Famous
[i]
He lived on credit. Throughout the winter, De Quincey drew so many bills on Wilson that by March 1820 the total had reached £90. ‘I scarcely see how I can avoid bankruptcy,’ Wilson cried in protest.1 Unsure of where to turn, De Quincey hunkered down in Dove Cottage, where he divided his time between opium, scholarship, and fatherhood. Three-year-old William liked to wander into his library, stack up the largest books he could lift, and then fire away at the ‘mighty structure’ with a bow and arrows until it crashed to the floor. Sometimes De Quincey would join in and shoot at piles of philosophy books, to the ‘frantic joy’ of William, and perhaps as an indication of his own intellectual frustrations. In June, the family welcomed a third child, Horatio.2
With books and babies vying for space, De Quincey made a remarkable decision. He would leave his library and his papers in Dove Cottage and rent a second house for his growing family. Fox Ghyll, a handsome cottage situated about one mile north-west of Ambleside, was owned by Robert Blakeney of Whitehaven, and currently for rent at 60 guineas a year for the house and furniture.3 The De Quinceys liked the cottage, agreed to Blakeney’s terms, and were settled in their new home by the late summer, while still of course paying rent on Dove Cottage. ‘Mr de Quinceys Books have literally turned their master & his whole family out of doors,’ Sara Hutchinson observed with amused contempt. The Fox Ghyll lease was only for six months but, predicted Sara, there the De Quinceys ‘will remain unless unsettled by an earth-quake or a second accumulation of Books’.4
De Quincey was trying hard to bring his laudanum addiction under control. His consumption at this time had stabilized at around 175 drops per day, though he sometimes went as high as 500 or even 700, and on other occasions dropped as low as 100, a reduction that within four days brought on the agonies of withdrawal. ‘Unceasing restlessness night and day: sleep – I scarcely knew what it was … lower jaw constantly swelling: mouth ulcerated … violent sternutation: … impatience and hideous irritability.’ Relief came only with the consumption of more opium. De Quincey was wedged between ‘the collision of both evils – that from the laudanum, and that from the want of laudanum’.5
Margaret attended him through these dreadful sieges of physical and spiritual despair. His sufferings frightened her, and when she witnessed the horror of his attempts to reduce his opium dosages, she was the ‘first to beg me to desist’.6 At length De Quincey ‘grew afraid to sleep’. One solution was simply to stay up the whole night and the following day. Another was to ask Margaret and the children ‘to sit around me and to talk: hoping thus to derive an influence from what affected me externally into my internal world of shadows’. But the plan backfired, and rather than the external relieving the internal, the internal ‘infected and stained as it were the whole of my waking experience’. ‘Oh … what do you see? dear … what is it that you see?’ was Margaret’s ‘constant exclamation’. The answer was nightmare worlds of apocalypse and desolation in which his dreaming mind echoed and reimagined some of the most traumatic moments from his childhood and teenage sufferings. In the midst of his other distresses, these new terrors pushed him towards thoughts of suicide.7
[ii]
Blackwood’s seemed his best alternative. He had already produced copy for the magazine, its popularity and influence continued unabated, and both Wilson and Blackwood were anxious to have him on board. De Quincey ‘solemnly promised’ a contribution for the March 1820 number, and Blackwood delayed the printing of the magazine for several days, but nothing arrived. Five months later, De Quincey committed to producing a review of the economist Robert Malthus. Again there was nothing. Wilson simply had to laugh. ‘I tried to convince Blackwood that you never had engaged to write for the Magazine, and his face was worth ten pounds – for it was pale as a sheet. – I told him, however, that now you were engaged.’8
Wilson was also pressing De Quincey at this time for another reason. In the spring he had decided to let his name stand for the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Merit was supposed to decide the outcome, but politics did, and Wilson’s Toryism carried the day. His excitement at being elected to the Chair, however, was tempered by the absurdity of his situation, for he now had to deliver 120 lectures on a subject about which he knew virtually nothing. Unsurprisingly, and as he had done in the past, he turned to De Quincey, who was of course deeply read in the area. ‘I intend giving half-a-dozen lectures on the Greek philosophy – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, &c.’, Wilson wrote with a candour that is almost risible. ‘Have you any books about them and their system; or can you write me some long letters about either, or their philosophy? … What does, in your belief, constitute moral obligation? – and what ought to be my own doctrine on that subject?’ De Quincey’s response to Wilson was partial and reluctant, and it is unclear how much, if any, material Wilson was able to extract from him on this occasion.9
Illness plagued De Quincey throughout the autumn as he drifted on at Fox Ghyll. Six weeks of ‘indescribable suffering’ left him convinced that he had ‘no hope of recovery’, while Margaret fought on bravely, managing the house, caring for the children, and stretching the money as far as it would go.10 Something had to be done, and in December De Quincey finally determined to journey to Edinburgh, and to write fulltime for Blackwood’s. He travelled first to the King’s Arms Inn at Keswick, and then procured a ‘loan of about 6 guineas’ from Southey to take him the rest of the way. The friends he had made on his 1815 visit to the Scottish capital were, he told his ‘dear Peggy’, ‘more kind’ than he could express, and he was soon installed in lodgings at 30 Northumberland Street in the New Town.11 His health, too, seems to have benefited, both from the change of scene and from the advice of Dr George Bell, an eminent Edinburgh surgeon, who listened to his sad tale of physical suffering and prescribed ‘ammoniated tincture of Valerian’.12
Blackwood and De Quincey were soon in touch, and on 9 December they reached an agreement regarding the timeline for submissions. But within three days they were at odds, for Blackwood ran his magazine with a firm hand, while De Quincey – confident that he could make a dramatic difference to the magazine – seems to have thought that he would be able to set his own terms. ‘I do “keep my word” – not “once” merely, but always – when I am aware that it is pledged,’ he snapped to Blackwood at the opening of a long letter of explanation and justification. Blackwood fired back a short note urging him to get on with his work.13 De Quincey responded with a second long letter, detailing the reasons for the first one, and explaining the major cause of his many delays. ‘Opium has reduced me for the 6 last years to one general discourtesy of utter silence. But this I shall think of with not so much pain, if this same Opium enables me (as I think it will) to send you an article not unserviceable to your Magazine.’ A week later De Quincey’s ‘Opium article’ was ‘very far advanced’, and he was writing it ‘with pleasure’ to himself.14
At this same time, De Quincey also completed his first solo article for the magazine. ‘The Sport of Fortune’, translated from Schiller’s ‘Das Spiel des Schicksals’, is a short tale of terror and abjection rooted in historical fact, and centring on one of De Quincey’s favourite themes: revenge.15 He almost certainly took the story from the twenty-six-volume edition of Schiller’s works sent to him for review by Murray over two years earlier, and at last realized some small return on this asset. The story was standard Gothic fare, but Blackwood was ebullient. ‘I am so happy to receive anything from you that your two pages appear like the 24 of any one else,’ he exclaimed. ‘It was the knowing what you could do if you were once resolved to do which made my repeated disappointments so very mortifying.’16 De Quincey’s translation duly appeared in Blackwood’s for January 1821.
