Tales of Terror
[i]
He liked to feel the noose tighten around his neck. He enjoyed panic. He sought alienation. He courted anxiety. These emotions brought intensity to his experience. They allowed him to develop an image of himself as the focus of great attention, as a person whose actions mattered, as someone fighting heroically against odds that would have defeated others. ‘Under these difficulties, that to most men would be overwhelming when combined into one simultaneous storm, I … have continued … to fight my way right and left,’ he declared to Alexander Blackwood. Earlier, after battling through a list of ailments that included despondency, hunger, and acute physical pain, he assured Robert Blackwood that, in similar circumstances, ‘I do really think that not many men could have struggled at all.’1
Playing the victim enabled De Quincey to indulge his passion for the sublime. Trapped ‘on the deck of a burning ship’, or at his ‘last gasp’, or ‘tied to a stake to be baited by my creditors’, he transformed himself into the central figure in a Gothic drama of flight and pursuit. ‘Ever since I knew you’, he once told Hessey, ‘I have had to struggle with difficulties more like the cases of romance than real life.’2 And if he was not actually being pursued, his imagination conjured demons. ‘He was constantly beset by idle fears and vain imaginings,’ reported Knight. ‘Various trivial obstacles’, Hill observed, ‘… were continually acting as lions in his path.’3 De Quincey ‘was haunted by an idea that he was being pursued by his various and no doubt much-tried landladies,’ said Eliza Priestley. John Hill Burton recounted how De Quincey once pled the ‘absolute necessity’ of borrowing seven shillings and sixpence, only to find that he had a fifty-pound banknote in his pocket.4 De Quincey mismanaged his time and money because to a considerable degree he wanted to be hounded. The pursuit was incessant because there are ‘people that he won’t allow himself to be released permanently from’, as his daughter Margaret emphasized. He had a taste for suffering, a craze for being despised. ‘I am sure it is not in my character to exaggerate,’ he told Wordsworth.5 The opposite was true.
Victimization brought De Quincey comfort and camouflage. It enabled him to dodge his responsibilities. He was ill. It was not his fault. Physical pain left him unable to function. He ‘would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he [was] powerless as an infant, and [could not] even attempt to rise’. On one level laudanum shackled him, but as a ready and inexhaustible pretext for missing deadlines and evading agreements, it released him on another. ‘Perfect weakness is often secure,’ he stated: ‘it is by imperfect power, turned against its master, that men are snared and decoyed.’ Letters in which he portrayed himself as ‘in the slough of despond’ were ‘like the cuttle fish’, his daughter Florence remarked. Their main purpose was ‘to throw ink in the eyes of the enemy, and himself’ for failing to deliver some manuscript.6
Opium played a vital – and typically paradoxical – role in this economy. On the one hand, it rounded off the sharpest edges of his anxiety. Without opium ‘life would have been intolerable to him; and certainly he would never have been able else to write what he had written’. Yet on the other, the drug deepened his unease, and he welcomed it for that reason. Under the ‘parching effects of opium’, he acknowledged, ‘… mole-hills are inevitably exaggerated by the feelings into mountains’. Recalled Florence: ‘It was an accepted fact among us that he was able when saturated with opium to persuade himself and delighted to persuade himself (the excitement of terror was a real delight to him) that he was dogged by dark and mysterious foes.’7 Opium terrorized De Quincey, but that was part of the attraction. In his world, the line between the conscious and the unconscious frequently gave way. His dreams were invaded by a figure he called the ‘Dark Interpreter’, ‘a mere reflex of my inner nature’. The Interpreter, however, ‘will not always be found sitting inside my dreams’, warns De Quincey. At times the internal becomes the external, and the Interpreter lives ‘outside, and in open daylight’.8
The fierce pressures that he allowed to build around him had a practical side. They forced him to produce. Writing was ‘always an extreme labour and difficulty to him’, and the more addled he was by poverty, debt, and addiction, the more pressure he was under to deliver, with the result that he usually did. The chaos that seemed to be keeping him from writing was actually driving him to it. ‘Failing … dire necessity’, he affirmed, ‘I believe that I should never have written a line for the press.’ Further, these pressures often shaped his subject matter. He was a keen observer at the spectacle of his own distress, and he actively re-lived past trauma and brought on new anguish as a means of generating copy and amplifying emotion.9 ‘Long disappointment – hope for ever baffled, (and why should it be less painful because self-baffled?) – vexation and self-blame, almost self-contempt … these feelings had impressed upon my nervous sensibilities a character of irritation – agitation – restlessness – eternal self-dissatisfaction.’ Drugs greatly facilitated his quest for his own degradation. De Quincey claimed that the pains of withdrawal invariably forced him back under the tyrannies of laudanum, but there was a part of him that revelled in the loss of power brought about by addiction, and that derived a masochistic pleasure from his repeated acts of self-annihilation.10 In De Quincey, an arrogantly high opinion of his own intellectual abilities was confounded by an implacable streak of self-laceration.
Yet De Quincey’s complicated pursuit of his own mortification did not always provide the pleasures he sought. When the drugs wore off, or his fantasies wore out, he seems often to have been genuinely surprised to find himself – and on many occasions his family – in seas of trouble, and he worked frantically to get everyone ashore. ‘Anxiety from fear, is bad: from hope delayed, is bad: but worst of all is anxiety from responsibility, in cases where disease or weakness makes a man feel that he is unequal to the burden.’11 Legal officers and creditors pursued De Quincey in droves, as the brutal black and white of the court records demonstrate, and he hid, fled, and holed up in an exhausting effort to stay one step ahead of them. Often without enough money for food, clothing, or warmth, De Quincey and his family lived in the certain knowledge that, if he was imprisoned again, their already grim circumstances would steeply decline. ‘All weakness is suffering and humiliation,’ he asserted, ‘no matter for its mode or its subject.’12
William Muir, a solicitor in the Scottish Supreme Court, was one of those actively hunting De Quincey, and in a document addressed to Alexander Wilkie, an Edinburgh messenger-at-arms, he details the activities of his various officers and assistants. De Quincey’s house was watched ‘this day for nearly 4 hours’, Muir reported, ‘but could not find him’. A day later assistants were ‘again watching in the neighbourhood’ and ‘searching over the walks’, but could ‘obtain no trace of him’. Weeks passed without success. There was ‘no certain intelligence’, ‘some persons asserting’ that De Quincey was ‘at the Lakes, and others that he was in the environs of Edinburgh’. Eventually, ‘continuing … enquiries … on repeated occasions’ produced the report that De Quincey had been ‘seen lately in the Meadows’. Officers staked out the area ‘at different times of the day & upon different days, but did not fall in with him’.13
At last, a break. An assistant waited a ‘whole day in the Meadows where in the Twilight he discovered a person corresponding to the marks given him of Mr De Quincey’. He ‘followed & watched through many turns & windings & finally lost sight of him about the South end of Clerk Street’. Undaunted, officers spent their time ‘going round the Meadows and neighbouring Lanes repeatedly and also watching the South end of Clerk Street & neighbourhood’, until they heard that De Quincey and ‘some of his family had been seen … near the top of Montague Street’, where after ‘searching … several lodgings’ they ‘found & apprehended the debtor’. There was some delay, and then De Quincey and the officers proceeded towards the gaol. De Quincey wooed paranoia, but that did not mean no one was after him. It seems a miracle that he kept writing in the midst of these relentless pressures from both without and within. Such was what he once called ‘the complex misery of my condition’.14
[ii]
‘I have not seen him this winter,’ Carlyle told John Stuart Mill on 18 April 1833; ‘and no man, except Bailiffs, it appears, has for the last eighteen months.’15 Thomas Hamilton made several unsuccessful attempts to see De Quincey, but heard tales of him ranging from the distressing to the ludicrous. On one occasion he indiscreetly discussed De Quincey’s hardships with Dora Wordsworth, whose longstanding antipathy now approached callousness. ‘The Opium eater … has discovered a new mode of procuring a cheap dinner for his family,’ she gossiped to Quillinan, ‘– he buys game which is too bad for other folks & thus dines them all for one shilling.’ On another occasion, Hamilton heard that two sheriff’s officers had arrived at De Quincey’s lodgings, and one of them ‘presenting a writ said: “I arrest you, Sir.”’ De Quincey looked coolly at the documentation and replied: ‘“Oh, you are mistaken, Sir. This writ is against my brother. My name is Charles, not Thomas.” The men said he was called Thomas by every one, but De Q. was confident. So one of them stept out into the kitchen to the servant. “What’s your master’s name, Betty?” “Charles, Sir”, with a curtsey.’ One of De Quincey’s daughters had ‘slipped out of the room & told her to say so if she should be asked by either of the men’.16
With ‘a family of 12 persons’ (including Margaret, the children, and the servants) ‘absolutely dependant’ on him for the ‘mere daily necessities of warmth – light – food &c.’, De Quincey resorted once again to selling his books ‘at the rate of about 30s. for 1s.’ Now forty-eight years old, his health had been badly undermined over the winter by an ‘attack of Ague, and immediately afterwards of Erysipelas, accompanied by a nervous illness’.17 That spring De Quincey was liable ‘to arrest from various quarters’, a fact brought home forcefully when on 23 May both he and Margaret were put to the horn for unpaid rent at Forres Street. Scrambling, De Quincey moved his family to Caroline Cottage, which was located just outside Edinburgh, near the village of Duddingston, and under the lee of Arthur’s Seat.18 The cottage was owned by Lady Caroline Nairne, the Scottish songwriter and laureate of Jacobinism, though she was living in Ireland at the time and her agent made the bad mistake of renting to a couple who had been ‘horned’ only forty-eight hours earlier. The country surroundings were undoubtedly welcome after the pollution and confinement of Edinburgh, and perhaps reminded the De Quinceys a little of their time at The Nab. Margaret’s sister Betty came to stay that summer.19
There was, however, no relief in the financial pressure, and De Quincey filed for his Cessio Bonorum (literally, ‘a cession of goods’), a provision under Scottish law which secured a debtor from personal arrest. The process required him to compile a list of his assets and debts. The assets were then voluntarily surrendered to his creditors, who sold them and applied the proceeds to their claims. The debts were not cleared away unless the assets ceded were sufficient for that purpose. Any property De Quincey might later acquire could also be claimed by his creditors, though at no point could either he or his family be deprived of the bare necessities. Carlyle put the matter in a nutshell: De Quincey is ‘busy getting a Bankruptcy transacted’.20
He listed his assets at £762.9s., but the calculation was hardly realistic, as most of the money was actually in the form of debt, and at the top of De Quincey’s list was ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet, Hampstead’, who was cited as owing De Quincey £315 for ‘cash lent in November 1807’ and an additional £393.15s. in ‘interest at 5 per Cent from 1 December 1807 till 1 December 1832 25 years’. Nor was De Quincey’s calculation entirely honest, as he listed his ‘Books manuscripts &c’ in Dove Cottage at a value of only £5.10s., while the thousands of volumes squirrelled away there – including several of the rare books that he had purchased at the Duke of Roxburghe’s sale – would undoubtedly have fetched a far higher sum.21
He registered his debts at £617.16s. Fifty-one creditors – from Edinburgh, Westmorland, Cumberland, Lancashire, and London – staked a claim, and the list of their names and occupations throws remarkable light on De Quincey’s professional, legal, social, and domestic concerns: ‘William Newton Wine Merchant’, ‘Thomas Troughton Stationer’, ‘James McLaren Boot & Shoe maker’, ‘Mrs Agnes Muirhead Lodging Letter Great King Street’, ‘David Hunter Tinplate Worker’, ‘Agnes Wilson Dressmaker’, ‘James Trotter Writing Master’, ‘Paul Baxter Collector of Police Duties’, ‘Archibald Haddow Cowfeeder’, ‘William Green Butcher’, ‘Thomas Wilson Carpenter’, ‘Cornelius Nicholson Bookseller’, ‘Christopher Gardner Brazier’, ‘John Thomson Grocer and Spirit Merchant’, ‘Miss Margaret Preston Haberdasher’, and ‘William Sproat Schoolmaster’, to name fewer than a third of those to whom De Quincey owed money. The document, signed on 9 July 1833, was witnessed by De Quincey’s solicitor, William Duguid, and his eldest son William, now sixteen.22
Such an extensive, legal declaration might have been expected to give De Quincey a fresh start, or at least some breathing room. But as he had few, if any, assets to turn over to his old creditors, and as he was already accumulating debts to a series of new ones, there was in fact very little change in his situation. Benson was again pressing him for the Dove Cottage rent, and was by this point angry enough to threaten to reclaim the property without allowing time even for the removal of personal effects. De Quincey consulted two lawyers and wrote back confident that he had the legal upper hand. ‘The consequences … are serious’, he advised, if ‘a landlord … should take any false step, and the dangers so heavy – that I am satisfied no man of sense would act hastily.’23 Out-manoeuvred, Benson retreated to plot a more effective course, while De Quincey – or rather his manuscripts and books – remained the tenant of Dove Cottage.
