Urban Intellectual
[i]
Where was all his money going? De Quincey received an allowance from his mother that totalled around £200 a year; his work for the periodical press yielded an additional £150 in a good year; and there were also the ‘contributions’ which he was ‘not ashamed to raise among his too generous friends’. ‘I judge he has actually a better income than many tolerably endowed Clergymen, Rectors too, and Gentlemen, with large families,’ wrote Mrs Quincey.1 Part of the problem was simply De Quincey’s mismanagement of debt. Part of it was the various demands of a growing family. Part of it was his inveterate book-buying. And part of it was his disastrous habit of renting two, three, or even four lodgings simultaneously. There was, however, another major expenditure that clearly undermined his finances, and that he typically only hinted at: the expense of all the laudanum.
How much did the drug cost him a year? Wilson stated candidly that De Quincey’s ‘chief expense is opium on which he spends £150 a year’. It is notoriously difficult to determine how accurate such an estimate might be. But, to take a low figure, 25 drops of laudanum could be had for a penny (on the old currency system of 240 pennies in a pound). De Quincey’s daily consumption rose as high as 12,000 drops, but usually hovered somewhere around 300 drops.2 The higher dosage would have cost him a staggering £14 per week, though it is doubtful that he could have sustained these levels of ingestion for any length of time. The lower dosage would have cost him about 85 pence per week. Even on the assumption that De Quincey would probably have been at the lower end most of the time, it is possible to see that Wilson’s calculation is not an unreasonable one, especially as De Quincey was probably spending more than the assumed price for individual doses.3 What the exact numbers were we will never know, but De Quincey’s drug habit was plainly a large and ongoing expense for someone with his commitments. It is hardly surprising that he plunged from crisis to crisis, with brief and probably opium-inspired spikes of confidence in between. Unless he could find a way to bring his expenses down drastically, it was simply not possible for him to get his head above water, no matter how hard he worked, how much he borrowed, or how much he published.
Drugs and debt crippled De Quincey in much the same way. Both relationships were rooted in denial, fabrication, and guilt. Both shared a common psychology. De Quincey invariably found that the closer he came to breaking his dependence on laudanum, the fiercer his struggles became. Similarly, he felt ‘unusual happiness’ when he believed himself close to deliverance from debt, and yet he trembled in the knowledge that he would be ‘more furiously persecuted’ for the amount that remained ‘than ever I had been when my debts were heaviest’.4 As opium was the solution to opium, so borrowing was his best answer to debt, and the two central afflictions of his life reinforced and extended one another in seamless circles of misjudgement, despondency, and alienation.
[ii]
‘To our great astonishment’, wrote Blackwood on 18 September 1826, De Quincey suddenly appeared from nowhere ‘expressly to write articles for the Magazine’.5 Both men undoubtedly remembered the fractiousness that had led to the breakdown of their relationship nearly six years earlier, but both were also ready to move on. De Quincey’s timing was fortuitous. Lockhart had recently left Blackwood to become the editor of the Quarterly Review, and Maginn was proving too erratic for Blackwood to rely on with confidence. De Quincey had ‘faults and failings’, as Blackwood realized, ‘but I know … that he is a man of first rate abilities’. Others agreed. Next to Coleridge, said veteran Blackwood’s contributor David Macbeth Moir, De Quincey is ‘the most splendid of the mystics’.6
Determined on this occasion to please, De Quincey delivered a ‘very elegant article of 16 pages’ to Blackwood when he went to dinner at his house on 17 October. ‘Gallery of the German Prose Classics. By the English Opium-Eater. No. I. – Lessing’ appeared in the magazine for November and January, and featured key extracts from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön (1766), one of the most important works of German Romantic aesthetics. Maginn described it as a ‘very valuable’ contribution, but warned Blackwood that he ‘may wait a year for such another – & by that time you will have wished [De Quincey] at the bottom of the Forth’.7 The third and final instalment of the ‘Gallery’ appeared in February as a translation of E. A. C. Wasianski’s Immanuel Kant in Seinen letzten Lebensjahren (Last Days of Immanuel Kant; 1804). By stating that his translation drew from several different biographical sources, when in fact he had followed almost exclusively in Wasianski’s footsteps, De Quincey made it sound as though he had done more work than he actually had. At the same time, in ‘The Last Days’ he produces his most suggestive exploration of Kant by revealing his highly ambivalent attitude towards the philosopher, and the ways in which Kant’s rationality and hypochondria invoked within him a complicated fascination.8
His work on the ‘Gallery’ series made De Quincey the natural choice to review his friend Robert Pearse Gillies’s German Stories (1826), an anthology of tales published by Blackwood, and including the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Caroline Pichler, Laurids Kruse, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, and others. Several of the tales in Gillies’s collection turn upon the ‘appalling interest of secret and mysterious murder’, though De Quincey is not always deadly serious: ‘Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn.’ The review demonstrated how quickly and thoroughly he was able to reproduce Blackwood’s characteristic blend of erudition, irony, and audacity, for it possessed ‘all the mirth and Magic of the Magazine’, noted Moir.9
Meanwhile, alone again with the children, Margaret was bearing up. Dorothy Wordsworth called in at Dove Cottage on 15 November, and sent De Quincey a ‘letter of good tidings’. Her visit coincided with William’s tenth birthday. She had recently seen him ‘at the head of the school-boys; as it might seem a leader of their noontide games’. Horace was also ‘among the tribe’, and both boys were ‘as healthy-looking as the best’. Yet all was not well. Margaret’s manner had ‘something of sadness’ in it as she told Dorothy how De Quincey was ‘not likely very soon to be at home’. Dorothy delicately suggested to both wife and husband that perhaps a change of plan was necessary. There were ‘many impediments to literary employments to be regularly carried on in limited time, at a distance from the press, in a small house, and in perfect solitude’. If De Quincey had some kind of ‘permanent engagement’ in Edinburgh, ‘why not settle there for the time … Lodgings are cheap … and provisions and coals not dear’.10 Margaret was reluctant to discuss the idea with her husband, but bade Dorothy write to him about it. Both women undoubtedly hoped that he would see the wisdom in at least temporarily moving his entire family to Edinburgh.
Throughout these months De Quincey lived in Wilson’s new home at 6 Gloucester Place, where he kept mostly to his room, and survived on coffee, boiled rice and milk, and a piece of mutton ‘from the loin’. Betty, Wilson’s cook, received her daily dietary instructions from him ‘in silent awe … for, had he been addressing a duchess, he could scarcely have spoken with more deference’:
Owing to dyspepsia afflicting my system, and the possibility of any additional disarrangement of the stomach taking place, consequences incalculably distressing would arise, so much so indeed as to increase nervous irritation, and prevent me from attending to matters of over-whelming importance, if you do not remember to cut the mutton in a diagonal rather than in a longitudinal form.
