Lasswade
[i]
‘What has he done? – From the beginning of his career to this hour, I know of no man who has so uniformly and consistently avoided writing any thing good.’1 So a disgruntled reader condemned De Quincey in an October 1840 letter to William Tait. Yet by the early 1840s the impact of De Quincey’s writings, and especially of his Confessions, was remarkably extensive. In 1828, the French poet and playwright Alfred de Musset produced L’Anglais, mangeur d’opium, a free translation of the Confessions. Just eighteen years old when the work was published, Musset followed the broad outline of De Quincey’s tale, but omitted several passages, summarized others, and inserted a great deal, including an entire episode in which De Quincey meets Ann again at a ball, fights a duel on her behalf, and then elopes with her.2
Propelled by Musset’s adaptation, De Quincey’s influence soon spread through France, and well beyond. The composer Hector Berlioz drew on De Quincey’s fascination with nightmares, opium, and idealized portraits of young women in the production of his Symphonie Fantastique (1830).3 Théophile Gamier’s ‘La Pipe d’Opium’ (1838), as well as Honoré de Balzac’s ‘L’opium’ (1830), ‘Les litanies romantiques’ (1830), and ‘Massimilla Doni’ (1839), all rework different aspects of the Confessions. The Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol borrowed from Musset’s translation for ‘The Nevsky Prospect’ (1835), particularly in his portrayal of the city, where the shadows, outcasts, drugs, and despair of De Quincey’s Oxford Street shape his representations of Saint Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect.4
American writers too responded to De Quincey. During his first visit to Britain in 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson was ‘inspired’ with the ‘wish to see the faces of three or four writers’: ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey’.5 In ‘Turkish Sketches’ (1836) the Reverend Walter Colton found his imagination ‘so kindled, by the perusal of a little book called the “Opium-Eater”, that I resolved to put its pleasing assurances to a practical test. So, sending to an apothecary’s shop, I procured two enormous doses of the precious drug.’6 In ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ (1838), Edgar Allan Poe offers exuberant praise of the Confessions: ‘fine, very fine! – glorious imagination – deep philosophy – acute speculation – plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible’.7 Moreover, several of Poe’s most famous tales, including ‘Ligeia’ (1838) and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), contain opium addicts, while in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842), he draws deeply on De Quincey’s Klosterheim.8 William Blair consciously modelled his Opium-Eater in America (1842) on the Confessions. ‘Before my entranced sight’, writes Blair, ‘magnificent halls stretched out in endless succession, with gallery above gallery, while the roof was blazing with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was thronged with strange, gigantic figures.’9
In Britain, De Quincey’s most decisive impact seems to have been on Branwell Brontë, who read the Confessions for the first time around 1839. The book captivated him, and he soon followed De Quincey into opium addiction, which ‘seized on his nervous system’ until he ‘underwent the torture of the damned’. In late 1839 Brontë moved to the Lake District, and shortly thereafter paid a visit to Coleridge’s eldest son Hartley, who was at that time living at The Nab.10 In April 1840 Brontë sent De Quincey ‘Sir Henry Tunstall’, one of his finest poems, as well as translations of five odes from Horace. ‘There are doubtless many mistakes of sense and language,’ Brontë told De Quincey. ‘… I had not when I translated them, a Horace at hand, so was forced to rely on memory’ De Quincey seems not to have responded to Brontë, but he did manage to avoid the fate that engulfed his young admirer, who died eight years later in the grip of debt, alcohol, and opiates. In procuring the drug, Elizabeth Gaskell remarked, Brontë ‘showed all the cunning of the opium-eater’.11
[ii]
John Pringle Nichol was a political economist, a radical, and the Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. A lifelong friend of John Stuart Mill and a notable influence on Poe, Nichol ‘looked like a poet, without knowing that he did so’. De Quincey arrived at the Old College in Glasgow to take up an invitation to visit that Nichol had extended a few years earlier when the two had first met in Edinburgh. To De Quincey, Nichol was ‘most kind’, and especially ‘interesting for his ‘intellectual characteristics’, which placed the ‘deep meditative style of his mind … in conflict for ever with the tumultuous necessity in him for travelling along the line of revolutionary thought’.12
De Quincey had been staying at the college about two weeks when Nichol received a shipment of ‘the earliest amongst a series of splendid instruments’ that were to be housed in a new Observatory being built in Glasgow’s west end, but which in the interim Nichol was forced to store in the confined space of his own rooms.13 Now obviously in the way, De Quincey transferred himself just a short distance to the Old College lodgings of Edward Law Lushington, a Cambridge ‘Apostle’, the Professor of Greek at Glasgow, and the future brother-in-law of Alfred Tennyson. De Quincey and Lushington had met for the first time at Nichols only days earlier, but a friendship quickly developed. De Quincey arrived at Lushington’s on 16 March and, on sitting down to dinner that same day, was seized ‘with a violent affection, inflammatory and connected with strong delirium, that for many subsequent days prostrated me in an infant state of helplessness’, as he explained in a letter to Blackwood, who was waiting for various articles from him.14
Illness often prevented De Quincey from delivering manuscripts on time, and in this instance he may well have been sick. But he was not giving Blackwood the whole story. Far from being unable to leave his bed, two days after arriving at Lushington’s, De Quincey was back in Edinburgh, where he was arrested ‘in the hands of … Mr William Tait’, and ‘at the instance of Frances Wilson’, his former landlord in Lothian Street. What is more, not only was he charged under his own name, but also under the name of an alias, ‘T. E. Manners Ellis’, a remarkable indication of the kinds of duplicity he resorted to in order to try and elude his pursuers.15 On this occasion he seems once again to have avoided prison, but he was clearly not anxious to tell Blackwood that he had been in Edinburgh, at Tait’s, and under arrest. So he pleaded sickness, and returned to writing for Blackwood as soon as he could. Blackwood, it seems, was none the wiser.
Staying with Lushington was not intended to be more than a temporary solution, and by 12 April De Quincey had taken lodgings in the High Street ‘opposite the gate of the Professor’s Court in the old College’. From here he sent Blackwood two translations, one of which featured the letters of the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and the other of which brought together key passages from the autobiography of the poet and historian Ernst Moritz Arndt. Living in these ‘strange’ lodgings, however, soon reduced De Quincey to a state of ‘extreme perplexity’.16 He was without the support of his family, and he could meet very few of his financial obligations in Glasgow, for virtually all of his income was funnelled by Blackwood to his children at Lasswade or his creditors in Edinburgh.
