The End of Night
[i]
‘A new literary public has arisen’, De Quincey announced astutely in 1846. When he began his career, aristocrats still exerted a profound influence on book and periodical publication, but over the course of the last three decades a much larger class of readers had ‘formed itself within the commercial orders of our great cities and manufacturing districts’, driving ‘the interest of literature … downwards through a vast compass of descents’. This new reading audience, ‘changed in no respect from its former condition of intellect and manners and taste, bringing only the single qualification of ability to read, is now strong enough in numbers to impress a new character upon literature’.1
De Quincey watched this process of democratization with a good deal of suspicion. As early as 1822 he had complained of the ‘stupidity’ of the reading public, and throughout his career his efforts to engage a wide audience put intense pressure on his conception of himself as a scholar and a gentleman. ‘A mob is a dreadful audience for chafing and irritating the latent vulgarisms of the human heart,’ he sighed. ‘Exaggeration and caricature, before such a tribunal, become inevitable, and sometimes almost a duty.’ On occasion his frustration with the mass media boiled over. ‘My plans far transcend all journalism high or low,’ he snapped in 1847. ‘And through fifty different channels I will soon make this mob of a public hear on both sides of its deaf head things that it will not like.’2
Yet despite his deep misgivings, financial need meant that De Quincey typically wrote with one eye firmly fixed on pleasing the gallery. ‘It is treason in a writer … to produce hatred or disaffection towards his liege lord who is and must be his reader,’ he remarked. And if times changed, the writer was obliged to change with them. ‘An attention to the unlearned part of an audience, which 15 years ago might have rested upon pure courtesy, now rests upon a basis of absolute justice,’ he observed in 1853. ‘Formerly … the learned reader would have told me that I was not entitled to delay him by elucidations that in his case must be supposed to be superfluous … At present, half-way on our pilgrimage through the nineteenth century, I reply to such a learned remonstrant – that … this infliction of tedium upon him is inseparable from what has now become a duty to others.’ De Quincey disliked the vulgarity and pandering associated with the magazine press, and he often longed for more elegant and educated audiences. Nevertheless, he spent his entire career shrewdly exploiting the press’s cultural and financial power, and he was keen to celebrate its ability to enlighten, transform, and unite. ‘So travels the press to victory,’ he cried: ‘such is the light, and so broad, which it diffuses: such is the strength for action by which it combines the hearts of nations.’3
[ii]
William Tait had decided to retire. After more than twenty-five profitable and productive years in the publishing business, he sold Tait’s to Alexander Alison, a wealthy and reform-minded ironmaster, who moved the magazine from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and who promptly hired the bright young journalist George Troup as his editor.4 Retaining De Quincey was one of Troup’s top priorities, and in December 1846 he sent his business manager Colin Rae Brown to Edinburgh to try and ‘secure the continued services of De Quincey as a leading contributor, and also to endeavour to get him to reside in Glasgow – for a time – so that he might be closely identified with the “future” of the well-known Whig-Radical organ’. Brown and De Quincey met and soon came to terms, though De Quincey stipulated that his stay in Glasgow was not to exceed six months, and that he needed ‘apartments of a modest kind … secured for him at the highest altitude possible in the northern part of the city’. ‘I had some painful experiences of life in Glasgow several years ago,’ he explained, ‘when I was victimized to within an inch of my life by the sulphuretted hydrogen – or some such noxious exhalation – which was then discharged into the atmosphere by the so-called “Secret Works” at the “Townhead.”’5
Brown found De Quincey lodgings ‘on the northern heights of the city’ at 112 Rottenrow Street, in the top flat of a ‘three-storey building with a grimy front and a white-washed gable’.6 Mrs Tosh, De Quincey’s new landlady, was ‘a quiet, fairly well-educated widow, of some sixty years of age’ who kept her house ‘in a manner that might be termed scrupulously clean’. De Quincey seems to have moved in around the middle of December, and immediately became to Mrs Tosh ‘a source of “muckle wonderment!”’ ‘There maun surely be somethin’ raaly wrang wi’ my lodger,’ she remarked. ‘He doesna eat as muckle in a week as my wee oo (grandson) eats in a day.’7
The new accommodations were ‘exactly what he wanted’, but De Quincey ‘was not destined to remain long under the watchful, motherly care of Mrs Tosh’. In early January ‘her little grandson was suddenly struck down by scarlet fever’, and Brown ‘had to make immediate arrangements for transferring our valued contributor and his few belongings to another domicile’. ‘Ah,’ De Quincey remarked as he prepared to move again, ‘that reminds me that I have been paying the rent of apartments in Renfield Street for a number of years. Many valuable books and papers are or should be there still.’ Brown ‘stared, almost agape, in downright amazement’. On 15 January De Quincey was staying at the Royal Hotel in George Square, but within three days he had come to some sort of arrangement with Youille, and re-installed himself in the Renfield Street rooms he had vacated three and a half years earlier when he moved to Lasswade.8
With his financial affairs in increasingly good order, and duns no longer in hot pursuit, De Quincey moved about with a great deal more freedom than had been the case during his previous stays in Glasgow. Gilfillan saw him ‘more than once’.9 Lushington called often to take a walk, and on at least two occasions De Quincey ‘came to dinner’, where Mrs Lushington – Tennyson’s younger sister Cecilia – played him ‘the loveliest of waltzes’.10 To Troup, De Quincey was ‘a constant and much-appreciated visitor’, and the two soon ‘formed an intimate friendship’. After indulgences in laudanum, De Quincey used to wonder ‘if he were fit to appear at a dinner party’, and was ‘generally guided’ by Troup’s opinion.11 In February, an unnamed lady escorted him to a concert featuring the child prodigy Louisa Vinning, whose ‘middle notes are beautiful and bell-like’, and the Tyler family, who played ‘lovely German airs … full of rich festal joyousness’, though De Quincey strongly objected to the ‘outrageous national vanity’ of the Scots for including ‘Ah ah the wooing o’ it!’ on the same programme.12 At some point he journeyed to the western coast to visit his friend William Robertson, now a minister at Irvine. But Robertson was not at home, and De Quincey’s shabby appearance roused the mistrust of the landlady, who worried that he ‘might have felonious intentions with regard to the minister’s books’.13
Charles Mackay, then editor of the liberal Glasgow Argus newspaper, received ‘not unfrequent visits’ from De Quincey, ‘which were generally concluded by the request on his part of the loan of sixpence or a shilling to purchase laudanum – a whole wine-glassful of which he was accustomed to drink with as little compunction as if it had been claret’. On one occasion Mackay bumped into De Quincey on the street. ‘I knew I should meet you,’ De Quincey told him. Every human being is ‘surrounded with a spiritual atmosphere’, and ‘three streets distant, I was mysteriously aware that you were somewhere in the neighbourhood’.14