The Nab was a different story. Having received no money since De Quincey’s mother had forwarded him £180 in April 1832, Pendlebury foreclosed on the mortgage. Margaret’s blacksmith brother William wrote De Quincey ‘a letter of ruffian brutality’, abusing him ‘as a swindler’ and objecting that he himself had been forced to pay Pendlebury £100, a sum he intended to recover either by selling his father’s ‘stock and crops’ or De Quincey’s ‘property and books’. De Quincey seems not to have responded directly to William, but he fired back a letter to his father-in-law. William could not ‘hold the language which he does to us, if you had done justice to our conduct’, he protested. For seventeen months, Margaret had ‘denied herself and her children every comfort of life’ in order to enable De Quincey to make up the £180 he had borrowed from his mother. Yes, he had ‘delayed a few months in paying this year’s interest’, but was ‘that any reason for doubting that I should pay it soon’? Pendlebury would get his money, and in the meantime, Simpson should not suffer himself ‘to be sent off like a parcel directed to me’.24
Some of these comments seem to have made their way back to William, who stepped forward at the last moment and offered to pay both the principal and the interest on the property. But it was no use. Pendlebury had had enough. The Nab was advertised for sale in late September at the Salutation Inn, Ambleside. After generations in Margaret’s family, it passed into other hands. Her mother seems to have died soon after the sale, while her father and mentally handicapped uncle Park travelled to Edinburgh to live at Caroline Cottage.25 The rumour mill claimed that De Quincey had ‘made his father-in-law sell his little estate for his benefit & father & family were brought literally to the parish’.26 In fact, De Quincey spent a great deal of his own money on The Nab with nothing to show for it, and then provided a home for Simpson and Park.
Domestic life remained a bizarre combination of tenderness and severe anxiety. Simpson, quiet, upright, and no doubt devastated by recent events, became a source of comfort to the De Quincey children, who listened in delight as he expressed himself ‘by words from the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope’s “Homer”, and sometimes a whole “Spectator”, humorous or grave, as the exciting subject might have been, and all in the homely, kindly Westmorland dialect’.27 Such tranquillity was shattered, however, when the pressures that raged around De Quincey forced themselves inside his family circle, and at no moment more dramatically than when one of his creditors seems to have resorted to kidnapping. ‘I have had a little child detained from me by violence at Portobello,’ De Quincey wrote to one of his publishers. ‘Which I mention because it has interrupted my writing, having involved me in applications to the Sheriff &c. for 4 days – and in other measures. I am driven hard by the rewards &c. necessarily promised in this case. I trust you will let me have 30 shillings.’28 Nothing more is known of the situation.
The final resort of Edinburgh debtors was the Holyrood sanctuary, and in late November De Quincey left his family in Caroline Cottage and moved into Mr Brotherstone’s Lodgings, Prospect Buildings, near Holyrood House.29 His decision was probably precipitated by a third horning on 13 November, this time for £17 owing to ‘Henry Gibson Duguid, Teacher of Music’.30 Formerly an Augustinian Abbey, Holyrood was now governed by a Bailie, whose chief duties included registering residents at a cost of two guineas, conducting the local court, and overseeing the prison. The sanctuary encompassed an area between six and seven miles in circumference, and included Holyrood Palace and the surrounding cluster of old lodgings, shops, and taverns, as well as Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags, and about half of Duddingston Lake. Within these boundaries debtors could move with impunity, and on Sunday they enjoyed the additional right of wandering anywhere they pleased, provided they were back within the sanctuary before midnight, a stipulation that often involved them in a race towards the boundary line at the foot of Canongate with their creditors in hot pursuit.31 For De Quincey, and for many others, the sanctuary made an acceptable alternative to prison, and indeed De Quincey may have taken Caroline Cottage with one eye on its close proximity to Holyrood.
The move into Brotherstone’s Lodgings brought ‘a total cessation of direct intercourse’ between De Quincey and Caroline Cottage ‘for the purpose of misleading a knave who held some acceptances of mine fraudulently obtained (in fact stolen)’. But as the weeks passed De Quincey began shuttling between the two residences, the combined rent costing him ‘from 10 guineas to 12 pounds’ per month, and his stay at either place probably dependent on whether or not he was facing the imminent threat of arrest.32 The arrangement provided him with a good deal of flexibility, but it was of course far more than he could afford. By 4 February 1834, he did not have the money to buy ink, paper, or laudanum, and he could not leave the sanctuary ‘without very urgent danger … emissaries are on the watch in all directions’.33 ‘We heard of De Quincey being located within the debtor’s sanctuary of Holyrood,’ William Bell Scott declared. ‘He was to be seen like the ghost of one whose body had not received the clod of earth to entitle it to rest in peace, and his growing son, it was reported, was getting well into his teens like an uncared-for dog.’34
The rent on Caroline Cottage had been in arrears almost from the start, and when Lady Nairne’s representatives instituted a ‘system of menaces … perfectly uncalled for’, De Quincey quit the cottage and moved his entire family into the sanctuary, where they took ‘miserable’ lodgings at Mrs Miller’s, Holyrood Gardens, Palace Yard, and where – as Margaret later recalled – they avoided ‘and were avoided by all of their former friends’.35 At the same time, De Quincey gave up his own lodgings at Brotherstone’s and took a single room in the Holyrood household of Miss Margaret Craig. Cost probably prompted the relocation, but both the Brotherstone and Craig lodgings seem to have served him in the same way: they were offices – sanctuaries within the sanctuary – where he could escape the demands of parenthood and concentrate on his writing. Not even in Holyrood, however, could he avoid persecution for debt. Beyond its boundaries, the bookseller Carfrae put him to the horn for the fourth time.36 Within its boundaries, paying ‘enormously’ at Mrs Miller’s, and not wishing to ‘drive any hard bargain’ at Miss Craig’s, meant that he soon found himself in the Holyrood court facing at least four prosecutions, though in each instance he seems to have escaped the lowest rung for an Edinburgh debtor: imprisonment within the sanctuary.37
The move to Holyrood coincided with a damaging new direction for De Quincey. ‘Ever since … coming to the Abbey … I have taken spirits,’ he reported: ‘first about 2 or 3 glasses; and often for some months milk and rum.’ Of this time, Florence remembered that her father’s ‘best chance of accomplishing anything was from about nine or ten o’clock in the evening till about four to six o’clock in the morning. And his most deadly certainty of failure was the touching of anything in the nature of wine or spirits.’38
[iii]
William Tait was ‘a big, jolly-looking man, with a broad black ribbon attached to a watch or glass hanging down his vest’. A politician of ‘the Radical school’, he founded Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in April 1832 ‘by way of rival to mine’, as William Blackwood put it, ‘and of course it is as much Radical as we are Tory’.39 Of Tait, De Quincey declared: ‘I have not known any man in the course of my life who has so much impressed me with the feeling of his being largely – unaffectedly – and deeply interested in whatever can be supposed likely … to exalt the standard of human nature’.40 In the first issue of his magazine, Tait wrote that ‘we are upon the confines of a new era … Mighty questions have been stirred; deep interests have been creared; old things are passing away.’ Two months later the 1832 Reform Bill – which served primarily to remove the glaring inequalities in representation by transferring voting privileges from the ‘pocket’ and ‘rotten’ boroughs controlled by the aristocracy to the heavily populated industrial towns – passed into law, and by April 1833 Tait could justly claim that ‘during the arduous contest between the people in conjunction with Earl Grey’s administration and the Whig party, on one side, with the enemies of all Reform on the other, we have not ceased to advocate the just cause’.41
Despite the magazine’s strong start, Tait made two major changes in 1834. First, he dropped the price from half-a-crown to a shilling, a move that made his magazine more affordable for artisans and the working class, and that for a time pushed his sales at least as high as Blackwood’s. Second, he absorbed Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine into Tait’s, and made its editor Christian Isobel Johnstone his new co-proprietor and primary editor. Johnstone instituted a number of changes, from a larger, double-columned format to a focus that was broader and more literary. She was the ‘working genius’ of the magazine, recalled the miscellaneous author James Glass Bertram, and she ‘generally passed judgment on the articles offered’.42 During this period, Tait’s featured work by leading radicals such as Richard Cobden, John Bright, John Stuart Mill, and Leigh Hunt, as well as by a host of women writers, including Catherine Gore, Harriet Martineau, Amelia Opie, and Mary Russell Mitford. It was a magazine ‘dedicated to purposes of political change such as many people thought revolutionary’, De Quincey observed. His mother agreed: ‘You will not write where you might with honour & no compromise of your professed principles; money being spent, and no choice left, you take up with Mr Tait.’43
At least one reader was curious to know how the ‘Tory … and Orthodox’ De Quincey could become ‘a writer in one of the most radical periodicals of the day’.44 There were a number of reasons. Tait’s offices were conveniently located in Princes Street, close to Blackwood’s, and within easy walking distance of Holyrood. Tait also paid better than Blackwood, usually ‘at the rate of fourteen guineas per sheet of sixteen pages’, and even ‘more liberally’ to ‘two or three writers … such as Mr De Quincey’. Further, Tait was keen to accept De Quincey’s work at a time when Blackwood was not. ‘Hannah More, I have seen, is dying,’ De Quincey wrote to Blackwood in a mood of ghoulish opportunism. ‘I can furnish a sketch of her daily habits.’45 And a few months later he wished to write a review of J. C. Colquhoun’s Animal Magnetism, ‘with regard to which I have some curious details’.46 Neither of these articles, however, appears to have interested Blackwood, and so De Quincey took them down the street to Tait, who was happy to publish both.
