The English Opium Eater

En Route

[i]

De Quincey seems to have asked the Wordsworths if he could borrow their ass, only to find that the animal insisted on bolting from its confinement at Fox Ghyll and running away to Ambleside. ‘I meant, if the rain had not been so heavy, to have come over this morning to Rydal Mount to concert something about the poor foolish creature,’ he wrote to Dorothy in a friendly and engaging letter. ‘For all agree that he is a most excellent creature if he had but more conduct – in fact, if he were not the most “outward” ass in existence.’1 De Quincey was also being called upon to deal with the high-spirits of his children. He had agreed to allow Thomas Monkhouse to use the Fox Ghyll coach-house when Monkhouse visited the Wordsworths in the spring of 1822, but there was no lock on the door, and one of the De Quincey children, together with some friends, stole into the building and began playing on Monkhouse’s carriage. De Quincey spoke to the servants and then wrote to assure Monkhouse that ‘no further intrusion of that sort will occur’.2

He took pleasure in these domestic concerns, but if he had hoped for peace on his return to the Lakes, he was not to find it. Money remained a pressing problem. In the dizzying cross-purpose of his finance, he had created a ‘new London debt … in the very act of extinguishing the old Westmorland debt’. Within weeks of returning to Fox Ghyll he was ‘harassed by Duns’ and ‘almost out of his mind’. ‘I have been employed – morning, noon, and night … in beating off creditors,’ he wrote to Hessey on 29 April.3 One large sum was owed to Margaret’s family. Another was due to Mr Blakeney for the rent on Fox Ghyll. ‘I do not understand Mr De Quincey,’ Blakeney complained to Wordsworth; ‘he has promised by two different Letters to pay his rent, but the Bill is not yet come to hand.’4

De Quincey pursued a variety of options in an attempt to alleviate his financial distress. He planned to sell his furniture, ‘my house here being a furnished one’. He prepared to sell a part of his library, ‘as a desperate remedy for a desperate case’.5 He wrote once again to his mother, who had of course recently learned – from the pages of a public journal no less! – that he had for nearly two decades been secretly consuming large quantities of laudanum. The shock must have been terrible, and she gave him a fulsome account of her unhappiness. She was not going to be gulled this time by ‘all the flattering accounts’ he gave her of his ‘literary expectations’. She had less money than he supposed. The sale of his library would bring ‘nothing like the amount’ he expected. His troubles were in several instances self-inflicted: ‘I can easily believe, and cannot but believe, that your stomach is miserably injured by the Opium you have swallowed.’ If De Quincey imagined, however, that she did not wish to offer him comfort, he did her little justice. ‘I am, in truth, always your affectionate Mother.’6 Enclosed was a bill for fifty-four pounds.

The money, if not the censure, was undoubtedly welcome, but it was nowhere near enough. De Quincey pushed forward with his book sale. ‘On Monday May 13 will commence at the Kings Arms Inn in Kendal the sale of a Library in the principle languages of modern Europe, together with a collection of Ancient Classics &c.’ De Quincey had hoped the sale would raise from £400 to £650, but it was as his mother prophesied. He made only £170, of which £32 went in fees and most of the rest ‘to purchasers of books who happened to have bills against me’.7

Endlessly compounding these troubles was of course his laudanum habit, which he chronicled with an almost obsessive interest. Rarely could he face the thought – in modern parlance – of going ‘cold turkey’, so he resolved on gradually weaning himself from the drug. During the writing of the Confessions he had relied heavily on laudanum to combat the pressures of deadlines and homesickness. When he returned to Fox Ghyll, his intake levels ranged between 160 and 300 drops per day. Then, on 24 June, he began his most well-documented attempt to break free from the drug. ‘I went off under easy sail – 130 drops a day for 3 days,’ he reported; ‘on the 4th I plunged at once to 80: the misery which I now suffered “took the conceit” out of me at once: and for about a month I continued off and on about this mark: then I sunk to 60: and the next day to – none at all’. This was the first time in nearly ten years that De Quincey had existed without opium, and he persevered in his abstinence for upwards of half a week.8

It proved too much. He could not sleep. He could not sit still. Excessive perspiration obliged him to use a bath five or six times a day, and he was racked by sneezing, ‘a sudden distention of the stomach; violent biliousness; rheumatic pains; then pains resembling internal rheumatism – and many other evils’. These griefs, however, he considered ‘all trifles compared with the unspeakable, overwhelming, unutterable misery of mind which came on in one couple of days’, and continued almost unabatedly into September. He endured both terrible gloom and a whirling excess of ideas. On the fortieth day of his experiment he was ‘in higher spirits … than for many years back’, but at other times he felt ‘the wretchedness of a lunatic’.9

The experiment ended in defeat. Withdrawal agonies eroded his resolution and drove him to swallow a huge dose. ‘It was solely by the tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it, that it kept its hold.’10 By the middle of the autumn he was an unresisting addict once again, and back up at his usual levels of ingestion. The truce brought a measure of stability, but choosing addiction over withdrawal hardly marked a step forward. Hessey reported on 7 October that De Quincey was ‘very ill’. Dorothy Wordsworth walked by Fox Ghyll, where De Quincey was ‘shut up as usual – the house always blinded – or left with but one eye to peep out of – he probably in bed – We hear nothing of him.’ At the end of November, Mary Wordsworth noted drily, ‘the Seer continues in close retirement’.11

[ii]

De Quincey was in regular touch with Taylor and Hessey, and continued to tantalize them with promises of exciting articles. One night ‘in high summer, when I lay tossing and sleepless for want of opium, – I amused myself with composing the imaginary Confessions of a Murderer’, he wrote to Hessey in October. But the article did not arrive, nor did any of the other work he had promised them. ‘The opium eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as suddenly left us darkling,’ Lamb wrote to Wordsworth.12 Disappointed but undaunted, Taylor and Hessey kept their much-celebrated contributor before the public by issuing the magazine text of the Confessions as a book in a print run of 1000 copies. Sales were brisk. A second edition of 1000 copies was published before the end of the year, and a third edition of another 1000 copies appeared on 24 December 1823.13

De Quincey’s failure to produce more for the London did not push his stock down. ‘In 1822’, he later declared, ‘I had 3 offers made to me which promised to be very favourable.’14 Despite earlier friction between him and Blackwood, one of these offers almost certainly came from Blackwood’s, which was being friendly to the point of flattering him in its pages. In March 1822, the magazine began to publish the Noctes Ambrosianae, a raucous and wide-ranging series of dialogues that presented the people and places of the Blackwood’s circle in a fictionalized form. Wilson, the lead author of the series, appeared as ‘Christopher North’, and in the second number for April he praised ‘the English Opium-Eater’ as ‘an invaluable contributor to any periodical’.15 De Quincey was content at this point to stay with the London, but from the corner of his eye he could no doubt see the admiring interest of Wilson and Blackwood’s.

In the late autumn he was once again animated with big plans. A number of articles were ‘in a very forward state’, he assured Hessey, and he would soon be down in London to complete his work on them, for he had convinced himself that he could not finish them in the isolation of Fox Ghyll.16 Hessey had by this time learned to take De Quincey’s promises with a grain of salt, but in November De Quincey made the necessary arrangements for another prolonged stay in London, and on 9 December he bid his family goodbye and headed south. Originally he had considered returning to lodge with the Bohtes, but a breach had opened up between the two parties over money and his late hours, and he took rooms instead with the Newbon family at 5 Racquet Court, Fleet Street, nearly opposite the premises of Taylor and Hessey.17

De Quincey arrived in London believing that he was within £100 of being free from the ‘intolerable bondage of debt’, but within only a few weeks it was clear that his situation was in fact growing increasingly bleak.18 He claimed that he had extinguished the rent due on Fox Ghyll, but in early January Blakeney’s agent John White was after him for arrears. Opium continued its treachery, as it ‘indirectly aggravated the misery which for the moment it relieved’. One Saturday the entire Newbon household was up all night in the room directly over his head as his landlady went into childbirth.19 ‘Why am I now in London?’ he burst out to Hessey in late January, ignoring his own earlier rationalizations that it would be easier for him to get his work done there, and claiming now that he was on site as a service to his publishers. ‘Are you aware’, he asked Hessey sharply in a long and distraught letter, ‘… 1. of the enormous sacrifice which I am making in personal happiness by staying at a distance of 300 miles from my own family in London? 2. Are you aware of the price in money at which I am doing this? 3. Have you ever asked – whose interests this residence in London was meant to serve?’20 The questions were unfair. Hessey simply wanted the material: he did not mind whether De Quincey was in the Lakes or London when he wrote it. De Quincey, however, was overwhelmed.

