.

On one of his regular mail-coach rides from the south back up to the Lakes, De Quincey was involved in an accident. It took place in August, and seems most probably to belong to 1814, though De Quincey himself was confused about the year.44 He had already travelled to Manchester earlier in the day, and was now getting ready to complete the final stage of his journey to Westmorland. It was after midnight. He was the only passenger on the coach. After mounting the box, he dosed himself with ‘a small quantity of laudanum’.45 The coachman was known to him as a driver from the south, and as they made their way out of Manchester, he explained to De Quincey that he was temporarily in the north attending to legal business during the day, and driving at night, an exhausting schedule that meant he had not slept in seventy-two hours. During the first few stages of their ride he fought hard against his drowsiness, but finally, at about mile twenty-four, he surrendered himself to sleep, though not before crossing his legs over his hand so that the reins would not slip free. There was only one other person aboard, a guard at the back, and he too had fallen asleep.

That left De Quincey in charge of the mail-coach as it thundered north up the Preston road into the silence of the night. The horses were familiar with the route, and he remained relatively calm, until he noticed that they were travelling on the wrong side of the road. Serious concern, however, did not seize him until he heard, in the distance, the sound of a wheel. ‘Who and what could it be? Was it industry in a taxed cart – was it youthful gaiety in a gig?’ De Quincey attempted to gain control of the coach, but he could not pull the reins free from the driver’s hand. He then tried to reach the guard’s horn at the back, but his way was blocked by the mail piled high on the roof. And then suddenly, ‘our frantic horses swept round an angle of the road’, and De Quincey could see before him, in the earliest light of dawn, an avenue, six hundred yards in length, with umbrageous trees on either side, and at its far end, just discernible, two young lovers sitting in a light gig.46 Panicked, he yelled out a warning. They did not hear him. He yelled again. The young man raised his head.

‘He saw, he heard, he comprehended, the ruin that was coming down.’ Rising to his feet, he pulled on the reins and his horse slowly began to move the gig, first so that it stood at a right angle to the oncoming coach, and then gradually over towards the edge of the road. Thirty seconds remained before the two vehicles collided. Then twenty. Then fifteen. ‘Oh hurry, hurry, my brave young man! for the cruel hoofs of our horses – they also hurry!’ The gig reached the side of the road. The mail-coach flew past. There was a thunderous blow. Either with its swingle-bar, or with one of its horses, the coach had struck the off-wheel of the gig. De Quincey spun around, terrified, and saw the young man safe, but ‘frozen into rest by horror’. Far more disturbing was the sight of the young woman. ‘Will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing!’47 Soon her image filled his nightmares in horrifying re-enactments of the accident scene. In some versions she is closely associated with Elizabeth. On occasion she escapes her fate. More often she is swallowed up by death.48

[iii]

In September 1814, Wordsworth hosted a party at Rydal Mount attended by De Quincey, Lloyd, Wilson, and the Scottish poet and novelist James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’. After dinner, an unusually bright meteor passed through the sky, and the group went out on the terrace to see it. Dorothy thought it ‘might prove ominous’, but Hogg was more optimistic, and – in his thick Scots accent – described it as ‘a treeumphal airch, raised in honour of the meeting of the poets’. Wilson thought the remark Very good’, though he would certainly have ranked Wordsworth’s poetry ahead of his own, or Lloyd’s, or Hogg’s. Wordsworth, however, was indignant, and leading De Quincey aside, ‘he addressed him in these disdainful and venomous words: – “Poets? Poets? – What does the fellow mean? – Where are they?’”49 De Quincey’s reaction to Wordsworth’s comments is revealing. On the one hand, he soon betrayed the poet’s confidence by reporting the incident, perhaps to Wilson, or maybe even directly to Hogg, for De Quincey knew all about Wordsworth’s tactlessness, and he was now prepared to speak of it openly. On the other hand, he was probably pleased that Wordsworth had chosen to confide in him, and – moreover – he agreed with him. Hogg’s egotism was, as De Quincey later put it, ‘absolutely insufferable’.50 Wordsworth no longer commanded De Quincey’s unstinting loyalty, but there was still a good deal of common ground between the poet and his former disciple.

Life in the Lakes remained full of interest. De Quincey continued to study the Danish language. He was one of the subscribers to Isabella Lickbarrow’s Poetical Effusions, as were Southey and Wordsworth. On a number of evenings he called at Calgarth Park, the large Georgian home of the formidable Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, with whom he discussed Kant.51 John Merritt, his old bookseller friend from Liverpool, came with his wife to stay at Dove Cottage. ‘At times in solitary or desolate places of Westmorland and Cumberland’, De Quincey bumped into Coleridge’s eldest son Hartley, whom he found ‘most intellectual’ and ‘most eccentric’. Pink bought a house in the village of Wetheral, near Carlisle in Cumberland, and De Quincey went there to visit him.52 And of course there was Margaret. She and De Quincey had taken to late-night trysts. ‘De Quincey was at the Nab’, Wilson noted on one occasion, ‘and when he returned about three o’clock, found me asleep in his bed’. In December, De Quincey planned a party at Dove Cottage that included young Mrs Jackson, Miss Huddleston’, and ‘the family from the Nab’. Wilson was also invited, and De Quincey was particularly anxious that the gathering benefit from his exuberance and social status: ‘come to dinner, if you can; but, at any rate, come’.53

Wordsworth was well aware by this time of De Quincey’s opium habit, but it did not prevent the two from working together on various literary projects.54 Despite the debacle of the Cintra pamphlet six years earlier, Wordsworth asked De Quincey for his help in seeing the famous 1815 edition of his Poems through the press, and De Quincey duly obliged when he returned to London to keep the winter term at the Middle Temple. More than this, the poet clearly valued De Quincey’s opinion. ‘I wished you had mentioned why you desired the rough Copies of the Preface to be kept, as your request has led me to apprehend that something therein might have appeared to you as better or more clearly expressed – than in the after draught; and I should have been glad to reinstate accordingly.’55

De Quincey was also at work at this time on a series of letters defending Wordsworth from the vitriolic abuse of Francis Jeffrey and other Edinburgh reviewers. Wordsworth was delighted with the scheme, and wrote to Stuart to suggest that a place for the letters might be found in the columns of The Courier. ‘Mr De Quincey’, he explained amicably, ‘… is a friend of mine whom you will recollect, with no very pleasant feelings, perhaps as having caused you some trouble while my Tract occasioned by the Convention of Cintra was printing.’ But, Wordsworth assured him, ‘You need not doubt … that the Letters will be a credit to any Publication, for Mr D. Q. is a remarkably able man.’ This optimism proved misplaced. By April it was plain that the letters were never going to be published, and De Quincey’s credibility dropped even further at Rydal Mount. ‘Notwithstanding his learning and his talents’, Dorothy observed flatly, he can ‘do nothing; he is eaten up by the spirit of procrastination’.56

When he returned from London to Grasmere that spring, or perhaps at some point later in the year, De Quincey walked again through Wales, where he no doubt relived both the exhilaration and the distress he had experienced thirteen years earlier following his flight from Manchester Grammar School. In June, Wellington triumphed at Waterloo. De Quincey was jubilant. Napoleon could be defeated, just as he had said all along. ‘And thus, it may be imagined … I had my triumph; and … I also, in another sense, had my vengeance, as the champion in so many disputes of our national character.’57 Two months later, on 15 August 1815, De Quincey turned thirty years old.