Brown has left the most vivid impression of De Quincey during this period. The two men met often for a ‘mild lunch’ at the Rose Tavern in Argyll Street. Like many before him, Brown was particularly struck by the refinement which characterized De Quincey’s actions and speech. When he made reference to a fellow journalist, ‘Mr John B. St John, pronouncing the surname in a pretty broad, Northernly accent, as “Saint John’”, De Quincey put on ‘a grave look, and holding up his thin, pale right hand in deprecatory style, said, “Singen, my dear sir, Singen’”. One afternoon the two discussed Robert Burns. ‘Ah!’ De Quincey remarked, while his eyes visibly dilated, ‘the Ayrshire Colossus is still expanding outward and upward, in spite of all his detractors.’ On another occasion, De Quincey and Brown dined with Nichol out at the Observatory, and then walked back into town through an ‘almost blinding “Scotch mist”’, leading De Quincey to a disquisition on the ‘damps and fogs of the late autumn’, and then to an idea for Winter Gardens in ‘all our large manufacturing towns’ to provide a place of ‘instruction and amusement’ for the poor.15
Yet while immersed in the intellectual and social attractions of Glasgow, De Quincey kept in close touch with his three daughters, travelling to Lasswade in April 1847 to spend a week with them before they set out on a holiday – almost certainly the first of their lives – to the south of England. De Quincey was filled with apprehension for their safety. ‘On some railways (and my poor girls never were on any), the doors of the carriages are not always securely fastened; and in the dark, or in the dusk, an accident might more easily happen than in full daylight.”16 Once they had set off, however, he received news of their travels with great delight, and sent playful letters in reply. ‘How is Florence?’ he asked. ‘I heard with anxiety that she was rather what people call delicate. I hope by this time, through sea-air, &c., she has become indelicate.’ Margaret wondered if he was reading their letters promptly. ‘It is only letters that make me unhappy which I defer, until by accident, perhaps, they never get read at all,’ De Quincey explained. ‘Complimentary letters, and letters of amusement from their news or their comments, I read instantly.’17
In June the Brontë sisters sent De Quincey a copy of their recently published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in acknowledgement of ‘the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works’. Wordsworth, Lockhart, and Tennyson received the same letter. De Quincey ‘greatly admired’ the poetry of the volume – especially Emily’s – and was in ‘every way well disposed’ towards the authors. The sisters also sent him copies of their novels – Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey were all published before the year was out – but De Quincey was nowhere near as impressed with their prose. ‘I fear this lady or gentleman, which ever the author is, is making a mistake,’ he remarked after laying down one of the novels: ‘young ladies, who are the chief readers of novels, will never stand to be interested in that sort of people: what they like is some heroic person, say a young or successful officer.’18
De Quincey’s health – surprisingly stable for months – gave way in early August. The summer heat and the ‘sometimes self-generated’ debilitation of a poor diet predisposed him to ‘the contagion of fever’, which he believed he had contracted as he walked among the poor Irish families who were ‘lying out all the summer on the bridges over the Clyde’.19 His fever broke after a month, but the physical anguish continued. Sometimes it took the form of ‘a bar rigid as a poker in the stomach, sometimes a more tormenting one as though the stomach were filled with cotton, sometimes (though more rarely) of an indescribable corrosive acid’. De Quincey fought these afflictions with his usual weapons: exercise (‘I walk with a watch in my hand so as to average 10 miles a day‘), and diet (‘I am most abstemious, taking no one thing likely to irritate the stomach – except only coffee’).20 His condition had improved by the middle of October, when – remarkably – his drug of choice was hemlock, ‘which once before did me so much good’, and which now bestowed at least a ‘moment’s peace’. Throughout these battles he consumed laudanum, though his attitude towards it remained deeply divided. ‘Since leaving off opium’, he remarked wryly, ‘I take a great deal too much of it for my health.’21
Troup and Brown had brought De Quincey to Glasgow to try to ensure that he remained a highly productive contributor to Tait’s. They would not have been disappointed. He wrote seventeen essays in thirteen months. Walter Savage Landor’s recent two-volume edition of his Works is the occasion of a four-part review in which De Quincey expresses misgivings about Landor’s ‘perverseness’ and degrading religious notions, but celebrates him as ‘a man of great genius’, a ‘leader in storms, a martyr, a national reformer, an arch-rebel’. Landor himself was delighted with the assessment, and that summer sent De Quincey a ‘very prettily bound’ copy of his collection of Poemata et Inscriptiones. ‘There is no author from whom I could have been more gratified by such a mark of attention,’ wrote De Quincey.22
Two historical essays – ‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘The Nautico-Military Nun of Spain’ – belong also to these months, and complement one another in intriguing ways. The former drew exalted praise from the Eclectic Review, which described De Quincey as, ‘since Tacitus, potentially the greatest of history writers. He is as eloquent, as epic, as impassioned in his nobler narrative as Carlyle, and he is far more dignified, less melodramatic, and purer in style.’ Yet in ‘Joan of Arc’, De Quincey’s fascination with historical events seems less notable than his disturbing attitude towards women. ‘You can do one thing as well as the best of us men,’ he observes, ‘… you can die grandly, and as goddesses would die were goddesses mortal’, an assertion strikingly anticipated only a year earlier by Poe’s declaration in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ that ‘the death … of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.23 ‘The Nautico-Military Nun’ is a second historical narrative, and one that again concerns a cross-dressing female soldier, this time the seventeenth-century adventurer Catalina de Erauso, who escaped from a convent at fifteen, fought as a Spanish soldier in South America, and later apparently drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. De Quincey clearly thought of ‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘The Nautico-Military Nun’ as two parts of a similar project, and planned to issue them together in a book, though nothing came of the idea. Very often in his writings, the suffocating protection of fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons leads to the death of women. Joan and Catalina are different. Both escape the home, and both die in their own cause.24 To De Quincey, however, Joan is emphatically more inspiring in death than in life. Only Catalina – or ‘Kate’ as he suggestively calls her – is allowed a life of independence and achievement that is undiminished by the mysterious circumstances that surround her death.