Yet even as these various distresses coiled round him, he backed away from ‘the brink of a precipice’, and began to write. He was now committed to the periodical press for his livelihood, and he had not lost confidence that he could profitably exploit what the New European Magazine called ‘the magic prefix of “by the Opium eater”’.21 In January 1823, the first of his five ‘Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected’ was published in the London. An extended series of observations on authorship, literature, language, memory, translation, and philosophy, the ‘Letters’ contain a suggestive comparison between De Quincey and Coleridge, who has ‘great and various powers’, but ‘unfortunately too little talent for teaching or communicating any sort of knowledge’. He might produce ‘another Ancient Mariner’, argues De Quincey, but ‘I wish he would leave transcendentalism to me’. Such gibes are designed to tempt Coleridge to ‘sally out of his hiding-place in a philosophic passion, and to attack me’. ‘Two transcendentalists’ who are also two opium-eaters ‘can hardly ever before have stripped in any ring’.22

The ‘Letters’ also feature a famous definition which De Quincey owed ‘to many years’ conversation with Mr Wordsworth’.23 What do we mean by literature? he asks. Traditionally, works that provide instruction are classified as the ‘literature of knowledge’, while works that provide amusement are called the ‘literature of pleasure’. The dichotomy is a false one, though, for ‘the true antithesis to knowledge … is not pleasure, but power’. And ‘if it be asked what is meant by communicating power, I in my turn would ask by what name a man would designate the case in which I should be made to feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting’. De Quincey then embodies the literature of power in describing a Shakespearean example of it:

When in King Lear, the height, and depth, and breadth of human passion is revealed to us – and for the purposes of a sublime antagonism is revealed in the weakness of an old man’s nature, and in one night two worlds of storm are brought face to face – the human world, and the world of physical nature – mirrors of each other, semichoral antiphonies, strophe and antistrophe heaving with rival convulsions, and with the double darkness of night and madness, – when I am thus suddenly startled into a feeling of the infinity of the world within me, is this power? or what may I call it?24

Like much of his finest criticism, De Quincey formulated the idea of the ‘literature of power’ in dialogue with Wordsworth, though his popularization of it in the ‘Letters’ adds an immediacy and a range that are uniquely his own.

He stayed productive throughout the spring. In March, he reviewed Letitia Matilda Hawkins’s Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches, and Memoirs, and the following month he produced the most important early critical account in English of Johann Gottfried Herder, whom he had already discussed briefly in the Westmorland Gazette.25 He also translated several tales by the prolific German storyteller Friedrich Augustus Schulze, who wrote under the pen name ‘Friedrich Laun’. ‘Mr Schnackenberger; or, Two Masters for One Dog’, is a rollicking tale of ill-fated amours and mistaken identities. ‘The Dice’ is a much darker narrative of satanic pacts, broken promises, and addictive behaviours.

After the distresses of his first few months in London, De Quincey was out and about a good deal. ‘He was with me again last Night,’ Hessey told Taylor on 14 March, with a trace of irritation. In early April, he and De Quincey went ‘to see Figaro at the Opera House – we were much entertained, but dreadfully hot’.26 De Quincey reconnected with several London contributors, including Thomas Hood, who described him as ‘almost boyish … from a peculiar delicacy of complexion and smallness of features’. As sub-editor of the magazine, it was Hood’s ‘frequent and agreeable duty’ to pick up copy from De Quincey at his Racquet Court lodgings, where he found him ‘in the midst of a German Ocean of Literature, in a storm, – flooding all the floor, the table and the chairs, – billows of books tossing, tumbling, surging open’. Hood often stayed far into the night listening to De Quincey, and watching as gradually his cheeks grew pale and his eyes ‘a degree dimmer’. These signs, according to Hood, marked the ‘waning influence’ of laudanum.27

De Quincey met a number of new people as well. William Hazlitt, like De Quincey, was a distinguished contributor to the London, a close friend of the Lambs, and a penetrating critic of Wordsworth and Coleridge. His unswerving radicalism and incessant flailing of the Tories, however, placed him on a political collision course with De Quincey. Procter testified that the two ‘thought poorly of each other. Hazlitt pronounced verbally that the other would be good only “whilst the opium was trickling from his mouth” … De Quincey, on the other hand, seems to have forced opportunities for sneering at Hazlitt’.28 Two or three times the unlikely pair ‘walked for a few miles together: it was in London, late at night, and after leaving a party’. De Quincey was ‘depressed by the spectacle of a mind always in agitation from the gloomier passions’, but amused by the pertinacity with which Hazlitt clung, ‘through bad reasons or no reasons, to any public slander floating against men in power’.29

Yet the radical and the royalist were not always at odds. In May 1823, the middle-aged Hazlitt published Liber Amoris, the obsessional tale of his disastrous love for Sarah Walker, the teenaged daughter of his landlord. The book was a gift to Tory assassins, who read it as confirmation of the degradation and moral confusion bound to result from a commitment to left-wing politics. Crabb Robinson was one of many who found it ‘nauseous and revolting’. De Quincey, however, did not see it that way. ‘I must reverence a man, be he what he may otherwise, who shews himself capable of profound love,’ he declared. ‘Pity was no demand’ of Hazlitt’s; ‘laughter was no wrong: the sole necessity for him was – to empty his over-burdened spirit’.31 Hazlitt sent De Quincey a copy of the book as a token of appreciation for his support. Indeed, he may have conceived the intense autobiographical introspection of Liber Amoris as a kind of counter-example to De Quincey’s Confessions.32

De Quincey was also introduced to the Scottish preacher Edward Irving, who was then at the height of his fame, and who was regarded by De Quincey as ‘unquestionably, by many, many degrees, the greatest orator of our times’. The two met at a dinner party, where an exuberant Irving ‘strode about the drawing-room … with the air of one who looked upon himself as clothed with the functions of Jonah sent to Ninevah’. Nobody would have been surprised, De Quincey recalled, ‘if he had dined on locusts and wild honey’. Irving talked at length of phrenology and went so far as to examine De Quincey’s skull, where he detected ‘conscientiousness’ and ‘veneration’ in great strength (or so De Quincey claimed). The two walked homeward together and found themselves united in their dislike of ‘common literary society’.33

There was, however, a moment of unpleasantness. As they neared Charing Cross, a female beggar came up to them and asked for charity. De Quincey of course had no money to spare, though the woman immediately engaged his sympathies, for he knew all about the desperation of London’s street-walkers. But Irving showed no compassion, and ‘shook off the poor shivering supplicant, whose manner was timid and dejected, with a roughness that would have better become a parish beadle towards a stout masterful beggar’. De Quincey put Irving’s behaviour down to an ‘untameable fervour’ in his manner rather than a deficiency of kindness, but the incident clearly bothered him.34

Occupied as he was with the London and its circle, De Quincey also found time during these months to start moonlighting. His former landlord Bohte was one of three publishers involved in a three-volume collection of German supernatural stories entitled Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations, and it was most probably in response to a request from him that De Quincey produced ‘The Fatal Marksman’, a translation of a tale by Johann August Apel that had already been adapted in Friedrich Kind’s libretto to Carl Maria von Weber’s immensely successful opera, Der Freischütz (1821).