Blackwood’s mortifications were not yet at an end. Early in the New Year De Quincey was promising to sell himself ‘soul and body to the service of the Magazine for two years’, but simultaneously alienating Blackwood with irritating requests for more money, paper, deadline information, and so on.17 De Quincey’s provoking explanations of his tardiness hardly helped matters: ‘I move slowly whenever I am uncommonly witty,’ he assured Blackwood of an article he was preparing on the Lake District.18 The situation boiled over on 8 January when De Quincey sent Blackwood a remarkable letter:
If Wilson and Lockhart do not put themselves forward for the Magazine I foresee that the entire weight of supporting it must rest on my shoulders: I see clearly that I must be its Atlas … A more dreary collection of dulness and royal stupidity never did the world see gathered together than the December No. exhibits … I am hard at work, being determined to save the Magazine from the fate which its stupidity merits.19
It is difficult to know where De Quincey was aiming with such a letter. Blackwood did not find it funny.
I can only excuse your letter … by supposing that you were hardly awake when you wrote it. When I apply to you to be the Atlas of my Magazine it will be time enough for you to undertake the burthen. And in the meantime I must beg leave to say that if you cannot send me anything better than the ‘English Lakes’, it will be quite unnecessary for you to give yourself any further trouble about the Magazine.20
De Quincey replied with a half-hearted apology, and the promise of more copy, but he had burned his bridge. By the end of January the relationship between the two men had broken down completely. De Quincey retreated to Fox Ghyll, and spent the month of February indoors, consuming laudanum and battling ‘a rheumatic affection’ of his face.21
Running counterpoint to De Quincey’s attempts to launch his career in Edinburgh is a disturbing tale of violence and deception which divided his loyalties and consolidated his retreat from Blackwood’s. In January 1820 the London Magazine was founded as a direct challenger to Blackwood’s. In format the two magazines closely resembled one another. Both were devoted primarily to a combination of independent critical opinion and original literary material, but the London was more polished, dispassionate, and liberal in tone, and it promised to convey ‘the very “image, form, and pressure”’ of London, as opposed to those ‘popular Journals’ that were based in the ‘secondary towns of the Kingdom’, like Edinburgh.22 The London actively disapproved of Blackwood’s habit of malicious reviewing and rancorous personal abuse.
John Scott – handsome, sensitive, and hot-tempered – was the London’s first editor. He gathered and then led a remarkable group of writers, including Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, John Clare, Mary Russell Mitford, and John Hamilton Reynolds. His initial plan as regarded Blackwood’s was to try to avoid open conflict, and in May 1820 he went so far as to praise the ‘ability, energy, and effect’ with which the magazine had ‘vindicated … several neglected and calumniated, but highly deserving poetical reputations’.23 Within a few months, however, the situation had degenerated into pomposity and insult. Wilson warned the London not to compete too closely with Blackwood’s. Scott immediately replied that Wilson and Lockhart wrote for a magazine in which ‘the most licentious personal abuse was to be the lure for one class of readers, and the veriest hypocritical whine, on matters of religion and politics, the bait for another’.24
De Quincey’s loyalties in the dispute were all in Blackwood’s corner, and in an extraordinary outburst of indignation and juvenile savagery, he urged Wilson to ‘make an example’ of Scott.
I do so loathe the vile whining canting hypocrisy of the fellow … Lampoon him in songs – in prose – by night and by day – in prosperous and adverse fortune. Make him date his ruin from Nov. 1st 1820 – Lash him into lunacy … My abhorrence of this beast is deep – serious – and morally grounded. He himself … insults his sovereign in the basest way upon his private concerns and … carries the bestialities of Radicalism into literature … oh! slave – oh! bugger!25
Wilson did not take De Quincey’s advice, but tensions between the two magazines continued to escalate nonetheless. In February, Scott challenged Blackwood’s ally Jonathan Christie to a duel, and was wounded by a bullet to the stomach. He hung in a fever for eleven days and then, on 27 February 1821, he died.
De Quincey’s reaction to the tragedy was very different from what might have been expected. After championing the Blackwood’s cause for several months, he now changed sides and ‘sincerely regretted’ Scott’s loss. In part he was motivated by guilt. Scott had died because of violence he himself had helped to foment. De Quincey also changed his mind because – like Scott – he disapproved of Blackwood’s habit of personal calumny, especially when it was directed against the ‘Cockney School’ poet John Keats. ‘To speak conscientiously, I cannot wholly approve of every thing you have done,’ De Quincey told Wilson: ‘what I should most condemn … is the harsh (and latterly to my feeling more painful than anything simply harsh – good naturedly contemptuous) treatment of Keats’. Finally, De Quincey transferred his sympathies because he had come to believe that Blackwood was largely responsible for the tragedy of Scott’s death. Scott had often demanded to know who edited the rival magazine. Blackwood had refused to reveal himself, and then launched elaborate campaigns of misinformation that left Scott flailing in the dark until the situation was out of control. Scott had been stubborn and rash in pursuing his various charges, but Blackwood bore a heavier responsibility for failing to answer them.26 During his weeks in Edinburgh, De Quincey had not gotten along with Blackwood. Now, with the news of Scott’s death, he decided he wanted nothing more to do with Blackwood’s.