Within only a few weeks De Quincey was convinced that he would soon be forced out ‘into the street’. Compounding these problems was the ongoing deterioration of his health, which collapsed again in early May, leaving him unable ‘to rise even to let the bed be arranged’.17 More than a month passed before he felt well enough to walk. At least, De Quincey claimed, his drinking had been brought under control. ‘Were it not for my excessive temperance, I should long since have been dead,’ he assured Blackwood, though this may have been another half-truth, for at this same moment he also observed that neither in classical times ‘nor in our days is there any just appreciation of the subsidiary benefits which sometimes arise from strong liquors’.18
Part of his solution to these troubles was to move again, this time to 79 Renfield Street, where he rented two rooms in the family home of Mr Thomas Youille (or Yuille), a college officer and a ‘trust-worthy man’ on a salary of £40 a year.19 Youille was for many months a generous landlord whose wife and daughters were soon involved in assisting De Quincey with money, books, supplies, and the mail. The new and much more supportive surroundings undoubtedly brought De Quincey a degree of relief, and yet his overall situation remained much the same. Gilfillan seems to have visited at around this time, and found De Quincey ‘in a mean room, such as students were wont to live in for five or six shillings a week … I heard of him, either before or after that time, living a while in a friend’s house, in a half-torpid condition under opium.’20
At some point during these weeks De Quincey also received a visit from his son Horace. The boy was soon to enter the Army and, having travelled through England on ‘some farewell visits to family connexions’, he returned to Scotland to bid goodbye to his father. His spirits on the occasion, however, were weighed down by a familiar family problem. Horace owed the tailor Buckmaster £116 for ‘extra equipment’ purchased after all the initial costs were paid in full, and he was in arrears an additional £60 to a series of ‘petty creditors chiefly in England’. Both debts, De Quincey reported, Horace ‘relied upon being able to meet himself within a year by means of presents which he anticipated from near relatives in England’.21
June brought alarming news from Lasswade. Margaret was ill. She had suffered two ‘nearly fatal’ haemorrhages, and the local surgeon, Mr Smith, apprehended ‘a 3rd which … would certainly be so’. Filled with terrible anxiety, De Quincey had to wait several days before he learned that his daughter was almost out of danger, though his immense relief was coupled with the guilty recognition that the ‘illness was caused by her sensibility to the persecution she underwent’ from angry creditors who had tracked her down to Lasswade. ‘This child will die, I foresee, under the misery of her situation,’ De Quincey reported. ‘For she has no firmness to face it, – is entirely guiltless of wrong: and I, unless I can do something effectual and sudden, shall feel myself in part the cause.’ Like her mother and namesake before her, Margaret lived in the country and fought off creditors while De Quincey buried himself in the city and struggled unsuccessfully to make enough money for both himself and his children. Once again he was filled with the dreadful thought that he might be responsible for someone’s death, if only partially in this instance. At one especially difficult moment Margaret and Francis took the risky step of borrowing £250 in their own names in an effort to put an end to the harassment.22
Most of his pursuers lost sight of him when he decamped to Glasgow, but De Quincey stayed in touch with Mary Miller, to whom, along with her sister Jane, he still owed rent on his Holyrood Gardens rooms. He made several payments to her, and even revealed how she might contact him through either Nichol or Lushington.23 Later she called on him at Youille’s ‘for the purpose … of raising money’.24 A second former landlady also wished to speak to De Quincey, but her attentions were far less welcome. Mrs McIndoe had decided to hound him with the same vigour previously shown by her husband. She traced De Quincey to Glasgow, where she tricked one of Nichol’s daughters into revealing his whereabouts.25 De Quincey fled on that occasion, but ‘she tracked him from lodging to lodging, and took advantage of the hours when she knew he was not at home, to procure admission to his rooms’. Eventually De Quincey ‘represented to Professor Nichol that the woman had conceived a violent but hopeless attachment to him, which he could not reciprocate’. His risible explanation belies the depth of his anxiety. Plagued on the one hand by ‘the morbid value he set upon his papers’ in her possession, and on the other by her repeated demands for money, De Quincey regarded her as ‘his evil genius’.26
That summer the Tories under Sir Robert Peel swept back into power with a long-expected general election victory over the Whigs. De Quincey’s response, ‘Sir Robert Peel’s Position on Next Resuming Power’, appeared in Blackwood’s for September 1841, and celebrated a return to conservative values and policies. Britons had been thoroughly disillusioned by the false promises of Whiggery. ‘We believe the great Reform mania, which has agitated our public atmosphere in varying strengths through the last eleven years, to be now at length ebbing to its very lees,’ De Quincey declared. The defeated Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne had stayed in power far too long. ‘Chop off his hands, he clings by his feet; chop off his feet, he clings by his teeth. And in reality, even these images do not express the intensity of that last desperate struggle by which [he] has clung to his seat.’27
Beyond contemporary politics, De Quincey needed to be as resourceful as ever to keep generating articles. Procrastination, he confessed to Lushington, remained amongst his ‘infirmities’, but Lushington’s classical expertise, together with his willingness to borrow books from the university library, enabled De Quincey to produce a string of Blackwood’s essays on Greek literature, beginning with ‘Plato’s Republic’ in July, and followed shortly thereafter by a three-part examination of ‘Homer and the Homeriade’ for October, November, and December. ‘Prof. Wilson, I believe, takes an interest in this question’, De Quincey informed Blackwood; ‘and will be pleased, I flatter myself, with the paper: which is unequalled amongst mine at least for quantity of previous reading.’28
December brought word that Horace was ‘afloat for China’, where he would fight with British forces under Sir Hugh Gough in the ‘Opium Wars’.29 A month earlier, and almost certainly in the knowledge that his son would soon be in the East, the jingo in De Quincey surged to the surface in his Blackwood’s assessment of the ‘Canton Expedition and Convention’. Though Britain was illegally importing opium into China, its aggression in the war was wholly justified, De Quincey argues. In a country like China, ‘it happens too often … that to murder is the one sole safeguard against being murdered … We did nothing wrong, because nothing that was not essential to self-preservation.’ Indeed, despite the bloodshed, De Quincey is brutally confident that Britain’s imperial agenda in the East will ultimately be seen as mutually advantageous. ‘Many times must the artillery score its dreadful lessons upon their carcasses, before they will be healed of their treachery, or we shall be allowed to live in the diffusion of peaceful benefits.’30
The New Year hit him with rounds of debilitating illness. He was racked by purpura, and while Blackwood greeted the news with some scepticism, De Quincey assured him that he had exaggerated neither his despair nor the malignity of the disease. ‘Dr Easton … told me – that … he expected for some days that mortification would take place in the right leg: and to my landlady he said – that it was the very worst case of Purpura which he had seen in his Hospital experience.’31 After a ‘shocking relapse’ in February, Dr Easton called in Dr Hanna, who concluded that gout was ‘mixed up with purpura in this case’.32 Three months passed without improvement, and opium only made his problems worse. ‘The purpura is so radicated that upon any use of a stimulant tho’ but for an extra effort of one 24 hours, or any sacrifice through this stimulant of a few hours’ sleep, – both legs are in one night scorched scarlet and purple, rheumatism on waking seizes the whole frame, I cannot lift either arm, – and other incapacitating effects follow.’33
Constipation was one of those effects, and another direct result of his opium addiction. In March his ‘condition from danger of inflammation of the bowels had become shocking’. That ‘I did not kill myself was owing chiefly I believe to my taking no liquor – and hardly anything else’. His doctors prescribed remedies, but De Quincey could not afford them. ‘Even the oranges, which are ordered by Dr Hanna, I cannot buy.’34 De Quincey beseeched Blackwood to help him relieve the suffering. ‘Nothing else than Seidlitz powders has, for some years, availed in my case: and 3 separate doses are required to reach the effect. Now, if you would oblige me by sending me 21 of the powders, so as to form 7 distinct days’ doses, – this would amply suffice for a fortnight.’ Blackwood generously complied and, in the short term, De Quincey was ‘very much better indeed’, though soon the laxatives began to work so well that he had the opposite problem.35 ‘In the whole system of houses, to which this house is attached, there exists but one templum Cloacinae. Now imagine the fiend driving a man thither thro’ 8 and 10 hours successively. Such a man becomes himself a public nuisance, and is in some danger of being removed by assassination.’36