He and Wilson walked, and talked, and drank together throughout that autumn. Wilson had recently lost most of his fortune, and while he had managed to hang on to Elleray, he had been forced to relocate to Edinburgh, in order that he might push forward his plan of passing Advocate. De Quincey’s opium and alcohol intake had been steadily increasing for months, and had now peaked at around eight thousand drops of laudanum per day, which sunk him into a state of the ‘profoundest melancholy’. Sara Hutchinson reported that Wilson was ‘tolerably steady’, but that ‘Quince was often tipsey … He doses himself with Opium & drinks like a f[ish] – and tries in all other things to be as great a [paper torn] legs as Mr Wilson.’58

In November, Wilson and De Quincey journeyed together from the Lakes up to Edinburgh, where De Quincey socialized a good deal. He and Wilson went to the playhouse to see Siddons perform for one of the last times as Lady Macbeth. It may have been during these weeks that he visited again with the poet Anne Grant.59 J. G. Lockhart, the novelist, essayist, and future biographer of Walter Scott, became an acquaintance, though not an admirer. De Quincey was ‘most strange’, Lockhart recalled. After dinner, ‘he set down two snuff-boxes on the table; one, I soon observed, contained opium pills – of these he swallowed one every now and then, while we drank our half-bottle apiece’. Many years later, Lockhart left another, and far more negative, portrait: ‘When sober he was a very interesting companion – a good scholar and a sharp critic – arrogant enough already and pompous but not at all so absurdly as afterwards. He usually however was drunk dead drunk at an early hour – for he drank all he could get and between glasses kept munching opium pills … I soon dropped him as unfit for a decent house with ladies in it.’60

Despite these excesses, De Quincey made a much more favourable impression on others, including the philosopher William Hamilton, who became a valued friend, and the author and advocate Robert Pearse Gillies. ‘The talk might be of “beeves”, and he could grapple with them if expected to do so’, reported Gillies.

But his musical cadences were not in keeping with such work, and in a few minutes (not without some strictly logical sequence) he could escape at will from beeves to butterflies, and thence to the soul’s immortality, to Plato, and Kant, and Schelling, and Fichte, to Milton’s early years and Shakespeare’s sonnets, to Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Homer and Aeschylus, to St Thomas of Aquin, St Basil, and St Chrysostom.

De Quincey’s wide acquaintance with German literature especially impressed Gillies, and confirmed for him that ‘great stores’ of knowledge ‘were contained therein’.61

The stimulation and change of pace he enjoyed in Edinburgh appear to have refocused De Quincey, and when he returned to Grasmere in December, he entered upon a period of happiness that he later referred to as his ‘year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers)’, though he was uncertain about the exact dates of this ‘year’, and it seems clear that he can be speaking of a period that lasted no more than about five months.62 What brought about the change? De Quincey drastically improved his mental health by bringing Margaret right to the centre of his emotional life. As his housekeeper, or lover, or both, she spent many days and nights with him at Dove Cottage. In addition, he slashed his opium intake ‘from 320 grains … to forty grains’ per day, and somehow managed to do so without provoking fierce withdrawal pains. The gloom that had been suffocating him ‘passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as a ship that has been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide’.63

Finally, De Quincey cut himself off from Wordsworth. He still wanted a relationship with the poet, but at this moment he found the price of it very high, and he appears to have decided that he needed a respite from the stress and sadness that it often provoked within him. He had a long list of grievances, some unfair, others justifiable. Wordsworth, he claimed, was ungenerous. He ‘appropriates whatever another says, so entirely, as to be angry if the originator claimed any part of it’, De Quincey asserted. In conversing with him one day, De Quincey ‘made some remark, which Wordsworth caught up, & amplified, & repeated, next day. De Quincey then observed, “I am glad you adopt that view of mine”. “Yours!” said Wordsworth. “Yes, mine”; said De Q. – “No”, cried Wordsworth, indignantly, “it is mine.”’64 Wordsworth was also arrogant. One day he, De Quincey, and Southey were out on a walk, and the topic of conversation turned to the condition of Lloyd, whose mental illness was soon to force his removal to a Quaker psychiatric hospital in York. Southey was making ‘earnest inquiries’ after the sick man. Wordsworth’s answer to him was partly lost on De Quincey, who asked him to repeat it. To De Quincey’s surprise – ’my wrath internally, but also to my special amusement’ – Wordsworth replied ‘that, in fact, what he had said was a matter of some delicacy, and not quite proper to be communicated except to near friends of the family. This to me! – O ye Gods! – to me, who knew, by many a hundred conversations, how disagreeable Wordsworth was, both to Charles Lloyd and to his wife.’65

Worst of all, Wordsworth was – in De Quincey’s eyes – a hypocrite. How could he disapprove of De Quincey’s relationship with Margaret? In the first instance, he himself had done something similar many years earlier when he fell in love with Annette Vallon, the Frenchwoman from a slightly lower social class who bore him an illegitimate daughter in 1792. The affair was no secret among the Wordsworth family, and De Quincey may well have known of it, though if he did he showed remarkable restraint in not making his knowledge public.66 More urgently, the poet of the Lyrical Ballads was judging Margaret, not on personal merit, but on social rank. ‘He could not see the loveliness’ in her ‘fair face’, De Quincey implies, because he would not now allow himself to see loveliness in any face that came from a class so far below his own. Indeed, having written Margaret off as unsuitable for De Quincey, Wordsworth went so far as to follow him out at night to prevent him from keeping his assignations with her, or at least so De Quincey suggests in a torn fragment in which he rages against the poet. ‘I found myself in the same situation almost every night: [paper torn] time almost a hatred for Wordsworth as though a malicious purpose had possessed him: [paper torn] possible unless he had corresponded with fairies, that he should then know anything [paper torn] He could not: it was impossible: I am sure it was: And yet oh Heavens! it makes / it drove me crazy then, it drives me crazy now.’67

De Quincey drew the curtains at Dove Cottage, and he and Margaret relished a winter together of pleasure and solitude. ‘Paint me … a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high’, he instructs an imaginary artist in a famous conceit.