De Quincey’s recoil from the Edinburgh magazine involved one more complicating factor. Envy and resentment appear at this time to have seriously undermined his friendship with Wilson. It is not hard to see why. De Quincey felt himself to be possessed of far greater talent than his friend, and he knew intimately of Wilson’s parasitism and charlatanry. Yet while his own circumstances continued to decline, Wilson was thriving as the lead writer for Blackwood’s, and enjoying his lucrative new status as Professor of Moral Philosophy. In mid-February, Wilson complained of the ‘indignities and degradations’ he suffered in paying the bills that De Quincey continued to draw on him. But at the same time he asked De Quincey for more help with his philosophical lectures without any reference to compensation or acknowledgement, and he requested further that De Quincey take various steps to ensure that the fraud went undetected. Speak of the lectures ‘as chapters in a work of your own, if you please, when you write to me,’ Wilson directed him. And ‘could you contrive to give your letters a less mysterious outward appearance?’27 Such requests must have galled De Quincey. His simmering anger with his closest friend soon surged to the surface.
[iii]
De Quincey spent the spring at Fox Ghyll. His neighbour Edward Quillinan, who later became Wordsworth’s son-in-law, reported that De Quincey ‘remained in bed, I understood, all day, and only took the air at night, and then was more shy than an Owl’. Mary Wordsworth hoped that the De Quinceys would give up Fox Ghyll by the summer so that it could be rented to her cousin, Thomas Monkhouse.28 The cottage, however, clearly suited the family, and they no doubt hoped to hang on to it as long as they could.
That meant money. Dire necessity had forced De Quincey north in December and that same necessity now forced him south. In June he travelled to ‘London avowedly for the purpose of exercising my pen, as the one sole source then open to me for extricating myself from a special embarrassment’. At De Quincey’s request, Wordsworth kindly supplied him with a letter of introduction to Thomas Noon Talfourd, whom De Quincey knew from his visits to London as a law student, but whom he now felt he had ‘no right to trespass upon … without some stronger warrant than any I could plead in my own person’.29
Talfourd gave De Quincey a warm reception, and soon introduced him to John Taylor and James Hessey, the men who had purchased the London following the death of Scott. According to John Clare, Taylor was ‘a man of very pleasant address’ who worked himself ‘into the good opinions of people in a moment’, though the effect was ‘not lasting’.30 His partner – nicknamed ‘Mistessy’ by Keats – was thin, dressed principally in black, and had a ‘readiness of droll quotation’. De Quincey found both men ‘hospitable and friendly’.31
As a publishing house, Taylor and Hessey had the high distinction of issuing books by Carlyle, Clare, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Keats, Lamb, and Landor. Both also served as editors of the London. Taylor took the lead role, and was centrally concerned with the content of each issue. Hessey performed various editorial functions, but was much more occupied with the financial side of the business. Under Scott, the London had established a reputation for London-bias and liberal idealism. Both remained hallmarks under Taylor and Hessey. De Quincey had a great deal to offer such an agenda, particularly as an admirer of Shelley and Keats, an enthusiast for London, and a keen popularizer of Ricardian economics. Taylor and Hessey offered financial terms to contributors that were ‘ultra munificent’.32 De Quincey took note and committed himself to the magazine, though he realized with some unease that if the animosity between Blackwood’s and the London flared up again, his status as a former Blackwood’s contributor made him an easy mark for reprisals.
He took lodgings at 4 York Street (now 36 Tavistock Street), Covent Garden. The premises was owned by the well-known German bookseller Johann Heinrich Bohte. De Quincey’s portion of the house was a small, two-storeyed section at the back, for which he paid twelve shillings a week.33 The only access to his rooms was from York Street. He walked through the front part of the house, passed under a roofed-in section, and then climbed a few steps to his door. Beneath the ground floor was a vaulted passage given over to darkness and rats. On the first floor were two small rooms, the larger of which he used for writing. During his stay De Quincey took full advantage of Bohte’s large selection of German books, and later claimed to have ‘read “a matter” of three thousand tales, long and short’.34
Yet his immersion in Bohte’s book collection would not have blinded him to one of the most bizarrely ironic twists of his career: John Scott had been the previous tenant of the rooms. After he was wounded in the duel, the surgeon gave ‘directions that Mr Scott’s apartments, at Mr Botte’s [sic], in York-street, should be prepared for his reception’. Scott, however, was too badly wounded and could not be moved, though after his death he was returned briefly to Bohte’s, from where on 9 March a hearse and four carried his body to St Martin-in-the-Fields for burial.35 Scott’s family vacated the rooms some time shortly thereafter, and in the summer De Quincey moved in. Seven months earlier he had urged Wilson to ‘ruin’ Scott. Now he was living in his rooms, meeting his friends, and writing for his magazine. He must often have felt as though he was living a double life, with Blackwood’s just behind and the London right in front of him.