Similarly, De Quincey began to publish in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, and almost certainly a year earlier than has commonly been thought. Charles Knight, a liberal editor and publisher, founded his Quarterly Magazine in June 1823, and listed Allan Cunningham, William Mackworth Praed, Coleridge’s second son Derwent, Edward Bulwer, and Thomas Babington Macaulay among his most important contributors.35 De Quincey is known to have produced two translations for Knight’s in the autumn of 1824, by which time he and Knight had become good friends, but the fullest index of authors’ contributions to the magazine lists two articles by De Quincey that were first published in 1823. De Quincey knew the magazine’s early numbers, for he was familiar with Henry Nelson Coleridge’s ‘Scibile’, which was published in the first issue, and which De Quincey regarded as ‘truly admirable’. More striking testimony comes from Henry Maiden, a prolific contributor to Knight’s, who knew that De Quincey was busy on behalf of the new magazine. ‘If De Quincey is within reach, pray extract something from him,’ he wrote to Knight on 15 September 1823. ‘His last article was much liked.’36

Reference to this ‘last article’ raises the possibility that De Quincey contributed to Knight’s as early as its first number, but he does not feature in the contributors’ index for June, and none of the articles in the issue seems clearly to belong to him. Maiden’s desire to have material from De Quincey, however, appears to have produced results, as two pieces by him are listed in the contributors’ index for the second issue of October. Both are signed ‘Archibald Fraser’. The first, a poem entitled ‘The Raven, a Greek Tale’, is in the manner of Theocritus, and describes an argument between Learchus and his lover Peroe. The work does not seem especially De Quinceyan, and he wrote poetry infrequently, but Peroe’s final speech certainly suggests the presence of the Opium-Eater. She has taken a lover who is ‘far more beautiful’ than Learchus, and is now ‘Lost in th’ intoxicating dream’. Learchus frowns sternly, but Peroe explains: ‘I yielded to his flatteries and his prayers, / And sunk into his arms – nay, start not – hear, / They were the arms of poppy-crowned sleep.’37

The second piece, ‘The Black Chamber’, seems very likely to be De Quincey’s. It is another translation of a German tale of terror by Apel, very much in the style of ‘The Fatal Marksman’, and just the sort of work he was producing at this moment. De Quincey enlarges the opening by playing up the animosity between two rival magazines, and he slightly reworks the closing commentary on the history of ghosts, but elsewhere he adheres closely to his source. ‘The Black Chamber’ features obligatory moments of terror, and apparently supernatural occurrences which are explained away as the result of a hidden door in a wall between two bedrooms. Yet at least one character, Wermuth, retains a partial faith in spectres. ‘It is not till the period when ghosts are banished, that men begin to tell their histories.’38

The strong output of these months brought De Quincey a steady income, but did not relieve his sorrows. He had not yet seen his fourth child, Francis John, who was born at Fox Ghyll on 26 November 1822, and baptized on 28 February 1823. He fretted that his letters to Margaret were being ‘pried into by such good but curious people as sometimes volunteer’ to carry them from Ambleside to Fox Ghyll. His health was a constant concern, as was his opium habit. In late May or June, the demand for copy especially pressing, he wore himself out ‘sitting up and taking laudanum for 3 days in succession’.39 And to top off these anxieties, Mrs Newbon was demanding her rent, and ‘adding servant, washerwoman, medicines, and a few other &c.’ De Quincey did not see how he would be ‘able to leave this place … under £16.10’. Shortly thereafter he simply fled without paying the rent, and in July took refuge in the Swan Inn – most probably the one at Holborn Bridge. He assumed an alias to keep the Newbons and his many other creditors from tracking him down. ‘“Mr M – in the Swan” – or simply “The Gent. in the Swan” is enough by way of direction.’ His circumstances partook of both farce and deep distress. ‘If you ask the man at what coffee-house I am,’ he solemnly instructed Hessey, ‘– I must request of you, not as an act of friendship but as an act of mere honour under some circumstances which I shall mention to you when I see you, not to communicate my address to any body.’40

The situation was untenable, even by De Quincey’s standards, and he determined upon escape to Westmorland. The journey was expensive at eight guineas, but he somehow managed to raise the funds and avoid his creditors. On the evening of Monday, 4 August, after eight months in London and the production of at least a dozen articles, he slipped quietly away, travelling first to Manchester and then – his enthusiasm for the outside of the coach undiminished – ‘on the box of the Mail the whole way to Preston’.41 He arrived at Fox Ghyll just before eight on Wednesday morning. The trip was exhausting, and many of his London problems would follow him north, but he was undoubtedly delighted to be home. Dorothy Wordsworth saw him soon after his arrival, and noted a marked change. ‘The opium eater must have left off his opium,’ she declared optimistically (if inaccurately): ‘he is returned quite well, and looks younger than he did seven [years] ago. He drank tea with us lately.’42

[iii]

De Quincey’s fame was spreading. There had been ‘scarcely one day’s interval since my return without callers from amongst the lakers, bringing letters of Introduction to me as the Opium Eater’, he told Hessey in September.43 The travel writer John Carne ‘passionately wished to see’ De Quincey, whose ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater … has made so much noise in the world’. He called one morning at Fox Ghyll but De Quincey ‘was not visible, and I concluded was not risen’. He had better luck that evening when he returned to find De Quincey and his eldest son William – now six years old, ‘with a beautiful countenance and flaxen hair’ – just back from a mountain walk. De Quincey was ‘one of the smallest men you ever saw, with very fine features, and eyes beaming with intellect and opium’, Carne reported. ‘He is an uncommonly clever man, and his interesting conversation, his faded countenance, on which the sense of his past miseries seemed still to rest, and the sweet tone of his voice, made me feel almost attached to him.’44

Wilson and De Quincey saw each other often that autumn. The intense animosity De Quincey had felt towards him in the weeks following the publication of the Confessions had apparently been resolved or forgotten. Wilson remained intent on bringing De Quincey back to Blackwood’s, and De Quincey seems to have been increasingly willing to listen to these plans. In September, Wilson wrote robustly to Blackwood that De Quincey is ‘disgusted with all the Cockneys and intends to get rid of them in half a year … [He] is very friendly to Maga & us all’.45 Wilson also made these sentiments public. Some of De Quincey’s London articles were signed ‘by the late Opium-eater’. Wilson provokingly misread this tag in Blackwood’s as a means of suggesting that De Quincey was meant for better things. ‘Mercy on us!’ he exclaimed in the September issue. ‘Is the English opium-eater dead?… The air of Cockaigne must have killed him … May we meet in another and a better Magazine.’46

Such a meeting promptly took place – in a manner of speaking. Unable literally to reinstate De Quincey with Blackwood’s, Wilson did the next best thing when he fictionalized him as ‘The Opium-Eater’ in the October instalment of the Noctes Ambrosianae, and then had him walk into Ambrose’s Tavern in Edinburgh and spend an evening talking, drinking, and eating with the Blackwood’s crew. Over the course of the dialogue, the Opium-Eater answers questions about Wordsworth, castigates Francis Jeffrey, and praises Blackwood’s for its criticism of Shelley, which ‘did you immortal honour’. At one point Christopher North asks, ‘Pray, is it true, my dear Laudanum, that your “Confessions” have caused about fifty unintentional suicides?’ ‘I should think not,’ replies the Opium-Eater defensively. ‘I have read of six only; and they rested on no solid foundation.’ Near the end of the conversation, the Opium-Eater drops a bombshell when he announces that Coleridge is ‘not only a plagiary, but, sir, a thief, a bonâ fide most unconscientious thief’ who ‘has stolen from a whole host of his fellow-creatures’.47 It was the first time that Coleridge had been accused of plagiarism in print. Wilson undoubtedly drew much of the dialogue – especially the comments concerning Shelley and Coleridge – from actual conversations with De Quincey, and over the course of the instalment he brought the Opium-Eater vividly to life.