Betty reverenced De Quincey, but these interviews ‘pretty well exhausted’ her patience. ‘Weel, I never heard the like o’ that in a’ my days,’ she exclaimed; ‘… a’ this claver aboot a bit of mutton nae bigger than a prin.’11
His opium addiction turned day into night. ‘An ounce of laudanum per diem prostrated animal life in the early part of the day,’ Wilson’s daughter Mary recollected. ‘It was no unfrequent sight to find him in his room lying upon the rug in front of the fire, his head resting upon a book, with his arms crossed over his breast, plunged in profound slumber.’12 At night, however, De Quincey came to life, working from eight in the evening until dawn (with a break towards midnight for a walk), or entertaining the company until three or four in the morning at one of Wilson’s dinner parties, where he was invariably accompanied by his laudanum bottle. ‘He could do nothing without this stimulant,’ recalled one guest. Wilson indulged De Quincey in his nocturnal routine. ‘Now and then as I went down-stairs at seven in the morning’, he remembered, ‘I would meet De Quincey coming up to bed with a candle in his hand.’ But Wilson also found his friend’s opium habit a frustration. ‘Hang you, De Quincey!’ he would cry. ‘Can’t you take your whisky toddy like a Christian man, and leave your d——d opium slops to infidel Turks, Persians, and Chinamen?’13
The two friends periodically ventured out together. One day they decided to take a trip to the seashore at Portobello, just east of Edinburgh, to test for themselves the theory ‘that every tenth wave was conspicuously larger than the other nine’. Unfortunately, when they arrived ‘the Yeomanry (of Mid-Lothian, I think)’ were executing with some difficulty a charge on the small beach. The sight of the men dampened Wilson’s spirits by reminding him too keenly of the years when he himself had served in the ranks of military volunteers. De Quincey, however, seems to have enjoyed the outing, and he and Wilson undertook subsequent expeditions to the beaches and countryside around Edinburgh. Not so pleasant were De Quincey’s infrequent trips to the university, where Wilson in his capacity as Professor of Moral Philosophy appeared to De Quincey as a figure of fun. ‘All dignity and impressiveness as a lecturer were destroyed by his drawing his forefinger down the side of his nose at the end of almost every paragraph … The hearer began to anticipate it whenever he saw Wilson coming to a pause, and the fulfilment of the expectation raised a sense of the ridiculous even in Wilson’s grandest passages.’14
In February 1827, De Quincey published one of his most famous essays in Blackwood’s. ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ seizes on the satiric and artistic approach to murder that he introduced four years earlier in his London article ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’. John Williams is again the focal point of his ruminations, though De Quincey quickly broadens his discussion to explore the history of murder, as well as the practice and theory that stand behind any art form, from a good painting to a good assassination. ‘People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse – and a dark lane,’ he remarks with the deadpan aplomb that gives the essay such energy.
Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us … Like Aeschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr Wordsworth observes, has in a manner ‘created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’.15
De Quincey’s breezy and ironized attitude towards violence helped to transform it into intellectual entertainment that could be marketed in a variety of fictive, impassioned, and comic guises, and that was rapidly consumed by a reading public insatiably interested in palatable versions of murder.
Several influences shaped De Quincey’s approach, from the accounts of criminals in the Newgate Calendar to Kant’s discussion of the sublime.16 Yet perhaps his most important source was Wilson, who in his April 1824 instalment of the Noctes mapped in several of the specific features of ‘On Murder’. Like De Quincey, Wilson evaluates disasters aesthetically: ‘I call this a very passable fire … I fear the blockheads will be throwing water upon [it], and destroying the effect.’ He is preoccupied with criminality: ‘a set of amusing articles might … be occasionally compiled from the recorded trials of our best British murderers’. He blends brutality and intellectualism: ‘one meets with the most puzzling malefactors, who perpetrate atrocious deeds upon such recondite principles, that they elude the scrutiny of the most perspicacious philosophers’. Wilson even mentions John Williams – ‘the Midnight Malletteer’, as he calls him – and details some of the more gruesome aspects of his crimes, such as the way in which he ‘tidily and tenderly’ covered up the Marr infant ‘when he knew that he had pierced its gullet like a quill’. In ‘On Murder’, Moir asserted, De Quincey sometimes approaches Wilson ‘so closely that I can scarcely persuade myself of there not being a little intermingling’.17
Yet while indebted to Wilson, De Quincey moves far beyond him in his brilliant conflation of ethics and aesthetics. On the one hand, the victim of a murder ‘ought to be a good man’, he insists. Indeed, ‘severe good taste’ demands that ‘the subject chosen ought also to have a family of young children wholly dependent on his exertions’. On the other hand, analysing the artistry of the murderer produces the liberation and fun that come from a temporary release from social values. ‘Everything in this world has two handles,’ he declares. ‘Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle … and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically … that is, in relation to good taste.’18
Such an approach opens the floodgates to a treatment of violence that is both disturbing and seductive. De Quincey’s remark that ‘every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it’ initiates a hilarious survey in which he observes that Descartes was almost murdered by ‘professional men’; Hobbes ‘was not murdered’ but ‘was three times very near being murdered’; Malebranche was in fact murdered by Berkeley; and Kant ‘had a narrower escape from a murderer than any man we read of’, except Descartes. In a discussion of artistic preconception, De Quincey bemoans the fact that ‘people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist, in our line, is generally embarrassed by too much animation’.19 These poker-faced lamentations run riot through the essay. In ‘On Murder’, De Quincey made violent crime a subject which could be detached from social circumstance and then exploited, intellectualized, and avidly enjoyed.
He stayed at Wilson’s until the early spring, when he made at least a brief return to Grasmere, for on 6 November 1827 Margaret gave birth to their sixth child and second daughter, Florence Elizabeth. De Quincey was back in the Lakes again in July, when a tourist who watched a rush-bearing ceremony at Grasmere church observed ‘the “Opium Eater” … Mr and Mrs Wordsworth, Miss Wordsworth and Miss Dora Wordsworth’.20 Perhaps they were all of the same party? De Quincey no doubt cherished these times in the Lakes with his family, but unremitting financial pressure meant that he could never afford to stay for long. Soon he was back in Edinburgh, though not with Blackwood’s. A new scheme was under way.
[iii]
The Edinburgh Saturday Post was a small, eight-page newspaper that espoused hardline conservative views. It was against freedom for Catholics, minorities, and the working class, while it stickled for ‘church and state’ and ‘the ascendancy of the aristocracy’. Established in May 1827, it was owned by the Edinburgh lawyer David Blackie, and written primarily by three opinionated and humourless Scottish Presbyterian ministers: Thomas Nelson, George Milligan, and Alexander Peterkin, who served as editor. It had a small circulation: 400 or 500 at the most.21
That summer the English Opium-Eater joined the three Scottish ministers on the Post, perhaps because of another falling-out with Blackwood, perhaps because he thought it might provide a more substantial income, or perhaps because he liked the idea of returning to the kind of work he had done during his days as editor of the Westmorland Gazette. Writing for the Post made some sense in terms of politics, for De Quincey knew how to produce the kind of inflated Toryism that pleased his readers and fellow contributors. Yet he was clearly the odd man out. His Englishness bristled at their Scottishness; his notoriety challenged their piety; and his irony chafed at their matter-of-factness. At Blackwood’s, his close friendship with Wilson made him an insider. At the Post, his broader perspective and delight in ambiguity made him an outsider. It is difficult to say which role he enjoyed more.