De Quincey was anxious to get to work for Taylor and Hessey, but relocating to London came at a high cost. He missed Margaret: ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove,’ he thought as he wandered in the evening and looked northward towards Westmorland, ‘And that way I would fly for comfort.’ He missed his children: ‘I was obliged to relinquish my daily walks in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, from the misery of seeing children in multitudes, that too forcibly recalled my own.’ Soon ‘I began to view my unhappy London life – a life of literary toils, odious to my heart – as a permanent state of exile from my Westmorland home.’36
His deep affection for his family, however, may not have prevented him from indulging in old habits. De Quincey usually walked in the evening ‘from 6 o’clock till ½ after 9 or 10’. To some extent, he was motivated by his belief that exercise was essential ‘to keep up any degree of health’. He also ventured out to buy opium, and had lately purchased small quantities from ‘three respectable … druggists, in widely remote quarters of London’. In part, too, De Quincey sought to extend his ‘studies of the working poor’ with ‘solitary walks at night’ through Drury Lane, St Giles, and Clare Market.37 But De Quincey was an addictive personality, and while there is no hard evidence, it seems at least possible that he also used these long nightly excursions to gratify his penchant for prostitutes. His teenage relationship with Ann was vividly before him during these weeks, and his evening walks took him back through their old haunts, which remained notorious for prostitution, as he well knew: ‘I am again in London: and again I pace the terraces of Oxford-street by night.’ When he visited prostitutes in Liverpool as a teenager, he came home ashamed. If he was again in the company of London prostitutes, thoughts of Margaret probably brought on guilt in larger and more complicated shapes, not least because each encounter would have cost him money and introduced the possibility of disease.38
Residence in London was intended to solve his debt problems, but they continued to pile up around him, in large measure because he was paying rent on Dove Cottage, Fox Ghyll, and 4 York Street. He solicited a £35 loan from Cottle, ‘having no friend after my mother excepting Southey … in whose kindness I had so much confidence as I had in yours’. De Quincey wrote to Coleridge as well, and pleaded with him to repay the £300 ‘loan’ he had given to him in late 1807. But his fellow opium addict had not a shilling, and his circumstances were as perilous as De Quincey’s own. ‘I feel that I am lingering on the brink – and what to say, my dear Sir! I know not!’ Coleridge cried.39 In mid-November De Quincey wrote to Taylor: ‘I do not know whether I am doing wrong … when I ask you – Whether it would be convenient to you and Mr Hessey to let me have … the sum of twenty or twenty-five pounds in any sort of bill that you please.’40
Sickness too pressed down on him, as he faced both ‘my infernal persecution, the Rheumatism’ and ‘a sore throat which … increased into a return of fever’. In December, he was ‘very unwell in the Evening, with the Cramp in his Stomach, owing to an omission for 2 days to take some medicine prescribed by Dr Darling’, the well-known Scottish physician who attended him throughout these months. Four weeks later De Quincey wrote to Hessey, ‘I am in great distress (bodily I mean) every evening – and all the night through.’41
As these various troubles and distractions swirled around him, De Quincey armed himself with opium and prepared himself for the task of writing.42 Earlier that year in Edinburgh, he had begun to weave together various notes and memoranda – some of which may have been composed months earlier – into an ‘Opium Article’.43 He now set his sights on finishing it, for the work had been welling up in him for a long time. De Quincey claimed that he wrote the ‘introductory part … with singular rapidity’, and the manuscript evidence bears him out: there are interlineations, changes in pagination, breaks in mid-sentence, and anxious notes to compositors.44 He seems to have delivered the manuscript to Taylor in eight separate batches. Typically, he worked frantically on each section while Taylor complained that ‘his Copy comes in so very slow’.45
On 9 August De Quincey availed himself of Taylor’s ‘kind permission to delay the conclusion for a day (or two), because I shall thus be able to execute some parts of it in perhaps a more satisfactory manner’. Later that same day, however, the threat of arrest for debt drove him out of his lodgings, and into ‘the tumult of coffee houses’, where he found it ‘difficult to write at all’.46 Fear and sickness kept him away from York Street for a week. When he returned, proofs of the opening pages of the article were waiting for him. He worked hard over the course of the following few days, and by 22 August the narrative had evidently grown long enough to be divided into two parts.47 Shortly thereafter, the opening instalment of his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater appeared in the September issue of the London in an unremarkable position two-thirds of the way through the magazine. It was published anonymously, as was the convention at the time.
He set to work on the second part on 7 September. Its two major sections – ‘The Pleasures’ and ‘The Pains’ of opium – took shape over the next ten days, and by 20 September he much wished ‘to see the whole lying under my eye finished all but final corrections’. De Quincey adopted a curiously inconsistent attitude towards the article’s final presentation. On the one hand, he fretted over the wording of a single phrase (‘visions as ugly, and phantoms as ghastly’), and wrote to Taylor and Hessey to ensure that they directed the printer’s eye ‘to the right arrangement’: ‘it seems a trifle but it sounds to my ear an inartificiality’. On the other hand, he was surprisingly blasé about which material was included in or excluded from the final version. ‘Some passages can easily be left out of what I send. I have kept back several sheets, convinced that you will have too much. Yet one is about the best dream.’48
In the end, very little is known about what De Quincey held back.49 But what he sent was superb, and Taylor and Hessey manoeuvred ably between his finickiness and his nonchalance. The second part of the Confessions was given pride of place in the October issue. ‘The Lion’s Head’, an editorial column which introduced each number of the London, announced that ‘we are not often in the habit of eulogizing our own work, – but we cannot neglect … calling the attention of our readers to the deep, eloquent, and masterly paper which stands first in our present Number’.50
De Quincey’s Confessions are one of the most innovative and influential autobiographies of the nineteenth century. In them, he invents recreational drug taking, not because he is the first to consume opiates or alcohol for non-medical purposes (he is hardly that), but because he is the first to memorialize his experience in a compelling narrative that is aimed at a broad commercial audience. His Confessions are an intimate, if highly selective, exploration of his past life, in which boyhood episodes and engaging conversational banter gradually give way to distorted worlds of personal tragedy and psychic anguish played out with horrifying repetitiveness in the tortured mind of the dreamer. The work, subtitled ‘An Extract from the Life of a Scholar’, opens with a brief, rhetorical address to the reader, before moving to a ‘preliminary’ confession in which De Quincey attempts to answer one of the key questions of his addiction: ‘How came any reasonable being to subject himself to such a yoke of misery, voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile, and knowingly to fetter himself with such a seven-fold chain?’51 His response is to detail the decisive emotional and imaginative moments from his past that he now believes led him down into the trap of drug dependence, beginning with his childhood and early education, and then passing on to his sorrows as a teenage runaway in Wales and especially London, where his narrative centres on his experiences with Ann. For many years he had searched for her in the London streets, but now he thinks of her, ‘more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave; in the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen; taken away, before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians had completed the ruin they had begun’.52
The second half of the Confessions is divided into two parts. ‘The Pleasures of Opium’ highlights the euphoria of his early experiments with laudanum: ‘portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach’.53 ‘The Pains of Opium’ is devoted to an unprecedented exploration of the bodily and mental deprivations of addiction, and climaxes with a section in which De Quincey exploits an explicitly poetic prose to capture the spectacular energy and gloom of his recent nightmares, including ones in which his various historical readings infuse his own anxieties about violence, women, and death.