There was yet another reason why De Quincey signed on with the new magazine. Blackwood’s typically demanded that he stifle the liberal element in his politics, whereas in Tait’s – even more than in the London – he was free to exploit it. To be sure, De Quincey did not always seize the opportunity. He was ‘a Tory of the purest strain’, remarked Tait, who on more than one occasion went so far as to insert editorial footnotes into De Quincey’s essays in an attempt to puncture their inflated conservatism. But De Quincey’s politics were not as inflexible as Tait initially believed, and vice versa. ‘Gradually I became astonished at the large amount also of our agreements,’ De Quincey told him, ‘… and I remember … some twelve or fourteen great themes, relating to colonial – penal – financial – or educational legislation, upon which we were in perfect harmony.’47 Though sometimes tarred as a furious right-winger, De Quincey’s sympathies extended to both sides of the political spectrum. He was ‘a Tory from the spiritual and ideal side of Toryism’, concluded the Quarterly Review, but he was also ‘in many respects a “Liberal” in the truest sense of the word. He was ready to challenge all comers, to investigate all problems, to hold every truth up to the light.’48
A more informal and tolerant De Quincey began to emerge. In Blackwood’s he damned ‘the incendiary press’ for spreading ‘poisonous and corrupting doctrines’, while in Tait’s he applauded the press’s ‘energy’, ‘vigilance’, and ‘sagacity’.49 In Blackwood’s he attacked ‘petty shopkeepers’ who lived ‘near to the base of society’ as an ‘order of men … purely Jacobinical’; but in Tait’s he acknowledged that while ‘Jacobinism’ is ‘the seminal principle of all political evil’, it is ‘natural to the heart of man … A good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances, must be a Jacobin.’50 In Blackwood’s he denounced Reform as a ruinous measure that would bring about ‘a prodigious expansion of democratic strength’. In Tait’s he argued that ‘in every great and enlightened nation … there is, and must be, a tendency widely diffused to the principles of sane reform’.51 In Blackwood’s he condemned the French Revolution as a ‘Record of an Iliad of woes!’ In Tait’s he praised it as an ‘awakening era’ and ‘grand explosion of pure democracy’.52 De Quincey was often bellicose in the articulation of his conservative views, but he was also a canny writer who needed to sell his work, and who possessed a remarkable ability to tailor his views to suit different – and in some cases oppositional – magazine contexts.
His career with Tait’s began in November 1833 with an engaging translation of Kant’s essay on ‘The Age of the Earth’, but his first major impact on the magazine came three months later when he launched his highly popular ‘Sketches of Life and Manners; from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater’, a series that eventually grew to twenty-five instalments before concluding in 1841. Wandering ‘backwards and forwards’ from his earliest years, through key experiences from his adolescence not covered by the Confessions, to his days with the London, De Quincey mined his memory for moments of beauty and despair, and delivered the whole in a prose style that was, by turns, rapt, ironic, anecdotal, and forthright.53 The series encompasses favourite topics such as secret societies, German metaphysics, the art of prose composition, and the idea of sin. He comments on a number of major contemporaries: William Blake is ‘that fine mystic’, Mary Wollstonecraft is ‘the sole rival in this country of the noblest of her sex – Madame Roland’, and Byron is a ‘plagiarist’.54 Personal moments of isolation and fear are set against a broad series of social engagements and professional relationships, while De Quincey’s preoccupation with classical literature is juxtaposed to several pressing contemporary interests, including the ‘gorgeous empire’ of the British and ‘the benefit of railroads’.55
Closely related to the ‘Sketches’, and eventually folded within them, are the group of essays commonly known as the ‘Lake Reminiscences’. The first of these, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, was prompted by ‘the unexpected news of this great man’s death’ in late July 1834, and appeared in Tait’s in four instalments from September through January.56 De Quincey’s motives were typically mixed, for the articles were written partly to relieve his ‘deep sentiments of reverential affection’ for Coleridge’s memory, and ‘partly, in however imperfect a way, to meet the public feeling of interest or curiosity’. De Quincey was fulsome in his praise, describing Coleridge as ‘the largest and most spacious intellect … that has yet existed amongst men’, and highlighting his accomplishments in poetry, psychology, philosophy, biblical scholarship, and German literature.57 Yet De Quincey also moved with disarming frankness over the crucial areas that still haunt Coleridgean biography: his opium addiction, his political apostasy, his decline as a poet, and – as Wilson had ventriloquized through ‘The Opium-Eater’ a dozen years earlier in the Noctes – his plagiarisms. ‘Coleridge loses by Dequincey,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘but more by his own concealing uncandid acknowledgement of debt to Schelling.’ De Quincey’s four articles constitute the first important critical biography of Coleridge, and reveal him with unmatched immediacy.58
The articles were highly controversial. ‘All the persons I have met with who have read them, have risen from them with the same disgust,’ declared Julius Hare. Crabb Robinson thought it ‘deplorable that men of talent like De Quincey, under the pressure of want, should seize on the reputation of a deceased friend as a prey, turning his personal acquaintance with them to profit’.59 Coleridge’s nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge condemned De Quincey’s ‘vile heap of personalities’, and ‘the incredible meannesses of thought, allusion, or language perpetrated in these papers’. Southey was even angrier: ‘I have told Hartley Coleridge … that he ought to take a strong cudgel, proceed straight to Edinburgh, and give De Quincey, publicly on the streets there, a sound beating!’60
Others, however, took a more balanced view. Carlyle contended that De Quincey wrote ‘merely for sake of the highly needful trifle of money, poor soul, and with no wish to be untrue (I could believe) or to hurt anybody, though not without his own bits of splenetic conviction also’. Wordsworth damned the articles as ‘obnoxious’, but conceded that it was ‘not to be doubted’ that De Quincey was ‘honoured’ by Coleridge’s confidence, and that he had extolled Coleridge’s ‘intellectual powers as much as the most ardent of his Admirers, if discreet and judicious, would do’.61 Most revealingly, Coleridge’s daughter Sara objected that De Quincey had seen Coleridge’s mind ‘too much in the mirror of his own’. Yet ‘of all the censors’ of her father, she added, De Quincey ‘is the one whose remarks are the most worthy of attention’, for he had ‘sufficient inward sympathy with the subject of his criticism to be capable in some degree of beholding his mind, as it actually existed, in all the intermingling shades of individual reality; and in few minds have these shades been more subtly intermingled than in my Father’s’.62 De Quincey’s essays caused a good deal of controversy, but even some of his detractors recognized their immense value.
[iv]
‘Listen for a moment,’ De Quincey wrote tremblingly to Tait in November 1834, ‘– and then judge what it was possible for me to have done.’63 William, De Quincey’s eldest son, was ill. For several months he had been battling deafness and then headaches, which in the last few weeks had grown increasingly severe. With a view to easing the pain and facilitating sleep, he had begun to use laudanum in considerable doses. On 4 October Dr J. H. Balfour was called in. William appeared to be suffering from ‘some deepseated disease of the head’, Balfour reported. ‘The patient was tall and emaciated, his eyes were large, his countenance had a pallid hue, and he appeared to be of a strumous habit.’ Balfour immediately ordered a number of measures, including ‘a blister … to the back part of the head and the nape of the neck’, and the prescription of purgative pills, savine ointment, ‘two grains of calomel, and half a grain of opium, to be taken twice a day’. But there was little improvement. William’s throat was ‘scarified, in order to afford relief from the feeling of suffocation’. His eyes ‘at this time became very prominent’.64
William’s parents kept a constant vigil, reducing Margaret to ‘the fiercest despair’ and De Quincey to ‘the very lowest state of physical dejection’. Gradually over each of William’s eyes a ‘film of darkness’ spread until he was ‘totally blind’. There was no chance of him recovering either his hearing or his sight. ‘Good God!’ cried De Quincey, ‘– what a destiny of horror!’65 On 9 November William turned eighteen. Shortly thereafter, ‘he was in a very restless and agitated state, being frequently troubled with horrible dreams, and throwing off the bed-clothes, as if in great agony. The recollection of some family distresses seemed to prey upon his mind, and he frequently alluded to them in a very striking manner.’ He was slipping away, and De Quincey’s grief was undoubtedly deepened by the guilty knowledge that his own actions had produced many of the ‘family distresses’ now haunting his son. William ‘could still answer questions rationally’, but the ‘paleness of his complexion, and the prominence of his eyes, combined as they were with blindness and deafness, contributed to give his countenance a peculiar ghastly and cadaverous appearance’. On 25 November at half-past nine in the morning he ‘expired without a struggle’.66
An autopsy took place ‘28 hours after death’. Under the scalp was ‘a large mass of olive-green coloured matter’, and under the skull-cap were ‘thin layers of similar green-coloured matter, interspersed with some bloody spots’ 67 More than four decades earlier De Quincey seems to have imagined – and possibly even to have witnessed – the disfigurement caused by the doctors when they examined the brain of his dead sister Elizabeth. This time he was spared that trauma. He surveyed William ‘one hour after the surgeons had laid the skull in ruins’, but ‘the dishonours of this scrutiny were hidden by bandages, and had not disturbed the repose of the countenance’. Balfour concluded that the ‘disease in this case appears to be of a very uncommon nature’, and was ‘unable to suggest any remedy’.68 De Quincey believed that both his eldest sister and his eldest son had died of hydrocephalus. Today, William’s disease would almost certainly be diagnosed as acute leukaemia.
It was a cruel blow. De Quincey and Margaret had lost two sons in just over two years. William was ‘the crown and glory of my life’, De Quincey later declared, and ‘upon him I had exhausted all that care [and] hourly companionship could do for the culture of an intellect in all stages of his life somewhat premature’.69 Mrs Quincey expostulated with her son ‘against the expense of putting his family (7 persons) into mourning dresses for poor William, knowing that either the tradesman who furnished them must go unpaid, or the Father must prefer the alternative of taxing his generous Friends for the payment’. De Quincey responded indignantly to his mother’s pleas, and then turned to his friends, who paid for his family’s mourning clothes.70
From Mrs Quincey’s perspective, her son was out of control. No amount of money seemed to move him any closer to solvency. In a letter of 13 December she poured out her distress to Dorothy Wordsworth, whom she had met when she visited De Quincey in the Lakes in 1811, and with whom she had clearly stayed in touch. ‘My daughter has often assisted her brother, to her own heavy loss,’ Mrs Quincey reported, and ‘to pay off the last arrears’ of De Quincey’s debts, she herself had cut into her own ‘very limited income by the reduction of principle’. In the space of eighteen months she had advanced him the enormous sum of £620, and this total was ‘over and above the yearly £200’. Yet De Quincey’s requests for money kept coming, and at present he was already in advance £35 upon his quarterly payments of £50.71
Severe financial pressures, however, may not even have been the worst of it, as Mrs Quincey hinted three months later in another, much darker letter to Dorothy. ‘My Son is not the Ruler of his family,’ she insisted: ‘this thought certainly brings to my remembrance, a long by-gone history of violence, which I’m afraid to look back upon in another quarter, as it would lead me only to fear more misery and greater perils in the path of handsome Daughters, so poor and so expensive.’ Mrs Quincey’s comments recall the reports that Margaret’s grandfather William Park was sometimes given to violence, and seem to point directly at Margaret and her management of the family, though Mrs Quincey may also intend Margaret’s father, or her uncle Park, both of whom were still members of the De Quincey household. It is impossible to say what truth – if any – is involved in her various claims. Certainly she was deeply and genuinely disturbed at what she saw as her son’s ‘sad lack of moral discipline’. But she was also anxious – perhaps especially in a letter to a former Grasmere neighbour like Dorothy – to make it plain that the situation was not all De Quincey’s fault. Indeed, the problems on the Simpson side of the marriage made her feel ‘compassion’ for her son. If Dorothy responded to Mrs Quincey, her letter has been lost. There are no other suggestions that there was violence within the De Quincey family.72
[v]
Work was De Quincey’s best remedy for the wounds of William’s death, wounds ‘applied as if with premeditating skill exactly to those points in which chiefly I was most vulnerable’. ‘I believe that in the course of any one month since that unhappy day,’ De Quincey avowed, ‘I have put forth more effort in the way of thought – of research – and of composition than in any five months together selected from my previous life.’73 In fact, his productivity did not increase dramatically following William’s death, though to write at all must have cost him a great deal, no matter how unyielding the pressure to sell articles.