Poor health, moreover, was not all that plagued De Quincey. Writing supplies were a real problem. In March he rejoiced when he received three new pens, and later he asked Blackwood if the seidlitz powders he was sending could be wrapped in some writing paper, ‘such as this on which I write’? Better still, maybe Blackwood could send paper ‘a little more satiny or glazed’, for De Quincey remained as finicky as ever about the presentation of his work, no matter how bad the surrounding circumstances.37 Mundane tasks filled him with an anxiety amounting to dread. ‘This morning I opened a letter which has been in my hands for 4 days, but which from nervous cowardice according to my practice I had not opened.’38 Expectedly, Mary Miller and the McIndoes were after him again about back rent, and he had fallen badly into arrears with the Youilles.39 Unexpectedly, ‘a fire arose in the shop immediately below’ his rooms, and while his ‘papers and everything else’ were safely removed, the ‘vexation’ caused ‘a total interruption of 7 hours’.40
Yet he kept writing. The Conservatives had been in power for seven months when he returned to contemporary politics with his April 1842 assessment of ‘Sir Robert Peel’s Policy’. ‘Not steam power is at this moment more effectually revolutionizing the world’ than those agitators who want to repeal the Corn Laws, and who argue in favour of ‘what is now called Manhood Suffrage’. Drastic measures were needed to stave off these reckless demands, and De Quincey saw reason for great optimism when Peel introduced one of the most famous budgets of the nineteenth century on 11 March. ‘It was understood at a glance that his measure, in so far as it was burdensome, had been called for by the negligence and errors not of himself, but of his opponents; and that, in so far as it promised to be splendidly effective, it was indebted to his characteristic boldness, and his determination to look the national difficulties in the face.’41
De Quincey’s confidence in Peel remained high over the course of the summer, but he found himself increasingly unnerved by the actions of the insurrectionists. Though he lived among the poor, and had done so for many years, he regarded them in Blackwood’s, not with sympathy, but with deep suspicion. ‘We, who often talk with poor men … have rarely found them other than jacobins at heart,’ he stated in Anti-Corn-Law Deputation to Sir Robert Peel’, published in the magazine for August. He was equally to the point a month later in his article on ‘The Riots’, where he condemned the Chartists and Corn League activists for trying to ‘put an end to our whole polity and civil existence’. ‘To a man,’ he explained to Blackwood, ‘I look upon the working poor, Scottish or English, as latent Jacobins – biding their time.’42
Overheated political assaults were a De Quinceyan speciality in Blackwood’s, but that autumn he also wrote on Ricardian political economy, which had long inspired radicals, but which De Quincey embraced as an abstract system of power and exchange that brought him both intellectual excitement and aesthetic pleasure. Published in Blackwood’s for September, October, and December, ‘Ricardo Made Easy’ lauds Ricardo for revolutionizing the science of economics, particularly in his analysis of value and rent, and offers a series of memorable examples that illuminate key Ricardian ideas. Yet De Quincey does have frank misgivings about Ricardo, especially concerning his opposition to the Corn Laws. ‘David, ringleader of the wicked anti-corn-law mutineers’, he writes scornfully, ‘how is it … that “very filth and shame” did not check thee in thus calling for aid upon that honest truth which thy whole faction had so deeply foresworn?’43 The third and final instalment of ‘Ricardo Made Easy’ was a good deal more digressive than the previous two, but – revealingly – it pleased Alexander Blackwood, who announced to his brother John that De Quincey had ‘wound up his Political Economy lectures in capital style’.44
Near the end of the year he received terrible news: Horace had died, apparently of a malarious fever, at Chich Choo in China, on 27 August 1842.45 When notices from foreign newspapers began to reach Britain a few months later, Margaret and her sisters were frantic, and sought confirmation of the death. They wrote first to their father in the hope of ‘quickening’ him ‘in attending to the subject’, but he did not respond.46 They then contacted Robert Blackwood, who wrote to John in London: ‘I wish you to make particular enquiry about the following in a Newspaper published at Calcutta and which came home with the November Mail. There is a paragraph that Horace De Quincey of the 26th had died at Hong Kong … His sisters are in real distress and believe him dead.’47 Wilson seems at this time to have told De Quincey that there was ‘some doubt … about the death of his son’, but was obliged soon afterwards to confirm the worst. ‘I am sorry,’ De Quincey replied, ‘… but it was against my advice he went to China at all.’48 Such a callous attitude towards one of his children is highly uncharacteristic, and comes in the midst of a recollection by Wilson that contains several errors of fact. But it may be that after months of illness and sorrow, and following the deaths of Julius, William, and Margaret, De Quincey had simply reached the end of his ability to respond to yet more loss in his family.
Contradictory reports of him emerge over the next several months. According to De Quincey himself, ‘excessive illness’ plagued him through the winter, and well into the spring. ‘The pains of gout … are the least thing,’ he wrote to Blackwood on 19 March 1843: ‘the greatest is – the deadly languishing from blood continually growing more torpid.’49 A month later ‘the horny substance, which encrusts my feet, increases continually’, and by May he was ‘much more sunk and dilapidated here than ever before’.50 When his old friend Charles Knight called in, however, he found De Quincey looking better than he had done twelve years earlier. He had ‘a beard a foot long … the cultivation of which, he said, was necessary to his health’. These same months saw Professor Nichol’s young son John, the future Regius Professor of English Literature at Glasgow, take a series of walks with De Quincey out to the new Observatory. Nichol later described their conversations as among his ‘most cherished recollections’.51
De Quincey stayed busy recasting and expanding his three articles on ‘Ricardo Made Easy’ with the intention of turning them into a book. By the end of April the project was nearing completion, but De Quincey was apparently feeling overwhelmed by the size of the task and the clutter of his room. It is unclear whether he asked for help or his daughters sensed that he needed it, but in early May he was joined in Glasgow by his twenty-year-old son Francis, who had recently moved back to Lasswade after deciding against a career with Mr Kelsall in the Manchester mercantile trade. His appearance was a great relief to his father. ‘Without his aid’, De Quincey confessed, ‘from my dire immobility, I never could have separated’ the papers intended for the book from the ‘masses of others with which by long lying about they had got confounded’. It took father and son about two weeks to pull the final sections together, and on 16 May they mailed to Blackwood ‘the entire remainder of the little book on Political Economy’.52
Debt, however, continued to undermine De Quincey’s own economy.53 His landlord Youille had been patient for months, but on 22 May he gave De Quincey an ultimatum: ‘if on Thursday June 1 … I could pay up an arrear still standing against my name, – well and good: if not, that on that day I must take my departure’. De Quincey hung on until the evening of 2 June, but he could not find the money, and he was ‘obliged to go’ after two years with the Youilles.54 Francis almost certainly assisted him as he gathered together as much as possible from the heaps of books and papers that he had accumulated, and made his way from Glasgow to his children’s home at Lasswade.
[iii]
It marked a turning point. Margaret, with great courage and common sense, had used her father’s annuity, plus the money he had sent to her from Glasgow, to pay off debts, and to bring what must have seemed previously unimaginable levels of comfort and financial stability to the household. Mavis Bush contained eight rooms, ‘one of which (the largest), or what in London is called the first floor, is used as a drawing-room, and one about half the size, on the ground floor, a dining-room’. The cottage was home to all five De Quincey children: Francis and Fred were as yet unsettled on careers, while Margaret, Florence, and Emily lived in ‘the most absolute harmony’, doing chores, reading books, playing music, and visiting when they could.55 De Quincey himself occupied the small study on the ground floor to the right of the entrance, which he soon crammed full of manuscripts and books, though his daughters kept the confusion in check in order to ensure that his ‘papering’ did not gradually force them all out of the house.56 The family kept two female servants, a housemaid and a cook.