If De Quincey had hoped that the new position would prove more lucrative, he was to be disappointed. The Post paid only small sums for an individual article, and while many of these needed to be only a couple of hundred words long, he was forced to produce scores of them in order to generate a reasonable income. What is more, the weekly schedule of the newspaper – as opposed to the monthly timetable of a magazine like Blackwood’s – put him under incessant pressure. He wrote on a broad range of topics, from diet, drunkenness, phrenology, and religious controversy to the letters of Junius, the Bank of England, and the teaching of languages. De Quincey was the Post’s music critic, and reviewed several concerts, including four by the Italian Opera Company, which visited Edinburgh during the winter of 1827–8. After attending a performance of Rossini’s Barber of Seville at the Theatre Royal, De Quincey memorably described ‘Miss Fanny Ayton’ as sometimes forcing ‘her voice beyond its physical capacities, – occasioning thus, what approximates to a scream’.22 In a series of literary reviews he singled out Burke for possessing ‘the finest and subtlest understanding that appeared in the eighteenth century’; Southey as ‘a man of high moral feelings’; Wilson for his ability to generate ‘the very sublime of fun’; and Macaulay for writing ‘in a style stamped with the characters of youth, levity, inexperience and audacity’.23
Contemporary politics, including emigration, slavery, the elective franchise, free trade, and the activities of the great Irish liberator Daniel O’Connell, all came in for consideration. De Quincey shuddered at the thought of plans to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, which ‘would leave the Protestant establishment … defenceless’, and pave the way for Catholic emancipation. He used Ricardo to condemn Brougham, Malthus, and Owen, though his combination of strict political conservatism and liberal economic thought was highly anomalous, and soon made him a mark. The Post ‘is a clever paper’, wrote the rival Standard, ‘notwithstanding that it aims to be that most incomprehensible, and preposterous of all things – a Tory political economist’. De Quincey’s greatest concern during these months was the revolving door in the Prime Minister’s office, where George Canning and then Lord Goderich led coalition governments in 1827, before the appointment in January 1828 of the Duke of Wellington, to whom De Quincey looked for ‘nothing but uncompromising firmness’, even as he detected the same reprehensible ‘spirit of trimming’ that had been a hallmark of recent Tory administrations.24
In addition to providing all manner of copy for the Post, De Quincey replaced Peterkin as its editor for September and October 1827. The paper immediately became more literary and more English, while its review section increased seven-fold to almost two full pages a week. De Quincey’s most demanding task involved writing the lead political article. The Post was the only Edinburgh newspaper to appear on Saturday evening, which meant that it contained London news from Thursday. All other Edinburgh newspapers came out on Saturday morning, so their English news was only as recent as Wednesday. In order to obtain this advantage, the Post hired someone in London to buy all the London newspapers every Thursday, bundle them up by six o’clock in the evening, and place them on the express mail-coach to Edinburgh. All being well, the mail-coach would pull into the Princes Street post office around six o’clock on Saturday evening. One of De Quincey’s clerks would then pick up the bundle and race back to Register Street where the Post offices were located. De Quincey then had under an hour to read the London news and write the Post’s leader, which was quickly set and printed along with the rest of the newspaper. He grew greatly proficient at these short bursts of high-stress productivity, though by November either he or the Post’s proprietor Blackie had grown dissatisfied with the arrangement, and Peterkin was reinstated as editor.25
Edinburgh was gradually becoming home. De Quincey probably stayed at Wilson’s as he settled into fulltime work on the Post. Depressed, however, ‘by this entire separation from my family, and recollecting besides that the education of my two eldest children was now urgently calling for my attention’, he resolved to take his own lodgings, relieve some of the pressure on Margaret, and bring ten-year-old William and nine-year-old Margaret to the Scottish capital. De Quincey remembered travelling down to Carlisle to meet the two children on 3 October, but a letter of 22 September reveals that at least ‘Willy’ was already in Edinburgh by that date.26 It is not known where the three lodged, but it was probably ‘19 Pitt Street, 3rd flat – right hand door’, where they were certainly staying the following year. Dora Wordsworth believed that De Quincey was ‘coming home every month, & then every week’, and undoubtedly Margaret hoped for such a schedule, but time and money would have made it very difficult for De Quincey to leave Edinburgh.27 It seems more likely that he and Margaret endured further months of painful separation.
Friendships were as necessary to him as ever. He saw a good deal of William Hamilton, whom he had first met on his visit to Edinburgh in late 1815, and whose ‘pancyclopaedic acquaintance with every section of knowledge that could furnish keys for unlocking man’s inner nature’ animated and challenged De Quincey. The two discussed ‘schemes literary and philosophic’, as well as the deep attractions of animal magnetism. ‘If you are not better engaged this evening would you come over to Coffee – with the Children?’ Hamilton wrote in an undated but typically kind invitation.28
Wilson remained a close companion. One day he called on De Quincey and found him wrapped in a ‘sort of grey watchman’s coat, evidently made for a man four times his size, and bought probably at a pawnbroker’s shop’. De Quincey launched into a discussion of transcendental philosophy, during which he became so vehement that his coat fell open, and revealed that he had ‘nothing else on of any description whatever’. ‘You may see I am not dressed,’ De Quincey said. ‘I did see it,’ replied Wilson. De Quincey ‘thought it not of any consequence’. Wilson agreed. De Quincey folded the coat ‘round him and went on as before’.29
Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle became new and unexpected friends. After mauling Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister in the London three years earlier, De Quincey in the Post spoke slightingly of Carlyle’s Edinburgh Review article on Richter, which contained ‘the greatest oversight, on the part both of editor and reviewer that I remember throughout my whole acquaintance with periodical literature’. Yet despite these negative reviews, Carlyle ‘wished to know’ De Quincey, and in November the two men met ‘half accidentally’ at the house of Carlyle’s close friend John Gordon. De Quincey ‘grew pale as ashes at my entrance’, Carlyle observed; ‘but we soon recovered him again’.30
He is essentially a gentle and genial little soul; only that the Liver is diseased, and the ‘I-ety’ is strong and both together sometimes overset his balance. Poor soul! One of the most perfect gentlemen I have ever seen; and yet here he is living in lodgings, with two of his little children (writing for bread in the paltriest of all newspapers) while his wife with other two [sic] resides in Westmorland, – as a kind of ‘hostage’ to his creditors!