… Make it populous with books: and, furthermore, paint me a good fire; and furniture, plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And, near the fire, paint me a tea-table; and (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one [on] such a stormy night,) place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray … for I usually drink tea from eight o’clock at night to four o’clock in the morning … Paint me a lovely young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms like Aurora’s, and her smiles like Hebe’s: – But no, dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to something more within its power: and the next article brought forward should naturally be myself … As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that … and … you may as well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine-decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum: that, and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood.

So De Quincey lived with Margaret through the dark and happy winter months of 1816. ‘Mr De Quincey has taken a fit of Solitude,’ Wordsworth wrote to Gillies in April; ‘I have scarcely seen him since Mr Wilson left us’ in November.68

[iv]

The bubble burst in early summer. Margaret was pregnant. A part of De Quincey was undoubtedly pleased at the thought of becoming a father and having a child, but the news also generated huge anxiety within him, and brought to a decisive close the ‘year’ of brilliant water. What would the Wordsworths say? His mother? His sisters? Her family? He and Margaret would have to marry. When? Right away? After the child was born? His patrimony was exhausted: how would he support his wife and child? Could he apply himself to the law, or did he need to think of something else? Slowly he unravelled under the stress, and while he stood by Margaret, he simultaneously retreated back into his opium.

At some point during these weeks he received – or thought he received – a visit from a Malay, whose unexpected appearance at the door of Dove Cottage unnerved the servant girl, and sent her upstairs to inform De Quincey that there was ‘a sort of demon below’ dressed in a ‘turban and loose trowsers of dingy white’. De Quincey, who was probably asleep when the stranger arrived, eventually made his way downstairs, where he saw his servant and a young boy from the village standing uneasily beside the Malay. Knowing virtually nothing of ‘Oriental tongues’, and reasoning that ‘Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental’ language, De Quincey addressed his visitor in some lines from Homer’s Iliad, which prompted him to respond in what De Quincey presumed was Malay. Their conversation at a close – and De Quincey’s reputation for learning ‘saved’ with his neighbours – the man lay down upon the floor and rested for an hour. At his departure, De Quincey presented him with a piece of opium that was large enough ‘to kill three dragoons and their horses’, and was startled to see him ‘bolt the whole, divided into three pieces, at one mouthful’: as had been the case in the accident involving the mail-coach and the young woman aboard the gig, De Quincey worried once more that he might be responsible for killing someone, but as ‘I never heard of any Malay being found dead, I became convinced that he was used to opium’.69 De Quincey breathed a sigh of relief – though not for long. Propelled by the guilt and racial anxiety that underwrite De Quincey’s representation of their encounter, the Malay soon returned to make fierce incursions into his dreaming mind.

It was also at about this time that De Quincey received another, unexpected visitor at Dove Cottage, but on this occasion it was a friend who was living in nightmares, rather than a stranger who caused them. ‘The first memorial I had of him was a gentleman, with his hair in disorder, rushing into my cottage at Grasmere, throwing his arms about my neck, and bursting into stormy weeping.’ It was poor Lloyd. He had escaped from the mental institution at York, and fled to the Lakes. ‘Could there be a situation so full of interest or perplexity?’ When healthy, Lloyd had usually been ‘gentle and remarkably quiet’, but now he spoke in ‘a tone, savage and ferocious, towards more than one individual’, though when he turned round and discovered Margaret seated at the tea-table, he was mortified at the ‘depth of emotion which he had betrayed before a stranger’, and thereafter ‘his whole manner wore the appearance of studied dissimulation’. De Quincey invited him to stay for the night, and promised to buy him at least an additional day and night in Dove Cottage by throwing false information in the way of the asylum men whom he knew must be in pursuit.70 Lloyd, however, would stay only for a quick cup of tea, before asking De Quincey to accompany him to his home at Brathay.

The two friends covered the first mile of the route without incident, but as they reached ‘an open plain on the margin of Rydalmere’, Lloyd suddenly stopped and addressed De Quincey. In one account of their conversation, related by De Quincey just a few years later, Lloyd is firmly in the grip of madness. ‘I dare say … you think you know me,’ he asserted: ‘but you do not and you cannot. I am the Author of all Evil. Sir, I am the Devil.’ De Quincey declared that he ‘certainly had thought differently’, but Lloyd continued: ‘I know also who you are: You are nobody. A non entity. You have no being.’ Lloyd then ‘entered into a variety of arguments to convince me he was what he pretended … He reasoned & reasoned, and became more himself, and more cheerful, and the fancy wore away by degrees.’ In another description of the same conversation, however, published by De Quincey nearly twenty-five years later, Lloyd is consumed, not by questions of identity, but by the brutal behaviour of his medical attendants. ‘At the side of that quiet lake he stood for nearly an hour, repeating his wrongs, his eyes glaring continually … and again and again threatening … those vile keepers who had so abused any just purposes of authority. He would talk of little else.’ De Quincey’s two versions of the conversation are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and over the course of the evening both may well have taken place. However this may have been, as night descended, De Quincey pressed his friend to return with him to Town End, and to take refuge there, but Lloyd would not, and he ‘did not wish for company any further’ than Rydalmere. They parted, and Lloyd was soon recaptured. The two men did not see each other again, though in later years De Quincey walked often over to Brathay, where he sat by the river and thought in sadness of his friend.71

In the early autumn, De Quincey received a letter from his mother. She began with amiable chit-chat about general family business, but then turned to what was undoubtedly her real motive in contacting him.

I … at last resolve to say a word of the report which we now suppose had no truth in it. It seemed to come from high authority that you were about to marry, and nothing short of an oracular Voice could have made us listen to the tale, considering your want of means to meet the demands of a family … I cannot help begging you to let me know your designs, and also to consider well before you trust the mere impulse of feeling, if, as I have but just now heard, the sober judgment of your Friends cannot approve the step.