Finally, during these months De Quincey produced his three-part examination of ‘Protestantism’, in which he analyses both John Henry Newman’s recent conversion from the Church of England to Rome, and his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Provocatively distinguishing between ‘Newmannians’ and ‘Oldmannians’, De Quincey explains that ‘Rome founds herself upon the idea, that to her, by tradition and exclusive privilege, was communicated, once for all, the whole truth from the beginning. Mr Newman lays his corner stone in the very opposite idea of a gradual development given to Christianity by the motion of time, by experience, by expanding occasions, and by the progress of civilization.’ Newman expressed marked displeasure with De Quincey’s account: ‘I wonder if he saw even the outside of my book on doctrinal development,’ he growled. ‘If he ever saw it, he would have known that the object of it, and the matter of it, was solely and entirely to answer the very objection which he makes.’25
Working with De Quincey brought Troup and Brown the usual frustrations. In one particularly irritating instance, Troup twice sent a messenger to De Quincey’s lodgings looking for copy, and twice the messenger returned with the same information: ‘the old gentleman has no’ got ’oot o’ his bedroom yet!’ ‘Dreadfully put about’, Troup sent Brown, who found De Quincey ‘either uncommonly sound asleep or in a state of stupor. He lay stretched out on the hearthrug before the parlour fire-grate … clad in an old dressing-gown, with no stockings on his feet, and merely a pair of thin, loose slippers over his toes. “I’m sure the puir body’s deid!” the landlady exclaimed.’ Brown searched amidst the chaos of the room and soon found the manuscript he was looking for, ‘neatly tied up with red tape, and addressed to the “Editor of Tait’s Magazine”. At least, Troup acknowledged, De Quincey became far more responsive once he had an article in press, for all Troup had to do at that point was to send a message explaining that he was ‘revising the proof, and would do his best with the Greek quotations’, to bring De Quincey ‘at once … to the office. The very idea of a wrong accent or a printer’s mistake in his Greek was intolerable.’26
Yet if the editor was often frustrated, the writer too felt he had cause for grievance. Editorial tampering always infuriated De Quincey, and he strongly objected when Troup made deep and unauthorized cuts to his work. ‘People that have practised composition as much, and with as vigilant an eye as myself,’ De Quincey insisted, ‘know … by thousands of cases, how infinite is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought by the mere position of a word.’27 Like Tait and the Blackwoods before him, Troup may have made the changes because he thought they improved the article, or because of circumstances beyond his control, including delays brought about by De Quincey himself. To De Quincey, that was not the issue. What mattered was the integrity of the writing. ‘Who is answerable for the beauty, for the grandeur, for the effect of my papers?’ he demanded. Troup holds that ‘if he bears the blame, no harm is done … But where or how does he bear the blame? My name is there: his is not.’ Over the course of the autumn these tensions apparently ruptured De Quincey’s relationship with Tait’s and Troup, and by November he had left Glasgow and returned to his family at Lasswade.28
Here he found Francis hard at work on his Edinburgh MD thesis on a highly topical issue – The Religious Objections to the Use of Chloroform in Obstetric Medicine. Only a few weeks earlier, James Young Simpson, the Professor of Obstetrics at Edinburgh, had successfully used chloroform as an anaesthetic agent. Simpson’s discovery met with considerable opposition from the clergy, who denounced it based on a literal understanding of Genesis 3:16, in which God curses Eve: ‘in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’. De Quincey – long himself a sufferer of acute physical pain – was squarely on the side of science, as he explained to Francis in a lengthy letter, in which he dismantled the arguments of ‘the religiosity people’, and applauded Simpson, whose ‘immortal discovery … I should think will be found to have done more for human comfort, and for the mitigation of animal suffering, than any other discovery whatever.’ Within a matter of months, De Quincey’s position was vindicated. ‘Here, in Edinburgh’, Simpson wrote, ‘… the religious, like the other forms of opposition to chloroform, have ceased amongst us.’29 Later Francis copied out his father’s letter and appended it to his thesis.
[iii]
On 28 December 1847, the Glasgow Athenaeum threw a large party. De Quincey was invited, but an illness ‘of a very depressing character’ forced him to send his regrets. Had he been able to attend, he would almost certainly have met Charles Dickens, who was the guest of honour, and who described the soirée as one of ‘unbounded hospitality and enthoozymoozy … I have never been more heartily received anywhere, or enjoyed myself more completely’.30 Dickens later listed De Quincey’s works as among his ‘especial favourites’, but De Quincey did not hold him in the same regard. ‘Extravagance and want of fidelity to nature and the possibilities of life are what everywhere mar Dickens to me,’ he had lamented to Florence a few months earlier; ‘and these faults are fatal, because the modes of life amongst which these extravagances intrude are always the absolute realities of vulgarised life as it exists in plebeian ranks amongst our countrymen at this moment.’31
De Quincey was similarly critical of another major contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson. ‘He was heard depreciating [him] as the palimpsest of a small Thomas Carlyle’. When Emerson came to Edinburgh, however, he and De Quincey met on at least four occasions, and seem to have taken considerable pleasure in each other’s company. ‘Sir, I never hear the name of your country without being awe-struck at its future!’ De Quincey exclaimed when they were introduced on Sunday, 13 February.32 To Emerson, De Quincey was ‘a very gentle old man, speaking with the utmost deliberation & softness. & so refined in speech & manners, as to make quite indifferent his extremely plain & poor dress’. That evening De Quincey talked ‘of many things easily’, from the duties of a guest and the rates of pay on the periodical press, through anecdotes of Wilson and Wordsworth, to an account of two Edinburgh street girls, one of whom took ‘eight shillings out of his waist-coat pocket, & the other, his umbrella’.33
The following Saturday, De Quincey hosted a dinner for Emerson at Lasswade before travelling back into Edinburgh with him to hear his lecture on ‘Eloquence’. Emerson was delighted – ‘De Q at lecture!’ – but the ‘American nasal sing-song in his speech’ seems to have put De Quincey to sleep.34 Two days later, De Quincey saw Emerson off at the train station after writing him a letter of introduction to Coleridge’s son Derwent. At some point during the week, Emerson gave De Quincey an inscribed copy of his Essays: First Series, New Edition, which De Quincey annotated at some length. ‘By Emerson’s own confession’, he recorded, ‘the Opium Eater is ruler of the Night.’35
De Quincey travelled in a remarkable social circle, as Emerson’s visit revealed. He still socialized often at the home of Catherine Crowe, and ‘so far got rid of his formality of Mrs or Miss as to speak of her and to her uniformly by her Christian name of Catherine’.36 De Quincey and Emerson dined with David Scott, the poet and painter, and De Quincey afterwards visited his studio, where he was transfixed by Scott’s picture ‘of the Resurrection on the Day of the Crucifixion’. ‘Is it possible!’ cried De Quincey. ‘When I met him the other evening, I thought him the dullest of mortals; but now I have been an hour with him among the tombs, I find him quick with thought, and the most interesting of men!’37 Samuel Brown, the chemist, took a kind and steadying interest in De Quincey. One evening as they travelled together into Edinburgh, De Quincey ‘grew very nervous’, apparently at the thought that he might encounter his nemesis, Mrs McIndoe. Brown had a thorough knowledge of De Quincey’s torments in this regard, and assured him ‘that his old enemy … had removed to another quarter of the city’. De Quincey is ‘serene & happy, among just these friends, with whom I found him’, Emerson asserted: ‘for, he has suffered in all ways, & lived the life of a wretch, for many years; & Samuel Brown, Mrs Crowe, & one or two more, have saved him from himself, & from the bailiff, & from a fury of … his landlady, – & from opium; & he is now clean, clothed, & in his right mind’.38