Taylor and Hessey cannot have been pleased. They did not ‘like the appearance, even, of losing an Author’, and Blackwood’s inveterate habit of blurring the line between fact and fiction made it seem as though one of their prized contributors had a place in the inner circle of their chief competitor.48 Their concerns in this regard would only have been heightened by a new tone in De Quincey’s letters that was goading and critical. The September number of the London was ‘thought a good one’, he reported to Hessey from the Lakes, though he added woundingly that this ‘rather surprises me’. He complained of ‘many … defects of due energy’ in the management of the magazine, and wondered if Taylor and Hessey might not be suffering from ‘dyspepsy’. As he prepared ‘an Abstract of all the minor and miscellaneous Essays of Kant’, he told Hessey to ‘beware how you think cheaply of these’. In case Hessey failed to take the hint, De Quincey spelled it out in a follow-up letter: ‘Wilson appears sure that Blackwood is most anxious to obtain a good account of Kant for his Magazine.’49

Perhaps De Quincey could sense that the situation at the London was deteriorating, as it fell further and further behind its Edinburgh rival in terms of sales and prestige. Taylor and Hessey still recruited and published some of the finest writers of the day, and they had both been kind and generous to De Quincey. But Taylor’s vagueness and reserve was an increasing source of concern to his contributors, and the magazine as a whole began gradually to lose that spirit of camaraderie and liberal intellectualism that had been such distinguishing features under John Scott. When comparing the two magazines, even key London contributors found Blackwood’s superior. ‘The London Magazine wants the personal note too much,’ Lamb complained to Hessey. ‘Blackwood owes everything to it. Think on it.’50 Another London contributor, Mary Russell Mitford, had a confession to make: ‘in my secret soul (don’t tell Mr Talfourd), though he and I both write in the London along with the Proctors, the Reynoldses, and the Charles Lambs, I like Blackwood’s better’. It has a ‘fine, swaggering, bold-faced impudence – a perfection of lying and of carrying it off – which is delightfully amusing’.51

Yet while the tide was clearly running in Blackwood’s favour, De Quincey’s complaints about the London appear to have been designed, not to signal an imminent defection back to the Edinburgh magazine, but to win more gratitude and money from Taylor and Hessey. He had worked hard for them in London throughout the first half of the year, and once he settled back into Fox Ghyll he found himself able to maintain this same high rate of productivity, a marked change from a year earlier, when he had lived in the cottage and been unable to complete a single article. In the London for September, De Quincey commemorated the recent death of his friend ‘Walking’ Stewart, ‘a sublime visionary’ whose ‘mind was a mirror of the sentient universe’. Stewart and Percy Shelley had died within a few months of each other, and De Quincey revealingly compared the two. Both had ‘a fine vague enthusiasm and lofty aspirations in connexion with human nature generally and its hopes’, though ‘in maintaining their own system they both found themselves painfully entangled at times with tenets pernicious and degrading to human nature’.52

‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ appeared in the London for October, in the same issue as Hazlitt’s ‘Pictures at Wilton’, Lamb’s ‘Letter of Elia to Robert Southey’, and the first instalment of Carlyle’s biography of Schiller. It is one of De Quincey’s most celebrated pieces of literary criticism, and marks the first time in his writings that he imaginatively revisits the bloody scenes of December 1811, when John Williams savagely murdered seven people in London’s East End. Guided by the injunction ‘never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind’, De Quincey approaches Williams from two starkly different angles. Famously, he introduces the satiric aesthetic that enables him to see Williams’s performance ‘on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway’ as ‘making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied with any thing that has been since done in that line’.53 At the same time Williams’s extreme brutality leads De Quincey to reflections on the psychology of violence, as well as to an absorbing interrogation of the moment in Shakespeare’s play when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth return fresh from the slaying of Duncan, and are unexpectedly interrupted. During the scene, ‘the world of devils’ is revealed, De Quincey remarks.

But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated – cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs – locked up and sequestered in some deep recess: we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is that when the deed is done – when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish: the pulses of life are beginning to beat again.

After reading the essay, Lamb observed that De Quincey had ‘written a thing about Macbeth better than anything I could write; – no – not better than anything I could write, but I could not write anything better’.54

German literature remained a central preoccupation throughout these months. De Quincey translated three essays from Kant, including ‘On National Character, in Relation to the Sense of the Sublime and Beautiful’. In the fifth number of a series entitled ‘Notes from the Pocket-Book of a Late Opium-Eater’, he provided what seems to be the first English translation of any part of Schiller’s key treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man.55 His translation of Jean Paul Richter’s ‘Dream Upon the Universe’ is a superb exploration of time, apocalypse, alienation, and God’s mysterious presence, in which he both follows Richter and charts his own psychology. ‘At length the human heart within me was overburthened and weary, and yearned after some narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the universe. And I said to the Form at my side – “Oh! Spirit! Has then this universe no end?” And the Form answered and said – “Lo! it has no beginning.”’56

Economics were another key concern. De Quincey’s brief essay on Malthus opened the London for October 1823, and is notable chiefly for provoking Hazlitt to the charge of plagiarism. An embarrassed De Quincey responded in the ‘Lion’s Head’ of the December issue, acknowledging that he had seen Hazlitt’s work, and that there was indeed a good deal of overlap, though intentional plagiarism seems unlikely. De Quincey can hardly have wanted to put information he knew was stolen from Hazlitt where Hazlitt himself was almost certain to read it. Less consciously, De Quincey had by this time assimilated so much economic information that he was probably no longer able to distinguish between what originally belonged to him, and what belonged to Hazlitt, to Ricardo, to Malthus, and to several others.57 In any event, he did far greater justice to his abilities in ‘Dialogues of the Three Templars on Political Economy, Chiefly in Relation to the Principles of Mr Ricardo’, published in the London for April and May 1824, and described by De Quincey himself as ‘the best’ two articles he had ever written. At the core of the inquiry is Ricardo’s theory of value, and its far-reaching implications for economic thought. ‘Grant me this one principle, with a few square feet of the sea-shore to draw my diagrams upon, and I will undertake to demonstrate every other truth in the science.’58

Reviews of the ‘Dialogues’ were generally positive. Philosophical radicals like John Ramsay McCulloch characterized them as ‘unequalled, perhaps, for brevity, pungency and force’, while Samuel Bailey found De Quincey traced Ricardo’s doctrines ‘fearlessly to their legitimate consequences’.59 Other readers, however, found him simply dull. De Quincey had initially taken the London by storm with the extremity and intense subjectivity of his Confessions. Now he was publishing long, arid treatises on economics. ‘Taylor has lately refused a paper of Procter’s & one of Reynolds’s, & kept back Darley’s reply to Terentius Secundus,’ fumed the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ‘for the purpose of introducing that thrice-double demoniac the aeconomical opium-eater.’ Pithily and prophetically he concluded, ‘Exit London.’60

[iv]

Wherever he was, was wrong. Living at Fox Ghyll cut him off from books, ready money, urban anonymity, and the enlivening conversation of the London circle. Eventually the pull of London would become strong enough and he would set off, full of ideas and optimism. Once settled in the south, however, he would almost immediately begin to have second thoughts. His expenses would be far higher than he projected. His lodgings were noisy and cramped. He missed Margaret and their children. Fox Ghyll would come to seem a haven of support and understanding where he could be happier and equally productive. Gradually he would extricate himself from London and travel to the north, brimming with ideas and optimism, and where within weeks he would think it necessary to return to London. Within this broad cycle of dislocation and perplexity spiralled De Quincey’s day-to-day existence of walking, reading, visiting, parenting, paying bills, consuming laudanum, and writing through long solitary hours for the London.