De Quincey must have been appalled. Wordsworth – surely the ‘oracular Voice’ – had either directly or indirectly seen to it that Mrs Quincey learned of her son’s reckless attachment. She was understandably concerned, for Wordsworth would no doubt have stressed Margaret’s slender means and lack of education. Mrs Quincey was keeping an open mind. ‘I can abate much of what the world demands in marriage,’ she told her son. But, she added, ‘I know there are congruities which are indispensable to you.’72 With his background, connections, and intellect, could he really be happy with an ignorant farm girl from a jacobinical family?

Crabb Robinson called in at Dove Cottage on 5 September. De Quincey was in a bad way, ‘an invalid … very dirty and even squalid … He seemed embarrassed when he saw me, and did not ask me to walk upstairs’ – perhaps because Margaret was staying over? Later on that same day De Quincey visited Robinson at the Salutation Inn at Ambleside. ‘He was in much better spirits than when I saw him in the morning,’ Robinson reported, no doubt because he had by this time revived himself with laudanum. Robinson mentioned to ‘Wordsworth and the ladies’ that he had seen De Quincey, and they all kindly encouraged him to accept his offer to take a walk together. Yet at this point Wordsworth himself would not even talk to De Quincey, nor De Quincey to him. On 24 September, the poet walked with Robinson from Rydal Mount to near De Quincey’s house, and then left him. On the return trip, De Quincey escorted Robinson to the gate of Wordsworth’s garden-terrace, but no further. That evening, Wordsworth returned with Robinson to Town End, but did not meet De Quincey.73

The following morning, De Quincey and Robinson took a long walk together over the hills to ‘Dungeon Gill Force’, and then ‘by Tilberthwaite to Coniston Water Head’. Neither enjoyed the experience. De Quincey displeased Robinson when he asked him ‘an abrupt & unhandsome question’: had Mr and Mrs Wordsworth been speaking about his relationship with Margaret? Robinson lied and said ‘No’, not wishing to fan the flames of De Quincey’s resentment any further. After a walk that lasted seven hours, the two men returned to Dove Cottage heartily tired of one another. Yet Robinson was impressed by De Quincey, at least as an intellect. ‘He is very arrogant, but I believe he has something to be vain of.’74

Gossip-mongering about Margaret’s pregnancy was probably quite wide-spread, and at about this time she and De Quincey seem to have made the decision to leave Dove Cottage, and to travel twenty-four miles south to take up residence ‘at the house of Quarrelflat’ near Holker on the Cartmel Peninsula, where for several weeks they enjoyed what amounted to a holiday. De Quincey had plenty of laudanum with him, they took a servant girl or two to wait on them, and they ‘used to bathe on the sea shore in front of the house’. As Margaret’s due date approached, however, it is not clear whether they stayed on at Quarrelflat by design, or returned either to Dove Cottage or The Nab. Be this as it may, on 9 November 1816, their son – William Penson De Quincey – was born.75

Wordsworth and De Quincey were never further apart than in their response to the event. The poet took a malicious delight in it. ‘You will recollect … that a little Friend of our’s was profuse in praises of the “more than beauty” – “the angelic sweetness” – that pervaded the features of a fair young Cottager dwelling upon the banks of Rydal mere,’ he chortled to Lamb. ‘To be brief, Love and opportunity have wrought so much upon the tender frame of this terrestrial angel, that, to the surprise of Gods, Men, and Matrons, she has lately brought forth a Man child.’ To De Quincey, however, William’s birth was a moment of joy. ‘The loveliest sight that a woman’s eye opens upon in this world is her first-born child; and the holiest sight upon which the eyes of God settle in Almighty sanction and perfect blessing is the love which soon kindles between the mother and her infant.’76

Three months later, on 15 February 1817, De Quincey married Margaret in Grasmere Church. The evidence is contradictory, but the Wordsworths appear not to have attended.77 Certainly the family view of the matter had not changed. ‘Mr de Quincey is married; and I fear I may add he is ruined,’ Dorothy wrote with disdain, and probably a little jealousy.

By degrees he withdrew himself from all society except that of the Sympsons of the Nab … At the up-rousing of the Bats and the Owls he regularly went thither – and the consequence was that Peggy Simpson … presented him with a son ten weeks ago … He utter’d in raptures of the beauty, the good sense, the simplicity, the “angelic sweetness” of Miss Sympson, who to all other judgments appeared to be a stupid, heavy girl, and was reckoned a Dunce at Grasmere school … As for him I am very sorry for him – he is utterly changed – in appearance, and takes largely of opium.78

Lamb was less vitriolic, but hardly less sparing. ‘Is Mr *** really married?’ he asked Dorothy with a snicker, ‘and has he found a gargle to his mind? O how funny he did talk to me about her, in terms of such mild quiet whispering speculative profligacy.’79

De Quincey was badly wounded by this criticism. He felt deserted. He felt betrayed. Even after his marriage the Wordsworth women refused to visit Margaret. ‘I was a mere football of reproach,’ as he memorably put it.80 Yet in his choice of her as his partner De Quincey was fully vindicated, for contrary to the expectations of many, his marriage was a successful one, though the support she gave him was outstripped by the stress he visited upon her. ‘Ah! happy, happy years!’ he later exclaimed of his time with Margaret in Dove Cottage, ‘… in which every wind and sounding hurricane of wrath or contempt flew by like chasing enemies past some defying gates of adamant, and left me too blessed in thy smiles – angel of life! – to heed the curses or the mocking which sometimes I heard raving outside of our impregnable Eden.’81

Wonderful though it was, Margaret’s love did not seal De Quincey off from the outside world as wholly as he liked to claim. Dove Cottage was their sanctuary, but he could still hear ‘the curses’ and ‘the mocking’ that raved both without its walls and within himself. Up until the middle of 1817 – he once claimed – he had been a happy man, but then ‘farewell – a long farewell to happiness’. Money was in very short supply, and he was forced to borrow £40 from his sister Jane.82 Far more seriously, his dependence on laudanum now spiralled out of control, and for weeks on end he anaesthetized himself, leaving Margaret largely alone to face new debts and the responsibilities for baby William. Then, committing himself to sharp reductions, he provoked the pains of severe withdrawal. If for many years laudanum had composed De Quincey, he now watched helplessly as it multiplied and dissolved him. Sometimes, when he felt well enough, he read Milton or Wordsworth aloud to Margaret. More often she read tracts on political economy to him. His great work of philosophy, De emendatione humani intellectûs, lay ‘locked up, as by frost’. But for misery and suffering, he remarked, ‘I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state’.83

Four factors began to shape his nightmares: his daydreams were transmuted into the dreams of sleep; he felt suicidal despondency; space and time expanded infinitely; and the minutest incidents from his past were revived. The subject matter of these dreams ranged from the literary, to the personal, to the apocalyptic. Their initial splendours were ‘chiefly architectural’. In London several years earlier, Coleridge had described Piranesi’s Dreams to De Quincey, who now found that they mirrored – or perhaps incited – the ‘power of endless growth and self-reproduction’ which haunted him in his sleep. Amidst a vast Gothic hall, De Quincey saw a staircase, and ‘upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself’:

follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.