And I heard it said, or I said to myself, ‘these are English ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I. These are the wives and the daughters of those who met in peace, and sate at the same tables, and were allied by marriage or by blood; and yet, after a certain day in August, 1642, never smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at Naseby, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, and washed away in blood the memory of ancient friendship’. – The ladies danced, and looked as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, even in my dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries. – This pageant would suddenly dissolve: and, at a clapping of hands, would be heard the heart-quaking sound of Consul Romanus – and immediately came ‘sweeping by’, in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos of the Roman legions.54
At the close of his narrative, De Quincey declares that if his account of opium has taught the reader ‘to fear and tremble, enough has been effected’. The Confessions, however, are not a cautionary tale. Opium is the ‘true hero’, and De Quincey figures as a noble explorer of the self, whose account of the highs make them seem almost irresistible, and whose Gothic renderings of the lows make them seem even more so.55
De Quincey’s title harkens back to the confessions of St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but he regarded these two key predecessors as passionless, and reconceived the confessional genre as a vehicle for the exploration of those moments of intense emotional insight that shape the mind of the writer.56 He taps also into the strong contemporary interest in the confessional mode, which was at the centre of legal and religious power, and which was intimately associated with a privileged access to private truths.57 The most significant contemporary precedents include The Confessions of J. Lackington (1804), The Confessions of William Henry Ireland (1805), Charles Lamb’s ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ (1813), and a host of Gothic novels, including Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian; or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (1805), and Robert Pearse Gillies’s Confessions of Sir Henry Longueville (1814).58
There had been previous accounts of opium smoking and opium eating in works such as Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia (1711), and Baron de Tott’s Mémoires … sur les Turcs et les Tartares (1784–5), but the consumption of the drug for non-medical reasons was supposed to be an exclusively Oriental practice, and one that led directly to oblivion. De Quincey dramatically changed that view.59 Mounting his argument along racial lines, he sneeringly remarked that Turks who took opium usually sat ‘like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves’. De Quincey, on the other hand, is emphatically an English opium-eater, which means that the drug produces a very different effect on his refined faculties and profound sensibilities. ‘I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the Paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I honour the Barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman.’60 Yet by ingesting vast quantities of an Eastern drug, De Quincey undermines the very Englishness he is bent on extolling. In his accounts of his opium experience, he emerges as an uneasy hybrid, at once domestic and foreign, familiar and exotic, contaminated and clean.
Politically, the Confessions are equally paradoxical. De Quincey enjoys an elitist education, quotes the arch-conservative Burke, and comments rather glibly on the pleasures of narcotic wanderings among London’s working classes. He knows several men of ‘eminent station’ who are opium-eaters, including ‘the late dean of ——; Lord ——’, and ‘a late under-secretary of state’, while his dreams contain lurid fantasies of racial superiority.61 Yet at the same time he rejects educational and parental authority and lives outside traditional social structures. He is an exile, a solitary, a sinner. He draws on the work of anti-slavery campaigners such as William Roscoe. He alludes to the poetry of Keats. Shelley’s Revolt of Islam is cited three times. Hazlitt is the third finest analytic thinker in England, behind Coleridge and Ricardo, whose liberal economic doctrines are lauded as revolutionary.62 In the Confessions, De Quincey both endorses and rejects the status quo, while his enthusiasm for privilege is confounded by his embrace of Cockneys, Whigs, abolitionists, and rebels.
De Quincey modelled himself on Coleridge, whose public persona was closely associated with opium dependence, unfulfilled potential, Gothic imaginings, the poetry of Wordsworth, and the philosophy of Kant. Wordsworth was also central, for his autobiographical epic The Prelude shaped De Quincey’s discussions of the growth of his dreaming mind. The painter John Martin may be an additional source. His Belshazzar’s Feast was on display at the British Institution in London in the summer of 1821, and drew huge crowds. It depicted the celebrated moment from the Old Testament when Daniel interprets the writing on the wall which spells Belshazzar’s doom. Its stupendous colonnades, panicked multitudes, vast distances, and apocalyptic subject matter are deeply congruent with De Quincey’s dream finale. Even more striking is the fact that one of De Quincey’s rare attempts at poetry concerns Belshazzar’s Feast, and seems most likely to date from this period.