‘My father’s habits were simple, almost to asceticism,’ Florence remembered. ‘Owing to the neuralgic suffering … he early lost all his teeth; and, from the extreme delicacy of his system, he could eat nothing less capable of perfect mastication than bread, so that only too often a little soup or coffee was his whole dinner.’57 The cold bothered him a great deal, and even in the months of July and August, he was forced to sit in the ‘closest proximity to a blazing fire’, with cloaks, blankets, counterpanes, hearthrugs, and horse-cloths piled upon his shoulders.58 Yet his overall condition was much improved, he contended, for he had begun to take ‘iron as a medicine’, and it had bestowed upon him what he had long lacked: ‘some hope of restoration’.59
Walking became a central part of his daily routine, for in his eyes working the laudanum out of his system through exercise was one of the best ways of combating his addiction. One circuit around the perimeter of the back garden was forty-four yards, meaning that ‘forty rounds were exactly required for one mile’. De Quincey usually began before breakfast, and within ninety days he had walked a thousand miles. Initially he counted his progress by a rosary of blue and white beads, but the plan proved troublesome, and he switched to a system of applying stones to the separate bars of a garden chair.60 The effect of this routine on his spirits was miraculous: ‘for the first time during many years I am able to write both energetically and satisfactorily to myself’, he declared to Blackwood on 13 October 1843.61
Life at Mavis Bush brought some of the irritations that he had previously experienced at Dove Cottage and Fox Ghyll. Bad roads could make communication a challenge, as could a postal system that relied on domestic servants and ‘a boy six years old to all appearance’.62 Grumbled De Quincey: ‘I can communicate more easily with Astrachan or with Mecca than with Lasswade.’63 Creditors had no trouble getting in touch, though. Like the Millers and McIndoes before him, Youille seized the mass of papers that De Quincey had been unable to carry when he vacated his Glasgow lodgings, and he was now actively uttering threats. The case is one of ‘real urgency’, De Quincey wrote apprehensively to Blackwood. ‘Mr Y’s “women-folk”, at least his daughters, are particularly kind and obliging: but he is a savage.’ In October De Quincey was ‘furiously pressed’ to ‘keep ahead of the hot pursuit’ of his creditors.64 Meanwhile, his aged father-in-law, who had been living with the family, was laid low by his final illness. ‘His complaint is ossification of the entire intestines,’ De Quincey explained in January. Simpson died on 2 February 1844. He had outlived his daughter by six and a half years.65
Five letters from the War Office lay on De Quincey’s desk, and in the spring he finally forced himself to open them. They all concerned Horace. After his death, his effects had been sold at Hong Kong for £114.13s.5d. In his reply, De Quincey proposed distributing the money between various creditors, and undertook to clear off whatever debts remained. An official at the War Office, clearly unaware of who he was, described the letter as ‘obviously written by a Man of taste and talent. The arrangement is highly creditable to him.’ Margaret later contacted the War Office in the belief that Horace might be entitled to prize money, but this was not the case.66
The fate of their brother notwithstanding, Francis and Fred were considering a career in the army. Blackwood kindly made enquiries on their behalf, although De Quincey was apparently confused as to what end. ‘Supposing that you could succeed in the case, is it not a military Cadetship you meant? For a civil one, you know, requires a preliminary course of study at Haileybury.’67 Margaret, even more anxious than her father about the future of the two boys, went a few unexpected steps further when she wrote directly to Wordsworth, in the knowledge that he had recently become Queen Victoria’s poet laureate, and in the hope that he might use his position to help secure places for her brothers. ‘I trust that as the daughter of an old friend you will forgive the liberty I take in addressing you,’ she began, before going on to explain that ‘the Duke of Wellington in answer to a letter from my Aunt (Miss de Quincey) promised my youngest Brother Frederick a commission in the Army … but we are told that such promises are never attended to unless reminded of them by some influential person’. Margaret was conscious of the ‘indelicacy’ of her request, but she hoped the ‘urgency of the case’ would be ‘some apology’. In a discreet postscript she added, ‘I need hardly say that this letter has been written without the knowledge of my Father, or indeed of the Family but a Sister.’ Wordsworth, in response, showed himself still remarkably willing to assist De Quincey. He took a ‘kind interest’ in the affair, and it was probably through his attention that De Quincey was put in touch with Lord Lonsdale, who within ten days saw to it that Fred was appointed as an ‘Ensigncy in the 70th foot’. ‘Allow me to offer our united thanks for your kindness in this matter,’ a grateful Francis wrote to Wordsworth.68
Old and new friends began to call at Mavis Bush, though perhaps not so often as De Quincey would have liked. Blackwood had travelled out the previous December, and was planning to visit again in the spring.69 Lushington was in Edinburgh in November 1844 and wrote to enquire about the possibility of staying overnight. ‘Without any shadow of inconvenience we can offer you a bed,’ De Quincey told him. ‘… The Lasswade coach brings you in so as to reach us (I understand) by half-past five.’70 The parish schoolmaster at Lasswade, William Young, had become a good friend of the family, and promised to visit De Quincey in December.71 Most notably, Wilson was pledged to dine at Mavis Bush just before the New Year.72 After years of intimacy in the Lake District and then Edinburgh, the two men had not seen much of each other in recent years, and there may even have been some definite break in the late 1830s or early 1840s. ‘It seems to me an illustration of Coleridge’s, “Alas, they had been friends in youth,”’ Florence asserted, ‘each indebted to the other at critical periods of their improvident lives for kindly help, perhaps not admitted as generously as they might have been by Professor Wilson when he was the successful man … and my father may have been embittered; but we are glad to remember that they met again in our home in Lasswade in the old kindly, joyous spirit.’73
De Quinceys various domestic concerns were woven around a writing schedule at Mavis Bush that he established early, and that enabled him to remain characteristically productive. Much of his time that first autumn was devoted to correcting the proofs of the book he had sent to Blackwood just before leaving Glasgow, and which was published in the spring of 1844 as The Logic of Political Economy. Not the Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy that he had promised so many years earlier in the Confessions, the Logic was instead devoted to the rather more modest aim of investigating the doctrine of value.74 It is a typical De Quinceyan performance, complete with Latin tags, rhetorical flourishes, incisive definitions, autobiographical asides, and references to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Kant. What Carlyle dubbed the ‘dismal science’ elicits from De Quincey wry humour and colourful examples, including one which concerns ‘the first sale in England of a RHINOCEROS’, another about turnips, and a third involving a passenger on a Lake Superior steamboat who is just about to set off into the wilderness, and who is ‘vehemently desirous to purchase’ a musical snuff-box as his sole hope for amusement ‘for a space of ten years to come’. Ricardo, observed De Quincey, possessed a ‘powerful and original’ mind, but a ‘natural inaptitude for the task of simplifying’ or ‘communicating knowledge’.75 In the Logic, De Quincey takes this task to himself. Lively, resourceful, and illuminating, the book constitutes his most successful attempt to transmit and develop key aspects of Ricardian doctrine.
Yet for all its readability, the Logic is even more distinctly marked by contradiction. On the one hand, De Quincey is fascinated by the permanent and impersonal workings of Ricardo’s system, where the great capitalist stands ‘in the very centre of the vast money machinery accumulated in London, and observes the ‘monetary symptoms … eternally perceptible in the condition of every trade’. Yet on the other, De Quincey acknowledges the ways in which Ricardian theory has become intertwined with a host of contemporary issues, and deplores the ways in which Socialists, Jacobins, and Chartists have personalized and mutilated Ricardo’s ‘profound truths’.76 Mill wrote the most important review of the book, and highlighted the inconsistencies in De Quincey’s argument when he came firmly to the defence of the Chartists. ‘Mr De Quincey thoroughly understands his master,’ he allows, but ‘the trade in food ought to be free’ as De Quincey himself is ‘bound to hold … by every fair deduction from his own principles’.77 Mill, however, found enough in the Logic to cite it several times in his own Principles of Political Economy (1848).78 More strikingly, De Quincey’s discussion of ‘the growing substitution of female for male, and above all of childish for adult, labour’ in the Logic is cited by Karl Marx in his examination of ‘Machinery and Large-Scale Industry’ in Capital (1867).79
Preparing the Logic for Blackwood coincided with the commencement in Blackwood’s of De Quincey’s last sustained assault on the political, religious, and cultural forces that he believed were irreparably damaging the institutions that constituted Britain’s pre-eminence, both as a nation and as a colonizer of other nations. Protestantism is the key concern in these essays. De Quincey claims that it brings ‘peace, freedom, security, and a new standard of public morality’ to colonized lands, as he puts it in his November 1843 article on ‘Ceylon’, where ‘God will now countersign his other blessings … by superadding the one blessing of a dovelike religion.’ Racial hatred, however, keeps breaking through the religious veneer. Ceylon is full of ‘filthy and bloody abominations of creed’ that render its inhabitants almost sub-human. Of the two peoples that occupy the island, De Quincey is certain that the ‘Cinghalese are soft, inert, passive cowards’, while ‘your Kandyan is a ferocious little bloody coward, full of mischief … and never to be trusted for a moment’. Nowhere does he question the British mission. Might is right. ‘The nation that can win the place of leader, is the nation that ought to do so.’80 He mobilizes a similar rhetoric in his August 1844 article on ‘Affghanistan’.