Other distractions kept him from focusing too sharply on his grief. Less than a month after William’s death, De Quincey was back in the Holyrood court, this time for £12.1s.8d. owing to David Nicolson, merchant. His drinking continued: it was now ‘water and spirits’, he confessed; ‘often, I fear, bad spirits’.74 Tait provided some companionship: ‘On Sunday or Monday, I will walk in any direction you please,’ De Quincey told him in March. Smallpox raged in Edinburgh during the spring and all six De Quincey children ‘were attacked … though all had been vaccinated’. In June, De Quincey faced yet another sudden and unexplained demand for money. Another remittance from his mother seems to have alleviated the distress.75
Meanwhile, in the Lake District, Benson had finally found a way to force De Quincey out of Dove Cottage. De Quincey countered the notice with an unrealistic proposal to rent the house for two or three more years, but Benson brushed this notion aside. Confronted then with the task of removing his property after renting the cottage for twenty-six years, De Quincey proposed sending a Mrs Garcia and one of his children to Grasmere.76 But this plan too collapsed, and in the event De Quincey himself travelled to the Lakes, where in six days and seven nights he transferred his possessions – including thousands of books – from Dove Cottage to Lingstubbs, the farmhouse near Penrith where Margaret and the children had stayed in 1830. Physically, it was a demanding task.77 Emotionally, it may have been even worse. ‘Cottage, immortal in my remembrance!’ he apostrophized. ‘From the beginning of the century to 1835 … was it either mine or Wordsworth’s.’ Yet when De Quincey finally completed the move, ‘the weight of a world’ passed from him. ‘I am now a changed man,’ he assured Tait in July. ‘I now possess my mind: heretofore I was under a possession.’78
Back in Edinburgh, De Quincey received word that his uncle Penson had died. He of course hoped that provisions in the will would help to lighten his financial burden. It was not to be. Penson bequeathed De Quincey an annuity of £100, which he had already been sending him for several years, as well as his wardrobe, plate, and household linen. De Quincey’s mother wrote to apprise him of different arrangements concerning the will, and to admonish him not to pawn the items devised to him, as ‘it would add to my bitter regrets, both to think of my folly and your scorn, of our goodwill in the surrender of our rights and your disrespect to your Uncle’s memory’.79
Having voiced one anxiety, she could not rest until she had voiced two others. One, ‘I have heard and noticed before, though you replied not, that you are still an Opium-Eater, and this dreadful Drug … acts on you … to the full extent which the more common forms of intoxication effect!’ And two, ‘I reject as quite incredible’ a report ‘that your Children’s education is neglected’. In a recent letter from her granddaughter Margaret ‘no less than seven false spellings of very common words appear. I blame not the poor Child but you and you only my son … A Parent with your means, who does thus, is utterly unworthy of Children.’ Mrs Quincey offered to pay for tutors, but De Quincey ‘would not consent’.80
Such censoriousness, coming just eight months after William’s death, was hardly helpful. The children ‘were highly educated’, he insisted in reply, a claim supported by their accomplishments as adults, as well as by a list of his debts, which included a writing master, a teacher of dancing, a teacher of music, and a schoolmaster. At the same time Mrs Quincey was right to worry. Chaos swirled constantly around her grandchildren, and she would not have been surprised when Emily later complained ‘rather bitterly of her own ignorance and lack of training’. Looking back, Margaret acknowledged that there were problems. ‘Papa left us to nature’, and ‘behaved very badly by some of us for our spelling and all ordinary branches of education’. Yet she also insisted that he fostered among them a strong sense of intellectual independence. ‘I always feel grateful’ to him ‘for never having arbitrarily withheld any book from us – he guided our tastes in forming judgments of them.’ In this regard, she concluded, ‘Papa … did for us … something better than the most careful Fathers do according to the notion of this world on these matters’.81
Part of the problem, at least from De Quincey’s point of view, was that his mother was missing a key irony: now well over eighty years old, she stood resolutely in the way of the inheritance that would have enabled him to address some of the difficulties that had prompted her criticisms in the first place. ‘Not only has she absorbed 2/3rds of my father’s fortune, but has intercepted the whole of a second, and almost the whole of a 3rd (my uncle’s),’ he remarked gloomily, though the humour of the situation was not lost on him. ‘… If all men had mothers living to ages so excessive and mothers by strange coincidence of accident absorbing one estate after another, who would escape embarrassment?’ A short time later, he pawned his uncle’s plate and linen, and then opened negotiations to obtain a loan on the annuity.82
Throughout these months De Quincey worked on a political article that he told Tait required more ‘writing cancelling rewriting’ than anything of equal length that he had ever produced, though such claims may have been designed to put pressure on Tait to accept an article that in many ways ran counter to the agenda of his magazine. In ‘A Tory’s Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism’, published in Tait’s for December 1835 and January 1836, De Quincey propounded the doctrine, not that Whiggism is wrong and Toryism right, but that ‘Whig principles and Tory principles are both and equally true’. They are the ‘two great forces at work in the British constitution; and the constitution is sustained, in its integrity, by their equilibrium’.83
Such theorizations were intriguing and abstract enough to appeal to Tait’s readers, but – unusually for De Quincey – much of the rest of his argument did not suit the specific periodical context he had in view, as he descended into a shrill and tenuous promotion of conservatism that was clearly going to rile both Tait and his readers. Rather than send the two essays back, however, Tait accepted them as they stood, and then inserted over two dozen editorial footnotes, in which he heckled, dismissed, and belittled De Quincey’s Tory dogma. ‘Mr De Quincey greatly underrates the real power of Parliament.’ His distinctions are ‘wire-drawn’. He contradicts himself. His theories are ‘delectable’: there ‘cannot be a half dozen … Tories in Great Britain’ who believe them.84 These editorial interventions naturally irritated De Quincey, who responded with a third instalment of ‘A Tory’s Account’ in which he chided Tait for his errors and oversights. Tait brought the exchange to a close by rejecting the article outright. De Quincey got the message.85 In his many future dealings with Tait, he did not again allow his Toryism to get the better of him. Turning from political polemic to the richer and more varied ground of his ‘Life and Manners’ sketches, he published the tenth instalment of the series in June 1836.
That same month complicated negotiations involving the Penson annuity came to a close when De Quincey’s solicitor J. J. Smith secured for him a loan of £950 from the Caledonian Insurance Company. ‘The time occupied in the affair from first to last … amounted to six calendar months,’ De Quincey recalled, adding that the enquiries of the insurance office passed from ‘levity and carelessness’ in the first two months to ‘mere torture’ in the final two.86 At around this same time, Margaret appeared before the Lord Provost in Edinburgh to sign various deeds. Details of the meeting are not known, but it may well have concerned unfinished business at The Nab. The transaction generated a further sum of money, and enabled the De Quinceys to treat their thirteen-year-old son Francis, who was staying for a time at Lingstubbs. ‘Order your clothes after your own fancy,’ his father instructed him: ‘only, do not get any long coat – but a jacket of any form you like … Your Mama sends you a thousand kisses.’87
The influx of money, coupled with the fact that he was no longer paying on either The Nab or Dove Cottage, brought a measure of stability to De Quincey’s finances that had been unknown for several years. Indeed, after weathering nearly a dozen court actions for debt in the years 1832 through 1834, not a single action was brought against him in 1835 or 1836.88 The relief for him and for his family was no doubt immeasurable. It was most probably in ‘the bright summer mornings’ of 1836 that Florence remembered her father capturing baby Emily ‘fresh from her bath … and dancing her about the garden; the child, with its scanty white raiment and golden head, looking like a butterfly glowing among the trees’. Some time during the autumn De Quincey must have been away from Holyrood for more than fourteen consecutive days, for his benefit of protection lapsed and he had to register for a second time when he returned on 24 November.89
As had been the case with various financial boons in the past, De Quincey relaxed from writing and published nothing during these months. He got very little exercise and drank a good deal, ‘often taking 4 to 5 wine glasses of spirit’ and ‘seldom less than 3½’. He ate little: a typical dinner was two cupfuls of ‘mutton broth thickened with rice’, followed by ‘a few spoonfuls of minced collups … with a little potatoes’. Yet his health was remarkably good. He had cut back on ‘the multitude of pills’ he took for the constipation caused by opium, and he had also made a ‘great discovery’: omitting supper before going to bed greatly improved his health. On 5 March 1837 he noted ‘an excessive degree of what … I have remarked for many months … namely of healthy power’.90
[vi]
It was the calm before his bitterest storm. In February and March he returned to his Tait’s ‘Life and Manners’ sketches with an uncharitable account of his time as a teenager in the Liverpool circle of William Roscoe, James Currie, and William Shepherd, all of whom he painted as decidedly minor figures: ‘Mr Roscoe is dead, and has found time since then to be half forgotten; Dr Currie, the physician, has been found “unable to heal himself”; Mr Shepherd … is a name and a shadow.’ De Quincey took a certain glee in turning on these men, and he probably felt confident that enough time had passed for him to do so without direct rebuttal. He was mistaken. Roscoe and Currie were indeed dead, but Shepherd was alive and well and living in Gateacre, and he responded with a letter to the editor of Tait’s in which he vindicated his friends and pointedly dismissed De Quincey, whose slavery to a ‘deleterious drug’ had inflamed his brain and impaired his memory. De Quincey took the criticism in his stride, while his editor Johnstone defended him in the May issue.91 As both no doubt recognized, controversy of this kind was good for business.
More strikingly, in July – after an absence of nearly three years – De Quincey returned to Blackwood’s with an essay he had originally proposed to William Blackwood in 1830.92 ‘Revolt of the Tartars’ is an elaborate piece of Oriental fantasy in which De Quincey describes the 1770–71 migration of a tartar tribe from the eastern border of Russia to the western fringe of the Chinese empire. Invoking both a series of famous military expeditions and the biblical exodus, the tale describes how the tartars are persecuted by their Russian pursuers, and how both sides suffer the ravages of hunger, disease, and exhaustion, as well as the extremes of cold and heat. At the climax, the tartars reach Lake Tengiz and the benevolent protection of the Chinese emperor Kien Long just as their Russian enemies chase them down in a frenzy of thirst and slaughter. ‘Wheresoever the lake was shallow enough to allow of men raising their heads above the water, there, for scores of acres, were to be seen all forms of ghastly fear, of agonizing struggle, of spasm, of convulsion, of mortal conflict, death, and the fear of death – revenge, and the lunacy of revenge.’93 De Quincey’s account is neither historically nor geographically accurate, but his impassioned prose vividly captures the despair and courage of the tartar journey.