Carlyle lent De Quincey Richter’s Autobiography and suggested that he translate it for Blackwood’s, so that ‘he might raise a few pounds and “fence off” the Genius of Hunger yet a little while … He is an innocent man; and … extremely washable away’.31
The following week De Quincey visited the Carlyles at their Comely Bank home and sat till midnight. He is ‘one of the smallest man-figures I ever saw’, Carlyle remarked; ‘shaped like a pair of tongs … When he sat, you would have taken him, by candlelight, for the beautifullest little Child; blue-eyed, blonde-haired, sparkling face, – had there not been a something too, which said, “Eccovi, this Child has been in Hell!”’ His conversation captivated Jane: ‘What wouldn’t one give to have him in a Box, and take him out to talk!’ she declared. Writing to John Taylor in late December, Carlyle confirmed that ‘Mr De Quincey is here’, and what ‘may seem still stranger, he and I, the Reviewer and the Reviewed, ar[e] very good friends!’32
The feeling was mutual. De Quincey found Carlyle’s conversation ‘spiced with paradox and tending to extravagance’, but ‘brilliant in the extreme’. Commenting in the Post only days after they had met, he described Carlyle’s Edinburgh Review assessment of ‘The State of German Literature’ as revealing ‘a young and hopeful enthusiast, reverencing the aspirations and the destiny of human nature’. It was Jane, however, who most fully engaged De Quincey, for he experienced a severe illness at this time and she nursed him back to health, possibly even at Comely Bank. De Quincey ‘retained the most profound feeling of gratitude for her motherly kindness, combined with the highest possible opinion of her character and intellectual power … “She was, indeed, the most angelic woman I ever met upon this – God’s earth!”’33
His health did not improve for long. On an otherwise convivial evening at Hamilton’s in March 1828 De Quincey looked ‘rather care-stricken’, and when Carlyle called round at his lodgings shortly thereafter, he found him ‘invisible in bed’ at two in the afternoon. ‘His landlady, a dirty very wicked looking woman, said if he rose at all it was usually about five o’clock!’ Just over a month later De Quincey was ‘“in a manner living upon opium”; and … very low’.34
Action was necessary and he found the strength to effect some change. Dove Cottage ‘I directed to be shut up, servants all but one dismissed, and that one sent’ with the three youngest boys to live with their grandparents at The Nab, ‘a paradise to them from the mighty barns and spacious pastures which they thus obtained for playrooms’. Horace and Francis were old enough now to go to school in Rydal.35 Margaret, probably with Fred and her new baby Florence, then journeyed to Edinburgh to join De Quincey and their two oldest children, ‘so that for three-quarters of a year we had a larger establishment in Edinburgh than in Westmorland’. De Quincey had plans to teach William Greek, but the boy told Jane Carlyle that ‘his father wished him to learn it through the medium of Latin and he was not entered in Latin yet because his father wished to teach him from a grammar of his own which he had not yet begun to write’.36
Nothing from De Quincey had appeared in Blackwood’s for over a year, but the March issue featured his ‘Toilette of the Hebrew Lady’, a translation from Anton Theodor Hartmann’s Die Hebräerin am Putztische und als Braut (1809–10) that Moir aptly characterized as ‘full of learning and most curious research’. A sequel to ‘On Murder’ soon followed, but it lacked the excoriating wit of the original and Blackwood rejected it.37
Undoubtedly stung – De Quincey could never afford to work on an article and then not sell it – he redoubled his efforts for the Post. In May the paper changed its name to the Edinburgh Evening Post and Scottish Literary Gazette, and took an even more contentiously conservative view. De Quincey was again promoted to the editor’s chair, though this time he shared it with a newer recruit, the Reverend Andrew Crichton. Catholic emancipation was a focal point throughout these months, and De Quincey stepped up his attacks on the ‘systematic outrageousness’ of the Irish and the ‘abject timidity’ of the English.38
In the summer, Margaret and the children may have returned to The Nab, or possibly even to Dove Cottage. Perhaps De Quincey accompanied them for part of the time, but the weekly demands of his co-editorship were heavy, and he may not have been able to get away. Certainly he was in Edinburgh in September, when his old friend Matthew Davenport Hill called to learn that De Quincey had ‘for the tenth time renounced opium, which he said he had not tasted for one hundred and eighty days’.39 Before his friends, and in certain frames of mind, De Quincey may well have convinced himself of the accuracy of such a claim. In his more realistic moments, however, he knew that he was speaking false – as Hill probably suspected. His stress was too high and his dependence too deep. Opium remained a daily necessity.
At some point he returned briefly to live at Wilson’s, where one evening the future novelist and terror fiction writer Samuel Warren came to dinner. De Quincey – ‘dressed in black, pale, care-worn, and with a very high forehead’ – spoke languidly at first, but as the evening progressed he consumed laudanum and grew more animated. ‘Is such a thing as forgetting possible to the human mind?’ he asked the company. ‘Is not every impression it has once received, reproducible?’ Warren ‘was so absorbed with watching and listening to the conversation’ that he left ‘almost supperless, in spite of the kindly pressure of Mrs Wilson’.40
De Quincey, Margaret, and – almost certainly – the four children were back in Pitt Street by December. That month Blackwood’s featured his essay on ‘Rhetoric’, which he memorably defined as the ability ‘to hang upon one’s own thoughts as an object of conscious interest, to play with them, to watch and pursue them through a maze of inversions, evolutions, and Harlequin changes’.41 For Wordsworth, the article demonstrated that ‘whatever [De Quincey] writes is worth reading’, though he added mildly that it contained ‘some things from my Conversation – which the Writer does not seem aware of’. More remarkably, ‘Rhetoric’ led an anonymous essayist in the popular London Athenaeum to urge De Quincey to put his name forward for the Professorship of Logic at the recently founded University of London. ‘We adjure him, by the spirits of Aristotle and of opium … to consider deeply before he declines offering himself as a candidate.’42
As Christmas neared, the Carlyles were in touch. They had recently moved to Craigenputtock in Dumfriesshire, and word had reached them that De Quincey had been enquiring after Jane. Would he come and visit? ‘Then indeed we had made a fair beginning, and the “Bog School” might snap its fingers at the “Lake School” itself,’ Carlyle wrote facetiously. But De Quincey was in no position to make such a visit, as perhaps the Carlyles realized. His ‘health and spirits were much broken’, and his resources soon to be ‘closed up’.43 By 27 December he had moved his family from Pitt Street to Porteous’s Lodgings, 18 Duncan Street, almost certainly in an attempt to save money and evade creditors. Margaret’s health was so bad that De Quincey’s mother and uncle began to discuss ‘the means of giving help in case your poor Children should be left without the care of a Mother’.44 William, now twelve years old, fell seriously ill for a few weeks in early spring, while ten-year-old Margaret was sent for more than a year to the houses of old friends, ‘partly as a visitor at Professor Wilson’s, but chiefly, as a visitor, almost as an adopted child’, in the Darnaway Street home of Captain Thomas Hamilton, the younger brother of William Hamilton. ‘Never mind her dress,’ he told De Quincey gently on one occasion, as the young girl probably lacked an appropriate outfit for visiting. On another, he and his wife hoped to see the De Quinceys at dinner as soon as Margaret ‘feels equal to such an exertion’.45
In the spring of 1829, De Quincey was hard at work for three different Edinburgh periodicals. As radicals and reformers successfully pushed forward an agenda that sought to extend the franchise and circumscribe the power of the aristocracy, De Quincey wrote Evening Post essays denouncing ‘the sweeping hand of liberalism’, and his first explicitly political article for Blackwood’s on the duplicity of ‘The Duke of Wellington and Mr Peel’ over the Catholic Emancipation Act, which had gone forward as De Quincey feared, and which he was convinced struck a ruinous blow to the Established Church by allowing Catholics in Britain to participate fully in political and public life.46 Yet politics were not all that preoccupied De Quincey, for at this same time he also contributed a review of the writings of the Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni to a new sixteen-page Saturday magazine, the Edinburgh Literary Gazette, which a few weeks later featured his three-part ‘Sketch of Professor Wilson’. Cast in the form of a letter to an American tourist, the essay is most notable for the almost risible lengths De Quincey goes to in order to avoid discussing Wilson as an intellectual. After the first instalment was published, Wilson wrote directly to De Quincey to ask that the ‘Sketch’ be more scholarly and substantial: ‘I wish you would praise me as a lecturer on Moral Philosophy … Am I a good critic?’ De Quincey promised a fourth essay devoted to Wilson’s ‘particular position … in relation to modern literature’, but no such essay appeared.47 For all the kindness he had received from Wilson over the past few years, he could not bring himself to praise him as a writer and thinker.