De Quincey may have been able to convince himself that Protestantism was having a positive influence in Britain’s colonies but, ironically enough, he was having to work hard to defend the Established Church from a series of threats at home. In May 1843, a majority of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly walked out in protest over government refusals to grant spiritual independence to the Church. De Quincey, chronicling these events in ‘Secession from the Church of Scotland’ for February 1844, argued that the blatant rejection of established authority and the subsequent founding of the Free Church of Scotland smacked of jacobinical excess. “When we hear of … divinity becoming the handmaid to insurrection,’ he stormed, ‘… we go back in thought to that ominous organization of irreligion, which gave its most fearful aspects to the French Revolution.’81 Yet as bad as things were in Scotland, in England they were perhaps even worse. John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey were leading members of the Oxford Movement, which sought to revive Catholic practices and thought within the Established Church. ‘Puseyism’, De Quincey warned in an October 1843 assessment of ‘The Last Session of Parliament’, was ‘a power of more ominous capacities than the gentleness of its motions would lead men to suspect, and is well fitted … to effect a volcanic explosion – such as may rend the Church of England by schisms more extensive and shattering than those which have recently afflicted the Church of Scotland’.82
All of these various anxieties came to a head when De Quincey turned his attention to Ireland. Daniel O’Connell, whose successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation had so angered De Quincey in 1828–29, was now pushing for the repeal of the Act of Union. De Quincey himself had watched the passage of this agreement in the House of Lords when he visited Ireland in 1800, and he was convinced that its repeal would initiate a fatal ‘dismemberment’ of the British empire. Peel, in response to the burgeoning insurgency, rattled the British sabre while simultaneously pursuing a number of concessions, including a considerable increase to the annual stipend for the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. De Quincey condemned the decision. ‘If this Maynooth endowment prospers, Protestantism will receive a deadly wound in the empire which is, and has been, and by Providence was appointed to be, its main bulwark.’ For De Quincey, the solution was obvious: ‘Now is the time for grasping this nettle of domestic danger, and, by crushing it without fear, to crush it for ever.’83
Such adamantine support of the British imperial agenda makes unpalatable reading now, but it brought De Quincey great acclaim within Blackwood’s circles, as he undoubtedly intended. ‘We are a horrible John Bull ourselves’, he proclaimed during the winter of 1844–5, a period that marked a particularly high point in his relationship with the magazine. In January he attended a ‘very nice party’ at Blackwood’s, where he was ‘uncommonly good in his way & told some capital stories’.84 A few months later he attended a similar gathering, and may have enjoyed himself too much: ‘Could the learned have the slightest shade of a suspicion – that I was a trifle “cut” last night?’ he asked sheepishly.85 On at least two other occasions he actually moved in with the Blackwood family in order to finish off an article. ‘One paragraph has occupied him for the last three days,’ Alexander reported to John, ‘& yet the body talks away about the facility with which he can now write.’86
De Quincey’s central role with Blackwood’s was commemorated when Robert and Alexander commissioned John Watson-Gordon to produce a portrait of him for their saloon. De Quincey was fifty-nine years old at the time, though in the finished product he looks a good deal younger. Seated and solemn, he gazes just off to the right, revealing a full left sideburn. His forehead is wide and steep. He looks both intent and detached. His right index finger is tucked into the leaves of one book, his left arm rests on another. He is dressed in a white shirt and black vest, over which he wears a large brown cloak. For the Blackwoods, the most arresting part of the portrait was ‘the infernal size of mouth he has & this John Watson cannot help shewing’. De Quincey, as self-conscious as ever about his appearance, objected: ‘if my mouth resembles this I am very much mistaken’. His eyes seem a much more striking aspect of the picture. Countless hours of writing and reading have now strained them to the point of misalignment. ‘They sparkle not, they shine not, they are lustreless: can that be a squint which glances over them towards you? No! it is only a slight habit one of them has of occasionally looking in a different direction from the other.’87
A prominent position within the Blackwood’s circle did not prevent De Quincey from socializing among liberal-minded intellectuals not associated with the magazine. The critic and biographer David Masson, who many years later edited De Quincey’s work, first met him in a room ‘high up in one of the tall houses’ in Edinburgh’s Old Town, and was struck by ‘the peculiar beauty of his head and forehead’, his immense erudition, and ‘his use of a phrase very beautiful in itself, and which seemed characteristic of his manner of thinking. Describing some visionary scene or other, he spoke of it as consisting of “discs of light and interspaces of gloom”’. Gilfillan also called on De Quincey at this time, and left a memorable portrait of what it was like to spend an evening with him. ‘Conceive a small, pale-faced, wobegone, and attenuated man, with … no coat, check shirt, and neckcloth twisted like a wisp of straw, opening the door of his room’ and ‘advancing towards you with hurried movement, and half-recognising glance’. He salutes ‘you in low and hesitating tones’, and asks you to be seated. Then, taking ‘a seat opposite you, but without looking you in the face’, he launches into a stream of wisdom and learning, ‘out-Kanting Kant, or out-mystifying Coleridge, or demolishing some ricketty literary reputation, or quoting, in his deep and quiet under tone, some of the burning words of Shelley or Wordsworth’. He talks ‘as long as you are content to listen’, and it is three in the morning before you depart, leaving him at his desk, where he works until dawn.88
Figure 4: John Watson-Gordon’s portrait of Thomas De Quincey, 1845
Boiling just below the routines and relationships of his daily life was his battle with addiction, which continued to mete out terrible mental and bodily anguish. His long walks around the back garden at Mavis Bush were improving his health, but his ‘irregular’ use of the drug still needed to be ‘reformed’. Laudanum, he admitted to Lushington, ‘might be the secret key to all this wretchedness’.89
He cut sharply back on his dose. For six months, utter despair. ‘One dreary uniformity of report – absolute desolation; misery so perfect that too surely I perceived, and no longer disguised from myself, the impossibility of continuing to live under so profound a blight.’ He contemplated suicide. ‘Too certainly I felt that to this my condition tended; for again enormous irritability was rapidly travelling over the disk of my life, and this, and the consciousness of increasing weakness, added to my desolation of heart.’ Then, in late February 1844, a breakthrough: ‘One firm system pursued through eight months as to one element, and nearly three as to another’ brought in a moment ‘such a rectification of the compass as I had not known for years’. This state of clarity ‘departed from me within forty-eight hours’, but ‘that no way alarmed me – I drew hope from the omen’.90
Hope, however, proved hard to sustain. In early May De Quincey confided to Blackwood that his struggles with the drug were pushing him ‘from purgatory into the shades of a deeper abyss’.91 He began a private journal in which he chronicled the insidious nature of addiction.