What is more, to these sublime architectural dreams ‘succeeded dreams of lakes – and silvery expanses of water’, which in turn blended with the anxieties he felt as a teenager roving through the London streets, and searching in vain for Ann. ‘Upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: – my agitation was infinite, – my mind tossed – and surged with the ocean.’84

[v]

De Quincey’s age witnessed the creation of a mass media, and the most dynamic of its early voices was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which stunned the literary world when it first appeared in October 1817. Its editor, William Blackwood, was ‘a short, “stubbed” man, of about five feet six … with a plain, straightforward business air, – like that of a substantial tradesman’.85 Already a successful publisher, his immediate objective in joining the periodical press was to challenge the Scots Magazine, an ailing miscellany published by his Edinburgh rival, Archibald Constable; less directly, he hoped to establish a spirited Tory monthly that would challenge the influence of the Whiggish Edinburgh Review and complement the ponderous Toryism of the Quarterly Review. Further, Blackwood seems to have realized that the magazine format itself, which had remained essentially unaltered since Edward Cave introduced his Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, was now ripe for change, and in Blackwood’s he established a new pattern for magazines by removing all the formal departments, mixing together fiction, reviews, correspondence and essays, and infusing exuberance throughout. Before long Blackwood’s was convincingly proclaiming itself ‘a Real magazine of mirth, misanthropy, wit, wisdom, folly, fiction, fun, festivity, theology, bruising and thingumbob.’86 It was able to blend authority and elitism with frankness and bravado, claiming the approval of the aristocracy while repeatedly championing the breadth of its own popular appeal.

In the early years, Blackwood took editorial advice from his two leading contributors, J. G. Lockhart and John Wilson, De Quincey’s closest friend, but by 1820 he had firmly established himself as the magazine’s sole editor. ‘He has only one great fault,’ wrote James Hogg, another important contributor; ‘he never will confess that he has been in the wrong’.87 Under Blackwood, ‘Maga’, as he himself referred to it, was especially well known for its truculent High Toryism, which informed its infamous reviews of the so-called ‘Cockney School’, a term the magazine coined to describe a group of London-based writers whom it smeared as liberal-minded mediocrities of low birth, inferior education, and loose morals, and whose members included the essayist William Hazlitt and the poet John Keats. In addition, Blackwood’s published groundbreaking fiction, and some remarkably insightful literary criticism, especially on Wordsworth and – unexpectedly – the radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The first issue alone contained Wilson’s notorious review of Coleridge’s recently published Biographia Literaria, Lockhart’s scabrous attack on Leigh Hunt as the King of the Cockneys, and the celebrated ‘Chaldee Manuscript’, an allegory in mock-biblical language, in which Whig enemies and Tory friends appear in the fictional guise of birds and beasts. Outrage was widespread, but within a matter of months, Blackwood’s was the pre-eminent magazine of the day. A host of imitators followed, including the New Monthly Magazine and the London Magazine, but none could keep pace with its energy and appeal.

De Quincey was thoroughly undisposed to sell his knowledge for money, and to ‘commence trading author’ with the periodical press. He had aimed much, much higher. ‘My ambition was, that by long and painful labour, combining with such faculties as God had given me, I might become the intellectual benefactor of my species’, as both ‘the first founder of true Philosophy’, and ‘the re-establisher in England (with great accessions) of Mathematics’.88 But with the possibility of practising law as remote as ever, and his grander intellectual aspirations frozen by opium and anxiety, he desperately needed to find more immediate ways of making money, and following Wilson in writing for Blackwood’s undoubtedly seemed the most practical and lucrative option. Southey made a good living – around £275 a year – writing for the Quarterly and other periodical publications.89 At least temporarily, De Quincey must have told himself, he might do the same.

His contributions to Blackwood’s may have begun as early as the first number, for Wilson’s review of Coleridge is prefaced by a striking rhetorical bravura that may well belong to De Quincey.90 A few months later Wilson sent De Quincey a copy of Shelley’s new poem, The Revolt of Islam, with a request that he write a review of it for Blackwood’s. De Quincey read the poem and was surprised to find in it ‘more ability of a particular sort than he expected, or indeed than he had conceived Shelley … to possess’. He did not formally review the poem, but he did state his judgement of it in a letter to Wilson, which he and Lockhart then used as the basis of a January 1819 article which praised The Revolt ‘very highly’, the magazine’s virulent Toryism notwithstanding.91 Shortly thereafter, Wilson sent a second book – David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation – to De Quincey, again in the hope that he would produce a Blackwood’s review. De Quincey was immensely impressed, despite the fact that most Tories vilified Ricardo, and his close alignment with prominent philosophical radicals such as James Mill. ‘Thou art the man!’ De Quincey cried of Ricardo. ‘Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more.’ Indeed, so inspired was he by Ricardo’s ability to introduce ‘a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos’ of previous discussions that he drew up his own Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy, a title he modelled on Kant’s Prolegomena to all Future Metaphysics. In the opiated torpor of these days, however, neither the book nor the review ever appeared.92

John Murray, publisher of the Quarterly Review, was also interested in De Quincey’s services, almost certainly on the recommendation of Southey. In the early autumn of 1818 he and De Quincey met, most probably at Dove Cottage, where Murray offered De Quincey ‘100 guineas for a good Classical article’, and soon sent him ‘for reviewal … the entire works’ of Friedrich Schiller in twenty-six volumes. No classical article was forthcoming, though, and after four months the Schiller edition was ‘still lying here, I am sorry to say, untouched’.93 In May 1819, Wordsworth hoped to have De Quincey write a Quarterly article ‘upon the Bullion question’, but Southey told him that the journal would not be interested, as De Quincey’s arguments against the resumption of cash payments were in direct conflict with the Quarterly’s established position on the subject. ‘This I am sorry for,’ declared Southey, ‘because if De Quincey could bring his reasonings before the public through a favourable channel I think he would go far towards exploding a mischievous error.’94

Westmorland politics provided him with yet another opportunity for employment. In early 1818, Henry Brougham, reformer, Edinburgh reviewer, and future Whig Lord Chancellor, was named as the candidate who planned to contest one of the two Westmorland seats in the forthcoming general election. Both seats had long been in the possession of the local Tory landowners, the Lowthers. De Quincey threw himself into the campaign with vigour, not only because his political sympathies were powerfully engaged by the Lowther cause, but because he saw it as an opportunity to reconnect with Wordsworth, who was also busily involved on behalf of the Lowthers, and whose connections in the area De Quincey rightly thought might be useful to him in securing a steady income.