The De Quincey family began winding up their ‘Scotch affairs’ in May, but it was the middle of June before they finally mounted a mail-coach – ‘which mail we had wholly to ourselves’ – and set off ‘under a heavenly summer morning’ for The Nab, which they reached early the following day.48 Wordsworth called shortly thereafter, but was not admitted ‘on account of illness which confines [De Quincey] in a great measure to his bed’. ‘This grieves me much,’ Wordsworth declared kindly, ‘as he is a delightful Companion and for weightier reasons, he has a large family of young Children with but a slender provision for them.’ Wordsworth and his son John (De Quincey’s former pupil, now an ordained clergyman) made other stops at the cottage over the next few weeks, as did the poet’s daughter Dora and her friend, the author Maria Jane Jewsbury. De Quincey promised to return these compliments, but on 17 July Dora snidely observed that his ‘“tomorrow” for calling at Rydal Mount [has] not yet arrived’.49
A full explanation came two days later. ‘My illness was a fever,’ De Quincey told Wordsworth, ‘caught, I believe from a fellow passenger on the Edinburgh Mail upon the 12th of June.’ For eighteen days he had been ‘utterly prostrated’, existing on only a little lemonade or ginger beer, and ‘scarcely able for a fortnight to crawl from room to room’. Even now, five weeks later, he was ‘not … strong enough … to go more than a few yards into the field behind the house’, though in other respects he felt ‘perfectly well and in good spirits’. In the ‘course of this week I shall certainly be able to come over’ to Rydal Mount for a visit.50
At least part of this account was a fib. De Quincey may well have been sick, but there was no passenger on the Edinburgh mail, as he himself made clear when he declared that he and his family had the coach ‘wholly’ to themselves. Why did he tell Wordsworth otherwise? The answer seems obvious enough. Opium, not fever, had caused his illness. In order to gird himself for the departure from Edinburgh, De Quincey had probably increased his dosage. Once back in the Lakes the drug took its revenge. De Quincey wanted none of this known to the poet, who had sufficient experience of Coleridge and De Quincey to spot the telltale signs of drug abuse. When Wordsworth called, De Quincey kept out of sight. When politeness finally demanded he contact him directly, he falsified the reasons for his ill-health. De Quincey did not want an open breach, and he may even have been gratified by Wordsworth’s neighbourliness, but it came too late to make much of a difference. When it had mattered, the poet had been both interfering and aloof. Now his calls seemed mainly an intrusion. For De Quincey, it was bad enough that he was still an addict; he did not need to be judged for it, especially by the Wordsworths.51
The return to the Lakes brought the entire De Quincey family together again, and must have occasioned enormous relief in grandparents, parents, and children. What is more, before them all lay a brief respite. Improbable though it was, De Quincey had just become an estate owner.
Storm clouds had been gathering over The Nab for many months. When Margaret’s grandfather William Park died in 1825, he left the estate to Margaret’s mother Mary, though it was at the time so badly encumbered with debt that by 1828 she and her husband faced the possibility of having to sell. In desperation, they turned to De Quincey. He of course had no money, but he did have a great deal of experience with moneylenders, and he soon concocted an ingenious plan.
John Simpson urgently needed £900 to pay off a series of debts. He valued The Nab at £3000. De Quincey offered to raise a second mortgage in order to purchase the estate from him. Simpson agreed to sell to De Quincey for £2500, and in the winter and spring of 1829 letters – and then De Quincey himself – shuttled back and forth between Edinburgh, the Lake District, and Manchester as a deal gradually came together. A Mr Gerard Pendlebury was willing to advance money on The Nab, and a mortgage was finally fixed at £1400. Simpson would get the £900 he needed. The remaining £500 would go to De Quincey. Each was answerable for the interest on his share. De Quincey would eventually be responsible for discharging the £1400 principal of the mortgage. In addition, he agreed to pay interest of 3½ per cent on the equity of £1100, on the understanding that when Margaret’s parents (and her mentally impaired uncle William) died, that sum would be paid to the parties stipulated in John Simpson’s will. Finally, at his death, Simpson wanted his favourite grandchild, De Quincey’s eldest son William, to receive £500, and De Quincey undertook to guarantee this sum as well. In total, then, he would eventually pay out £3000 – his father-in-law’s estimate for the value of the property – and become owner of The Nab. The deal hit various snags along the way, but came together in May, and by the middle of June the De Quinceys were installed at their estate.52
In the long term, the plan was madness. Given De Quincey’s financial history, there was not the remotest possibility that he was going to be able to keep up with even the interest payments. But, as he rather disarmingly put it, ‘You know there is such a thing as buying a thing and yet not paying for it,’ and in the short term, everybody won.53 Simpson paid his debts. De Quincey put £500 in his pocket. And poor Mr Gerard Pendlebury remained blissfully unaware of the frustrations in store for him.
Liberated from his most pressing anxieties, De Quincey wanted to share his good fortune, and he wrote ebulliently to the Knights to ask them to come and visit:
Think what a glorious El-Dorado of milk and butter and cream cheeses and all other dairy products, supposing that you like those things, I can offer you, morning, noon, and night. You may absolutely bathe in new milk, or even in cream, and you shall bathe if you like it. I know that you care not much about luxuries for the dinner-table, else, though our luxuries are few and simple, I could offer you some temptations: mountain lamb, equal to Welsh; char, famous to the Antipodes; trout and pike from the very lake within twenty-five feet of our door; bread, such as you never presumed to dream of, made of our own wheat.
The Knights were unable to take up De Quincey’s invitation, but in October the Hills accepted what was probably a very similar offer.54
De Quincey enjoyed extolling the rural virtues of his new home, but it was soon clear that The Nab was not the haven he had hoped it would be. Space was at a premium. The house was much larger than where the De Quinceys had been living in Edinburgh, but at least sixteen people were squeezing into it: the De Quinceys and their six children; Margaret’s parents and uncle and possibly some of her sisters; and several servants. The bustle it occasioned was too much for Margaret, who was pregnant again, and so De Quincey planned to take her, two children, and two servants, and remove to Dove Cottage, which of course he was still renting. Some time that autumn a boy, Julius, was born, though it is unclear whether he arrived at The Nab or Dove Cottage.55
Blackwood’s was missing him, though he had little inclination to write, and there was not much time or quiet had he wanted to. ‘When he wons in Westmorland’, Wilson wrote in the Noctes for December 1829, ‘he forgets Maga, and a’ the rest o’ the civileezed warld.’56 It was – it need hardly be said – a lifestyle he could not afford, and by the New Year deep cracks were visible in the financial dyke he had constructed around The Nab. De Quincey needed work, and he did not much mind who gave it to him. He wrote to liberal-minded friends. Did Knight know how ‘a man might make his way to a professorship in the London University’? Hill was one of the founding members of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which sought to make good books available at low prices to the working class. Did he know of ‘any literary work, tolerably lucrative’? De Quincey also tapped Tory contacts. To Blackie, he promised ‘continued and effectual help’.57 Lockhart was one of the advisers on John Murray’s new Family Library series, and in reply to De Quincey’s ‘application’ he suggested works on either the Lake District or Oxford, to which De Quincey responded with an offer to produce ‘A History of the Crusades’ or a ‘Digest … of the Corpus Historiae Byzantinae’.58
Wisely, De Quincey contacted Blackwood as well, and placed before him a host of new proposals. Might he be interested in a collection of New Canterbury Tales, a book patterned on both the Chaucerian precedent and the Gothic Canterbury Tales (1797–1805) of the sisters Harriet and Sophia Lee? ‘I am perfectly willing’, Blackwood answered, ‘to give you Two Hundred Guineas for the entire copyright of your work should it extend to two volumes of 400 pages.’ De Quincey also assured Blackwood he had ‘several papers in a state of forwardness’ for the magazine, including one on the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, another on the history of logic, and a third ‘on the flight of the Calmuck Tartars from Russia to the frontiers of China’.59
Wordsworth called in mid-February and saw De Quincey (perhaps for the last time) looking very well, and busy on his Canterbury Tales. But shortly thereafter Margaret was ‘at the point of death from jaundice’, and one of the children contracted erysipelas. More bizarrely, in March ‘a servant woman of mine went mad, and threatened and continually plotted destruction to herself and several persons of my family … For a fortnight and a little more, were we obliged to keep a howling – yelling maniac in our house.’ In the midst of this chaos De Quincey tried to write and seems to have produced a reasonable amount, though he informed Blackie that what he had attempted for him was ‘so poor and so unsuitable, and run out to such a length, that I have burned it’.60
He had to get away. London was a possibility, but it was soon supplanted by Edinburgh. It could not have been an easy decision, especially given Margaret’s poor health and their newest baby. At the end of March, De Quincey missed ‘meeting the interest on a large mortgage’, and was soon harassed by ‘disagreeable business’ undoubtedly related to The Nab. On ‘Monday afternoon May 24’ he returned alone to Edinburgh, less than a year after he had packed up his family and moved back to the Lakes.61 Wilson once again provided him with a room at his house in Gloucester Place. De Quincey never ceased to fantasize about living in the Lake District as a gentleman scholar, but he spent most of his career in the city as a deadline-driven intellectual.