The sale of two articles to Tait’s and one to Blackwood’s demonstrated again De Quincey’s marketability and range, but the money it generated did little to stem a fierce new tide of financial distress. The £950 he had raised on his uncle’s annuity had clearly run out by the early weeks of 1837. Soon he was hard pressed for the payment of bills he had recklessly guaranteed on behalf of a Holyrood friend named Major William Miller, and he now revealed that he still owed a ‘very considerable sum’ to his father-in-law.94 Between April and December creditors swarmed. De Quincey was sued at least ten times, and twice put to the horn. In June, he wrote despondently to his lawyer Smith seeking ‘to raise another loan from the Insurance Office upon my reversionary interest in the other parts of my uncle’s property’.95 Smith strongly advised him not to borrow, to which an indignant De Quincey replied that his application ‘never was for advice … but for your practical aid in effecting the loan’. A month later the money had still not come through, and De Quincey was ‘hunted in every direction by writs and diligences’.96
Then, the unthinkable. Margaret, whose fragile health had been a cause of concern for several years, became seriously ill towards the end of June. By the middle of July the sickness was ‘making ravages… such as I do not wish to speak of or to think of’. 97 On 7 August, at the age of forty-one, she died from typhus fever. Perhaps there was talk of returning her body to Grasmere, but Margaret was buried at the west end of Princes Street in St Cuthbert’s churchyard. Coming hard on the deaths of Julius and William, this third grief hit De Quincey with an intensity that was almost unbearable. He and Margaret had marked their twentieth wedding anniversary only six months earlier, and stretching back even before the time of their marriage she had been his partner and his closest friend. Their need for each other had been most clearly evident in the pain they both endured when they were separated. ‘Looking back to that time, when I was a mere child,’ Florence wrote, ‘I yet seem to see that his mind was unhinged by these sorrows.’ James Glass Bertram found De Quincey in the sanctuary looking ‘pale and fragile … Shortly before my visit Mrs De Quincey had died, and his bereavement was, as I heard him say to Mr Tait, “a source of ever-present grief to him.’”98
De Quincey explored the anguish of Margaret’s death through writing, a kind of salvational act for him, as it had been with other sorrows in his past. He plunged into and idealized their life together, especially their early years in Grasmere. ‘When the gate moved upon its golden hinges that opened to me the paradise of her society – when her young, melodious laughter sounded in my too agitated ear – did I think of any claims that I could have? Too happy if I might be permitted to lay all things at her feet.’ This paradise slipped away, for the years came ‘in which circumstances made me an Opium-Eater; ‘years through which a shadow as of sad eclipse sate and rested upon my faculties’. Yet even these years now seem bliss by comparison, for at least they were years together; ‘years through which I was careless of all but those who lived … within “my hearts of hearts”; years – ah! heavenly years! – through which I lived, beloved, with thee, to thee, for thee, by thee! Ah! happy, happy years!’99
Like Elizabeth Quincey, Ann of Oxford Street, and Catharine Wordsworth before her, Margaret now became a symbol of suffering innocence who returned to him in vivid dreams. At one point, she appears ‘in the sweet sunny morning of June’, and almost immediately invokes ‘my sister’s coffin in the month of June’. ‘Are the dusky and distant stages of life – thus dimly connected?’ De Quincey asks. In another instance, she emerges before him in a dream set five years before they actually met, beckoning him towards and then warning him away from Dove Cottage. ‘All was peace and the deep silence of untroubled solitude – only in the lovely lady was a sign of horror that had slept under deep ages of frost in her heart.’ Not all De Quincey’s dreams of Margaret, however, conjured fear and death, for ‘sometimes, after days of intellectual toil … I wrap my head in the bedclothes … and then through blinding tears I see again that golden gate; again I stand waiting at the entrance; until dreams come that carry me once more to the Paradise beyond’.100
De Quincey felt guilt over Margaret’s death. He was undoubtedly thinking of Julius, William, and her when he wrote of the ‘two or three’ afflictions which have been ‘most hard to bear, because not unmingled with pangs of remorse for the share which I myself may have had in causing them’. He felt resignation. His daughters had seen ‘the silence and tranquillity with which I have supported losses the heaviest by which I could have been assailed’.101 He felt renewed and bitter anger, especially at the Lake District neighbours who had snubbed Margaret. He remembered how, after his marriage, he ceased to see, and ceased to hear of, the Southeys and the Coleridges, though their transgressions were nothing to those of the Wordsworths: ‘the hour is passed irrevocably, and by many a year, in which an act of friendship so natural, and costing so little, (in both senses so priceless), could have been availing. The ear is deaf that should have been solaced by the sound of welcome.’ Most searingly, De Quincey recalled Wordsworth’s inability to see ‘the loveliness of a fair face now laid low in the dust’, a face ‘which struck my own eyes with awe as well as love. I may say that I perfectly hated him for his blindness.’102
The most potent and sustained expression of his grief, however, came in one of his finest tales of terror. ‘The Household Wreck’ was published in Blackwood’s in January 1838, less than five months after Margaret’s death. De Quincey grounds the tale in a well-known case of shoplifting that almost certainly came to his attention many years earlier when he was a teenager in Bath.103 But his primary concern in the tale is with the terrible fragility of human hope, and those ‘cases … in which a single week – a day – an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of a memorable felicity’. The unnamed narrator, clearly modelled on a younger version of De Quincey, is healthy and prosperous, but also haunted by ‘an over-mastering and brooding sense … of some great calamity’ travelling towards him. He lives in domestic bliss with his beautiful wife Agnes, a ‘daughter of the hills’ whose character and history invoke Margaret at almost every turn.104
One morning Agnes ventures into town on errands, but fails to return at the appointed time. The narrator, soon frantic, is consulting with servants when a policeman knocks on the door with news that Agnes has been arrested for shoplifting. The narrator goes immediately to the police station, where he learns that she has already been incarcerated, and that a new law makes it impossible for him to see her ‘during the progress of the official examinations’. The next day he haunts the area around the prison in the company of a mob of vagrants, from whom he contracts a fever that consigns him to his bed for several weeks, leaving Agnes to face the terrors of her trial alone. When he finally revives, it is to discover that Agnes has been found guilty and sentenced to ten years of hard labour. The narrator gains surreptitious access to the prison and effects Agnes’s escape, taking her to lodgings which, though squalid, are still ‘a sanctuary … from treachery’. The entire ordeal, however, has been too much for her, and she dies two months later. The narrator’s wrath ‘rises, like a towering flame, against all the earthly instruments of this ruin’, but when an angry mob beats the shopkeeper who falsely accused Agnes, and he confesses his perfidy towards her in his dying moments, the narrator’s revenge is perfect.105 ‘The Household Wreck’ exalts and compresses many of the circumstances of De Quincey’s relationship with Margaret, from their early happiness in Grasmere to the persecution, criminality, and anguish of their years in Edinburgh. The tale indulges in wish-fulfilment, and rages against fate and the malevolence of others. Yet washing over all is the paradoxical sense that, while the narrator loves his wife, he is able to do so little to protect her.106 With the atmosphere and inevitability of nightmare, De Quincey charts the complex trauma of losing Margaret.
His other troubles continued. On the day Margaret died, David Nicolson sued him again for £12.1s.8½d., a sum that had been owing for at least three years. Within two days of her death De Quincey’s good friend Major Miller also died, leading to two more suits against De Quincey for bills he had guaranteed for Miller. Miss Craig was after him for rent, driving him back into the city of Edinburgh, where he lost the protection of the sanctuary, but found it easier to hide from creditors.107 In November he took up residence in the house of Frances and Christian Wilson at 42 Lothian Street.108 At around this same time the publisher Adam Black ‘found the little man one day in the hands of the sheriff’s officers conveying him to Calton gaol. He stopped the melancholy procession and finding the debt for which De Quincey was seized to be under £30, he became responsible for it on condition of De Quincey’s furnishing the articles on Shakespeare and Pope’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an arrangement to which De Quincey readily agreed.109
Meanwhile, nineteen-year-old Margaret had assumed the central place in the sanctuary household. Indeed, according to one friend, her father would ‘undoubtedly have sunk … had it not been for the high character, the energy, decision, and premature business capacity’ which she manifested at the crisis of her mother’s death.110 De Quincey – hidden away in Lothian Street, and unable to leave without the possibility of incurring arrest – was reduced to seeing his children only once a week from 5 p.m. to dinner on a Sunday, when he could walk the city and visit the sanctuary with impunity. To some extent, such an arrangement was necessary in order for him to make money. ‘You young children was noisy and he could not study,’ one of De Quincey’s Lothian Street landladies told Emily years later.111 De Quincey, however, was also looking for an escape. The sudden and unexpected demands of single parenthood were overpowering him. ‘I felt resting upon me always too deep and gloomy a sense of obscure duties, that I never should be able to fulfil,’ he conceded, ‘– a burthen which I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off.’ To Florence at least, his actions amounted to ‘deserting his family’. He had ‘the terrible burden’ of six children ‘that he literally didn’t know what to do with’, and he ran away ‘for his own enjoyment’.112
De Quincey returned to fulltime writing eight months after Margaret’s death, but he found it very difficult to manage without her, and he soon came to rely heavily on his children. William Watson, a bookseller-connoisseur, related how ‘Mr De Quincey’s young, fair-haired English laddies’ were sent to him to borrow money.113 Thirteen-year-old Fred and ten-year-old Florence acted for their father as go-betweens, delivering copy to publishers, picking up money, relaying messages, and waiting for hours at appointed meeting places. To Black: ‘One of my children was last night instructed to call for your answer this morning.’114 To Tait: ‘Would you by Fred let me have 25s.’115 To Blackwood: ‘My little daughter, who carries this, will bring anything safely.’116 The children may well have recognized the importance of the tasks they were performing, but they could not always cope with the adult world their father had thrust them into. ‘Three separate times, in three separate lodgings,’ De Quincey snapped unkindly, ‘I had been traced by the emissaries of my creditors; and always through the carelessness of my children, who suffered themselves to be followed unconsciously.’ He seems not to have realized the terrible strain he was inflicting on them. ‘I know the north and southbacks of the Canongate, George the Fourths Bridge the cross causeway &c as hideous dreams,’ Florence recalled, ‘my heart rushing into my mouth with the natural terrors of footsteps approaching and rushing down again into my shoes when left to quiet and the ghosts.’117
Others too found themselves drawn into De Quincey’s business affairs. Policemen, messenger boys, landladies, servants, and friends all delivered manuscripts and messages for him when he could not get out of the sanctuary or be seen in the streets of Edinburgh. In one instance a cabman arrived at Tait’s shop with a manuscript from ‘a little gentleman, as polite as a prince, although he wasn’t dressed like one’. On other mornings ‘a young woman would enter the shop … and throwing down a roll of paper, with an exclamation of “There!” would rush off as abruptly as she had entered’. Upon examination, the manuscript would be found ‘addressed in the neatest of handwriting to, “William Tait, Esquire”’.118
Tait’s shop boys were sometimes instructed to carry money to De Quincey. ‘Once, when a cheque for a very moderate sum was sent to him, a messenger brought it back to Mr Tait with the intimation that at the moment “so large an amount was not required by him, two pounds being all he wanted.”’ Bertram recalled delivering both proofs and money to De Quincey, who in at least one instance sent him on a further errand. ‘Might I request you – there is a place of entertainment, a public-house, almost at the door – to have the kindness to go there and ask the lady who keeps it to give you money of lesser amounts for this note … and, if at the same time you will be good enough to ask the servant of the establishment to send me a small supply of the excellent brandy which is kept there, you will still further oblige me.’119
De Quincey was an often erratic witness of his own condition. Sometimes he felt he had enough money for conscientiousness and generosity. ‘I am now in far more affluent circumstances than last year,’ he told a creditor confidently on 21 February 1838; ‘and am paying off all debts of every description at the rate of £15 a week.’ In early March he settled accounts with his landlady Miss Craig by guaranteeing her rent for the next fifteen months. And for several weeks he sent money to ‘a certain Peggy Brown’, a ‘char-woman, a washerwoman’ in Holyrood who ‘had been discharged from the Infirmary as cured of a fever’, but who was ‘weak and incapable of work’.120