Depths behind depths were there – dim, labyrinthine apartments … spaces abysmal
Where golden galleries ran high overhead through an endless
Mass of stair cases climbing; till sight grew dizzy with effort
Of chacing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses.63
[iv]
The impact of the Confessions was immense. ‘Everybody who noticed magazines at all is interested in the Fate of the Opium Eater,’ wrote Taylor. Charles Knight had ‘never read anything more deeply interesting’ than the first instalment. James Mackintosh ‘read the second part … with more delight than I know how to express’. Nearly twenty-five years later, George Gilfillan noted that the Confessions ‘took the public by storm. Its popularity was immediate and boundless; nor, even yet, has it declined.’64
There were over a dozen reviews. De Quincey was faulted for disorganization, vanity, and moral laxity. ‘The work is written throughout in the tone of apology for a secret, selfish, suicidal debauchery,’ declared the Eclectic Review: ‘it is the physical suffering consequent upon it, that alone excites in the Writer a moment’s regret.’65 Most reviewers, however, were enthusiastic. The Imperial Magazine described the Confessions as produced by a ‘mind gifted with first-rate talents’. For the Medical Intelligencer, De Quincey’s ‘confessions are a valuable addition to our stock of medical information’. The United States Literary Gazette found that De Quincey’s language was ‘always exquisitely felicitous … and sometimes powerful and magnificent in the extreme’. ‘We thought it one of the most interesting, and certainly the very most extraordinary, production that we had ever seen,’ declared the Album.66
The anonymous appearance of the work generated a good deal of debate about its authorship. Lamb and Coleridge were leading suspects.67 Edgar Allan Poe insisted that the Confessions were ‘composed by my pet baboon, Juniper, over a rummer of Hollands and water’. Several others were less entertaining, but more in the know. Crabb Robinson had read only the first instalment when he stated that the work ‘must be by De Quincey. It is … a fragment of autobiography in emulation of Coleridge’s diseased egotism.’ Shelley’s publisher Charles Oilier complimented Taylor ‘upon having “the best prose writer in England” for a contributor’, and ‘mentioned the name of the Author’. Anne Grant also knew. She and De Quincey had met twice several years earlier, and apparently De Quincey rehearsed for her the story he would eventually tell in his Confessions, for when Grant read the work she ‘directly recognized’ him through the ‘thin disguise’.68
For some, the Confessions were an admonition. ‘Better, a thousand times better, die than have anything to do with such a Devil’s own drug!’ Carlyle exclaimed after reading the work.69 But for scores of other readers, De Quincey’s account of his experience was almost as seductive as the drug itself, and his Confessions were embraced as an invitation to experimentation.70 In 1823, one doctor reported an alarming increase in the number of people dying from an overdose of opium, ‘in consequence of a little book that has been published by a man of literature’. That same year, the anonymous author of Advice to Opium Eaters noted that ‘many persons had greatly injured themselves by taking Opium experimentally, which trial they had been enticed to make by the fascinating description of the exquisite pleasure attendant on the taking of that drug, given in a recent publication on the subject’.71 The 1824 edition of the Family Oracle of Health announced that the
use of opium has been recently much increased by a wild, absurd, and romancing production, called the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. We observe, that at some late inquests this wicked book has been severely censured, as the source of misery and torment, and even of suicide itself, to those who have been seduced to take opium by its lying stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense.72
Southey cited ‘one who had never taken a dose of opium before’, but ‘took so large a one for the sake of experiencing the sensation which had made De Quincey a slave to it, that a very little addition to the dose might have proved fatal’. Coleridge read the Confessions with ‘unutterable sorrow … The writer with morbid vanity, makes a boast of what was my misfortune.’ The painter and poet William Bell Scott recalled the time when he and a fellow student took opium in ‘imitation’ of De Quincey, ‘till my friend went into a comatose state, out of which he could not be roused. All night long I sat by him, and into the next day, when he came to himself.’73
The Confessions created great interest in De Quincey’s past, but many questioned the veracity of the narrative. ‘Do you suppose it is to be considered as a true history?’ Lloyd asked Talfourd. ‘Is it not very singular that we should have associated with him for several years pretty confidentially, & should never have heard him allude to one of these adventures?’ Doubts about the authenticity of his narrative soon reached De Quincey, who was quick to acknowledge that he had not told ‘the whole truth’: ‘delicacy towards some who are yet living, and of just tenderness to the memory of others who are dead’, made that impossible. He insisted, however, that he had told ‘nothing but the truth’, for he had spoken ‘fearlessly, and as if writing private memoirs for my own dearest friends’.74 One evening Lamb began ‘a sort of playful attack’ upon him about the Confessions, and ‘added something in a jeering but good humoured way about Oxford Street’. De Quincey did not laugh.
‘There are’, said he, ‘certain places & events & circumstances, which have been mixed up or connected with parts of my life which have been very unfortunate, and these, from constant meditation & reflection upon them, have obtained with me a sort of sacredness, & become associated with solemn feelings so that I cannot bear without the greatest mental agony to advert to the subject, or to hear it adverted to by others in any tone of levity or witticism.’75
The Confessions were a commercial endeavour in which De Quincey drew on a broad series of cultural, political, and literary sources, and successfully exploited his experience in order to engage a mass magazine audience. At the same time, they were also a sincere if partial record of his past, and they powerfully commemorate his deep personal hurt over his losses and his addiction.
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He claimed he ‘lived in the most austere retirement’ during his months in London, yet as in Edinburgh the previous December, many sought his company, and he was very often happy to oblige.76 Taylor and Hessey held regular dinner parties for their contributors on their premises at 93 Fleet Street. Wine and venison were in liberal supply, as were camaraderie, humour, and eccentricity. The poet and London essayist Bryan Waller Procter remembered how the ‘hearts of the contributors were opened, and with the expansion of heart the intellect widened also. If there had been any shades of jealousy amongst them, they faded away before the light of the friendly carousal.’77 De Quincey consented to attend one of these gatherings soon after the publication of the Confessions, though his health was bad. Dinner was ‘fixed at “half-past five, for six”; and … as an invalid, or, as the hero of the day, I was planted inexorably, without retreat, in the place of honour by the fireside’.78
On several evenings, Taylor and De Quincey talked long into the night, on the identity of Junius, political economy, philosophy, the management of the magazine, and much else.79 ‘Mr Taylor professed himself a religious dissenter,’ De Quincey recalled, ‘and … he manifested an illiberal spirit … in the temper which he held habitually towards the Church of England.’ De Quincey was shocked to meet with ‘so much levity of rash judgment’ in Taylor, and seems to have guided their conversations towards more abstract theological concerns. ‘From a Conversation last Evening with Mr De Quincey,’ Taylor remarked, ‘I learn that the old Disputers about the Existence of God are likely to have a third Claimant of the Honour of Philosophy in this Department, in the Person of a German, who asserts that God neither is nor was … but is about to be.’80 Taylor greatly enjoyed these discussions, though on at least one occasion De Quincey outstayed his welcome. ‘I am so much and often taken up with Conferences, etc., with Contributors, and about the Magazine that my Time is never at my own Disposal. It is now ½ past 12 and the Opium Eater has only just left me.’81
De Quincey also became friendly with several star contributors to the London, including John Hamilton Reynolds, Thomas Hood, Allan Cunningham, and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, painter and art critic, who was one of the mainstays of the magazine, and who later almost certainly murdered three members of his family. De Quincey dined with Wainewright on 6 December at Taylor and Hessey’s, and vividly recollected their evening together.