On the outs with both Blackwood’s and Tait’s, De Quincey produced an essay on ‘War’ that Brown helped him to place in the February issue of MacPhail’s Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal, edited by Peter Landreth, and known as the unofficial voice of the established Church of Scotland. In the article, De Quincey argues that military conflict is both a physical and a moral necessity. Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace is praised for its ‘great sagacity, though otherwise that little work is not free from visionary self-delusions’, while Wordsworth’s notorious proclamation that ‘Carnage is [God’s] daughter’ is marshalled in support of De Quincey’s contention that the ‘cessation of war … would not be for the welfare of human nature, but would tend to its rapid degradation’.39
This same month De Quincey was asked by the Glasgow Athenaeum to contribute to their forthcoming Album, and in response produced a self-mocking essay on ‘Sortilege’, dated ‘FEB. 24, 1848’. There is a bathtub in his study at Mavis Bush, he announces, and in it is all manner of paper, from dinner invitations and half-completed essays to unanswered letters and long-forgotten bills. While Margaret, Florence, and Emily look on, De Quincey orders Francis to dip his hand into the reservoir and fish out something that might be suitable for publication in the Album. Francis’s first four attempts – ‘Prepare to dip!’ – are failures. No one would want to read a ‘horrid’ dun, or a lecture to De Quincey ‘by an ultra-moral friend … on procrastination’. On his fifth and final try, however, Francis pulls forth a blank sheet of paper, which De Quincey then fills with a jocular lecture on astrology.40
More deeply engaging was the opportunity to write for the North British Review, a quarterly journal edited by the Free Church of Scotland minister and writer William Hanna. Established in 1844, the North British sought the middle ground between the avowedly religious magazines that were too exclusively theological and too rigorously sectarian, and those political, literary, and scientific journals that excluded religion altogether, or gave it only minor notice. De Quincey himself described it as a ‘liberal’ journal.41 In the May issue, he reviewed John Forster’s recent biography of Oliver Goldsmith, and while illuminating on eighteenth-century literature and men of letters, he is most incisive on contemporary politics. ‘Mr Forster, in his views upon the social rights of literature, is rowing pretty nearly in the same boat as Mr Carlyle in his views upon the rights of labour. Each denounces, or by implication denounces, as an oppression and a nuisance, what we believe to be a necessity inalienable from the economy and structure of our society.’42
A second review, this time of William Roscoe’s recently reprinted edition of Alexander Pope, was published in August, and occasioned some of De Quincey’s most celebrated thoughts on the definition and role of literature. ‘Didactic poetry, he maintains, is a contradiction in terms. ‘No poetry can have the function of teaching.’ Poetry can teach ‘only as nature teaches, as forests teach, as the sea teaches, as infancy teaches, viz., by deep impulse, by hieroglyphic suggestion’. De Quincey also returns to his famous distinction between the ‘literature of knowledge’ and the ‘literature of power’, which he first introduced in the London nearly twenty-five years earlier, and which he now reformulates in a way that shifts the emphasis from the affective to the moral.43 ‘What do you learn from Paradise Lost?’ he asks.
Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe – is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite.
The definition provides perhaps the best example of what De Quincey expected of literature, and of what he himself hoped to achieve.44
In November, his old friend Thomas Noon Talfourd’s Final Memorials of Charles Lamb formed the ostensible subject of his third and final North British review. Across a survey that covers Lamb’s prose style, his friendship with Coleridge, his Elia essays, and his religious convictions, De Quincey interweaves his own memories, from his early experiences with Lamb in London, to their evenings together as colleagues on the London. ‘Both Lamb and myself had a furious love for nonsense,’ De Quincey writes. Yet he is also keenly aware that Lamb’s life was darkened by the madness which assailed his sister, and which on at least one occasion seriously threatened him. ‘Is there peace on earth for the lunatic?’ De Quincey wonders solemnly. ‘Charles Lamb, thou in thy proper person, shalt enter the skirts of this dreadful hail-storm: even thou shalt taste the secrets of lunacy, and enter as a captive its house of bondage.’45
During that autumn De Quincey appears to have left Mavis Bush and moved back into Edinburgh. There had perhaps been some quarrel between father and children, for he saw little of them over the next several months. ‘They are young and thoughtless,’ he declared tersely. Certainly on occasion their high spirits grated on him. ‘Oh my dear girls, I fear you are talking sad nonsense,’ he would whisper to himself, before introducing ‘a specimen of genuine and first-rate talk’ that was designed to bring their ‘female’ minds up to a ‘masculine and philosophic level’. In a less patronizing mood, De Quincey noted that ‘we, who see most of each other, nearest relatives united in the same household, see but little of that inner world – that world of secret self-consciousness – in which each of us lives a second life apart and with himself alone’.46
Margaret, Florence, and Emily almost invariably treated their father with affection and respect. But they were each spirited, witty, and intelligent ‘supporters of the rights of women in the democracy of Mavis Bush’, and all three were more than capable of voicing objections both to their father’s point of view and to ‘his cranky ways’. At dinner one evening, his condescending attitude towards them was so irksome that they were – in Margaret’s words – ‘quite ready for a “stand-up fight” for our tastes’. In another instance, a friend wrote asking for help in retrieving ‘two valuable books’ that he had loaned to De Quincey. It was probably Margaret who replied that ‘she had done her best, but the truth was her father had for two days been sitting on them and at night took them to his room and put them under his pillow’.47 Once De Quincey slopped whisky and water on himself, and then cleaned up the mess by reducing a pair of Margaret’s ‘very pretty lace cuffs’ to ‘a piece of dirty wet rag’. On another occasion, he trimmed the candles using a tiny pair of scissors belonging to Florence, who ‘with a terrific scream precipitated herself’ upon him when she discovered what he had done.48 De Quincey often ‘set something on fire, the commonest incident being for some one to look up from work or book to say casually, “Papa, your hair is on fire”, of which a calm, “Is it, my love?” and a hand rubbing out the blaze was all the notice taken’. One night a maid reported with alarm that De Quincey’s study was on fire. The sisters rushed downstairs, but were told by their father that they could not use water to combat the blaze, ‘as it would have ruined the beloved papers’. Instead, De Quincey entered the room, locked the door behind him, and put the flames out with a heavy rug. ‘He was not a reassuring man for nervous people to live with,’ Florence remarked mildly. Margaret was more to the point: ‘for Papa, we are at constant war with him’.49
Living again in Edinburgh, De Quincey was ‘oppressed’ by various ‘calls upon my time’, though in September he seems to have enjoyed the visit of a young Greek scholar, Neocles Jaspis Mousabines, who shared his enthusiasm for Wordsworth, and who journeyed down to the Lake District to meet the poet with a letter of introduction provided by De Quincey. ‘My Dear Sir,’ De Quincey began, before outlining to Wordsworth how Mousabines had been ‘powerfully and unaffectedly impressed by the study of your works’, as De Quincey himself had been half a century earlier when he began his study of the poet. De Quincey signed himself, ‘Your faithful friend and servant’.50 Despite everything that had transpired, he still felt close enough to the poet to address him directly and with a trace of their former intimacy. It was the last time the two men were in contact.