On 23 March, Brougham championed the forces of reform in a heady address to a Kendal crowd. De Quincey immediately drafted a response, and two days later tentatively approached Wordsworth, first ‘with a view to your revisal of what I have written’, and then with a request that Wordsworth use his influence with the Lowther election committee to help him find a publisher. The poet was encouraging, and a week later De Quincey sent him the completed essay, which Wordsworth read with Lord Lowther in Kendal, augmented by interweaving a passage of his own ‘related to facts’, and then praised in a note to De Quincey whose response was swift and rather fawning: ‘It was the very highest gratification to my wife and myself, that we could reap from it, to find that what I had then sent was honoured by your approbation.’ Witty, concise, and effectively partisan, Close Comments Upon a Straggling Speech appeared as a pamphlet a few weeks later.95 It was De Quincey’s first stand-alone publication.

He then sent out a feeler. The Lowther interest in Westmorland was planning to establish a Tory newspaper in Kendal, but had not yet done so. Rumour had it that ‘one cause at least of the delay was the want of an Editor’. De Quincey heard that the post had been offered to Wordsworth, and that he had refused it. ‘Now, – if this be so’, De Quincey wrote to him, ‘and if the post be still undisposed of, – do you know of any reasons which should make it imprudent or unbecoming in me to apply for it? If you do not … I feel confident that you will do me the kindness to assist me in obtaining it with your recommendation.’ It was a bold step, especially as De Quincey acknowledged in the same letter that Wordsworth probably felt some doubt about him as regards ‘punctuality … and power of steady perseverance’. He did his best to reassure him on that score. ‘I have suffered too much in conscience … ever to offend in that way again,’ he declared confidently.96

How Wordsworth responded is not known, but De Quincey did not get the editorship, which went instead to a London journalist named C. J. Fisher. Yet despite his disappointment, De Quincey showed himself willing to stay involved in the Tory campaign. On Saturday, 23 May 1818, the new weekly paper, the Westmorland Gazette, appeared for the first time, and in its second number for 30 May, De Quincey published his ‘Philadelphus, on Mr Clarkson’s Letter’, a detailed response to the tireless anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson, who had recently published a letter in the rival Kendal Chronicle in which he detailed his decision to assist Brougham in his Westmorland canvass. ‘Though he has written on other subjects with great credit, both to his head and heart’, De Quincey argued, Clarkson ‘may be fairly pronounced, in the present case, a … most perplexed and vacillating politician’.97

De Quincey’s productivity on behalf of the Lowthers throughout the spring suggests, perhaps, that he had temporarily been able to bring his laudanum intake under control. These months, however, were not generally ones of stability. He was bitten three times by a dog, placing him for many weeks ‘under fear of Hydrophobia’, and he was plagued by some of the most horrendous nightmares of his career.98 In particular, the tired Malay who had visited Dove Cottage two years earlier was transformed, by the ‘fierce chemistry’ of his dreaming mind, into a ‘fearful enemy’ who generated within De Quincey a vicious xenophobia, and who brought to the surface his deepest fears about persecution, self-division, and alterity. Asleep in his English cottage, De Quincey was transported every night into ‘Asiatic scenes’, where he was

stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

At the beginning of the dream, De Quincey describes himself as cut off from the Orient by a ‘barrier of utter abhorrence’. At its close, his identity is disintegrating ‘amongst reeds and Nilotic mud’.99 Like opium, the Malay is both without and within him, an almost unlocatable figure who reveals to De Quincey the terrifyingly permeable boundary between waking and sleeping, West and East, self and other, external and internal.

[vi]

Margaret Thomasiana De Quincey was born on 5 June 1818.100 Her arrival was an occasion of great happiness at Dove Cottage, but it also meant an additional mouth to feed, and further bills to pay. De Quincey again turned to his family for financial assistance. His uncle Penson sent £84, and his mother later topped this sum up to £100 by adding De Quincey’s share of the rent on a Manchester warehouse. Both made it clear to him, moreover, that he could now expect to receive this sum as an annual family remittance.101

More good financial news arrived in early July. Fisher, the editor of the Gazette, had been fired after only seven issues. The proprietors of the paper wanted someone who could passionately articulate Tory values in the face of a torrent of liberal-minded criticism from the Chronicle, and Fisher had disgusted them with his timidity and impartiality. De Quincey was the obvious choice to replace him, and – perhaps with a good word from Wordsworth – the proprietors offered him £160 per year to assume the editorship. In the first instance, De Quincey turned them down, as they insisted he move to Kendal. In a second round of negotiations, however, a deal was struck. Out of the £160 yearly salary, De Quincey would pay a clerk of the press named John Kilner two guineas a week to be on the spot to perform all the mechanical tasks related to the production of the Gazette. That left roughly £50 a year for De Quincey, which the proprietors rounded up to a salary of one guinea a week. Under this arrangement, De Quincey would continue to live in Grasmere, with regular visits to Kendal to supervise Kilner. Sometimes he would select and revise articles for publication, but his ‘proper duty’ as editor was ‘simply to write a political essay on some subject’ of his own choosing.102

De Quincey embraced his new role with gusto. After years of reading and thinking, the Gazette provided him with his first sustained opportunity to craft a public voice that was distinct and marketable. The appointment pleased Wordsworth, though he was not without misgivings: ‘the new Kendal Paper has passed into the hands of a most able man’, he informed Lord Lonsdale; ‘one of my particular Friends: but whether he is fit, (I mean on the score of punctuality) for such a service, remains to be proved’. De Quincey’s first issue of the Gazette appeared on 11 July. Nearly three weeks later he wrote from Kendal to his ‘sweet wife’: ‘I have found nothing but trouble here’, yet ‘I hope … that I shall soon get the Paper into a right train.’103 He did. For several months De Quincey defied his critics, and kept to the grind of the demanding weekly schedule.