Returning to the routine he had established four years earlier when he had first moved into Gloucester Place, De Quincey worked long hours and wrote often in consultation with Wilson. His health was as precarious as ever, and at one point ‘an accidental blunder’ of Wilson’s cook inflicted upon him a dreadful colic. Peaks in his opium ingestion brought both stamina and ‘continued … suffering from Diarrhoea’.62 He remained reclusive. The University of Edinburgh student and future historian John Hill Burton called at Wilsons in the hope of seeing him, but ‘the Opium-Eater … chose neither to appear in the drawing-room nor the dining-room’. On another evening, however, Blackwood’s eldest son Alexander called on some matter of business and did De Quincey ‘the favour of sitting a half hour with me’.63
Wilson brought his house guest alive in the pages of Blackwood’s when he gave ‘The Opium-Eater’ a large speaking part in the Noctes for April, May, June, and August 1830. The portrait contains caricature, but it is rooted in Wilson’s many years of intimacy with De Quincey, and communicates a lively sense of what it was like to watch and listen to him as he discoursed on Wordsworth, Ricardo, Kant, Coleridge, sublimity, education, periodical literature, and much else. The Opium-Eater is seen ‘filling up drops of laudanum in the minimeter to 120’, and boasting that he has reduced his daily dose of laudanum to five hundred drops.64 His hours are erratic: he lies ‘in bed till sax o’clock o’ the afternoon’. His digestion is delicate: ‘Edinburgh beef and mutton, however long kept, are difficult of mastication.’ His manners are impeccable: ‘were I ask’t to gie a notion o’ your mainners to them that had never seen you, I shou’d just use twa words, Urbanity and Amenity’.65 His writings are highly prized. ‘Will you accept from me … an essay, to be entitled, “Comparative Estimate of the English and Scotch Character?”’ the Opium-Eater asks Christopher North. ‘My dear sir,’ North responds, ‘when did I ever decline an article of yours?’66
In August, De Quincey began a period of great productivity for Blackwood’s with the publication of ‘Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays’, which he addressed to Christopher North, and which he revised after Wilson read the conclusion and suggested that it should be extended. Confrontational to the point of character assassination, De Quincey describes Kant as ‘something of a brute’ who ‘never read any thing at all’.67 Yet in the essay he follows Kant in identifying God, freedom, and immortality as the three major concerns of philosophy; successfully outlines the key difference between the categories of Aristotle and Kant; and comments incisively on a number of minor works, including Toward Perpetual Peace (1795).68
Politics, too, fixed De Quincey’s attention, and from September through February he produced five jeremiads in direct response to the ominous events of the day. On the Continent, the second French Revolution took place in late July 1830. The Bourbons were finally overthrown, and the Duc d’Orléans proclaimed king. Revolution spread across Europe. In Britain, there was mounting pressure on the government to address such issues as the enormous national debt and the abolition of slavery. William IV had succeeded to the throne following the death of George IV in late June, and Tories feared that he would prove more sympathetic to reform and the Whigs. In the autumn there were disturbances throughout rural southern England, as protesters destroyed machinery and demanded higher wages. Wellington’s government collapsed in November, and the Whigs, under Lord Grey, came to power for the first time in a generation. Lord John Russell introduced a Reform Bill in March 1831.
Stunned by these incidents, De Quincey in the five essays ranges across British history in order to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of reform. He draws extensively on the anecdotes and statistics that filled the mass media, as well as on the rhetoric and ideas of Milton, Wordsworth, and especially Burke. ‘REVOLUTION! – French Revolution! – Dread watchword of mystery and fear! – Augury of sorrow to come!… Is it then indeed true that another French Revolution has dawned?” 69 Expansive and overheated, the series constitutes De Quincey’s reflections on the second Revolution in France, and the momentous events that followed in its wake.
These articles give voice to genuine political anxiety, but they were also written to order. Gone were the days when De Quincey mocked Blackwood over the dullness of his magazine, or gave notice that he was willing to become its Atlas. From the late 1820s onward Blackwood commissioned specific political articles, and De Quincey complied with his directions to the point of obsequiousness. ‘I shall of course immediately attend to your wishes,’ he wrote to Blackwood in August. And ‘with respect to the suggestion as to the higher grounds of religious principle’, he told him a month later, ‘– I assure you that I have of late years most sincerely held such views myself.’70
Alongside his political work, De Quincey in September and October published his lengthy review of James Henry Monk’s recent biography of the great eighteenth-century Cambridge classicist Richard Bentley. De Quincey devised the review in collaboration with Wilson, and is heavily indebted to Monk throughout, but he also uses his extensive classical knowledge to point to errors in Monk, who duly corrected them when a second edition was called for.71 The Bentley articles were generally credited to De Quincey’s old nemesis William Maginn. ‘They are not written by me,’ he rejoined, ‘but by a much cleverer fellow, and a much better scholar, Thomas De Quincey.’ Moir compared ‘what the other periodicals have said on Monk’s book’, and was confident that ‘the eloquence and learning of Maga’s critiques will shine more distinctly preeminent. Scholastic literature is evidently De Quincey’s forte, and within that magic circle not one of his contemporaries … is fit to try a fall with him.’72
If Blackwood’s featured classical studies as a kind of alternative to its political agenda, it also used classicism to serve that agenda, as is clear in De Quincey’s January, February, May, and June 1831 review of a series of new books on Samuel Parr, the Whig scholar and polemist. The Parr articles display the same voluminous classical erudition that is so much in evidence in the Bentley review, but De Quincey’s assessment is blatantly political. Sydney Smith called Parr ‘by far the most learned man of the day’, and Macaulay referred to him as ‘the greatest scholar of the age’. For De Quincey, however, a first-rate liberal makes a third-rate classicist, and after aligning Parr with the new Whig government, he dismisses him as vain and vulgar.73
Blackwood continued to pay for De Quincey’s contributions at the rate of ten guineas a sheet (sixteen printed pages), and he added to this total when articles were delivered in a timely way. Yet De Quincey frequently sent promised material late, and rarely did he send an essay in its entirety, so that Blackwood grudgingly found himself doling out money in a convoluted series of instalments, advances, credits, and loans. When De Quincey complained of poor treatment or became befuddled by arrangements he himself had requested, Blackwood brought him firmly into line. ‘I simply adhered to a written agreement, which I concluded you should have been as much aware of as I was,’ he informed De Quincey in one testy exchange. ‘… I do not expect blame to be thrown upon me if I adhere to my ordinary rules of business.’74
But Blackwood was not all business. In November he responded generously when De Quincey turned to him in crisis. It was Margaret. She had now been without her husband for six months, and she was again coming undone. Burgeoning personal and financial strains appear to have forced her to leave The Nab shortly after he departed for Edinburgh. She and the seven children took lodgings either with or near Margaret’s sister Anne, most likely at Lingstubbs, a farmhouse lying just west of Penrith. Living in lodgings, however, soon produced its own set of problems, and Margaret was now ‘threatening suicide’, a ‘condition of spirits’ De Quincey took seriously, as ‘at a very early period of her life she really did make an attempt of the kind she now threatens’. He sent her long letters addressing ‘each particular grievance’ and ‘endeavouring to tranquillize her mind’, but money was what was needed. At five in the morning on 20 November, an exhausted De Quincey wrote a desperate letter to Blackwood asking him for yet another advance. Under the circumstances, Blackwood could hardly have refused him, but he replied in a ‘very liberal manner’ with ‘over-pay’ for De Quincey’s ‘exertions’.75