A ‘deep-seated nervous derangement’ had plagued De Quincey for several months, and in late October he decided once again that only by conquering his addiction could he hope to restore his health. Resolving on abstinence, he cut himself off for eighteen days, during which time he ‘descended into utter despair’, before sliding even further downward into the ‘profoundest suffering and utter hopelessness – (rigid obstruction, throbbing without intermission, and sub-inflammation)’. And then suddenly, ‘to my utter surprise’, on 23 November ‘the misery passed off after breakfast, not fully and consciously until about one or half-past one; so it continued until after cocoa, when for an hour or so a reaction of misery set in, which again passed off; and now, half-past eleven at night, I am almost as well as before cocoa’.51
De Quincey had fought hard against the agonies of laudanum withdrawal on several previous occasions, ascending towards the hope of sobriety in some instances, and plunging towards rock bottom in others. But this time he reached a startlingly different conclusion about ‘the cause of my misery’. For decades he had been convinced that it was the opium, but now ‘it appears more strongly’ that it ‘must be the alcohol’. He fought on for another three and a half weeks, and felt confident that he could triumph. ‘The advance will not, perhaps, be continuous,’ he realized, ‘… but it will burst out more and more at intervals like a fugue, until the restoration shall be perfect.’52 There was, however, no restoration. A greater understanding of his laudanum habit did not help him to defeat it, and by the spring of 1849 he had relapsed again. Further, at this same moment, one of his most implacable creditors, the tailor Craig, tracked him down and demanded money that had been owing for several years. De Quincey either could not or would not pay, and in the early summer, after avoiding incarceration for almost fifteen years, he went to prison for the second time.53
John Blackwood got word of his plight, and bailed him out in exchange for the promise of a series of articles for the magazine. In July, De Quincey submitted ‘Conversation and S. T. Coleridge’, an article in which he mixes praise with a good deal of censure and biographical summary: ‘Treachery there was in [Coleridge’s] own nature, and almost by a necessity he yielded to the dark temptations of opium.’ Blackwood liked parts of the article, but he rejected it. ‘In anything you write there must be fine expressions & thoughts but in this case I do not think you are at all happy in the mode of handling your subject.’54 It was a setback for both De Quincey and Blackwood, but De Quincey regrouped by focusing his energies on an article that he had begun to compose at around the same time as Suspiria, and that he seems at various points to have considered part of it.55 The result is one of his most remarkable achievements.
Too late. Those words haunted De Quincey. It was too late to help Elizabeth, Catharine, Ann, William, Margaret. It was too late to meet his deadlines, to avoid laudanum, to stop the tortures of his dreaming mind. In ‘The English Mail-Coach’, published in Blackwood’s for October and December 1849, De Quincey confronts ‘the dreadful legend of TOO LATE’.56 But this time, at least in the powerful mythology of the tale, he is ‘in time’.
De Quincey opens the essay with meandering badinage and anecdotal humour that he steadily deepens into impassioned strains of resurrection and grief. At the centre of the tale is his memory of the night when the mail-coach on which he was riding was involved in the near-fatal collision with the gig just outside Preston. Over thirty years have elapsed since the accident, yet it continues to replay itself endlessly in his nightmares, where the gig, the coach, and the young girl have become conflated with both the tragedies of his childhood and his intense commitment to nationhood.
Memories of the mail-coach trigger within De Quincey penetrating insights into time, spirituality, the self, and sudden death. There is, he contends, an abysmal infirmity in the human will that leads us to act against our own better interests. Dreams cannot explain this frailty, but – either consciously or unconsciously – they enact for us that fatal moment when we all guiltily embrace it. The result is a deep division within ourselves that precedes, rather than reflects, our experience of the world, and that creates within each of us an inexhaustible sense of shame and sin. As Adam fell in paradise, so for De Quincey in dreams a bait is offered to the infirm places in our individual wills, and in taking it we complete for ourselves the aboriginal fall.57
The bifurcation of the self that haunts all of us is especially severe in De Quincey, as is evident in his ongoing dreams of Fanny, the beautiful girl he used to meet when travelling many years earlier on the Bath Road. In these nightmares, De Quincey conjures up the face of Fanny, which invokes a rose in June, and these two images proliferate until he sees ‘roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end’. Then come thoughts of Fanny’s grandfather, the coachman, whose inability to turn round reminds De Quincey of a crocodile, an association which immediately calls forth a ‘dreadful host of wild semi-legendary animals’, including ‘griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes’. At length these ‘fighting images’ crowd together ‘into one towering armorial shield’, and De Quincey is brought face to face with his deepest fear. ‘The dreamer finds housed within himself’, he trembles, ‘… some horrid alien nature.’
What if it were his own nature repeated, – still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even that – even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness – might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how, if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself?58
From one vantage point, this is a terrifying portrayal of a consciousness divided against itself in ways that clearly suggest schizophrenia. But from another it is even more disturbing, for it suggests that there are parts within us that are not human, but ‘alien’, and that in our worst nightmares aspects of our selves are inoculated upon these alien natures – inoculated upon the vile, the bestial, the unthinkable.59
De Quincey’s dreams of Fanny ‘betray a shocking tendency’ to pass from ‘lovely floral luxuriations … into finer maniacal splendours’60 Yet if his recollections of the mail-coach propel him downward into the depths of his own consciousness, they also propel him outward into a consideration of Britain in the Victorian age. De Quincey feels an intense nostalgia for the now obsolete mail-coach system of his youth, while he is divided in his opinion of the Industrial Revolution, which is to him a source of both fascination and terror. His account of the accident on the Preston road illustrates what happens when a mail-coach runs out of control, but his entire narrative hints at the infinitely greater trauma that would ensue if the newer steam technologies went similarly out of control. In the same way, De Quincey acknowledges that industrialism has bestowed benefits, but he also believes that something is lost when machines replace people. The mail-coaches promoted ‘inter-agencies’ between passengers and horses, whereas the railways have ‘disconnected man’s heart from the ministers of his locomotion’. Trains travel much faster as ‘a fact of… lifeless knowledge’, but ‘on the old mail-coach … we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling’. The ‘pot-wallopings of the boiler’ are spiritually deadening, while the ‘laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming on the wind’, provided innumerable opportunities for the sublime.61 In the ‘Mail-Coach’, De Quincey recognizes the achievements of the Industrial Revolution, but he expresses profound misgivings about its imaginative costs and potential dangers.