Politics were the lifeblood of the Gazette, and De Quincey wrote as an anxious, sometimes semi-hysterical, High Tory who viewed ‘the signs of the times’ as ‘unusually impressive’, and who stood staunchly behind a conservative agenda that was essentially imperialistic, defensive, and intolerant, though the internecine war between the two Kendal-based newspapers no doubt led him on occasion to exaggerate his own views in an attempt to surpass or pre-empt the Chronicle. Combativeness, De Quincey believed, was necessary in order to rally Tory support in Westmorland. Perhaps even more importantly, it was also at the heart of his conception of how to sell newspapers: ‘If the Chronicle knocks the Gazette down one week, the Gazette must get up and knock the Chronicle down the next … There is no unpardonable crime but tediousness; and no sin, past benefit of clergy but dulness.’104

De Quincey, however, had a fine line to walk. When he attacked the Chronicle as ‘atrociously jacobinical’, or published too many vengeful letters from Gazette readers, he ran the risk of being labelled ungentlemanly or desperate. Parts of the Gazette were ‘most low scurrilous & abusive’, Lord Lowther complained in one instance. ‘… Do not let us face the enemy on the advantage ground of good breeding.’ But when, on the other hand, De Quincey was too polite, or ignored the Chronicle assaults altogether, he left himself open to the charge that he was not defending the good old Tory cause. ‘It is no longer political to meet them mildly,’ Lord Lowther wrote on another occasion, in direct contradiction to his earlier view. ‘If they recommense attacks, we must stand up to them.’105 De Quincey moved briskly, if uneasily, between these two extremes, and managed for the most part to keep his readers content with the direction of the paper. In terms of explicit confrontation between the two editors, De Quincey did not know that the Chronicle was edited by a man named Richard Lough, but Lough knew of ‘De Quizzy’, and regularly flailed him for his ‘patrician pen’ and – more personally – for his ‘midnight rambles through and around this town (as your august personage is rare seen anywhere between sun-rise and sun-set)’.106

The Gazette covered all the major political debates of the day, including those on the Corn Laws, the Poor Laws, the Game Laws, the National Debt, taxation, colonial policy, and education reform. As an unyielding anti-bullionist, De Quincey wrote at length on the question of the resumption of cash payments by the Bank of England. He championed emigration as a means of removing the ‘redundant’, and potentially rebellious, portions of the British population. He railed against the need for Catholic Emancipation. Catholics in Britain were not allowed to hold a seat in Parliament, purchase land, or inherit property. ‘We deny that we persecute the Catholics by denying them certain privileges,’ he retorted; ‘and we deny that there is any “bigotry” in refusing political power to the Catholics’.107 De Quincey also attacked liberal-minded leaders: Brougham is ‘an object of just fear’; the utilitarian philosopher and economist Jeremy Bentham is an impostor and a charlatan; and the pioneer socialist Robert Owen – who so long ago had bought Greenhay from Mrs Quincey – is an ‘imbecile’ whose plans for Utopian co-operatives provoke laughter from knowledgeable economists like Ricardo.108

The biggest political event of these months took place in August 1819. Radicals, led by the orator Henry Hunt, rallied on St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to protest high food prices, and push for parliamentary reform. The local magistrates, alarmed by the size of the gathering, ordered it dispersed by the yeomanry, who seized Hunt, and then turned their sabres on the close-packed crowd. Within ten minutes, eleven people were dead, and around four hundred were injured. The massacre (likened to Waterloo) infuriated radicals across Britain and beyond, and became known as ‘Peterloo’. The Chronicle issued declarations of solidarity with those seeking reform, opened a fund for the victims of the violence, and excoriated both the magistrates and the yeomanry. At the Gazette, De Quincey saw it very differently. ‘The magistrates have in our judgment taken no step but such as sound discretion warranted. The meeting, both from it’s size and it’s composition, was dangerous to the peace and property of the neighbourhood … The magistrates were therefore justified in dissolving it. It was their duty to do so.’109 In the overheated political atmosphere of England in 1819, De Quincey used the Gazette as a platform from which to survey the ills that beset the country. In virtually every instance, his remedy was an unrepentant version of Toryism that bludgeoned down the cries for reform, and insisted defiantly on the status quo.

As vital as his political belligerence was to the success of the paper, De Quincey also published articles in a variety of other areas. British literature was a central feature. He championed Blackwood’s as a literary journal of ‘distinguished ability’, and reprinted Wilson’s ‘Letters from the Lakes’ after their initial appearance in the magazine.110 He praised the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, published the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley, and described Walter Savage Landor as ‘a man of transcendent genius’.111 When the famous Gothic novelist Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis died in May 1818, De Quincey wrote a brief biography describing him as a ‘great genius … addicted … to the demonology of belles lettres’.112 Under De Quincey the Gazette also gave a prominent place to European books and writers. Not unexpectedly, he attacked French literature as ‘decidedly the feeblest … which the human mind has created’. In all branches of philosophy, however, ‘not England only but all Europe ought to yield the precedency to the Germans’, and in particular he lauded Kant, who was often attacked in the Chronicle. ‘Since the time of Luther’, De Quincey shot back, ‘no one man has had so extensive … an influence upon the course of human thought … Great indeed is the strength of Kant.’113

Sensationalism was the other key component in De Quincey’s mind when he put together an issue of the Gazette. Assize reports, especially of murders, were a staple: ‘First, Because to all ranks alike they possess a powerful and commanding interest; Secondly, Because to the more uneducated classes they yield a singular benefit, by teaching them their social duties in the most impressive shape … Thirdly, Because they present the best indications of the moral condition of society.’ Elsewhere De Quincey made the case for publishing these reports rather more bluntly: ‘As to old women, and the mob of newspaper readers, they are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough.’114 Other articles chosen for the Gazette concerned suicides, rapes, laudanum, freak accidents, and the bizarre. Perhaps most strikingly, only a few months after Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, De Quincey ran a feature called ‘Galvanic Experiment on the Dead Body of a Murderer’, which gave his readers details of the experiments of a Dr Ure, who used electric rods to contract muscles on the corpse of a murderer. ‘On moving the second rod from the hip to the heel … every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face.’115