The pressures on him had been mounting for weeks. ‘That beautiful residence near the Lakes, Fox Ghyll, Loughrigg, Grasmere, is announced for sale’: so ran an advertisement in the Westmorland and Cumberland papers. Blakeney had recently died, and his widow had decided to put the property on the market, perhaps in response to De Quincey’s habitual inability to pay the rent. Prospective buyers were soon knocking at his door. De Quincey was reluctant to let them in. Farcical scenes ensued, including a particularly disagreeable encounter with a violent would-be owner.61

Creditors were also pressing him: John Newby, miller; John Green, butcher; George Pearson, grocer; Mr Newton, wine merchant; Mrs Robert Fleming, dressmaker; Miss Preston, haberdasher; and so on.62 Matters came to a head near Christmas when an Ambleside bill was unexpectedly returned. De Quincey briefly considered flight as his best option, but ‘in what direction – I hardly know; for I have not half a crown disposable for travelling … I am scarcely able to crawl … I will never give another bill as long as I live.’ Wordsworth called at the peak of these distresses. De Quincey lied and said he was not at home. Almost immediately he wrote to apologize. ‘I feel so much pain at not having been able to express my sense of the favour you did me in calling,’ he assured the poet, ‘– that I think it right to explain that the load of labour, under which I groan, has continued to make it impossible for me to get out for one half hour even.’ Wordsworth seems to have been prepared to accept explanations such as this one, for De Quincey later recalled several conversations with him at this time ‘partially connected with political economy’, and especially with the doctrine of rent.63

He spent the first six weeks of 1824 in bed, battling an addiction that had him completely surrounded. ‘If I take no laudanum, I am in a state of semi-distraction’, but ‘if I take even 12 or 15 drops’ there is a ‘return of bilious symptoms which often put me hors d’état for any sort of labour’. He believed ‘some affection of the liver’ was pushing him towards madness. An unnamed doctor prescribed ‘very large doses of the blue pill’, but these only made him sicker.64 In the spring his mother gave him the £84 annually remitted to him by his uncle Penson. Clamouring creditors took most of it, though De Quincey was certain that he had been ‘grossly swindled’ by his Ambleside grocer Pearson, and turned the matter over to a lawyer. Throughout April he walked the three miles from Fox Ghyll to Dove Cottage, where he rummaged through mountains of old letters and bills in order to produce a long legal document that would explain his financial situation, and prevent ‘a series of nearly a dozen arrests’ that would have forced him to flee the country in order to avoid prison.65

De Quincey’s stress in the Lakes added greatly to Hessey’s in London. For two and a half years, the publisher had managed to remain reasonably calm as he waited for De Quincey to deliver his copy, but he no longer had that luxury: the London was now losing around £500 a year; several contributors were up in arms about various editorial decisions; and Taylor was slipping towards a nervous breakdown.66 In March, Hessey lost his patience with De Quincey, and itemized his debts to the firm in a letter ‘couched in terms of most unprovoked ill-temper and violence’. De Quincey responded in kind. Hessey undoubtedly had a right to insist upon ‘the most minute accuracy’ when it came to the financial transactions of the magazine. But ‘Good God!’ cried De Quincey. ‘If you had let me know beforehand that you would detain anything I sent in order to repay yourself, – I would, on learning the amount, have instantly set about some steps for meeting your demand as soon as possible.’67 The situation was soon resolved, but it flared up again in late April, when Hessey complained bitterly of De Quincey’s ‘cruel delay’ in sending material. De Quincey wondered why Hessey was not more generous. ‘Messrs. Hazlitt, Reynolds, &c. have put you to a thousand times more inconvenience in a single month than I in a year.’ His excuse was unparalleled suffering. ‘Theirs – that they got drunk, – went to the play, – had a cold, – gave a party.’68 Hessey seems not to have responded to De Quincey’s assessment of the London circle, though he can hardly have found it either helpful or accurate. Both editor and contributor were becoming fed-up, with the situation and with each other.

De Quincey resolved to travel back to London, undoubtedly in an effort to speed up the exchange of material, and ease the frustrations that were undermining his relationship with Hessey. His departure, of course, meant a return of all the old strains that beset him when he and Margaret were separated. On 6 May he had ‘no money’, but soon he managed to scrape enough together for the coach fare, and by the middle of the month he was in Liverpool, where his health – and probably his resolve – broke down, and he ended up staying for a month with his friend Merritt.69 De Quincey set out for London again in mid-June, but this time got caught in a downpour while travelling on the outside of the coach, and ended up at the George Inn in Litchfield ‘in a shivering fit, with very high pulse’.70 It was two additional weeks before he set out for a third time. Had he known the nasty shock that was waiting for him, he may well have turned around and retreated to Fox Ghyll.

[v]

On Saturday, 3 July 1824, at around six in the morning, De Quincey reached London aboard one of the northern mails. The coach delivered its bags in Lombard Street, and then drove him down ‘to a great city hotel’. After indulging in the ‘luxurious refreshment’ of a hot bath, he seated himself at the breakfast table around eight, where the waiter brought him the morning edition of The Times. His eye passed indolently over the paper until it fell on a list of new publications. His heart immediately misgave him. A satirical journal – The John Bull Magazine – had just published its inaugural issue, and he was singled out as one of the ‘Humbugs of the Age’.71 Fearing the worst, De Quincey headed straight for Smithfield, where the publisher kept a shop. He entered, bought a copy of the magazine, and went out into the street. In the weeks immediately following the publication of his Confessions, De Quincey had become semi-hysterical in the conviction that Wilson was about to smear him in the pages of Blackwood’s in retaliation for switching his allegiances to the London. The attack had not come then. But it did come now.72

William Maginn delivered the blow. A clever and recklessly malicious satirist, he had risen to great prominence in Blackwood’s, both in his own right and as the fictive Ensign O’Doherty in the Noctes sketches. He did not know De Quincey, but he did know Wilson, who almost certainly provided the details for the attack, though perhaps in unguarded moments of merriment, rather than as part of a deliberate plot. However this may have been, Maginn rounded on De Quincey from several different fronts. He lashed him for the ‘wretched infirmity’ of his drug addiction, his ‘hanger-on’ status with ‘the lake school’ of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and his ‘nauseating succession of idle boasts’ about his learning and language skills. His physical appearance was even more laughable. ‘Conceive an animal about five feet high, propped on two trapsticks, which have the size but not the delicate proportions of rolling-pins, with a comical sort of indescribable body, and a head of most portentous magnitude … As for the face, its utter grotesqueness and inanity is totally beyond the reach of the pen to describe.’ Maginn then turned on Margaret. She was De Quincey’s ‘servant-maid long before he married her’. More grievously, ‘we should request Quincy to give us an extract from his parish-register, dating the birth of his first child, and also his marriage … It would be an important addition to the chronology of the county.’73

Blood was his first thought: he would trace his assailant and challenge him to a duel. But he soon thought better of it. Doubtless he remembered the recent killing of John Scott. Wilson at least came immediately to his defence. ‘You would disapprove, I suppose, of the attack on De Quincey in the John Bull Magazine?’ Ensign O’Doherty asks Christopher North in the August number of the Noctes. ‘Disapprove?’ North retorts, ‘– I utterly despised it, and so, no doubt, did he.’74 Wilson’s public display of friendship, however, could not stop the slander from spreading, and De Quincey underwent the further humiliation of discovering that his old Westmorland nemesis, the Kendal Chronicle, had cheerfully reprinted large excerpts from the assault as the lead article in its 14 August number. De Quincey seems eventually to have discovered that Maginn was responsible for the calumny, but at the time he could only submit in impotent rage as he was – in Carlyle’s summary – fried ‘to cinders on the gridiron of the John Bull’.75 Wilson had not sanctioned the article, but De Quincey had been right to worry. Indirectly and at last, Blackwood’s punished his disloyalty with the kind of ferocious character assassination that he had worried all along would break suddenly upon him, ‘like a bull-dog at the throat’.76

Consolation, for these and other troubles, came most often in the form of friendships. One was with Matthew Davenport Hill, an educationalist and legal reformer, who leaned well to the left politically, and who was closely connected with figures such as Bentham and Brougham. Hill had recently published his Plans for the Government and Liberal Instruction of Boys in Large Numbers, which De Quincey had enthusiastically reviewed in the London for April and May 1824. Clearly linked to utilitarian philosophy, Hill’s educational system contemplated ‘the whole man with a reference to his total means of usefulness and happiness in life’. De Quincey was especially impressed with the humanity of Hill’s plan. The boys were to be self-governed, and responsible for their own discipline and administration. Corporal punishment was to be entirely abolished in order to avoid not only the physical pain that was inflicted on the student, but the psychic trauma of shame and embarrassment that went with it. De Quincey – the miseries of his own and Pink’s school experience undoubtedly before him – found such measures ‘very wise’.77