Amongst the company, all literary men, sate a murderer, and a murderer of a freezing class; cool, calculating, wholesale in his operations, and moving all along under the advantages of unsuspecting domestic confidence and domestic opportunities … He was a contributor to a journal in which I also had written several papers. This formed a shadowy link between us; and, ill as I was, I looked more attentively at him than at anybody else.
A few days later Wainewright sent De Quincey an ‘invitation to a dinner party, expressed in terms that were obligingly earnest … From an accident I was unable to attend, and I greatly regretted it.’82
The toast of the London circle was Charles Lamb, whom De Quincey had of course known for many years, and whose famous Essays of Elia were currently the most popular feature in the magazine. When flushed with wine, Lamb was ‘joyous, radiant with wit and frolic, mounting with the sudden motion of a rocket into the highest heaven of outrageous fun and absurdity; then bursting into a fiery shower of puns, chasing syllables with the agility of a squirrel bounding amongst the trees’. He lived now with Mary at No. 20 Great Russell Street, not far from De Quincey’s York Street door, and on many evenings De Quincey went over to dine, for the brother and sister ‘absolutely persecuted’ him ‘with hospitalities’.83
On one occasion he and Lamb argued about Hazlitt. De Quincey rated him lower than Lamb felt was just. De Quincey cited Hazlitt’s cynicism. Lamb countered that ‘it was for the intellectual Hazlitt, not the moral Hazlitt, that he professed so much admiration’. De Quincey retreated enough to ‘admit the splendid originality of much that Hazlitt has done’ in the hope that he might ‘effect a compromise with my opponent’. Lamb, however, pushed on and ‘chose to insinuate (whether sincerely and deliberately I cannot say) that Hazlitt was another Coleridge’. This was too much. ‘I, whose studies had been chiefly in the field of philosophy, could judge of that,’ De Quincey returned with pique. ‘Lamb felt, or counterfeited a warmth, that for the moment looked like anger.’ Doubtless there were fine thinkers in Westmorland. ‘But you must allow for us poor Londoners. Hazlitt serves for our purposes. And in this poor, little, inconsiderable place of London, he is one of our very prime thinkers.’ Lamb continued until it was hard to tell whether he was in jest or earnest, though if he ‘felt any vexation, it was gone in a moment; and he shewed his perfect freedom from any relic of irritation, by reading to me one or two of his own beautiful compositions’.84
Richard Woodhouse, barrister and occasional writer, is best remembered now as the close friend of Keats, and the most important transcriber and collector of ‘Keatsiana’ in the years following the poet’s death. What is not as well known is that during the autumn of 1821, he was also a close companion of De Quincey, whose conversations he recorded with Boswellian fullness. Here is the closest we come to the pleasure of listening to De Quincey talk.
‘The word Patron is a favourite word with me, from its association with those high & noble instances of patronage, about the age of Elizabeth; when great men took a pride & pleasure in fostering ability, and lending their names & protection to Authors. This patronage was without humiliation or servility – each party felt that he was receiving as well as conferring a benefit. The Poet, in return for present countenance & favours had it in his power to transmit his patrons name down with honour to posterity. He made a sort of glory of this mutual obligation – and the praise that he gave, though somewhat excessive, was the Poetic garb in which he decked the expression of his own excited feelings. It was the illumination which genius & enthusiasm always throw round their subject. At the same time that they thus made their offerings or expressed their gratitude to their noble friends, they did not scruple to tell them that those offerings & those thanks would be the means by which their names & Characters would be handed down to future times.’
Woodhouse set down this anecdote, and a good deal more, ‘in the first person, because, tho’ not the very language of the narrator, it contains the substance of what he said, and is given somewhat in his manner, & in the order in which he gave it; and it will afford some idea of the general tenor of his conversation, & of the richness of his mind’.85
De Quincey gossiped to Woodhouse about his life in the Lake District, and ‘mentioned several stories, entirely groundless, & carrying in their very horror an assurance of their falsehood & absurdity’. One such rumour was that De Quincey himself was the father of Catharine Wordsworth. Another ‘unnatural tale current, & which the Opium-Eater had heard even in London’, was that Wordsworth had been ‘intimate with his own sister’. De Quincey condemned the story as an ‘abominable accusation bruited about’ to Wordsworth’s prejudice by ‘his coarse-minded neighbours’.86
The contemporary literary scene was a frequent topic of conversation. De Quincey read more of Keats’s poetry, almost certainly at the instigation of either Woodhouse or Reynolds, and while he found Endymion ‘the very midsummer madness of affectation’, he was enormously impressed by Hyperion, which presented ‘the majesty, the austere beauty, and the simplicity of Grecian temples enriched with Grecian sculpture’.87 In December, the Literary Gazette attacked Keats in its review of Shelley’s Adonias: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats. De Quincey ‘expressed in the strongest terms his execration, at such a rascally & villainous assault upon the memory of anyone scarcely yet cold in his tomb’. On another occasion, he wondered why anyone would think of comparing the poetry of Wordsworth and George Crabbe, ‘who had not one thing in Common in their writings. Wordsworth sought to hallow & ennoble every subject on which he touched’, while Crabbe did all he could to make his subjects ‘flat, prosaic & commonplace’.88
Socializing brought him pleasure and relief, but not everyone enjoyed his company. ‘I did not like him,’ Procter declared. He was ‘certainly an able man; and he was, I believe, liked and admired by those to whom he uncovered his more amiable qualities. But this exposition did not take place in London, where his attractions were not manifested.’ Crabb Robinson called on De Quincey as ‘a visit of duty’. ‘He is in ill-health, is querulous, very strongly impressed with his own excellence, and prone to despise others.’ On another visit, however, he took a more tolerant view. De Quincey was ‘less offensively arrogant than he was, and is fully sensible of every intended kindness. Talfourd came and sat with him.’89
At some point during these months, Wilson showed up in London. De Quincey welcomed his friend, and spent a good deal of time with him, but the appearance of Blackwood’s lead writer in the midst of the London circle foisted upon him exactly those anxieties he had fretted about when he first signed on with Taylor and Hessey. On the one hand, he did not want the London circle to learn that he had exhorted Wilson and Blackwood to humiliate John Scott, and that he had been in Edinburgh working for Blackwood’s the month before Scott was slain. On the other hand, he did not want Wilson to think that he had betrayed Blackwood’s by publishing with its arch rival, the spectacular London appearance of the opium article he had initially promised to Blackwood’s notwithstanding. Wilson knew all the intimate details of De Quincey’s marriage, finances, drug addiction, and Lake District experience. He was a good friend, but he was also erratic and spiteful. If the magazine wars resumed, De Quincey was convinced that Wilson would use his private knowledge to flail him in the pages of Blackwood’s.