Something had to be done. The November crisis passed, but living apart had never worked well for either husband or wife, and Margaret was now worn to the breaking point. De Quincey’s solution – long ago suggested by Dorothy Wordsworth and perhaps at the heart of Margaret’s most recent cries for help – was to move his entire family to Edinburgh. Initially, he wondered if Blackwood might do him the favour of obtaining some information about the furnished houses in Portobello, but in the event he moved from Wilson’s to 7 Great King Street, an expensive address in Edinburgh’s New Town. Margaret and the children travelled to Edinburgh in late December, and the family was installed in their new home by early in the New Year.76
De Quincey and Margaret never again lived apart. Her mental and physical health remained fragile, as indeed did his, but they both tried hard to support each other, and to care for their children. ‘Even during the long night-watches … my mother was with him much of the time,’ their daughter Florence remembered. De Quincey needed ‘a certain amount of perfect quiet, though not necessarily of solitude … for the shaping of his work’, and Margaret carefully trained the children ‘to respect his busy times’. Husband and wife superintended ‘the behaviour of the children at the dinner-table, examining each little scaramouch to see that it had not effected an entrance with unwashed hands’. Florence especially recalled her father’s tenderness on those occasions when her ‘small ill-regulated uproar’ in the middle of the night brought his ‘kind, careful arms’, which rescued her ‘from a weariful bed’ and carried her ‘to the bright warm room’, where she enjoyed the ‘dignity and delight of “sitting up with papa”’.77
Yet in spite of the consolations it brought, Great King Street created as many problems as it solved. De Quincey claimed that he took such a large house with the intention of keeping boarders, but it is difficult to believe that he seriously pursued this scheme. The rent was approximately £200 a year, and when he fell into arrears he ‘dipped into a new term’ in order to defer payment.78 At some level De Quincey seems to have felt that he deserved to live in a beautiful home such as Greenhay or Westhay or Great King Street – that as an adult he deserved the luxury that had surrounded him as a child – and he repeatedly convinced himself that ‘his own powers of work’ would enable him to meet his heavy financial responsibilities. Yet within months he conceded that renting Great King Street brought new ‘misfortunes’, and that he was ‘not wholly without reasons for self-blame’.79 Later, in a much less generous moment, he criticized Margaret, who ‘brought me into heavy difficulties … Not that she had any expensive habits in her own person, but that she was incapacitated by temper from controlling a household of vicious servants such as we found requisite in Great King Street and she was preyed upon openly and secretly by grasping relatives.’80
Creditors soon descended. Thomas Benson sent a representative to call on De Quincey to enquire about payments due on Dove Cottage. De Quincey bought himself some time by paying part of what was owed, but Benson’s representative soon returned to demand ‘payment of a sum considerably larger’, which De Quincey could not find. Wednesday, 11 May 1831 marked a new low, as he came for the first time into contact with the Scottish legal system. John Carfrae, a bookseller, entered a ‘Protest’ (the formal declaration in writing that a bill has been presented and payment refused) against him for £37.16s.6d.81 No other court action followed, so De Quincey must have been able to pay or placate the bookseller.
Prostrated by influenza in early July, he suspended work on ‘several articles in preparation’ and turned his thoughts back to politics, almost certainly on instructions from Blackwood.82 ‘On the Approaching Revolution in Great Britain’ was published in August, and in the article De Quincey ratcheted up his rhetoric from previous assaults on Reform by writing in the guise of an elderly English gentleman who feels not only betrayed by the new Whig government, but certain that he faces the ‘absolute ruin’ of his property and investments. ‘At a time of life when energy languishes … I am consumed with a burning – a just – I will presume to say, a righteous indignation at the atrocious scenes now passing in this country.’ No matter how far he himself sunk into poverty, De Quincey always wrote for Blackwood’s as a champion of aristocratic privilege. Yet that summer his private life must also have seemed a touchstone of British public life, for in both he saw deepening unease and widespread instability.83
Beset by ‘illness or nervousness’ throughout the autumn, De Quincey wrote nothing for Blackwood’s.84 With no money coming in, his situation grew critical, especially at The Nab, where payments on the property were badly in arrears, and Pendlebury was threatening to sell. In December or early January, De Quincey travelled first to London, most probably to speak with moneylenders, and then on to visit his mother, from whom he also hoped to raise funds. ‘From the love we all bear to the place’, Margaret wrote to the solicitors representing Pendlebury, ‘there need be no doubt that we will all of us make any sacrifice rather than endanger its loss.’85
De Quincey returned to Edinburgh on the afternoon of 31 January. His trip had not been wholly successful. Mrs Quincey came to his aid once again by agreeing to pay the £180 owing on The Nab, but she stipulated that the money was a loan to be recouped out of his annual £200 allowance, which would now be reduced to £100 for two years. The consequences of such a bargain were immediately apparent: in the enervating see-saws of his existence, the situation at The Nab temporarily improved, while in Edinburgh his circumstances further declined. Less than a day after his return, he wrote distractedly to John Wilson’s brother Robert, a banker, to explain that he was facing ‘utter ruin’ if he could not ‘turn aside’ a bill for £30. Wilson apparently sent the money, for De Quincey did not suffer prosecution. At around this time he also obtained £110 from his sister Jane, though that sum too quickly disappeared – to Dove Cottage, to The Nab, to Great King Street, to the necessities involved in raising a family of seven.86
In an effort to retrench, De Quincey sold some of his books (a sure sign of desperation), and on 15 May he moved his family from Great King Street to 1 Forres Street, a less expensive address but still in the New Town.87 His children seem to have borne up fairly well under these strains. It was almost certainly at this address that two of his younger sons played one day with the future author Francis Espinasse, who described them as ‘flaxen-haired, fair-complexioned, with angelic looks and English accents’. Their ‘name was De Quincey’, they said proudly, and ‘their papa … was “an author’”. On 23 July, even De Quincey himself had reason to be pleased. ‘My debts … are now under two hundred,’ he assured Blackwood, ‘– whereas 3 months ago they were little under three.’88
Overall, however, his situation continued to worsen. ‘Dunned at times furiously: and at times … at my wits’ end’, De Quincey only a day later could not pay ‘for Water Duty … and there the penalty is of course to lose this sine-qua-non of life’.89 On 2 August he faced a ‘small debt case’, and twelve days later he was forced to leave home ‘suddenly in expectation of a process of arrest’. Then, some time after 2 September, he was again forced into hiding. ‘It would be dangerous to me, that any servant should know where I am,’ he reported to Blackwood; but his son Horace would bring ‘any communication … left at Forres Street, in 15 or 18 minutes at farthest’.90
With so many creditors at his heels, De Quincey inevitably faced a curious procedure in Scottish law known as being ‘put to the horn’. In Scotland, a debtor could not technically be imprisoned, so a legal fiction developed in which the Crown demanded that a debtor satisfy his creditors. If the debtor failed to do so, he was held to be in violation of a royal command, and his offence was publicly announced by a messenger-at-arms, who blew three blasts on a horn at the market-place in Edinburgh, and then denounced the ‘rebel’ by name. De Quincey suffered this very public humiliation on a number of occasions, the first of which was 20 September 1832 for a debt of £10 owing to his former Duncan Street landlord John Cathcart Porteous.91