Hill was delighted with the review and sought to make De Quincey’s acquaintance. He and his wife Margaret lived in a cottage near the parish church at Chelsea, and discovered that De Quincey was lodged nearby at 4 Eccleston Street, Pimlico. Hill invited De Quincey to a family dinner, and before long he was a regular visitor. The Hills were astonished at ‘the wealth of his conversation, and his felicity of expression’. De Quincey came occasionally to their Sunday morning breakfast table, where he met a wide range of liberal writers, including Macaulay. Fond as always of the society of women, he charmed ‘Mrs Hill with his conversation in the long evenings when she sat up for her husband’. One morning the Hills discovered De Quincey at their door ‘wet and shivering’ from ‘having slept under a hayrick in the Hampstead fields’, undoubtedly to escape angry creditors.78

De Quincey also became closely associated with one of Hill’s good friends, Charles Knight. As we have seen, De Quincey probably became a contributor to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine in 1823, but it was the summer of 1824 before he knew Knight personally, and had ‘naturally’ fallen into company ‘with the whole band’ of his contributors. Knight recorded that De Quincey’s health was bad and that he was swallowing large doses of opium, but he added that he and his wife Sally were captivated – like the Hills – by his aristocratic manners, eccentric appearance, and inspired conversation. ‘One hour of De Quincey – better, three hours from nine till midnight – for a rapt listener to be “under the wand of a magician.”’79

Two of De Quincey’s tales, ‘The Incognito’ and ‘The Somnambulist’, were published in Knight’s for August, and the same issue took a page from Blackwood’s when it featured a fictional account of a dinner for contributors at which the ‘Opium-Eater’ makes an unexpected but welcome appearance. ‘Even now do I feel the gnawings of that poison with which I have drugged my veins,’ he tells the company.

We all looked at each other with surprise. ‘Can it be?’ was on every tongue. ‘May I venture to ask, Sir, whom I have the honour of seeing amongst us?’ … ‘My name, Sir, is——; but you may have heard of me as a too celebrated Opium Eater.’ We all involuntarily bowed; and in two minutes Haller and our illustrious friend were deep in a discussion on political economy, while Murray and Tristram appealed to him in the intervals of the debate upon their contrary views of the knowledge of Greek in Europe, at the time of Dante.80

Knight’s portrait – like Wilson’s – is rooted in actual observation, and neatly captures the way in which drugs, erudition, and eloquence defined De Quincey’s public persona.

He socialized in the London circle as well, where for the first time he met fellow contributor John Clare, whose depressed spirits drew his sympathy, and whose poetry he much admired. ‘He had studied for himself in the fields, and in the woods, and by the side of brooks. I very much doubt if there could be found, in his poems, a single commonplace image.’ Clare was fascinated with ‘the French style of beauty as he saw it amongst the French actresses in Tottenham Court Road’ (De Quincey’s polite way of referring to Clare’s taste for prostitutes), but he retained in the midst of the tumult and glare of London the ‘most hearty and almost rapturous spirit of admiration’ for Wordsworth. To De Quincey he undoubtedly seemed a kindred spirit. Clare, for his part, had been greatly impressed by the Confessions, and left a vivid vignette of De Quincey: ‘A little artless simple seeming body something of a child over grown in a blue coat and black neckerchief for his dress is singular with his hat in his hand steals gently among the company with a smile turning timidly round the room – it is De Quincey the Opium Eater.’81

The London for August and September featured De Quincey’s notoriously unsympathetic review of Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Of the author: ‘not the baseness of Egyptian superstition, not Titania under enchantment, not Caliban in drunkenness, ever shaped to themselves an idol more weak or hollow than modern Germany has set up for its worship in the person of Goethe’. Of Wilhelm Meister. ‘in German novels such things may be tolerated, as also in English brothels’. Of Carlyle as translator: ‘the Scotticism of “open up” is perfectly insufferable … No man in these volumes opens a book; he opens it “up”: no man opens a door; he opens it “up”: no man opens a letter; he opens it “up”’.82 Carlyle read the review and condemned De Quincey as ‘a man who writes of things which he does not rightly understand’. In fact, De Quincey’s review seems to have gone right to the heart of Carlyle’s own misgivings about his translation. A year earlier he himself had complained about the novel’s indecency: ‘when I read of players and libidinous actresses and their sorry pasteboard apparatus for beautifying and enlivening the “moral world”, I render it into grammatical English – with a feeling mild and charitable as that of a starving hyaena’. What is more, he later conceded that De Quincey ‘was quite right in his animadversions on some of the Scotticisms in the first edition’.83

Strikingly, after dismissing Carlyle’s translation of a German novel, De Quincey himself took on a similar task. In the spring of 1824, Bohte attended the annual Book Fair in Leipzig, and was surprised to discover that a new novel by Walter Scott had just been translated into German. In this there was nothing unusual: Scott was a very popular author in Germany, and rival booksellers produced translations of his novels almost as fast as they appeared. What was unusual, though, was that this new title, Walladmor, had not yet reached the bookshops of London. His curiosity piqued, Bohte purchased the novel and brought it back to York Street, where his suspicions were soon confirmed: Walladmor was a fake. It was written by Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Häring, who produced dozens of novels under the pseudonym ‘Willibald Alexis’, and who had already translated some of Scott’s poetry.84 When Alexis realized that Scott had not produced a new Waverley novel for the 1824 Fair, he enterprisingly produced his ‘translation’ to fill the gap in the market, and meet the insatiable public demand for Scott’s work.

‘We must have Walladmor… if Heaven or Earth can get it,’ De Quincey wrote eagerly to Hessey in September. A review would be of ‘universal interest’. Bohte’s copy ‘was bespoke for Sir Walter Scott’, but De Quincey could borrow it on two conditions: one, it had to be returned in thirty-two hours; and two, it had to be in mint condition, which meant that no more than one-sixth of the uncut leaves could be opened. De Quincey complied, and read the 883 pages of Walladmor in the stipulated time, gazing up the pristine folds like someone ‘in the uneasy position of looking up a chimney’.85 In a lengthy October review, De Quincey labelled the novel ‘the boldest hoax of our times’, and proceeded to sketch the whole of the plot through a combination of hastily chosen set-pieces and facetious badinage. He was impressed, though: ‘there is great life and stir in the movement of the story; much dramatic skill in devising situations; and an interest given to some of the characters, beyond the mere interest of the action, by the passions which move them’.86

Such enthusiasm had an unexpected result. The public was anxious to know more of the pseudo-Waverley novel, and Taylor and Hessey seized the moment by commissioning De Quincey to produce a full translation ‘on the conditions of dividing profits and risk’. De Quincey, his various debts to the firm still hanging over his head, quickly agreed. He would generate forty-eight pages of copy a day. One week would bring him to the end of the first volume, three weeks to the end of the project. Once he began to read the novel carefully, however, he made a depressing discovery. It was ‘trash … absolutely beyond hope’, and it needed to be thoroughly rewritten if it was to become coherent, let alone marketable. Scrambling to supply the press with eight pages a day, De Quincey forged, altered, and dramatically pruned, eventually collapsing the ‘three corpulent German volumes … into two English ones, of rather consumptive appearance’. The novel was advertised in The Times for 1 and 20 October, and 1, 9, and 24 November. It finally appeared on 20 December, though the volumes themselves were dated 1825.87

Walladmor is a Welsh tale of pirates, prisons, lovers, madness, and mistaken identity. It tells the improbable story of Bertram and Nicholas Walladmor, twin brothers who are kidnapped from their ancestral castle as babies and then brought together again in a shipwreck over twenty years later. Bertram has been raised in northern Germany and returns to Wales in search of the picturesque. Nicholas, bred up by brigands, is deeply in love with his cousin, Genevieve Walladmor, and has recently become involved in the key political episode of the novel, the Cato Street Conspiracy of February 1820, when a number of radicals plotted to assassinate all members of the British Cabinet. Revenge drives the plot. Half-crazed Gillie Godber lost her young son twenty-four years earlier when he was sentenced to death for his role in the killing of two revenue officers who were trying to stop a group of smugglers. Gillie frantically tried to save her son, but the novel’s patriarch, Sir Morgan Walladmor, refused to intervene and the boy was executed. Later it is revealed that he played a part in the smuggling operation, but was not involved in the killings. After his death, Gillie curses the House of Walladmor and arranges for the kidnapping of the twins. Lady Walladmor is soon dead. Sir Morgan’s life is blighted by grief.