Did you ever read of leprosy as it existed in Judea, or – and that was worse – as it existed in Europe during the dark ages? Did you ever read of that tremendous visitation in the early days of Judaism, when, if the poor patient would have hushed up his misery in silence, the walls of his house whispered of his whereabouts? Horrible! that a man’s own chamber – the place of his refuge and retreat – should betray him!… Not fear or terror, but inexpressible misery, is the last portion of the opium-eater.92
On Christmas Day 1844, De Quincey recorded in his journal an epiphany that betrays just how often he must have lied to himself. His laudanum dependence had for more than three decades imposed a highly defined grid of acquisition and consumption upon the turmoil of his existence, yet he could pretend otherwise to the point that his addiction still caught him by surprise.
This night … has first solemnly revealed itself to me that I am and have long been under a curse, all the greater for being physically and by effort endurable, and for hiding itself, i.e., playing in and out from all offices of life at every turn of every moment. Oh, dreadful! by degrees infinitely worse than leprosy – than ——. But oh, what signifies the rhetoric of a case so sad! Conquer it I must by exercise unheard of, or it will conquer me.93
De Quincey was facing facts. Writing – his impassioned prose – might help him analyse or objectify his drug addiction, but it could not release him from it. He was trapped in endless circles, walking around and around the back garden at Mavis Bush just as over and over again he fought cycles of denial and guilt, excess and restraint, secrecy and candour, despondency and hope.
Coleridge dominated his thoughts. De Quincey almost certainly has him in mind when he describes ‘a man called X——who has often jumped out of bed – bounced like a column of quicksilver – at midnight, fallen on his knees and cried out, while the perspiration ran down his wasted face, and his voice waked all the house, “O Jesus Christ, be merciful to me a sinner!” – so unimaginable had been the horror which sleep opened to his eyes’. De Quincey compared their addictive states, and fathomed Coleridge’s chaos by the darkness of his own. ‘It is as if ivory carvings and elaborate fretwork and fair enamelling should be found with worms and ashes amongst coffins and the wrecks of some forgotten life or some abolished nature,’ he observed.
In parts and fractions eternal creations are carried on, but the nexus is wanting, and life and the central principle which should bind together all the parts at the centre, with all its radiations to the circumference, are wanting. Infinite incoherence, ropes of sand, gloomy incapacity of vital pervasion by some one plastic principle, that is the hideous incubus upon my mind always. For there is no disorganised wreck so absolute, so perfect, as that which is wrought by misery.94
On the surface, De Quincey’s addiction did not prevent him from carrying on as a writer, a father, and a friend. But within, it fragmented his sense of self to the point of disintegration.
In ‘Coleridge and Opium-Eating’, published in Blackwood’s for January 1845, De Quincey surveys his relationship with the drug, and the ‘shocking’ contradictions that underwrite his experience of it. Opium is a con: it can convince an addict of twenty-five years that he can lay it ‘aside easily and for ever within seven days’. Opium is a trade-off: ‘it defeats the steady habit of exertion, but it creates spasms of irregular exertion’. Opium is irresistible: in that ‘ruby-coloured elixir, there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui’. Opium is a scourge: it withers life ‘root and branch’. And finally De Quincey acknowledges what he has often only intimated: opium is a celestial lover. For those ‘whose nervous sensibilities vibrate to their profoundest depths under the first touch of the angelic poison, even as a lover’s ear thrills on hearing unexpectedly the voice of her whom he loves, opium is the Amreeta cup of beatitude’.95
De Quincey’s dreams blazed into new splendour, and he found himself forced to confront the shame and fear that he associated with so much of his past. ‘On some fatal morning in middle-life’, he explained, ‘– the far-off consequences’ of ‘actions done in youth’ come back upon you. ‘And you say to yourself, “Oh, Heaven, if I had 50 lives – this crime would reappear” … So was it with my affliction.’ ‘Some things that had sunk into utter forgetfulness, others that had faded in visionary power – all rise as gory phantoms from the dust.’96
Both tortured and inspired, De Quincey grew intent on catching these phantoms as they rushed upwards into his dreaming mind.97 In the summer of 1844 he decided that he would ‘write another Opium Confession’, and by early January he could report to Blackwood that he had never before ‘succeeded so entirely to my own satisfaction. I am a new birth for composition.’98 Wilson and two others read the opening section and all independently agreed that it was ‘very greatly superior’ to the original Confessions. Indeed, De Quincey considered the new piece ‘the ne plus ultra, as regards the feelings and the power to express it, which I can ever hope to attain’.99
Suspiria de Profundis – literally, ‘Sighs from the Depths’ – was published in Blackwood’s for March, April, June and July, and chronicled in some of his most elaborate prose the poignant memories and dreadful nightmares that had gripped him during the opium sieges of the last several months. Described by De Quincey as ‘a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, Suspiria is in fact a ‘prequel’, for it centres on the childhood death of Elizabeth, which De Quincey did not – or could not – confront in the Confessions, but which he now rehearses at length, first in a section entitled ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, and then in a series of prose poems, including ‘The Palimpsest’, ‘Savannah-La-Mar’, and ‘The Apparition of Brocken’.
The powerful and often paradoxical relationship between drugs and the human imagination is at the heart of Suspiria. In his ‘Introductory Notice’, De Quincey alternately invokes Carlyle and Wordsworth to describe how opium offers great spiritual benefits. Modern British society is defined by the ‘colossal pace’ of industrial advance, and ‘the continual development of vast physical agencies’ such as ‘steam in all its applications’. Forced to live too constantly with ‘eternal hurry’ and ‘varied company’, people are ‘haunted as if by some jealousy of ghostly beings’. Some minds are reduced to lunacy, others to ‘a reagency of fleshly torpor’. Counter-forces must be marshalled, forces in the direction of religion, philosophy and, most crucially, ‘the power of dreaming’, which De Quincey characterizes as ‘the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy’, and which at its noblest ‘forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain’. Opium has a critical role to play in this process, for it ‘seems to possess a specific power … not merely for exalting the colours of dream-scenery, but for deepening its shadows; and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities’.100
Yet if the drug helps to foster a private sense of the sublime, it also eviscerates that sense.101 Twice, De Quincey now claims, he has fought the ‘dark idol’ of opium, and twice he has emerged victorious, though on both occasions he has relapsed because of his failure to undertake rigorous exercise as ‘the one sole resource’ for making withdrawal endurable. Then, beginning in the summer of 1843, he fights a third battle, but there is no victory this time, only a further fall. What is worse, whereas on the previous two occasions he has risen again after his clash with the drug, this time he knows almost instinctively that there is no possibility of re-ascent. The ‘dreadful symptoms’ of his addiction have been ‘moving forward for ever, by a pace steadily, solemnly, and equably increasing’, and now at last they have run him down. ‘Were the ruin conditional, or were it in any point doubtful, it would be natural to utter ejaculations, and to seek sympathy,’ De Quincey observes. But ‘where the ruin is understood to be absolute’, the case is otherwise. ‘The voice perishes; the gestures are frozen; and the spirit of man flies back upon its own centre … One profound sigh ascended from my heart, and I was silent for days.’102 In Suspiria, as in the Confessions, opium is revelation and destruction, simultaneously deepening and obliterating the self.