During the first nine months of his editorship, De Quincey turned the Gazette into an effective Tory flagship that entertained and instructed its expanding readership. Yet there were problems almost from the start. In the early months, he had to contend with Wordsworth, who was as anxious as ever to use De Quincey’s talents, but who could not resist giving him directions on how he thought the paper should be run. On several occasions, Wordsworth spoke to him about how to handle personal calumny in the Gazette. ‘I have had a conference with the Editor,’ he reported to Lord Lowther in September 1818, ‘… about a rascally Letter to you which appeared in the last … Chronicle, and still more rascally notice of it by the Editor of that Journal. We have agreed upon the mode of noticing both.’ Wordsworth also called a number of times to ask De Quincey to terminate long-winded political discussions in the paper. ‘He acknowledges the propriety of it; but he has no firmness. – I shall be at him again upon the subject.’116 In response to Wordsworth’s meddling, De Quincey sometimes simply did as he wished and then scapegoated Kilner, whom he claimed had misunderstood or failed to follow his instructions for cancelling or altering contentious material.’117 More commonly, though, De Quincey just turned a deaf ear, for of course he had plenty of ‘firmness’, especially when it came to defying authority, and he was not about to let Wordsworth dictate how he edited the paper. Later, De Quincey boasted to friends that, although the Gazette was established ‘with a view of supporting the Lowther Interest … I so managed it as to preserve my Independence’.118

A more formidable problem was the eighteen miles between Grasmere and Kendal. Bad weather or bad planning sometimes meant that De Quincey did not get his manuscripts to the Gazette offices on time, leaving Kilner to cobble the paper together at the last minute with whatever material came to hand. Illness – often opium-related – also frequently undermined De Quincey’s efforts: ‘I had during the week compelled myself to make up the Paper; nearly the whole was of my selection: I had even written some articles which would, I trust, have bothered the Broughamites … But, when it came to correcting and transcribing these articles on Tuesday night, I was so overcome by pain that I could not do it.’ On 28 January 1819, De Quincey had even to battle fire. It was a Thursday night and he was up late trying to finish his share of the Gazette in time for Friday’s post. ‘In a single moment a volume of smoke passed between him and his paper so suddenly as to darken it in one instant as much as if the candles had been extinguished. On looking round to the fire, nothing was at first seen; but in half a minute a great fork of flames … sprung out from a crevice on one side of the grate.’ De Quincey roused Margaret and the servants, and the blaze was put out in time for him to send an account of it to Kilner a few hours later in the Friday-morning manuscript bundle. The story duly appeared in the Gazette for Saturday, 30 January.119

His money woes continued to worsen, despite his Gazette salary, and the offers from Blackwood’s and the Quarterly. In a long letter to his mother, he reviewed his past life, informed her for the first time of his marriage, and – in a staggering blend of self-pity and arrogance – castigated the women in his family for thinking of him as ‘ruined – a lost creature’.

You would scarcely have addressed me, if I had been a member of Parliament or a distinguished Barrister or a judge or Chancellor of the exchequer, in the tone which you hold in your last letter which addresses me sometimes as a baby and sometimes as a poor crazy nervous decayed gentleman boarded out by his friends in a retired situation … If I, instead of labouring for years to mature a great scheme of philosophy and education, had pushed myself forward in the path of common vulgar ambition … I am sensible that I should have experienced a very different treatment from all my female relations.120

He then came to the point of his letter: could he borrow £150 to clear all his debts? Mrs Quincey was at her finest when she responded: ignoring all his bluster, she sent him £160, before going on to align the Westhay household with him in his choice of Margaret: ‘Let me at once assure you we all think there can be but one reasonable view taken of the condition in life which you have described your Wife’s to be, and that view is the same as yours, that it is a happy and respectable one, and we are greatly rejoiced to find that she has dignified it by her conduct.’121 De Quincey was often impatient with or dismissive of his mother, but in many tight situations she met him far more than halfway.

In the spring of 1819, new dreams descended upon him. It was Easter Sunday morning. He was standing at the door of Dove Cottage. Right before him lay ‘the very scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by the power of dreams’. No living creature was to be seen, except that in the Grasmere churchyard the cattle were reposing around the grave of Catharine Wordsworth. De Quincey determined to walk abroad, and to try for a day to forget old griefs. He turned, as if to open his garden gate, and suddenly upon the left he saw an Oriental landscape, very different from the scene around Dove Cottage, and yet harmonized with it by the power of the dream. More significantly, in this Eastern setting, De Quincey finds, not the avenging terrors of the Malay, but the possibilities of salvation, while at the same time Catharine is transformed into the figure of another, older love, who is once again portrayed as both sexual and innocent. At a vast distance De Quincey sees the ‘domes and cupolas of a great city’. And then,

not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman; and I looked; and it was – Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length: ‘So then I have found you at last’ … Seventeen years ago, when the lamp-light fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears: the tears were now wiped away … Suddenly her countenance grew dim, and, turning to the mountains, I perceived vapours rolling between us; in a moment, all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and, in the twinkling of an eye, I was far away from mountains, and by lamp-light in Oxford-street, walking again with Ann – just as we walked seventeen years before, when we were both children.122

The intensity of De Quincey’s inner life was simultaneously an escape from, and an escalation of, his external predicaments, and opium deepened this paradox, as it both consoled him for past sorrows and – particularly in the throes of withdrawal – redoubled their fury.

As he neared the end of his first year as editor of the Gazette, its proprietors met to insist upon some changes. His distance from the press had begun to cause serious problems, and they resolved that ‘a notification be made to the Editor expressing their sentiments of the great importance of a regular communication between the Editor and the Printer of the Westmorland Gazette by want of which it appears that great inconvenience has frequently arisen from the exclusion of the latest London news’. They suggested that he move to Kendal to be closer to the office, and warned him also to refrain from ‘direct remarks on any products or observations which may appear in the Kendal Chronicle’. De Quincey must have given them satisfactory assurances that the situation would improve, for he retained the editorship, and over the course of the next few months he published some of his most impressive work for the paper, including essays on ‘Immanuel Kant, and John Gottfried Herder’, ‘Immanuel Kant & Dr Herschel’, ‘The Planet Mars’, and a four-part series on ‘The Danish Origins of the Lake Country Dialect’. By October, however, he was writing very little for the paper, and on 5 November 1819 the Gazette Committee Minutes record that ‘Mr De Quincey be respectfully informed that his Resignation is accepted’. Eight days later, the proprietors announced that Kilner was the paper’s new editor.123

During his sixteen months at the helm, De Quincey accomplished a good deal. His management of the paper was sometimes slipshod or disingenuous, but he sharpened its political agenda, broadened its appeal, and raised its sales. After his departure, shareholders did not see another dividend for at least seven years.124 The Gazette also gave De Quincey a good deal, for it acquainted him with the opportunities and demands of the periodical press, and enabled him to map the literary guises and central themes that would preoccupy him over the course of his career. Just after De Quincey took over the Gazette, he promised to exalt it into a ‘philosophical Journal’. He did not reach this goal, but ‘writing in The Gazette … 1st taught me … my real power,’ he declared.125 More to the point, bigger things lay just ahead.