De Quincey worked within the broad outlines of the plot, but changed a good deal.88 Alexis’s blunders in geography and chronology are repaired. One character is added, another removed, and several renamed. The St David’s day celebrations are rewritten. Loads of ‘rubbish – political, astrological, “and diabolical’” – are excised, as are any hints of vulgarity. Miss Walladmor is cured of her ‘hysterical affection’ and becomes much more dignified. The prose style is sharpened, and on several occasions De Quincey cannot resist introducing passages of conspicuous rhetorical display, as when Bertram has a dream vision of mysterious vengeance. Most notably, De Quincey recasts the entire ending of the novel, which now climaxes with the death of Miss Walladmor in the arms of Nicholas, who flees to South America, where he dies as a soldier. Bertram is now the sole heir, and Sir Morgan approaches death in the hope that ‘Grief shall be o’er at Walladmor’.89 Public interest in the German hoax and English counter-hoax did not last long, but De Quincey’s book – his second in three years – found admirers. Walladmor was ‘well worth reading’, wrote Sara Hutchinson, ‘– as the style & descriptions are far very far beyond anything in merit that you meet with in such publications – seldom indeed any where – for every thing that he does must be clever’.90

[vi]

Margaret gave birth to a boy named Paul Frederick at Fox Ghyll on 25 November 1824.91 He was named after De Quincey’s favourite German author, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, and was the couple’s fifth child in eight years. At the same time Letitia Luff, a longstanding friend of the Wordsworths, had purchased Fox Ghyll, and taken upon herself the trouble of ‘ousting the de Quinceys’. On one occasion she sent labourers into the garden in an apparent attempt to drive Margaret and the children from the cottage, though they could not be legally ‘forced to quit’ for almost a year.92 Margaret hung on, but her already battered ability to cope could not easily take these additional strains. She began slipping towards collapse.

Her husband could offer little assistance. He was chained to London, and in as much difficulty as ever. Creditors were in constant pursuit, and he told at least one of them that he had been in Boulogne, ‘whither I had been compelled to go for the purpose of meeting an English friend on business’. The French port was a well-known retreat for English debtors, but De Quincey was probably just making excuses. It is doubtful that he could have found either the time or money to make such a trip, and local records in Boulogne have so far revealed no trace of him. Illness laid him low for much of October, and a broken tooth compounded his suffering.93 He tried to produce material at a faster rate, but relentless demands for money rarely overcame his own exacting literary standards, and he chose most often to discard or withhold inferior material, rather than try to sell what did not satisfy his own judgement. It was a policy that ensured the quality of his published work and that garnered him a good deal of respect, but it all came at a heavy price.

By this stage De Quincey was dividing his loyalties between the London and Knight’s. The final instalment of his ‘Notes from the Pocket-Book of a Late Opium-Eater’ series appeared in the London for December, and a rather laboured satire of Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Library Companion, promised to Hessey in September, was duly published in January 1825. At the same time, De Quincey assured Knight that he was anxious to assist ‘your journal’ in ‘whatever way I can’, and after three years of giving top priority to the London, he marked a decided shift in his allegiances when he told Knight that he considered his ‘first service as always due to you’.94

Such a balancing act was familiar to him, and unlikely to endear him to either publication. In the event, he did not have to sustain it for long. On 4 December, Taylor reported that Henry Southern, co-editor of the Westminster Review, had offered to take a share in the London, and within weeks Taylor and Hessey had turned their magazine over to him.95 De Quincey undoubtedly recognized that Southern’s strongly utilitarian views would cramp his ability to write for the London, and he published nothing further in it. Remarkably, 4 December was also the day that De Quincey called on Knight and ‘was concerned to find that your Journal was at an end’. He expected that Knight’s friends would rally round to promote some new undertaking, and he unrealistically promised ‘that you may count upon me as one of your men for any extent of labours’. But it was too late. The magazine was ‘a loss and a trouble’, Knight declared, and ‘with the sixth number I determined to announce that its career was ended’.96

With his two main sources of income gone, De Quincey turned once again to his mother for help. Her reply was a frank financial update. His uncle Penson had recently returned from India to live with her. His income had dropped from £4000 a year to £700, and he shared her passion for home improvement. Major works were in progress at Westhay, including the construction of a new dining-room and a separate suite of apartments for Penson. Mrs Quincey’s own income amounted to £600 a year, out of which £250 went to Westhay and £150 to miscellaneous expenses. She told De Quincey she was prepared to divide what remained and remit £100 a year to him: £20 could be sent now, and the rest would follow in March and May. Generous and well-meaning as she often was, though, she closed her letter with the kind of cold censoriousness that had caused so many problems in the first place. De Quincey had sent her a copy of Walladmor. She was unimpressed: ‘I cannot expect that your literary productions either as a Translator or an Author will rise in moral tone to my point, for I suppose you must please your Readers, and unfortunately little is required.’97

With no obvious source of income, and his mother unable to advance the bulk of the new remittance until the spring, De Quincey cast about for employment. Taylor and Hessey still owned their publishing house, and he wrote to them about his financial difficulties, but they appear not to have offered him any work.98 Blackwood’s crossed De Quincey’s mind as a possibility, and he put himself in touch with Wilson. ‘I am quite free from opium,’ he assured him disingenuously, but the drug had badly damaged his liver, and he painted a vivid picture of his distress. To fence with illness ‘with the one hand, and with the other to maintain the war with the wretched business of hack author, with all its horrible degradations, – is more than I am able to bear’. Yet stepping back from his grief, De Quincey was able to acknowledge a way out. ‘With a good publisher and leisure to premeditate what I write, I might yet liberate myself: after which, having paid everybody, I would sink into some dark corner, educate my children – and show my face in the world no more.’99 Was he suggesting that William Blackwood was the ‘good publisher’ he needed to put himself in the clear?

Wilson may well have responded positively, but at this point De Quincey was in such dire straits that any agreement the two reached would probably have come to naught. Soon after losing his position with the London and Knight’s, De Quincey had abandoned his lodgings in Pimlico and been forced into the winter streets, a no doubt harrowing reminder of his life over twenty years earlier when he had lived in the capital as a runaway. ‘At this moment I have not a place to hide my head in’, he reported on 24 February. He was ‘lying out in the suburban fields, or sleeping in retired doorways, or upon bulkheads’.100

Eventually Knight tracked him down and kindly took him back to his lodgings at 7 Pall Mall East, where he gave him a room. De Quincey’s ragged clothes and dirty shirt worried Sally Knight, and she asked her husband to raise the issue. ‘Why, to tell you the truth,’ De Quincey responded solemnly, ‘… I have, at this precise moment, no other shirt in the world. I left my last but one in a poor lodging-house in the Hampstead Road, because I could not pay for my night’s lodging.’ The Knights apparently saw to it that De Quincey got more shirts, but he was – to say the least – an idiosyncratic house guest, and more shirts did not necessarily solve the problem. ‘His sensitiveness was so extreme,’ recalled Knight, ‘in combination with the almost ultra-courtesy of a gentleman, that he hesitated to trouble a servant with any personal requests without a long prefatory apology.’ On one occasion, Sally Knight and the children were in the country, and Knight invited a few friends over to meet De Quincey. When the evening concluded, he tapped on De Quincey’s door to bid him good night, only to find him ‘sitting at the open window, habited as a prizefighter when he enters the ring. “You will take cold,” I exclaimed. “Where is your shirt?” “I have not a shirt – my shirts are unwashed.” “But why not tell the servant to send them to the laundress?” “Ah! how could I presume to do that in Mrs Knight’s absence?”’101