During these same months, however, De Quincey also wrote at length of his own persecution and sorrow. He began the New Year under arrest, and pleading for help from Wilson, Blackwood, and Tait.121 In March, Nicolson again threatened him with ‘instant persecution’, and a particularly tenacious creditor, the Albion Clothing Company, made ‘renewed applications’.122 He could not even afford money for the coal needed to heat his room: ‘My hand is so cold I cannot guide a pen,’ he told Tait plaintively.123 The tailor John Craig put him to the horn in April, as did his sanctuary landlady Jane Miller a month later. ‘Will you be so good as to let me have one pound?’ he implored Blackwood on 6 June. ‘I am utterly aground without even paper or pens … If I fail, and once get into prison, I am booked for utter perplexity for a year and more.’124
A measure of relief came that spring when De Quincey left Lothian Street and took up residence at 31 Windsor Street with the daughters of his deceased Holyrood friend, Major Miller. ‘Better or more excellent creatures than these three sisters never existed,’ he declared. His days in the house were quiet, and in the evening he enjoyed dinner, tea, music, polished conversation, and the ‘luxuries of elegant female society’. But the respite, as De Quincey himself put it, ‘was too happy to last’. Peggy Brown, the charwoman he had assisted, betrayed him when she followed ‘Little Fred, by night and more than once’, until she discovered where De Quincey was hiding. Convinced that she would turn him over to his creditors, De Quincey took ‘sorrowful leave of my three fair young friends’, and moved to accommodations they located for him. Shortly thereafter the sisters themselves moved from Windsor Street to 18 Duncan Street, where De Quincey looked forward to visiting them. ‘I will take my chance of finding you at home,’ he wrote to them on 26 May, before going on to make a request: ‘give me no whiskey’. On a previous occasion in Windsor Street he seems to have ‘annoyed ladies in the drawing room by my potations’.125
In June, trouble erupted at Lingstubbs. The farmer (probably a Mr Carr) who had rented De Quincey space to house the books he had formerly stored at Dove Cottage had grown tired of waiting for payment, and had evidently decided to recoup his losses by advertising about ‘2 thousand volumes’ from De Quincey’s library ‘for public sale’. On ‘the Coronation Day’ – Queen Victoria officially received the crown on 28 June 1838 – a distraught De Quincey ‘left town by the mail for Penrith’, where he found the book sale already in progress, and a ‘drunken ruffian’ in charge.126 Digging through ‘heaps of dust and rubbish’, he was able to rescue ‘the jewels of my library … books, for which I would not take a thousand guineas’, but he could not stop a Mr Lawrence Harrison, who ‘in the space of one minute … completed a contract for ransoming the books: he offered 20 guineas on the spot; and … in 3 or 4 hours the books were all carted away into his care’. De Quincey was devastated. Not only had he lost a sizeable portion of a library that he had jealously guarded for years, but would ‘you believe it, all my papers – letters even to my wife, hers to me in early days – were all open to the public? Oh my God!… The agitation of my dreams, always tumultuous at intervals, has been fearful since this accursed affair began.’127
On 7 July, De Quincey left Penrith and the Lakes for perhaps the last time. The hunt for him in Edinburgh was ‘hot’ throughout the rest of the summer.128 A small hotel called the Guildford Arms, in Register Street, was one of the places in which he was ‘occasionally pleased to hide himself. The Miller sisters helped to keep creditors off his trail. William Wilson, an unidentified friend, lived at 1 Montague Street, and De Quincey also took refuge there.129 In early August his luck appeared to run out when catchpolls arrested him for his debt to the tailor Craig, but Black came once more to the rescue and De Quincey was ‘liberated’ almost immediately. The pressure of ‘finding the daily expenditure’ for his children was relieved when De Quincey managed to obtain credit at a Mr Thompson’s in Duncan Street, but the arrangement collapsed in late September and De Quincey was forced back on the necessity of raising ready cash – as he emphasized to Black – ‘each separate morning’.130
While creditors dogged him, he pursued his solicitor J.J. Smith, whose handling of the Penson annuity had aroused his suspicions. In October Smith seems to have agreed to ‘paying over the £120 which he admits having of mine’. This money may be part of the original £950 loan from the Caledonian Insurance Company that Smith had found some excuse to withhold from De Quincey. Or it may be money that Smith had stolen from him, for at some point during these weeks De Quincey discovered that Smith had guaranteed bills for De Quincey’s friend Major Miller in the amount of £100, and then silently reimbursed himself out of De Quincey’s loan. In any event, Smith later absconded to America, and De Quincey simply lost the money.131 The option of raising a second loan on the annuity was similarly ill-fated. De Quincey claimed that ‘9 or 10 different Insurance Offices’ had offered him a loan of £2000, but each had ultimately turned him down ‘upon putting the question to me if I were not the Opium-Eater’. Habitual brandy drinkers could get insurance, De Quincey later protested, but not laudanum addicts.132
As the year drew to a close, he and his family sunk to the point of deprivation. For the past three months ‘my household, now of 9 persons, had been reduced to a single meal a day – usually at night’, he explained to Wilson. ‘Even then my youngest daughter, 5 years old, besieged the ears of all about her with clamours for something to eat from morning to night.’ For the past three weeks the stress had been ‘worse than ever: no article of dress, no household utensil belonging to me, no plate received under my uncle’s will, but has long disappeared (you may be sure) at the pawnbroker’s … I need not pursue the odious recital. The story is humiliating enough.’133
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Though the turmoil of his life constantly intervened, De Quincey wrote furiously across these months of flight and grief. Black had originally hired him to produce two entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, seventh edition (1830–42), but he eventually increased that total to four. De Quincey wrote on Goethe, a poor choice, as his disparaging attitude had changed little since he attacked Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister fourteen years earlier. His entry on Schiller was much more enthusiastic, for De Quincey regarded him as ‘the representative of the German intellect in its highest form’. A third article on Alexander Pope praised him as ‘the most brilliant of all wits who have at any period applied themselves to the poetic treatment of human manners’.134 Finally, ‘no paper’ ever cost De Quincey ‘so much labour’ as his essay on Shakespeare; the result, enthused Eraser’s Magazine, was an ‘admirable and ingenious memoir’ in which De Quincey was ‘alert and vigorous’.135
At the same time, De Quincey asserted that he wrote ‘exactly 200 days without intermission’ for Tait: ‘what could I do? To stop for a single day … was to endanger my children’s daily support.’ De Quincey claimed that he produced the articles ‘in a coffee room of a mail coach inn; with a sheriff’s officer lurking near; in hurry too extreme to allow of reading them over even once; and with no after revision’.136 Tait, however, saw these articles as De Quincey delivered them, and he told a very different story. ‘Every piece of manuscript belonging to the Autobiography which he put into my hands bore many, very many proofs of having been carefully read over and corrected,’ he declared. ‘As to hurry, or rapidity of writing, I … can only say that he has always told me that he composes very slowly; that his language costs him a great deal of attention; that he studies the connection of every sentence with its neighbours.’ Further, ‘I know that the quantities of manuscript he brought me, at times when I knew he was anxious to write as much as he could, shewed that he did not compose with rapidity or hurry; for they were small as compared to the time he took to produce them.’ In a more candid mood, De Quincey himself admitted as much: ‘instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it is villainous insensibility to the written.’137
Tait’s featured four instalments of the ‘Life and Manners’ series in 1838, including a three-part essay on Lamb for April, June, and September. In late autumn, on a bitterly cold day of snow and sleet, Bertram saw De Quincey at his Holyrood Gardens address, ‘wrapped in an old camlet cloak, cowering over the remains of what … had been originally a good fire’, his ‘strikingly beautiful face’ overcast by a ‘sad and pre-occupied’ look.138 Bertram carried to him the proofs of an article entitled ‘A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature’, which appeared in Tait’s for December 1838 and June 1839.
The New Year saw De Quincey commence perhaps his best-known biographical study. Written in the early months of 1838 but published from January through August 1839, De Quincey’s five-part examination of the life and writings of Wordsworth serves as a companion piece to his earlier four-part series on Coleridge. The essays move broadly and digressively to incorporate accounts of Southey and Coleridge, as well as a moving tribute to Dorothy: ‘I have not seen you for many a day – shall never see you again perhaps; but shall attend your steps with tender thoughts, so long as I hear of you living.’ Word had reached De Quincey that a ‘nervous depression’ was now clouding Dorothy’s days. His response is highly revealing. ‘It is too much to expect of any woman (or man either) that her mind should support itself in a pleasurable activity, under the drooping energies of life, by resting on the past or on the present: some interest in reversion, some subject of hope from day to day, must be called in to reinforce the animal fountains of good spirits. Had that been opened for Miss Wordsworth, I am satisfied that she would have passed a more cheerful middle-age.’ With typical incisiveness, De Quincey points to Dorothy’s denial of her own literary and intellectual gifts as the reason for her mental collapse.139
Yet over the course of the five essays, it is the poet who holds centre stage. De Quincey sketches his biography, including his early days in the Lakes (‘I do not conceive that Wordsworth could have been an amiable boy’), his time at Cambridge (‘he felt – to use his own words – that his hour was not come’), and his commitment to the French Revolution (‘mighty was the transformation which it wrought in the whole economy of his thoughts’).140 Throughout De Quincey summarizes and quotes from Wordsworth’s as yet unpublished poem The Prelude, possibly from memory but more probably from a transcription that he seems to have produced in 1810 or 1811 when Wordsworth allowed him to read the poem in manuscript.141
As was the case in the Coleridge series, De Quincey’s attitude towards his subject matter is highly ambivalent, placing him in what he once described as ‘a strange sort of contradictory life’.142 Wordsworth is ‘the most original and most meditative man of his own age’, a man ‘of unimpeached, unimpeachable integrity’ who is ‘not simply destined to be had in everlasting remembrance by every generation of men, but … to be had in that sort of remembrance which has for its shrine the heart of man’. Yet Wordsworth has also failed De Quincey many times in ‘friendship and kindness’: ‘I acknowledge myself to have been long alienated’ from him for reasons ‘too deep and too personal for a transient notice’. ‘Sometimes even I feel a rising emotion of hostility – nay, something, I fear, too nearly akin to vindictive hatred.’ In retrospect, the failure of their relationship was partly ‘Wordsworth’s in doing too little’ and partly ‘mine in expecting too much’.143
The articles make it clear that the poet could be a trying companion. One day during tea he took down a volume of Burke from De Quincey’s bookshelf and proceeded to open its uncut leaves with a butter knife ‘that left its greasy honours behind it upon every page: and are they not there to this day?’ The experience, De Quincey remarks with equanimity, ‘just brought me acquainted with Wordsworth’s habits, and that particular, especially, with his intense impatience for one minute’s delay which would have brought a remedy’.144
Other observations were woundingly indiscreet. Both William and Dorothy had aged prematurely, as ‘strangers invariably supposed them fifteen to twenty years older than they were’. Mary Wordsworth had a squint. ‘It ought to have been displeasing or repulsive’ but, De Quincey assures us, ‘in fact it was not’. Wordsworth himself was poorly put together. His ‘walk had a wry or twisted appearance; and not appearance only – for I have known it, by slow degrees, gradually to edge off his companion from the middle to the side of the highroad’. More invidiously, one summer morning Dorothy and De Quincey were following the poet and a Westmorland clergyman at a little distance, when Dorothy became ‘positively mortified’ at what she saw. Next to the ‘fine towering figure’ of the clergyman, Wordsworth looked narrow and bowed. ‘Is it possible?’ she asked De Quincey ‘in a tone of vexation’. ‘Can that be William? How very mean he looks!’145
With recollections such as these De Quincey knew that he had crossed the line, and on occasion he fought to keep them out of Tait’s: ‘For God’s sake do not send the paper to the press as it is.’ In at least two instances he was successful, and Tait reluctantly agreed to remove passages that would have done ‘very great injury’ to De Quincey, ‘besides giving very great pain’ to the Wordsworths.146 Yet at the same time De Quincey had more than enough bile in him to relish the publication of material that revealed Wordsworth in a bad or embarrassing light, though he did not necessarily want to take responsibility for it. His strategy was to send Tait sensational material and then claim that it had been printed before he had been given the chance to edit it. ‘If … you ever look into my Autobiographical Sketches,’ he instructed his old friend Talfourd, ‘… bear in mind that I disown them.’147 Such disclaimers, according to Tait, were a ruse. De Quincey was telling the story that he wanted to tell, and Tait was doing all he could to accommodate him in terms of time and space. What is more, while they squabbled over different aspects of the series, author and editor were driven by the same objective: selling magazines. And as they both undoubtedly recognized, the juicier the gossip the better.