How to cope with these intense pressures? De Quincey’s answer in Suspiria is that suffering is essential to the full development of the self. Suffering is part of God’s plan. ‘He works by earthquake … he works by grief.’ It is as vital as joy. ‘The rapture of life … does not arise, unless as perfect music arises – music of Mozart or Beethoven – by the confluence of the mighty and terrific discords with the subtle concords.’103 Most memorably, it is various and vast enough to be transformed into myth, as De Quincey does in his prose poem ‘Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow’. Levana is the Roman goddess of early childhood. She is assisted by three Ladies. All of us have our spiritual education shaped by at least one of them. De Quincey knows all three. In his early life he lived under the dominion of Mater Lachrymarum, who ‘night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces’. As an adult he came to know Mater Suspiriorum, whose meekness ‘belongs to the hopeless’. More recently, he has encountered Mater Tenebrarum, ‘the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides’. His education is by this point well advanced, yet the Ladies will continue to assail him, tempt him, scorch him: ‘So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had – to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit.’ In the face of the desolation of addiction, Suspiria argues that grief enriches and reconstitutes the self. ‘My heart trembled through from end to end,’ wrote De Quincey’s fellow opium addict Elizabeth Barrett Browning after reading the work. ‘What a poet that man is! how he vivifies words, & deepens them, & gives them profound significance.’104
De Quincey would have been delighted to hear such praise, for he had struggled mightily with Suspiria, and had been very dissatisfied throughout much of the publication process. So anxious was he about the printing of the work that he decided to leave Lasswade and take lodgings at Miss Carrick’s, 71 Clerk Street, Edinburgh, in order to ensure that he was on hand to safeguard against misunderstandings and double-check the proofs for accuracy.105 The relocation, however, hindered as much as it helped, for word of his whereabouts soon reached the ears of many of his Edinburgh creditors, who promptly began to harry him for payment on debts that in some instances stretched back seven years or more.106 ‘Unideaed wretches!’ De Quincey exclaimed late one evening after trying for hours to shake off two determined bailiffs. ‘I tried them on every subject under heaven, but they did not seem to have a thought in their minds unconnected with their base and brutal profession!’107
The publication of Suspirias first instalment in March appears to have gone smoothly, but De Quincey was greatly distressed when he read the second instalment for April. Unauthorized changes had been inserted into his text, and he denounced ‘some unknown person at the Press’ who was ‘constantly doing him the most serious injuries’.108 Further, restrictions on space meant that the instalment had been cut off before the inclusion of ‘Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow’, which De Quincey had relied on as the ‘main artillery’ for the number. ‘It will not only here – but hereafter absolutely ruin the better part of the impression that might else be made, if there is not some dispensation from the general rule of compression’ into a space of sixteen pages. After reading the third instalment, however, Blackwood resolved, not that he should make more room for Suspiria, but that his readers were in need of a break from it, and he deferred the continuation of the series from the May until the June issue, a decision De Quincey regarded as ‘a knock-down blow’.109 He remained conciliatory: ‘if you will tell me what you finally wish for, I on my part will do my best to accomplish it’. But did Blackwood not realize what an elaborate undertaking it was to write and rewrite a work such as Suspiria? ‘Of all the tasks I ever had in my life,’ De Quincey declared pointedly, ‘it is – from the aerial and shadowy nature of the composition – the most overwhelming.’110
In July the relationship between the two men disintegrated. ‘My horror … for inserting’ Suspiria in Blackwood’s ‘takes this form’, De Quincey wrote bitterly, ‘– that I am thus made a party – nay, I make myself a party to the ill-treatment, the undervaluation of my own truth.’ He still had great hopes for the work, ranging from a third and fourth part, to a series of prose poems with titles that included ‘The Dreadful Infant’, ‘The Princess and the Pomegranate’, ‘Morning of Execution’, and ‘The Nursery in Arabian Deserts’.111 In October, Robert Blackwood turned the editorship of the magazine over to his brother John, who was far less willing to accommodate De Quincey. A month later De Quincey wrote with icy formality to inform ‘Mr Blackwood … that, in the course of this present month, he will send the remainder of the Suspiria (now nearly finished) – making in all from 72 to 80 pp of the Magazine’.112 No new material arrived, however.
Following its magazine publication, Alexander Blackwood had thoughts of reissuing Suspiria in a book that would also include the 1821 Confessions. John Taylor, the former co-editor of the London Magazine, owned the copyright, though, and he wanted £100 for it. Blackwood baulked at such a high price – ‘the thing is out of the question’ – but Taylor retorted that De Quincey still owed him £150 for a novel that he had promised in 1822 and never delivered.113 Such a debt was ‘not improbable’, Blackwood rightly acknowledged, but he refused to increase his offer and negotiations collapsed. De Quincey too had hopes of turning the work into a book, which he would preface ‘by a Letter of some length’ to his three daughters.114 This plan also failed to materialize, for his conception of Suspiria continued to outrun what he was able to accomplish. Yet even in its incomplete form it remains one of his most compelling narratives, in its treatment not only of his childhood afflictions, but in its searching attempts to assess the variable effects of opium, creativity, industrialism, and addiction.
[v]
He reverted to a familiar pattern. His relationship with one magazine in disarray, he went immediately over to its chief rival. William Tait had published nothing by De Quincey since early 1841, but he overlooked the disagreements in their past, and warmly welcomed him back within the Tait’s fold, as indeed the Blackwoods had done twice in their turn before him. De Quincey set promptly to work, and between September 1845 and September 1846 he published thirteen articles in Tait’s, including two for March and two for April.
‘On Wordsworth’s Poetry’ constitutes his finest assessment of the poet. For decades, Wordsworth’s long philosophical poem The Excursion (1814) had been celebrated as his major achievement. To De Quincey, however, The Excursion was badly damaged by its ‘undulatory character’ and ‘colloquial form’, whereas works such as ‘We Are Seven, ‘The Two April Mornings’, and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ were ‘generally scintillating with gems of far profounder truth’.115 De Quincey’s reading explicitly inverts the contemporary view of Wordsworth, and clearly anticipates our own.