The Knights harboured De Quincey throughout the spring as he waited for money from his mother and apparently wrote for no one. ‘It was a pleasant time of intellectual intercourse for me,’ wrote Knight. ‘… I was associated with Hill, and St Leger, and De Quincey, who each thoroughly relished the conversation of the others.’102 In the north, however, the situation had come badly unravelled. Carlyle reported that De Quincey’s wife and children were ‘living or starving on the scanty produce of his scribble, far off in Westmorland’. Margaret had held on to Fox Ghyll as long as she could, but in the early spring she and the children had moved out of the cottage, and into her parents’ home at The Nab.103 It is not clear whether the Simpsons were away, or whether they simply did not want her living with them, but Margaret was ‘thrown entirely upon herself, with no soul (unless her eldest sister) to speak a word of comfort to her’. In July, harkening back to a time of much greater intimacy, De Quincey wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth and implored her to call on Margaret. Had he not sympathized with Dorothy thirteen years ago when Catharine had died? ‘Now, when I am prostrate for a moment – and the hand of a friend would enable me to rise before I am crushed, do not refuse me this service.’ He beseeched Dorothy to go and drink tea with Margaret. Talk over her distress. She must not ‘lie down too much’, but ‘walk in the fields when it is cool’, and ‘take some solid food’.104

De Quincey’s anxiety over Margaret was genuine, but undoubtedly exacerbated by his guilty awareness of the disparity between their respective situations. He was living in very agreeable circumstances with the Knights and waiting for money from his mother, while she took care of five young children and fought a losing battle against poverty and isolation. He was not above making excuses for failing to do all he could. ‘Repeated interruptions from the Press’, he assured Dorothy, had not allowed him to finish a long letter to Margaret.105 Yet it is virtually certain that he was not at this moment writing anything for publication. He had time to finish his letter. He just did not.

The money from his mother seems finally to have arrived in late July or early August. What is more, there had been an exciting change of plan. She had promised him £100 in total, but been able to send £300!106 De Quincey’s relief must have been inexpressible. Gathering his few belongings, he told Knight’s servant that he was leaving to rejoin his family at Grasmere. Yet two or three days later he was still in London. Knight traced him to ‘a miserable lodging on the Surrey side of Waterloo bridge’, where De Quincey explained that his mother’s draft was on ‘a London banker at twenty-one days’ sight’, and that when he had tried to cash it, he had been told that he would have to wait until the three weeks had passed. He could not face apologizing to Knight’s servant for the inconvenience of his unexpected return, and so he had taken lodgings and prepared to wait. Knight of course immediately explained that an advance was possible. ‘Come to me tomorrow morning, and I will give you the cash,’ he instructed De Quincey. ‘What? how? … Can the amount be got before the draft is due?’ ‘Never fear – come you – and then get home as fast as you can.’ De Quincey duly appeared at Knight’s, cashed the draft, and ‘went away home’, probably somewhere around 15 August, his fortieth birthday. He reached The Nab on 13 October. At some point he was well off his usual route north and passed through York, where he saw the famous American grammarian Lindley Murray.107

Why, especially given Margaret’s despair, did it take De Quincey so long to get to The Nab? His perplexity about his mother’s remittance is hard to understand. He had long been familiar with bank drafts, and it is highly unlikely that he was unaware of a fast method of raising money on them. Similarly, the trip to Grasmere could be made in under twenty-four hours, but on this occasion it took De Quincey two months. Illness may have waylaid him on the road, as it had on his way down to London, but at some level it seems clear that he was stalling. With £300 to pay his debts, and no publisher demanding work, De Quincey quite suddenly found himself tasting freedom for the first time in several years. He was apparently disinclined to give it up quickly. Margaret and the children gave him a great deal, but they also required a great deal, and it took De Quincey a while to muster the strength necessary to return. ‘Wife and children’, he once observed, ‘… being a man’s chief blessings, create also for him the deadliest of his anxieties.’ How was he as a writer to ‘win his inspiration for poetry or romance from the prelusive cries of infants clamouring for daily bread’?108

De Quincey’s reappearance at The Nab was undoubtedly an enormous relief to Margaret, and a joy for the children, particularly William and Margaret, who knew him much better than the three younger boys, Horace, Francis, and Fred. For all his reservations, De Quincey too seems to have settled in well, and he was soon caught up in the rounds of domestic life.109 The Wordsworth women were aware of his return, and maintained a catty interest in him. ‘How I should have enjoyed seeing you personate the Opium Eater,’ Wordsworth’s daughter Dora wrote to Edward Quillinan on 17 October. ‘By the way, the poor little man is returned – he reached the Nab Thursday last.’ De Quincey’s drug habit was a leading source of conversation. Sara Hutchinson had little time for his pretence. ‘He tells Miss W. that he had entirely left off opium before he came hither, but has been obliged to have recourse to it again; “as he has no Shoes to walk in & without exercise he is obliged to take it” – I suppose it is easier to send to the Druggists than to the Shoe Maker.’110

Wilson was holidaying at Elleray, and soon in touch. He and Lockhart had recently founded a literary annual called Janus. Would De Quincey be willing to write something for them? Wilson had also agreed to write a Quarterly Review article on the lectures of the Edinburgh philosopher Thomas Brown. Would De Quincey confide his views of Brown to Wilson, who did not ‘despair of being able to interweave them with my own in a way not unsatisfactory to your mind’.111 De Quincey promised to supply material for both ventures, but he resented these requests as much as ever, and he sent nothing for either one.

He was hardly in a position to be turning down work. Astonishingly, the £300 from his mother was nowhere near enough to clear his debts, and shortly after arriving at The Nab he suffered ‘the miserable consequences of an Arrest for £90’. He uncharitably blamed his own bad financial decisions on others, for ‘a little knowledge of business in those about me would have saved me from all these disgusting exertions and expenses’. He does not comment on life at The Nab, but the seven De Quinceys in the house – with or without Margaret’s parents – could not have been easy, and in December 1825 he notified the owner of Dove Cottage, Mrs Benson, that he wanted to renew his lease ‘for five years from next May day’.112

As he entered the New Year, De Quincey was hit by ‘heart-withering depression’. Only three or four times in as many months could he bear ‘going into the smallest company – such for instance as that of Rydal Mount’. Spring brought modest improvements in his condition. On or around 1 March he received £100 from his mother, though it disappeared almost upon arrival. At some point De Quincey held a ‘general conflagration’ of his papers, undoubtedly in an effort to streamline the move from The Nab back into Dove Cottage, which had stood empty – or, more accurately, jammed with his books and papers – for nearly six years.113 The family moved in early June, and were soon re-established in their old home.

De Quincey had not sold an article in eighteen months, and already he was skidding back into serious debt, despite large lump sums from his mother, a liberal annuity, and only one rent to pay. He claimed, as he often did, that he had ‘totally weaned’ himself from opium, but these were fictions that he told himself in desperate or in optimistic moments. When he ingested the drug in 1804, an ‘abyss of divine enjoyment’ suddenly revealed itself. Now, laudanum had ‘so much diminished’ the sensibility ‘of my stomach … that … nothing ever stimulates my animal system into any pleasure. Suffer I do not any longer: but my condition is pretty uniformly = o’.114 He concentrated on finding a way forward.

Writing for Blackwood’s was again his best opportunity. Indeed, returning to it had always lurked in the background as a possibility. De Quincey had badly offended Blackwood five and a half years earlier, but surely Wilson might help to bring about a reconciliation, particularly when he pointed to the popularity and diversity of De Quincey’s London output. Wilson caught immediately at the proposal, for having De Quincey in Edinburgh would be of immense help to him in terms of both his university lectures and his magazine writings. But De Quincey too would benefit: Edinburgh was closer and cheaper than London; Wilson took a sincere interest in him; and Blackwood’s would pay him well.

He signalled his change of attitude in a remarkable letter to Wilson of 10 June 1826. Seven months earlier Wilson had proposed that they collaborate on a Quarterly review of Thomas Brown. De Quincey had shirked the obligation then, but he was now anxious to compose the article ‘in partnership’. After years of pressing for just such an arrangement, Wilson must have been elated. De Quincey had one other request. Could Wilson ‘find time to enquire and let me know whether there is anything in which I could assist Mr Blackwood at this moment’? Wilson’s response was apparently in the affirmative. On 12 September the poet Samuel Rogers reported that ‘the opium-eater … lives in the house where we first found Wordsworth and dines with him to-day’.115 But within a few days De Quincey had packed his box and travelled north. His London life was over. His future lay in Scotland.