Reaction to the series was predictably divided. For some, it had the effect Tait most ardently desired. After reading the fifth instalment, the poet and translator Edward FitzGerald concluded that Tait’s ‘seems to be very well worth a shilling a month’.148 For others, De Quincey’s tactlessness was unforgivable. ‘The fellow cannot even let Mrs Wordsworth’s squint alone!’ stormed Hartley Coleridge. Harriet Martineau was philosophical. De Quincey has ‘perpetuated an act of treachery scarcely paralleled, we hope, in the history of Literature’, especially in his unauthorized use of The Prelude. But as she cuttingly put it, ‘nobody’s name and fame could be really injured by anything De Quincey could say’. Wordsworth himself did not read the articles, but he seethed at what he heard of them: ‘A Man who can set such an example, I hold to be … one of the most worthless of mankind.’149 Even he was partially mollified, however, when Crabb Robinson told him that De Quincey had described Mary as ‘a better wife than you deserve. “Did he say that?” W. exclaimed in a tone of unusual vehemence. “Did he say that? That is so true that I can forgive him almost anything else he says.”’ Robinson himself aptly summed up the series: ‘scandalous, but painfully interesting’.150
De Quincey concluded his account of Wordsworth in August, but in the ‘Life and Manners’ sketches that appeared over the next several months, the poet was never far from his thoughts. De Quincey complains rather pathetically that Wordsworth has never honoured ‘Professor Wilson or myself … with one line, one allusion, from his pen; but many a person, of particular feebleness, has received that honour’. He memorably derides the poet for his ‘inhuman’ egotism: ‘never describe Wordsworth as equal in pride to Lucifer; no, but if you have occasion to write a life of Lucifer, set down that, by possibility, in respect to pride, he might be some type of Wordsworth’. Again he broods on Dove Cottage, invoking both the ghost of Margaret and the memory of Wordsworth. That house, writes De Quincey, ‘by ties personal and indestructible’, has been ‘endeared … to my heart so unspeakably beyond all other houses, that even now I rarely dream through four nights running, that I do not find myself (and others beside) in some one of those rooms’.151
Working for Tait’s clearly liberated De Quincey to write searchingly and prolifically of his own past. Yet as his ‘Sketches’ wound their way to a close, he and Tait found the friction between them growing steadily worse. Matters came to a head in November 1840 when an angry De Quincey pointedly informed Tait that he ‘considered himself not well used in the 3 following points’: one, the press repeatedly lost proofs that he had corrected; two, the press took no care, or most insufficient care, to adopt the corrections he made to the proofs; and three, the press harassed him about correcting proofs when very often proofs already corrected had not yet been printed.152 Tait, who had been forbearing in the face of such outbursts, was apparently no longer prepared to put up with them. In February 1841, he published the last of the ‘Life and Manners’ sketches, and De Quincey disappeared from the pages of the magazine.
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Remarkably, during this same period, De Quincey also published extensively with Blackwood’s. Indeed, sometimes there was overlap, and both Blackwood’s and Tait’s featured an essay from him in the same month. When it came to being difficult, however, De Quincey did not play favourites. To Blackwood – as to Tait – there were the incessant requests for money, and the usual delays: ‘my manuscripts have become so injured by acid medicines, port wine, and ink thrown upon them – that I am obliged to patch them, piece them, and in some instances rewrite them’.153 When articles were submitted, De Quincey grumbled that Blackwood inflicted ‘castrations’ on them, or misplaced parts of them, leading him to protest that he would ‘sooner sacrifice the money’ than lose work that had cost him so much time and effort.154 In a particularly testy exchange, De Quincey told Blackwood that he believed him ‘incapable of countenancing any unprincipled act’, a provocative expression that moved Blackwood to ‘indignation and scorn’.155 Blackwood later declared in exasperation that he could no longer become mixed up in De Quincey’s private affairs, to which De Quincey mildly replied that he was ‘not aware of ever having done anything of the kind’.156
These frustrations notwithstanding, Blackwood typically exercised towards De Quincey an ‘accommodating spirit’, and the two men managed to keep their relationship on track much of the time.157 In June 1838 De Quincey presented Blackwood with ‘a German Tale (scene laid in Germany, I mean, but entirely my own invention), turning upon secret murder’. Blackwood rejected it as too long, but when De Quincey agreed to allow ‘friends’ of Blackwood to cut it ‘to about half its present length’, the tale was transformed into his most successful foray into terror fiction. Published in the August number, ‘The Avenger’ is a story of vigilantism and retribution in which De Quincey offers a ‘moral lesson’ that ‘deserves the deep attention of coming generations’, though the corrupt and bloody world of the tale make it difficult to determine what exactly that moral lesson is.158
Maximilian Wyndham is an idealized hero who returns from the Napoleonic Wars to settle in a quiet town in north-eastern Germany. Before long a series of brutal murders take place, all of which involve a killer who plants himself within a house and then exterminates the occupants. Footsteps in the chapel promise to ‘furnish a clue to the discovery of one at least among the murderous band’, while the terrified townspeople grapple with ‘the mystery of the how, and the profounder mystery of the why’. Eventually the murderer is revealed to be Maximilian himself, who is Jewish, and whose mother was publicly flogged to death in the town when he was a boy. Maximilian swears vengeance at her death, and then grows into a quiet but murderously angry adult who knows that the seemingly innocent inhabitants of the town are actually sadists and extremists who executed others for the crime of their race. As he pursues his homicidal career, however, Maximilian comes to seem at least as cruel as his victims, though he insists that their wrongs create his rights. When his reprisals careen so far out of control that he accidentally takes the life of his wife Margaret, he regards her death not as a confirmation of the dead-end futility of violence, but as a final sacrifice that affirms the divinity of his mission. In a closing confessional letter, Maximilian anticipates the rise of crime and detective fiction as he explains the inspired ways in which he committed his acts of murderous vengeance, and marks ‘the solution of that mystery which caused such perplexity’.159
That autumn De Quincey stumbled when he submitted an article to Blackwood that was thrown back upon his hands. ‘I do not perceive the law or principle on which Blackwood rejects or receives,’ he cried to Wilson, clearly a serious matter for him, and one that in the past had rarely been a problem.160 But if he had temporarily lost his bearings, he soon recovered them, for in January 1839, as he worked on his Schiller article for the Encyclopaedia, and published the first of his five Wordsworth articles for Tait’s, De Quincey began his most prolific period as a writer for Blackwood’s, producing twenty-five articles in twenty-five months, and doing so across a strikingly wide range of topics.161 ‘Generally … you cannot doubt that for many reasons I should prefer writing for your Journal,’ De Quincey assured Blackwood that same January, for he was always adept at telling individual publishers what they wanted to hear.162 Yet the statement also signals a genuine change in direction. For the past five years, he had concentrated on producing for Tait’s. Now, as that relationship dwindled into acrimony, Blackwood’s once again became his primary concern.
De Quincey wrote at length on theology, philosophy, and classical scholarship. His reply to David Hume’s argument ‘against miracles’ was published in July 1839, and centres on a discussion of ‘constituent miracles’, two of which are ‘absolutely indispensable to Christianity, and cannot be separated from it even in thought, viz. the miraculous birth of our Saviour, and his miraculous resurrection’. ‘The Essenes’, a three-part article for January, April, and May 1840, makes a convoluted case for the incorporation of the Jewish brotherhood of the Essenes within the Christian fold, and is grounded in his conviction that Christianity is superior to all other religions, and Protestantism to all other forms of Christianity. In ‘Modern Superstitions’, published in April 1840, De Quincey argues that ‘superstition, indeed, or the sympathy with the invisible, is the great test of man’s nature … In superstition lies the possibility of religion.’163 Several of these theophilosophical articles were thoroughly revised before they were published, for De Quincey had exacting standards and Blackwood pushed him hard to ensure that he reached them. What is more, though De Quincey may not always have been aware of it, he was still writing Blackwood’s articles in collaboration with Wilson, who corrected his response to Hume ‘with the utmost accuracy’, and who helped to prune ‘The Essenes’ in order to render it ‘suitable to the Magazine’.164
Literary criticism also preoccupied De Quincey. His article on the ‘Theory of Greek Tragedy’ explores the essential difference between the ancient and the English drama. The Greek tragedy is, by ‘comparison with the life of Shakespeare, what the inner life of the mimetic play in Hamlet is to the outer life of the Hamlet itself. It is a life below a life.’ In ‘Milton’, he details both how the ‘mighty poet’ was able to introduce ‘the Pagan pantheon into Christian groups’, and why he used ‘words of art’ such as ‘architrave’ and ‘amphitheatre’ in his descriptions of the ‘primitive simplicities of Paradise’. Wordsworth is lauded in a four-part article on ‘Style’ for ‘by far the weightiest thing we ever heard on the subject of style; and it was this – that it is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction “the dress of thoughts”; and what was it then that he would substitute? Why this: he would call it “the incarnation of thoughts”. Never, in one word, was so profound a truth conveyed.’165
Politics retained their grip, as De Quincey once again donned the robes of a ‘furious Conservative’ who taxed ‘even the bigots’ of his party ‘with being too frigid’.166 His haughty nationalism frequently passes off British imperial interests as the civilizing mission of Christianity. In ‘Foreign Politics’, he examines the first ‘Anglo-Afghan War’ of 1839–42, while in ‘The Opium and the China Question he vigorously defends Britain’s role in the first ‘Opium War’, a three-year battle fought between Britain and China over Britain’s illegal smuggling of opium from India into China, and which takes as its unspoken premise De Quincey’s vested interest in ensuring that opium continues to flow from the East back to the West. Britain’s domestic agenda also brings out the John Bull in him. ‘Hints for the Hustings’ is his most provocative consideration of a series of key contemporary issues, including the so-called ‘bedchamber crisis’, when the Conservative leader Robert Peel insisted that the Whig ladies of Queen Victoria’s bedchamber be removed, and the Queen imperiously refused; the Irish Catholic secret society of Ribbonmen, who wore green ribbons as badges, and were notorious for their sectarian outrages; the intractable problem of the Corn Laws, controversial measures of agricultural protection that benefited large landowners and punished the working class by keeping the cost of domestic grains artificially high; and Chartism, a working-class movement for parliamentary reform that De Quincey dismisses as ‘nothing more than ancient Jacobinism’.167
Perhaps the most memorable article from these months is his November 1839 sequel to ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. The essay opens with a bantering address to Wilson as Christopher North before moving to the description of a raucous dinner at which murder connoisseurs celebrate the achievements of a long line of practitioners, from Indian Thugs and Jewish Sicarii to more recent adepts such as the infamous Edinburgh killers William Burke and William Hare. De Quincey introduces a curmudgeon known as ‘Toad-in-the-hole’, who has grown despondent of late at the paucity of really fine murders, but who is given new life when he learns of Williams’s sensational 1811 debut on the Ratcliffe Highway. In both the original and the sequel De Quincey exploits the same satiric topsy-turviness that enables him to graze the brink between comedy and horror, though in the sequel morality is not so much suspended as inverted. Artistic and ethical standards must be maintained, insists the narrator. ‘For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop.’168
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Months of immense productivity for Black, Tait, and Blackwood had no immediate effect on De Quincey’s finances. He seems to have been both so inured to desperation that he could not see beyond it, and so in need of it that he did not want to. His money problems were genuine, but almost entirely avoidable. A bewildered Florence later attributed these terrible financial pressures to ‘some strange failure of intellect – they were so purposeless, and brought such unspeakable pain to his own higher nature and to those he loved’. Added Emily: ‘I think no one will make much out of my father who does not take in the extreme mixture of childish folly joined to a great intellect.’169