More literary and political assessments followed. In a review of Gilfillan’s Gallery of Literary Portraits, De Quincey discussed a series of liberal figures, from John Keats to the reform-minded Baptist minister John Foster. To be sure, he found little to admire in William Godwin, whose radical treatise on Political Justice (1793) carried ‘one single shock into the bosom of English society, fearful but momentary’, and whose terror novel Caleb Williams (1794) contained ‘no merit of any kind’. But he was much more just to his old acquaintance William Hazlitt, who ‘wilfully placed himself in collision from the first with all the interests that were in the sunshine of this world’, but who ‘requited his reader for the pain of travelling through so gloomy an atmosphere, by the rich vegetation which his teeming intellect threw up as it moved along’.116 Most compellingly, in his essay on Percy Shelley, De Quincey justified his longstanding admiration of the radical poet by drawing a line between the sublime poetry and the heinous ideas which motivated it, a tenuous strategy which nevertheless prefigures the approach of several key Victorian critics, including Matthew Arnold. ‘Can we imagine the case of an angel touched by lunacy?’ De Quincey asks. ‘Have we ever seen the spectacle of a human intellect, exquisite by its functions of creation, yet in one chamber of its shadowy house already ruined before the light of manhood had cleansed its darkness? Such an angel, such a man … was Shelley.’117
The same run of Tait’s essays also contained De Quincey’s most optimistic views of the social and political forces transforming Britain, notwithstanding the fact that many of the same forces had recently provoked him to thunderous disapproval in Blackwood’s. His article on the Whig writer and politician Sir James Mackintosh argues that a great part ‘of our political life and struggling is but one vast laboratory for sifting and ascertaining the rights, the interests, the duties, of the unnumbered and increasing parties to our complex form of social life’. In ‘On Christianity, as an Organ of Political Movement’, the Christian religion appears, not as in lockstep with British imperialism, but as at the heart of four great movements of social reform: Christianity ‘first caused the state of slavery to be regarded as an evil’; it promoted the rise of ‘charitable institutions’; it allowed for the ‘social influence of woman’; and it led to the foundation of societies seeking ‘the extirpation of war’. Finally, in his essays on Wordsworth and Mackintosh, De Quincey champions the legacy of the French Revolution. ‘It was the explosion of a prodigious volcano, which scattered its lava over every kingdom of every continent, every where silently manuring them for social struggles,’ he avows; ‘this lava is gradually fertilizing all; the revolutionary movement is moving onwards at this hour as inexorable as ever … Man walks with his head erect; – bastilles are no more.’118
De Quincey wrote several of these essays in Glasgow, where he had returned after the breakdown of his relationship with Blackwood’s. He stayed again with Nichol, this time at the new Observatory, which he liked immensely. ‘How serene, how quiet, how lifted above the confusion and the roar … is the solemn Observatory’, he remarked. ‘… And duly, at night, just when the toil of over-wrought Glasgow is mercifully relaxing, then comes the summons to the labouring astronomer.’119 Nichol invited him to stay for a week, but De Quincey seems to have remained at the Observatory for about five months.120
He was not an easy house guest, as Nichol, Knight, Wilson, and several others already knew. In his October 1845 essay ‘On the Temperance Movement of Modern Times’, De Quincey sought to help others renounce their alcohol or drug habit, and touted himself as someone whose extensive knowledge ‘upon the subjects of abstinence’ had given him the right to offer hints upon it. Yet it is clear that it was at this same juncture that he sank back down into his own deep dependence on opium. Nichols son John offered a vignette of him during his stay at the Observatory that Gerard Manley Hopkins recorded in one of his early notebooks: ‘De Quincey would wake blue and trembling in the morning and languidly ask the servant “Would you pour out some of that black mixture from the bottle there”. The servant would give it him, generally not knowing what it was. After this he would revive.’121 It was at Nichol’s, too, that De Quincey informed the poet Charles Mackay that ‘after a course of abstinence, extending over a considerable period of failing health and energy’, he had returned to the practice of ‘laudanum-drinking’ with ‘the most beneficial effects both upon his mind and body’. Indeed, after months of consequences ‘so dreadful and utterly unconjectured by medical men’, he was ‘glad to get back under shelter’.122
De Quincey seems to have been with Nichol until at least November, at which time he informed an unknown correspondent that his general address was ‘Lasswade near Edinburgh’, but that ‘for the present, and until Christmas, a better address is – To the care of William Tait Esq. Publisher, Princes Street, Edinburgh’.123 Certainly just after Christmas he was back in Edinburgh, for on 30 December he attended a production of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, which he then reviewed in Tait’s for February and March. Charmed by the performance of Helen Faucit in the title role, De Quincey compared her to Helen of Troy and animatedly described the impact of her entrance: ‘Then, suddenly, – oh, heavens! what a revelation of beauty! – forth stepped, walking in brightness, the most faultless of Grecian marbles.’ The only blemish in her performance was that in the closing scene ‘her voice grew too husky to execute the cadences of the intonations’. Faucit later protested that she had a bad cold on the night De Quincey saw her, and she was ‘vexed’ to find that his review dwelled ‘upon a passing and purely accidental failure’ in her voice.124
Early in the New Year De Quincey learned of his mother’s death.125 She had for several years been deaf and ‘so agitated by any novelty of whatever nature’ that medical men and her daughter Jane had done their best to shield her from excitement.126 Mother and son had never been close, and they had not seen each other in fourteen years, though De Quincey had of course solicited her financial assistance on several occasions over that period. ‘She was above 97,’ he observed calmly: ‘and her death was therefore always a thing to be expected, though not now more than for years past.’127 Under the terms of the will, Jane received all the personal property and the house, Weston Lea, in Bath, where Mrs Quincey had lived after Westhay, and where she had died. De Quincey received £200 per annum from the estate, but as his mother had already been advancing him this sum for many years, his financial situation was unchanged. The money almost certainly went directly to Margaret, who with her sisters continued to manage both Mavis Bush and, to some extent, the financial affairs of their father.128
Back residing in Edinburgh, and probably often at Lasswade, De Quincey became preoccupied with the interests of his two sons. Francis, still living with his sisters, had decided to go into medicine, and now walked the seven miles back and forth each day to attend lectures at the University of Edinburgh. In late January, he was anxious to help secure the appointment of John Goodsir as the new Professor of Anatomy. De Quincey himself took up the cause, and at one point visited Tait to request that he use his influence on behalf of Goodsir, who was duly appointed to the Professorship later in the year, to the delight no doubt of father and son.129
Fred, De Quincey’s other son, had now been in the military for nine months, and was stationed in India. In a letter ‘dated Umballah about the 18th of January’, he informed his family that ‘he was then nearing the head quarters with a party of recruits for his own regiment (the 80th)’.130 A month later, on 10 February 1846, he saw action in the bloody Battle of Sobraon, the fourth and final conflict of the First Sikh War (1845–46). ‘I have, in my possession, and will restore, and have read, Fred’s letter from the Punjaub,’ De Quincey wrote excitedly to Margaret. ‘What a godsend!’ Fred received a medal for his part in the Sobraon conflict, and ‘very soon after got his lieutenancy’.131
In May, De Quincey was ‘prostrate and utterly prostrate’ after having stayed in the house too long ‘without air or exercise’, but these recurrent bouts of ill health did not prevent him from writing, and in the summer he turned his attention to an article on astronomy, a topic that had absorbed him for much of the previous year.132 ‘Nobody can study the stars without a profound pity or contempt for the … religious animosities and unchristian hatreds of mankind,’ De Quincey had said to Nichol one evening over dinner when he was staying at the Observatory. ‘The stars always preach to me that I am a prisoner, that I am condemned, possibly for some sin I have committed in a previous, but now forgotten, state of existence.’133
According to Mackay, it was also during this dinner that Nichol received a letter from William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse, who had recently built a powerful new telescope. Nichol had long been a supporter of the so-called ‘Nebular Hypothesis’, which Rosse now wrote to announce had been undermined by his discovery that the nebulae were individual galaxies, not gaseous masses as Nichol had previously believed. ‘A magnificent discovery!’ De Quincey exclaimed. Further investigation soon established that sections of the great Orion Nebula could even be resolved into stars, and that the universe was much vaster and more chaotic than had been realized. Nichol was in Edinburgh in April to give a series of lectures, and conveyed the most up-to-date information to De Quincey, who rather graphically comprehended its implications. ‘Dr Nichol … has … cut the lovely throat of – the Nebular Hypothesis.’134
Nichol’s new book, Thoughts on Some Important Points relating to the System of the World (1846), attempted to come to terms with these remarkable new discoveries. De Quincey’s review of the volume, published in Tait’s as ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosses Telescopes’, explores the various and profound impact these same discoveries have made upon him. In the private realm, De Quincey invokes the deep trauma he associates with the autopsies performed upon his son William and his sister Elizabeth when he describes Nichol’s reprint of Sir John Herschel’s drawing of the Nebula in Orion. Pictured in the stars De Quincey sees a man’s head ‘thrown back’, but it is a head appallingly disfigured, for ‘in the very region of his temples, driving itself downwards into his cruel brain … is a horrid chasm, a ravine, a shaft, that many centuries would not traverse’.135 As a public statement, De Quincey confronts Victorian conceptions of space, and the scientific debates over the evolution and constitution of the heavens. Rosse ‘found God’s universe represented for human convenience … upon a globe or spherical chart having a radius of one hundred and fifty feet’, and he ‘left it sketched upon a similar chart, keeping exactly the same scale of proportions, but now elongating its radius into one thousand feet’. The new information demolished the best available cosmology, and left astronomers struggling to account for humankind’s increasingly obvious insignificance. The Great Nebula, as De Quincey averred, was ‘famous for its frightful magnitude and for the frightful depth to which it is sunk in the abysses of the heavenly wilderness’.136