He is much more certain about Britain’s role in the Napoleonic Wars. The political mission of the mail-coach in distributing news of Britain’s military campaigns against Revolutionary France has fused in his imagination with the accident on the Preston road to produce kaleidoscopic nightmares in which Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo is assimilated within a broader myth of Britain as a righteous colonial power charged by God with the task of preserving and extending Christian civilization.62 In the spectacular ‘Dream-Fugue’ which closes the piece, a celestial mail-coach carrying the words ‘Waterloo and Recovered Christendom’ flies headlong down the grand aisle of a cathedral towards a girl who is at once Elizabeth, the goddess Britannia, and the young woman aboard the gig.63 Death seems inevitable. And yet this time death is cheated. For ‘at the last, and with one motion of his victorious arm’, God sweeps the girl, ‘now grown up to woman’s height’, far upwards to an altar, where she stands ‘sinking, rising, trembling, fainting’, but safe. In the fifth and final movement of the fugue, De Quincey and all the ‘children of the grave’ emerge through the eastern gates of the mighty cathedral, ‘rendering thanks to God in the highest – that, having hid his face through one generation behind thick clouds of War, once again was ascending – was ascending from Waterloo – in the visions of Peace’64 It is one of the most astonishing moments in all of De Quincey – a mind-boggling amalgamation of Protestantism, patriotism, history, and the self in which innocence is redeemed and God’s ways are justified.
‘The English Mail-Coach’ is De Quincey’s last article for Blackwood’s, and marks a fittingly bittersweet close to his connection with the magazine. On the one hand, his departure left a bad taste in the mouth of Blackwood, who had received nowhere near enough material from De Quincey to reimburse him for the money he had paid to effect his release from prison, and who in response had De Quincey’s portrait turned out of the Blackwood’s saloon.65 On the other, the ‘Mail-Coach’ brought Blackwood’s considerable acclaim, especially for the purple prose of its conclusion, and clearly influenced a number of contemporary authors, including major figures such as Herman Melville in Moby Dick (1851) and George Eliot in Felix Holt (1866).66
[v]
He was not long without a publisher. James Fields, of the Boston firm of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, had been writing to him for several months with a proposal to produce an American edition of his works. ‘Some years ago we published in this city an Edition of “The Confessions of an Opium Eater,”’ Fields explained, ‘and being about to issue another, we beg to ask if it will be agreeable to you to supply a list of your other articles & where published that we may include in a larger volume of your writings a complete collection of your essays &c.’ The notion of a collected edition of his work seems never even to have occurred to De Quincey, and his first reaction was incredulity. ‘Sir, the thing is absolutely, insuperably, and for ever impossible. Not the archangel Gabriel, nor his multipotent adversary, durst attempt any such thing!’67
Fields, however, was determined to proceed, and loose copyright laws at the time allowed him to do so, though he kept in close contact with De Quincey, and paid him handsomely from profits he was not legally obliged to share with him.68 In August 1850 he issued Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis as volume one, and a collection of Biographical Essays as volume two. Five other volumes followed within a year, including Life and Manners and the Literary Reminiscences. The firm printed 1500 copies of each title, and reprintings started within a few months. William Davis Ticknor declared that the De Quincey edition had ‘far exceeded our expectations’, and he was particularly gratified by ‘the kind expressions that come to us from every quarter in regard to the real value of these writings’. In late 1852 Fields reported that De Quincey was ‘still the rage’. By 1853, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields had sold over 45,000 copies of De Quincey.69
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, De Quincey had introduced himself to the publisher James Hogg, and become a contributor to Hogg’s Instructor, a monthly magazine of humour, information, and reviews that was printed in Edinburgh and London, and that reached a middle-class audience of 5000–6000.70 De Quincey wrote for the Instructor on miscellaneous topics ranging from ‘Conversation’, ‘Logic’ and ‘French and English Manners’, to ‘Judas Iscariot’, ‘California’, and ‘On the Supposed Scriptural Expression for Eternity’. In his most interesting work for the magazine, however, he surveys the ‘revolutionary character’ of contemporary British society in ways that are both sympathetic and slightly ominous. The ‘Young England’ of Benjamin Disraeli has received ‘a volume of new life-blood’ from the ‘evocation of new interests, new questions, new sympathies – and the remarkable concurrence, with this intellectual awakening, of a far cheaper and more stirring literature’. Railways continue to transform social and economic life, for they are ‘not only swift in themselves, but the causes of swiftness in everything else; so that very soon, I am convinced, out of pure, blind sympathy with railway trains, men will begin to trot through the streets’. Immense strides have been made in ‘the capital interest of Education’, which is now ‘solemnly recognized as a national duty’, with measures in progress for bringing it, ‘like water or gas, almost to every cottage door’. In summation: ‘I cannot but feel a steady persuasion that this age is labouring with a deeper fermentation of thought and self-questioning than has ever before reached the general heart of a nation.’71
Productive relations between De Quincey and the Instructor, however, did not prevent him from returning briefly to Tait’s, which was now printed in London and under the editorship of the Cambridge-educated barrister and journalist Horatio Mansfield.72 In ‘Lord Carlisle on Pope’, published in April, May, and June 1851, De Quincey conceded that Pope was ‘the most brilliant writer of his own class in European literature’, but he damned him for his narrowness, false refinement, conventionalism, and dishonesty. After the publication of the second instalment of the article, Thornton Leigh Hunt criticized ‘DE QUINCEY’S rambling exaggeration on POPE’. Rejoined De Quincey: ‘I do not see any actual exaggeration, simply because I do not see that any exaggeration is possible.’ Of far more concern to him were the ‘press errors’ that had appeared in the first instalment, the result of trying to write and revise ‘at a distance of 400 miles’ from London. De Quincey voiced his dissatisfaction with the arrangement, but Mansfield was apparently unsympathetic, and ‘Lord Carlisle on Pope’ was De Quincey’s last article for Tait’s.73 His departure from the magazine brought to a close a relationship that had lasted eighteen years, and that had been the prompt for some of his most progressive and engaging work.