The legal progression was simple: from ‘protest’, to ‘horning’, to prison. De Quincey gave Porteous £5 at the time of the horning, but he still owed him £5, and when it was not paid as promised, Porteous took the next step. On 2 October he had De Quincey imprisoned in the Canongate Tolbooth, a spired, dark-mouthed building near the foot of the Royal Mile. De Quincey’s mortification must have been acute, and within hours he had negotiated his release on the grounds of ill-health. ‘The usual pressure upon myself … is just now at high pressure mark,’ he told Blackwood, ‘– a furnace 7 times heated.’ Three weeks later De Quincey was again arrested, but was able to purchase his release with the money raised ‘by a composition’. In mid-December he returned to the prison according to the conditions of the bail bond, but was liberated the same day, probably due to the forbearance of Porteous.92
In the middle of these miseries, tragedy struck. ‘We have had the misfortune, which to us is a very heavy one, of losing our youngest child – a boy of rather more than 3 years old,’ De Quincey wrote to William Hamilton. Julius ‘died in his mother’s arms’. Margaret’s shock was aggravated by the fact that she had not ‘been informed of his danger by the Surgeons’, and that when she rose ‘at midnight to resume her charge of him, she mistook the extreme tranquillity of his death for sure indications of his recovery; and was not undeceived until within one half minute before he expired’. De Quincey went on to make a peculiar request. Margaret wanted the child buried in Grasmere, and De Quincey had been ‘informed that the proper course – is to ask permission of some friend, who may happen to have a vault or a piece of burying ground in Edinburgh: for depositing the coffin there during the next 9 or at the utmost 12 months’. Did Hamilton have a vault in Edinburgh? ‘Would it be possible or convenient for you to grant us the permission we are seeking?’93
It is not known how Hamilton responded, but Julius was buried in Edinburgh, and the straitened circumstances of the family make it highly unlikely that he was ever moved. During preparations for the funeral, De Quincey was forced to flee when one of his creditors somehow ascertained that he was at home, and sent an officer around to arrest him. He could not even grieve in peace. He later wrote mournfully of Julius: ‘With respect to a little child of my own, whom we lost at three years old, I made a discovery – which but for the merest accident I never should have made – that his happiness had been greatly disturbed in a way that afflicted me much.’ Five months after Julius’s death, on 27 February 1833, De Quincey and Margaret’s eighth and last child, Emily Jane, was born.94
[v]
‘I myself, though much debilitated … have never wholly given up writing,’ De Quincey declared in the summer of 1832. Indeed, though there were occasional periods of dormancy, he continued to deliver copy at a remarkable rate given the turmoil that constantly threatened to engulf him. Two and a half years earlier he had asked Hill about the possibility of writing for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Nothing came of his enquiries then, but De Quincey had been back in touch with Knight, who was currently publishing a ‘Gallery of Literary Portraits’ under the Society’s auspices, and who was pleased to receive from De Quincey a ‘spirited memoir of Milton’, which he published that summer.95
De Quincey continued to write only about a third of what he promised to Blackwood, but that still meant a good deal of material. His 1832 novel Klosterheim: or the Masque was published in a single volume, and appeared under the signature of ‘THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER’. De Quincey’s attitude towards the project was workmanlike, to say the least. Do you ‘wish to have Klosterheim lengthened’? he asked Blackwood. ‘…I can throw in a chapter of 8–10, or 12 pp … if you think this of importance.’96 Blackwood evidently did think it ‘of importance’, and De Quincey duly supplied an extra chapter.
Set at the midway point of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Klosterheim concerns Maximilian, an avenging Catholic hero whose rightful place as Landgrave has been usurped by a duplicitous tyrant in league with the Protestant forces of Sweden. Dressed as a mysterious masque, Maximilian perpetrates a series of murders and abductions that are finally shown to be fabrications, the product of special effects and ‘victims’ who go willingly. In the sublimely operatic conclusion, the Landgrave unveils the body of a dead woman. He believes her to be Maximilian’s lover Paulina, but she is in fact his own daughter Adeline, whose execution he has unwittingly commissioned. The Landgrave dies, and Maximilian is restored to his rightful place as ruler of Klosterheim.
On one level the novel is a highly conventional example of the kind of Gothic romance made famous by Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s. On another it is De Quincey’s most ambitious exploration of intrigue and betrayal, and reveals the perplexed nature of his own political sympathies, for in Klosterheim the Protestant De Quincey gives the Catholics the victory, and confounds his attraction to power with his affinity for the outcast. On still another level, the novel is redolent of De Quincey’s private experience. Like the mind of the opium-eater, the city of Klosterheim is strangely cut off from its surroundings. In the day various authority figures attempt to maintain order, while at night chaos reasserts itself in ways that are both inspired and frightening.97 Crabb Robinson declared that Klosterheim ‘made no noise – perhaps because of its lumbering style and forming one small volume only’, but Coleridge asserted that ‘in purity of style and idiom’ the novel reached ‘an excellence’ to which Walter Scott ‘appears never to have aspired’.98
De Quincey was also hard at work for Blackwood’s. His ‘Prospects of Britain’, published in April 1832, takes as its subject a pamphlet by James Douglas of Caver, and communicates the pervasive sense of crisis in the Tory ranks as the government prepares to enact the Great Reform Bill. Exactly one year later, his review of Thomas Gordon’s History of the Greek Revolution charts the ‘exceedingly romantic and scenical character of the leading incidents’ in the War of Greek Independence, but is perhaps most memorable for its spiteful attack on Lord Byron’s ‘intense vanity’.99 Finally, in October 1832, De Quincey launched his six-part series on ‘The Caesars’, his most detailed historical study and his first collection of biographical essays. Drawing extensively on Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and the Historia Augusta, he weaves together his preoccupation with political intrigue, classical scholarship, black humour, the moral efficacy of Christianity, the expansion and decay of empires, and the ‘hideous excesses of the Roman Imperator’.100
Yet despite these strong levels of productivity, the relationship between De Quincey and Blackwood had become increasingly overshadowed by irritation and unpredictability. It took three months of haggling before Blackwood was able to extract De Quincey’s review of Gordon, and in the end he published only one of the three instalments that De Quincey sent to him, a decision that the proud and penurious De Quincey found very difficult to endure. In March 1833, De Quincey accepted a dinner invitation from Blackwood with ‘great pleasure’, but shortly thereafter the relationship between the two men appears to have soured, and nothing from De Quincey appeared in the magazine over the course of the following fourteen months, after which time Blackwood printed the final three instalments of ‘The Caesars’ for June, July, and August 1834.101 The following month Blackwood died, and his magazine passed into the hands of his sons, Alexander and Robert. In the meantime, De Quincey had embarked on a long-term relationship with a radical Edinburgh magazine that was established in direct opposition to Blackwood’s, and that pushed his career in new and controversial directions.