De Quincey’s tactic was to strike back – at least privately – before Wilson could assail him publicly, and he launched a vicious personal assault on his oldest friend. Wilson wrote ‘the most objectionable of the articles’ in Blackwood’s, De Quincey assured his London friends. He will ‘domineer over those authors who have as yet no reputation in the world, he will grudge them their fair degree of credit, he will abuse them, & strive to keep them back, & even to crush them’.90 Wilson was also – as De Quincey well knew – an intellectual impostor. He had a ‘happy knack at catching & making use of the thoughts of other people’, but that was about the extent of his ability. He had ‘no opinions of his own on any subject’; he ‘never had any originality’; he had ‘no principles at all, and no judgment’.91
Berating Wilson in this way may have shored up De Quincey’s credentials as a loyal London supporter, and exposing him as a fraud no doubt enabled De Quincey to vent anger that had been building inside him for a long while. But smiling to his face, and then stabbing him in the back, was a task that wore badly on De Quincey’s nerves, and before long guilt and fear reduced him to something approaching paranoia. He ‘had a sort of feeling or ominous anticipation, that possibly there was some being in the world who was fated to do him at some time a great & unexpiable injury – and this thought often weighed upon him’, Taylor reported. ‘He was not superstitious, but he could not get rid of this impression. Many circumstances seemed to make it not improbable that Wilson might be that man.’ De Quincey was even more forthcoming when he discussed his dread with Woodhouse. He and Wilson had already crossed one another ‘in respect of the two Magazines. These things Wilson can never forgive: they will rankle in his mind: and at some time or other I am sure he will do what he can to injure me. I care not for myself, but there are quarters through which he can wound me.’92 Wilson had already published ferocious character assassinations of writers like Coleridge, another scholar, author, Lake District neighbour, Blackwood’s colleague, and opium-eater. In the weeks following the publication of his Confessions, De Quincey convinced himself that he was next.
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He stayed committed to writing for the London. The December 1821 issue opened with a letter from the Opium-Eater promising ‘a Third Part of my Confessions’. For the same number he also produced an introduction to his favourite German writer, Jean Paul Richter, complete with two translations from his novel Flegeljahre. The ‘perilous gas of wit in John Paul’ is so exuberant that he may ‘blow up’, De Quincey joked. Yet ‘from every sort of vice and infirmity he drew nutriment for his philosophic mind. It is to the honour of John Paul, that in this, as in other respects, he constantly reminds me of Shakespeare.’93 De Quincey’s assessment constitutes, by broad agreement, the first important critical article on Jean Paul in English. Carlyle remembered the essay ‘first put me upon trying to be orthodox and admire. I dimly felt poor De Quincey … to have exaggerated’, but he ‘then passed for a mighty seer in such things’.94 De Quincey began the year by publishing a translation of Schiller in Blackwood’s. He ended it by publishing a translation of Richter in the London. A good deal had happened in between.
And he had big plans for the future. Woodhouse reported that he was ‘to write, for the London Magazine, an introduction to some English Hexameters which he has composed’, as well as articles ‘on the mode of reading Latin – on Kant’s philosophy – on Coleridge’s literary Character’, and ‘on Political Economy’. The ‘Lion’s Head’ for December also contained a list of his future contributions, which included a number of ‘LETTERS to a YOUNG MAN of TALENT whose Education had been neglected’, and several ‘TRANSLATIONS in Prose and Verse from the most eminent of the FINE WRITERS OF MODERN GERMANY’.95 De Quincey’s literary ambitions extended at this time to novel writing as well. Taylor and Hessey, convinced of the selling power of their star contributor, advanced him 150 guineas to produce the work.96
The large lump payment made it possible for De Quincey to plan his return to the Lakes. After seven months away, he was anxious to be home: ‘The picture of Fox-ghyll … was for ever before my eyes.’ He seems to have thought of a Christmas visit to his mother, but gave up these plans. ‘My anxiety is now so great, that I could not endure such a delay.’97 His time in London had been a success. Through illness and anxiety, he had launched himself to fame with the Confessions, and established his place within the London circle. Further, there had been no assault upon him in Blackwood’s, nor would there be. Yet De Quincey’s fears turned out to be fully justified. He would be attacked with an animus and intimate knowledge that thoroughly humiliated him, and from a quarter closely allied to Wilson – but that was to come.
De Quincey’s departure from London was set for 29 December. In the afternoon he went to Fleet Street, where he met Taylor, Hessey, and Woodhouse, and where he lingered almost too long. ‘If Hessey had not almost pushed him off he would not have got to the Place in Time,’ Taylor wrote. ‘I never saw an Instance in which much Reflection so completely deprived a Man of active Energy as in De Quincey.’98 At last he bid Taylor goodbye, and then walked with Hessey and Woodhouse to his lodgings in York Street, where he went inside to collect his travelling box, while his friends waited outside, Hessey with his watch in his hand. Before he could re-emerge, however, De Quincey was stopped by Bohte, who wanted payment for four books of German philosophy that De Quincey had recently purchased on credit. De Quincey ‘compromised the matter by promising a bill at 3 months from Westmorland’, and then hastened through the darkened London streets with Woodhouse and Hessey, who saw him ‘into the mail’. Another London contributor, Allan Cunningham, had departed ‘by another Coach for the north the same Evening. It was a subject of regret to both that they had not travelled together.’ The journey was dreadful, but De Quincey was home ‘in 21 ½ hours’, arriving in time to greet the New Year with Margaret and their children at Fox Ghyll.99