At some point he removed himself from his Edinburgh lodgings and returned to live at Mavis Bush. Margaret, Florence, and Emily were all still at home, though Francis had by this time successfully completed his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, and emigrated to Brazil.74 In late March, the person in charge of collecting data in Lasswade for the 1851 census knocked at the door of the cottage, where he discovered that De Quincey had not yet filled in the required form, and was soon flustered at the thought of having to do so. ‘Where was he to sign? What was his occupation, etc.? At length he inscribed his own name and entered himself as a “writer to the magazines’”. When the enumerator recorded the information in his book, however, he listed De Quincey as an ‘Annuitant’.75 These two very different responses highlight a paradox that repeatedly shaped De Quincey’s conception of himself. From one point of view, he was justly proud of his accomplishments as a professional writer with a burgeoning international reputation. But from another, he resented the ways in which the magazines had forced him to temporize and commodify his knowledge, and he never ceased to think of himself as a moneyed man of leisure who had no real need to write at all.
The enumerator then enquired about the other occupants of the cottage. De Quincey gave the names of his three daughters, but was ‘floored’ when he was asked to specify their ‘occupation’. Eventually he took up his pen, ‘put a bracket round the three names, and wrote against them – “These are like the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin”’.76 It was hardly an accurate description. De Quincey may have believed – or even hoped – that his daughters devoted most of their days to leisure, but in addition to the responsibilities of running the household, they spent a considerable portion of their time managing his affairs and correspondence, as well as doing what they could to ensure that he took care of himself. De Quincey was proud and still remarkably self-reliant, but Margaret, Florence, and Emily were much busier – especially when he took up residence at Mavis Bush – than he knew or cared to acknowledge. The census record closes with the information that the De Quincey household also included a thirty-two-year-old cook, Jane Stewart, and a nineteen-year-old maid, Marion Duncan.77
De Quincey embraced the pleasantries and routines of Mavis Bush, but they were not enough to stave off the terrible episodes of mental and emotional stress that still waylaid him. An ‘undecipherable horror’ brooded day and night over his nervous system, and brought on ‘whirlwinds of impatience’, as he explained in a remarkable letter to the poet and essayist Mary Russell Mitford, who long ago had contributed to the London Magazine at the same time as him. ‘Whatever I may have been writing is suddenly wrapt, as it were, in one sheet of consuming fire – the very paper is poisoned to my eyes. I cannot endure to look at it, and I sweep it away into vast piles of unfinished letters, or inchoate essays.’ De Quincey was ‘quite alone’ in his study, so no one witnessed these fits, nor ‘if they did, would my outward appearance testify to the dreadful transports within’.78 Yet across these months he continued to labour as hard as ever at his prose. ‘This I do know’, he declared in December 1851, ‘that here, as always, I have written my best. That is, given the conditions under which I wrote, which conditions might chance to be very unfavourable; hurry, for example, exhaustion, dissatisfaction with my subject, &c., and latterly overwhelming nervousness; these allowed for, always I have striven to write as well as I could.’79
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Many people saw De Quincey at this time, and left vivid recollections of their encounters with him. A Mr Sinclair claimed that he used to accompany De Quincey ‘to the apothecary’s in Edinburgh where stands Scott’s monument, to see him toss off a wine-glass of laudanum and with a sang-froid as if the draught had been mere water’. Bertram and De Quincey met often in Princes Street, where ‘he would take a turn or two with me, speaking his beautiful English’.80
Thomas Cooper, the Chartist and religious lecturer, visited De Quincey at Mavis Bush and gave him a copy of his Purgatory of Suicides (1845), a political epic in Spenserian stanzas that Cooper had composed whilst in prison for sedition. De Quincey ‘showed true courtesy in speaking to me on political subjects’, Cooper asserted, to the point where either Margaret or Florence ‘proudly chid’ him for not ‘maintaining his sentiments with dignity’. ‘“My dear,” said [De Quincey], whose small slender frame shook with feeling, “do not talk so, I beseech you – you will insult Mr Cooper.”’ Harriet Martineau, the essayist, novelist, and economist, spent an afternoon at Mavis Bush. De Quincey ‘spoke of her with real liking’, while Martineau, who suffered from deafness, responded particularly to De Quincey’s voice, ‘so clear, so soft, so sweet; so delightful a contrast to the way people have of bawling to me”’.81
In addition to various exchanges with James Hogg, De Quincey met often with Hogg’s son James junior. Once the two were overtaken by a severe thunderstorm and driven into Paxton’s Royal Exchange Hotel for shelter. ‘While there having a basin of soup, the waiter, after closely scrutinising my companion, gently touched him on the arm, and said, “I think, sir, I have a bundle of papers which you left here some time ago” … It then turned out that my friend had slept at this hotel some twelve months before, and on that occasion had confided these papers to the waiter, asking him to keep them till he called for them.’ On another occasion, De Quincey and Hogg walked together in the country, where De Quincey easily outpaced the much younger man, ascending a steep hill near Lasswade ‘like a squirrel’ while keeping up ‘an unremitting monologue on the Beauties of Herder’.82
Hill Burton saw much of De Quincey. ‘His costume, in fact, is a boy’s duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the fragments of a parti-coloured belcher handkerchief; on his feet are list-shoes covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter-night; and the trousers – some one suggests that they are inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink.’ One night De Quincey stayed over at Burtons, where he ‘lugged a considerable heap’ of books to his room, including Burton’s ‘best bound quarto’, which he spread ‘upon a piece of bedroom furniture, readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him pore over it’ while he lay recumbent on the floor, ‘with only one article of attire to separate him’ from nakedness. On a different occasion, De Quincey described to Burton his horror at a peacock that had come to live near Mavis Bush, for ‘not only the terrific yells of the accursed biped … pierced him to the soul, but the continued terror of their recurrence kept his nerves in agonizing tension during the intervals of silence’.83
In January 1852, Hill Burton walked to Lasswade with John Ritchie Findlay, editor of The Scotsman newspaper. It was the beginning of a close friendship between De Quincey and Findlay. ‘We talked, among many other things, about Macaulay,’ Findlay stated. De Quincey remarked that a ‘passion for speaking was usually the sign of a weak and shallow mind, but that Macaulay was a remarkable exception to this rule’. Ten days later Burton and Findlay walked out again, this time for dinner with De Quincey and his daughters. Their conversation concerned ‘all the current topics of the day’, and a variety of ecclesiastical matters, including ‘the great Antichrist controversy’. In the course of the evening, the party heard the sound of children’s voices, and went out into the back garden to find a group of young ‘guisers’ singing. De Quincey evidently misunderstood the reason for their visit, and ‘instead of rightly regarding them as village children on an evening frolic, fancied that they were in actual distress, and making a somewhat peculiar and more than usually clamorous appeal for charity. Silence was strikingly broken by his exclaiming, “All that I have ever had enjoyment of in life, the charms of friendship, the smiles of women, and the joys of wine, seem to rise up to reproach me for my happiness when I see such misery, and think there is so much of it in the world.”’84
Francis Jacox, a clergyman and prolific magazinist, was one of the most enthusiastic of De Quincey’s youthful admirers, and in the summer of 1852 he spent the better part of a week at Mavis Bush, where he witnessed firsthand the misery De Quincey endured as a result of his addiction. ‘During the days that I was his guest I could not but take note of the vicissitudes of temperament and spirits to which he was subject,’ reported Jacox. ‘For some time in the morning of each day he appeared to be grievously depressed and prostrate; the drowsy torpor of which he complained so keenly was then in fullest possession of him.’ His eyes looked ‘heavy’, ‘filmy’, and ‘void of life’. Sometimes De Quincey fought this lethargy well into the afternoon, though he was usually able to revive himself earlier with a walk in the fresh air and a cup of good coffee, which acted upon him ‘like a charm, bracing up his energies’ and ‘clearing up his prospects’.85 Jacox may well have believed that De Quincey effected his recovery in this way, for he makes no mention of laudanum, but the drug was undoubtedly at the root of both De Quincey’s stupor and his resurgence.