‘Snowed up’. That was De Quincey’s term for a room that he had so stuffed with books and papers that ‘there was not a square inch … on the table to set a cup upon’, ‘no possibility of making his bed’, ‘no chair which could be used for its legitimate purpose’, and no track ‘from the door to the fireplace’. When the confusion grew to the point where he could no longer work, De Quincey often simply locked the door and turned elsewhere, ‘leaving his landlady, if … honest, fearfully impressed with the mysterious sin of meddling with his papers, but, if dishonest, with such a handle for playing upon his morbid anxieties, as was a source of livelihood’. De Quincey’s habit of renting multiple rooms seems only to have grown worse as time went on.170
In the autumn of 1838, he was sued twice by his solicitor Thomas McIndoe, who had recently added his name to the long list of those who had provided De Quincey with legal advice. Two of De Quincey’s sons had stayed with McIndoe at 113 Princes Street earlier in the year and the suits probably involved arrears on the rent. At around this same time De Quincey himself went one evening to consult with McIndoe, whose wife noticed that ‘some essential part’ of his ‘outgoing raiment was wanting’, and asked him to stay until the next morning in order that she might have time to mend it. De Quincey accepted the kind invitation and was before long himself the regular occupant of McIndoe’s ‘bedroom by the side of the dining-room’. The Scottish preacher William B. Robertson, a kinsman of McIndoe’s, visited De Quincey often, and vividly recalled his ‘low-toned, weird, musical speech – to which I would, alone with him, night after night, listen for hours together’. Many years later, Robertson’s younger sister remembered being in awe of ‘that door and the mysterious man behind it, who put forth his hand to receive his meals’. One day she and De Quincey’s daughter Emily were playing in the lobby when ‘the door of the dreaded room was opened softly’ and De Quincey asked if he might speak to her. The young girl ran screaming into the kitchen, but Emily dragged her back to the door, and pushed her in. ‘De Quincey spoke kindly, and said, “I do not wish to frighten you, my dear, but only to ask you whether your name is Robertson, Robison, or Robinson.”’171
Other company gathered round. Hill Burton, who had sought an introduction years earlier, met him now and offered his aid ‘in borrowing a few books’. The publisher Robert Chambers declined De Quincey’s offer to become a contributor to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, but the two men became friends. ‘He used to spend many Sundays at my father’s house’, recalled Chambers’s daughter, ‘and had to rush back to get into Sanctuary before twelve o’clock, after which hour he could be arrested. For the sake of convenience he left a pair of his Wellington boots in my mother’s keeping.’172 The preacher and biographer George Gilfillan was introduced to De Quincey and ‘spent two nights with him. He is the most extraordinary specimen of humanity I ever met with.’ The newspaper editor and writer Robert Carruthers visited with De Quincey in Tait’s shop, and the next evening enjoyed an oyster supper with him, ‘when I listened with intense pleasure and surprise to his musical voice and eloquent periods for at least six mortal hours’.173 An anonymous recollection, most probably by the writer and clergyman Robert Aris Willmott, described passing a night with De Quincey at around this time. ‘The winds, keen and cutting as a scythe, swept the North Bridge of Edinburgh; but snugly seated in the Rainbow, we bade defiance to its blast. When fully kindled up and warmed in his subject, his whole talk is poetry.’ John Pringle Nichol, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, met De Quincey at a dinner party hosted by the novelist Catherine Crowe, ‘in whose house in Darnaway Street’ De Quincey spent ‘many a pleasant evening’. ‘The little man came very late, dressed in a rusty suit of black. In the drawing-room, after dinner, he and Dr Nichol stood together in a corner, engaged in talk, when, in a slow, measured tone, De Quincey said to his new acquaintance, “Dr Nichol, can you lend me twopence?” He borrowed money … to lay out on opium, and always asked for very small sums, knowing that they would not be refused.’174 In May 1840 De Quincey lamented ‘the utter solitude I have suffered for more than 2 years’. Seven months later he told Blackwood that, ‘except Mrs McIndoe once in 6 or 7 weeks, and my son Fred, I have seen no human being, for 15 months’.175 Such claims were clearly intended to convince his publishers that he was focused solely on work, but as had often been the case in the past, De Quincey was socializing far more than he liked to let on.
Getting out was probably very good for him. He was often in poor health, ‘condemned to a watery diet of slops’, or plagued by ‘obstinate sleeplessness’, or simply ‘too ill to write’.176 In July 1840 his eyes gave way as he worked through the night by a gas light that had no glass and burned ‘with a fierce flickering sort of roar’. For a month back ‘I have had but a feeble glimmer of sight’, while for ‘the last three days large spots of colour obscure everything’.177 Deplorable living conditions further undermined his health, but there was no money to improve the situation. His ‘hereditary funds’ were locked up by past debt.178 Black, Tait, and Blackwood were all garnishing large portions of his wage to pay bills they had guaranteed.179 And the vast majority of the money that did come to him went immediately to support his six children, as well as Margaret’s father and possibly her uncle Park. Between January 1839 and July 1840 De Quincey was sued seven times, including once by McIndoe, and twice by his sanctuary landlady Jane Miller, who submitted a petition to seize his books and papers for sale.180 In May 1840, as various ills closed down upon him, De Quincey produced one of the most harrowing letters he ever wrote:
Having in a moment of pinching difficulty for my children about 10 months since pawned every article of my dress which would produce a shilling, I have since that time had no stockings, no shoes, no neck handkerchief, coat, waistcoat, or hat. I have sate constantly barefoot; and, being constitutionally or from the use of opium unusually sensible of cold, I should really have been unable to sit up and write but for a counterpane which I wrap round my shoulders … Such hardships … I could support with some chearfulness, – were they of any use to others. But the painful result from the whole is – that, after paying little to any creditor but one, as regards that one I am about £100 worse than I was when I began. This is terrific.181
On 15 August 1840 De Quincey turned fifty-five years old. He had managed to fight on for three years without Margaret, but not to pull himself free of deprivation.
For all its severity and persistence, however, there is an aspect of De Quincey’s grief that cannot be taken at face value. De Quincey sought often to hide or excuse broken promises, late-night visitings, book collecting, and especially his drug addiction, which he mentioned only sporadically in his correspondence with his employers, but which fundamentally shaped his daily existence. His favourite tactic was to draw attention away from these indulgences by creating a diversion, most often in the form of a barrage of cries for more time, more money, and more support. In January 1839 he faced ‘the severe pressure of legal hunters’. In February he was ‘writing (as often I am compelled to do) in the street’. May: ‘I have been driven to dire extremities’. July: ‘I am in the very centre of a fierce struggle’. December: ‘Already I have been aground for half a week’.182 January 1840: ‘I shall never extricate myself to the end of time’. March: ‘I am driven to the last gasp’. May: ‘the persecutions I suffer allow me no choice’. October: ‘I am a done man’. December: ‘I am overwhelmed by a most perplexing affair’.183 February 1841: ‘I am in the greatest difficulty for money’.184
Yet throughout all these struggles, De Quincey harboured in his McIndoe lodgings ‘about 8 separate works’ of the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, along ‘with one or two’ other volumes ‘almost equally rare’. These were the volumes for which he declared that he ‘would not take a thousand guineas’.185 While hunger, cold, and despair bit deeper into him and into his family, and while he protested loudly and frequently against his fate, he refused to pawn or auction these precious jewels from his library. His need for them appears to have been almost as strong as his need for opium. The books were in his possession when he died.186 De Quincey lived amidst grim realities, and often he fought bravely against them. But on other occasions he manufactured or exploited his distress in order to front his quiet pursuit of opium, and books, and freedom.
He tried to take care of his children. From their grandmother they received what paid ‘for clothes, schooling, house, up to the 12th of each month’, but ‘on the 13th’ they fell upon him, and ‘their total weight’ was often more than he could bear. At an especially low ebb he appealed to Blackwood for the ‘punctual payment of “trifling” balances’ in order to save one of his daughters from ‘a 14 hours’ starvation’.187 Yet in periods of relative calm he was generous with his children far beyond his means. One day he bought all his daughters bonnets, and on another evening he escorted one of them to a dance at Robert Chambers’s house.188
His two eldest sons, meanwhile, were now old enough to leave home. Horace was to enter the military. The cost, including the commission, was over nine hundred pounds, seven hundred of which fell jointly on De Quincey and his mother, and above two hundred more solely on De Quincey. How on earth he raised these funds is not clear, but the money was paid and Horace prepared to join the 26th Regiment.189 Francis was to go into business. John Kelsall, who decades earlier had been brought into the mercantile trade by De Quincey’s father, had a son, Strettel Kelsall, who was now eager to return the favour by bringing one of De Quincey’s sons into the trade, and before long Francis had joined Kelsall and moved to Manchester.190
In the summer of 1840 De Quincey owed his Holyrood landlady Jane Miller just over £175 for rent and a series of small loans. The family received a formal notice to quit the house in August.191 De Quincey was ‘thoroughly harassed’ by these circumstances and ‘unable to write a line’. His children, however, took action: first they successfully persuaded him to turn over ‘the management of his small fixed income’ to them; and then they obtained Mavis Bush Cottage, a ‘decent little home’ seven miles outside of Edinburgh near the village of Lasswade, where they moved on 14 August. It was a change, Florence declared, ‘which rests in my memory as one of the most lively foretastes of Paradise I have had in my life’.192 The hell of sanctuary was finally over.
De Quincey did not join his children at the cottage, but he too was making plans to leave Edinburgh. McIndoe had become his fiercest persecutor. The situation seems to have broken down in April 1840, when he sent a terse letter to De Quincey, addressed in the third person when they were both living in the same house. Given De Quincey’s enormous literary output over the past two years, McIndoe apparently speaks with some justification when he points out that ‘Mr De Quincey … has enjoyed a great deal of care and has been saved from a great deal of vexation’ during his time at 113 Princes Street. But McIndoe was no longer prepared to wait for ‘Mr De Quincey, because he appears to be indifferent’ to any claims made upon him for arrears, ‘however pressing these may be’.193 For three weeks McIndoe made ‘the most violent efforts at ejecting’ De Quincey, and it was at least another three before the two men effected some sort of truce, and De Quincey was able to return to his writing.194 Unfortunately, the situation collapsed again in November, when McIndoe renewed his demands that De Quincey either pay the rent or leave the house, though De Quincey insisted that McIndoe’s immediate object was retaining his manuscripts: ‘personally I was not a prisoner: but by my papers, which would have been held over my head for years to come as a screw for extorting money, I was’.195 Trapped and intimidated, De Quincey’s description of his circumstances typically assumes the cast of terror fiction. Mrs McIndoe has avowed ‘openly to me that she has been trying and feeling my letters to ascertain if they contained bank notes … After this who could doubt tampering with locks, listening, eaves dropping.’ He had to get out. ‘But I am obliged to proceed cautiously,’ he confided to Blackwood: ‘and amongst other cautions I have earnestly to request that you will not leave this letter lying on any table open to strangers … A boy amongst your servants, or a porter… might chance to make treacherous discoveries.’196
It was late February before De Quincey had the ‘prospect of liberation from the dire perplexity of my position without sacrificing my manuscripts’. Shortly thereafter, he packed up as much as he could, hired a porter, and somehow stole from McIndoe’s without being detected, just as he had stolen from Charles Lawson’s house as a Manchester schoolboy nearly four decades earlier. He headed to Glasgow, where by early March he was living with Professor Nichol at the university.197 McIndoe sued him one final time in April, though at that point he almost certainly had no idea where he was. ‘Henceforwards I am a free man,’ De Quincey claimed exultantly.198 It was a rare moment of joy after months of suffering and upheaval. But De Quincey was far from free.