De Quincey’s misery, however, did not diminish his intellectual energy. He talked to Jacox about the music of Pergolesi, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bellini. Activists such as Charles Kingsley and the ‘Christian Socialists’ ‘puzzled’ him. A politician like William Gladstone ‘had a charm for him: “But what am I to think … of his sympathies with a party abroad which at home would be identified with extreme democracy?” Not that extreme democracy in politics, any more than abstract atheism as such, was to Mr De Quincey otherwise than philosophically interesting.’ Modern literature led him to discuss a wide range of authors, including Coleridge, Lamb, Madame de Staël, Charles Maturin, George Henry Lewes, and William Makepeace Thackeray. ‘Referring to Wordsworth’s happy immunity from distracting anxieties … Mr De Quincey exclaimed, “Heavens! had I but … had his robust strength, and healthy stomach, and sound nerves, with the same glorious freedom from all interruptions and embarrassment!”’ On the subject of Bleak House, ‘then in course of publication’, De Quincey objected that Dickens was ‘repeating himself … and a heavier cause of complaint lay in the popular author’s dead set against the “upper classes”, as such, and his glorification at their expense of the idealised working-man’.86
At the end of his visit, Jacox walked with De Quincey into Edinburgh and up the Mound, where he noticed the ‘nervous solicitude’ with which De Quincey ‘refrained from any gesture while passing a cabstand that might seem to warrant any driver in concluding himself summoned and engaged. Some unhappy experience of a mistake of this kind may have been the secret of his disquiet, for evidently he entertained a dread of the “overbearing brutality of these men”’. Passing on to a bookshop window, De Quincey examined a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), which Jacox went inside and purchased for him. De Quincey began to talk of ‘Hawthorne’s genius, and to mention a recent visit of Emerson’s, – to neither of whom could he accord quite the degree of admiration claimed for them by the more thoroughgoing of their respective admirers’. The two men then proceeded through George Square and into the Meadows, where De Quincey assured Jacox that he need accompany him no further on the way back to Lasswade. ‘It was between eight and nine on that lovely July evening that I took leave,’ Jacox remembered. ‘… The last I saw of him, he had opened Hawthorne’s book, and went along reading as he walked.’87
A month later, De Quincey’s American publisher Fields, near the end of an extended stay in Britain, accepted an invitation to visit Mavis Bush. At the time appointed for his arrival, De Quincey stood waiting on the garden porch, and before long Fields’s Edinburgh carriage came into view. Stepping forward to the gate, De Quincey prepared to receive his guest, while Fields claimed that he immediately noticed the ‘alabaster shine’ on De Quincey’s face, which he had often observed ‘in other opium-eaters’, as well as the restlessness of his body, which ‘also proclaimed his well-known habit’. With ‘exquisite courtesy’, De Quincey greeted Fields and escorted him into the cottage, where ‘beautiful’ Margaret De Quincey – whose poor health often kept her at home – sat reading. ‘Soon after came in his other two daughters whom he introduced as “fresh from the Kirk”. His second daughter Florence is a great beauty.’88
Lunch was served, and then Fields – locked arm in arm with the ‘smallest … looking little man I ever saw’ – walked over the hills to nearby Roslin Castle. De Quincey spoke ‘very freely about his Opium Life and seemed to consider it no failing that he had destroyed his constitution’. He took a great interest in the countryside. ‘You should have seen him listening with his head uncovered to a stock dove that sat cooing over against a cottage wall and you should have heard his indignant railing as he showed me where the Esk had been turned away from its proper channel for some millpurpose.’ At one point De Quincey stopped to dwell on his youth and ‘dead companions’, before acknowledging with a sigh that these were topics ‘too sad for this bright day’.89
The conversation turned to books and authors. Conscious as ever of his audience, De Quincey abandoned the qualified enthusiasm for Emerson and Hawthorne that he had displayed in his earlier conversation with Jacox, and he lauded the two American writers to his American publisher. ‘Emerson seems to have made a most favourable impression on the whole De Q. family. His visit to their cottage they will always remember & more than once during the day the Opium Eater quoted him with delight. Hawthorne’s books De Q. has read himself and always he told me with great interest.’ De Quincey also spoke to Fields of British authors he had known as personal friends, referring to Lamb and Southey with ‘love and tenderness’, and invoking ‘those days among the hills of Westmorland when his daily companions’ were Coleridge and Wordsworth. Wilson was the subject of a number of humorous anecdotes, yet he was now in very poor health, and when De Quincey mentioned him, ‘his eyes filled and his voice trembled’.90
That evening, as Fields prepared to leave, he quietly slipped into Margaret’s hand a cheque for £50, as the first of several instalments he paid to De Quincey for his share in the profits of the American edition of his works. De Quincey insisted on accompanying Fields back into Edinburgh. ‘I feel that at my period of life, and your home being three thousand miles away, the chances are against our ever meeting again.’ Fields could not allow him to walk the whole way, but he sent his fly a few miles down the road, and the two men set off. De Quincey spoke of ‘his family and his sons, one in India and one in Brazil, and gave me a history of all his joys and sorrows. Evidently a little crazed I should say he was.’ When the two finally parted it was ‘dark and lowering on the brow of a hill looking towards Edinburgh’. ‘God bless you,’ said De Quincey, before turning back towards Mavis Bush. Fields watched him, Vanishing, reappearing, vanishing’, until he was lost in the mist.91