Recollected
[i]
De Quincey consolidated the shift in his reputation from Romantic bohemian to Victorian man of letters when, in 1853, he began to publish Selections Grave and Gay, his own revised edition of many of his most important essays. Fields’s ‘American energy’ was at the core of the enterprise, for in collecting De Quincey’s widely spread magazine work into a series of handsome and affordable volumes, he provided a service which De Quincey himself candidly admitted he ‘could not have accomplished in twenty years’.1 When the Fields edition began to circulate in Britain, James Hogg and his son persuaded De Quincey to produce his own British selection. The agreement placed De Quincey in an awkward position with Fields, for by using the American edition as a basis for revision he was rendering it obsolete. In the event, however, both publishers benefited. Fields’s edition underwrote Hogg’s, while De Quincey saw to it that the new material he produced for Hogg was released to Fields, who duly rolled it into the ongoing American project.2
The chance to amend, justify, and reimagine what he had written sometimes more than three decades earlier brought out all of De Quincey’s fussiness. Typically, he fretted over the spelling of ‘porticoes … porticos’, or consulted ‘three or four different lexicons’ to decide whether ‘calligraphy’ should be spelled with a single or a double ‘l’.3 Scarce wonder that the labour often proceeded very slowly. De Quincey’s ‘whole constitution and habit of mind were averse from sustained and continuous work of the kind’, Hogg sighed. ‘He was constantly being caught with new plans, and when I was desirous of pushing on the publication of the works, would entertain me with the most ingenious devices and speculations.’ The publisher soon found, however, that it was of no use ‘to show impatience – that the causes of delay were for the most part beyond his control: that he did not lack the will to make efforts, but the power, and that the power was most amenable when he was left unharrassed’.4 Through charm, resolution, and infinite patience, both Hogg and his son stayed at De Quincey’s elbow and gradually cajoled fourteen volumes from him. De Quincey could only work by fits and starts, as illness, opium, and perhaps brandy – ‘that dreadful potentate’ – continued to ground him: ‘pardon me … and read in this furious nonsense the restlessness of my shattered nerves’.5 But he produced in the end a characteristically accomplished body of work.
Figure 6: George D’Almaine’s portrait of James Fields, 1849
Volume One of his Selections was published on 21 May 1853. De Quincey opened with a ‘General Preface’ which reads in part like an apologia for his career as a magazinist: the harsh and peremptory deadlines of the mass media often drove him into hurried writing, while producing for specific magazine audiences had the effect at times of narrowing his publicity, especially amongst those classes of ‘leisure and wealth’.6 De Quincey’s account hardly does justice to his own popularity and productivity, but in the ‘Preface’ he slights the magazines in order to re-fashion himself as an author no longer shackled by the demands of time and money, and who now presents his last and best thoughts in the dignity of a selected edition.
His writings, De Quincey goes on to explain, are best thought of as falling into three categories. The first comprises those papers which propose ‘primarily to amuse the reader; but which, in doing so, may or may not happen occasionally to reach a higher station, at which the amusement passes into an impassioned interest’. The second encompasses ‘those papers which address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty’. And the third concerns a ‘far higher class of compositions’, such as the Confessions and especially Suspiria, for in them De Quincey ‘attempts to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music’.7
Volume One contains the first thirteen instalments of his Autobiographic Sketches, a series in which De Quincey once again reaches far back into his past, moving in this instance from infancy to ‘premature manhood’ through a combination of newly written material and revisions to work previously published in Blackwood’s, Tait’s, and The Instructor.8 When the volume appeared, De Quincey wrote a flattering letter to George Henry Lewes, co-editor with Thornton Leigh Hunt of the radical weekly newspaper, The Leader. Would Thornton’s father, the iconic liberal Leigh Hunt, like a copy of the Sketches? More to the point, might Lewes review it, though ‘you are too generous to suppose that I wish to bespeak any public notice from you beyond the most equitable and enlightened notice which The Leader, more by much and more uniformly than any other journal whatever that I have ever seen, accords to all books whatsoever’.9 Lewes was enthusiastic about the volume, and a two-part review duly appeared in The Leader for 11 and 25 June: ‘THOMAS DE QUINCEY we hold to be the greatest of English prose writers. We are not in the habit of making such assertions lightly, and … beg the reader to consider that all our remarks are made in reference to the very highest standards, such as the commanding excellence of De Quincey’s writing claims from all.’ Shortly after Lewes’s review appeared George Eliot reported, ‘I have De Quincey’s Autobiographical Sketches with me, and have now done with them.’10 Perhaps Lewes passed his copy of the book to her?
The second and concluding volume of the Sketches was published on 24 January 1854, and is largely concerned with De Quincey’s revisions to his Tait’s essays on Coleridge and Wordsworth. Retained – indeed augmented – are his allegations regarding Coleridge’s plagiarisms, though in other respects De Quincey is more conciliatory in his attitude towards both poets, toning down a number of passages that originally gave offence, and excising others altogether. ‘The truth and life of those Lake Sketches is something wonderful,’ Mitford declared. ‘Of course the blind worshippers of Wordsworth quarrel with him; but there is quite enough left to praise and admire in the bard of The Excursion.’11
Henry Arthur Bright wrote at length on both volumes in the Westminster Review, where he praised De Quincey’s essays as ‘filled with passages of a power and beauty which have never been surpassed by any other prose writer of the age’, before going on to a balanced assessment of De Quincey’s strengths and weaknesses.12 Hawthorne, for whom De Quincey was a ‘special favourite’, thought the overall tenor of Bright’s review inexcusably tepid, and he told him so. ‘Your article is calm, wise, well-considered, and, so far as it goes, unquestionably just; but yet you remind me of a connoisseur of wine, sipping a drop or two out a glass, and praising or criticising its flavour, when you ought to swallow it at one gulp, and feel your heart warmed through and through with it.’13
Volume Three of the Selections – Miscellanies, Chiefly Narrative – appeared on 9 June 1854. It featured revised versions of three articles from Blackwood’s and another three from Tait’s, including ‘System of the Heavens’, which Nichol thought De Quincey should have updated much more thoroughly. ‘The Nebula, as now known, is wholly different from what it seemed’ in 1846, when De Quincey had first published the article. ‘Its form is not the same – thanks to the great telescopes, which have revealed so much more of it.’ De Quincey confessed himself perplexed by Nichol’s response. ‘That a new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further stages will alter them, concerns me nothing,’ he asserted. ‘… Wordsworth in at least four difference places … describes most impressive appearances amongst the clouds … Would it have been any just rebuke … if some friend had written to him: “I regret most sincerely to say that the dragon and the golden spear had all vanished before nine o’clock?”’14 Nichol wanted scientific accuracy, but De Quincey was still haunted by that hideously broken skull in the stars.
An initial round of productivity on the new edition came to a close on 16 November 1854 when De Quincey published revised versions of his two Blackwood’s articles ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, as well as a newly written ‘Postscript’, in which he indulged in his most extensive exploration of the Williams murders. Contemporary descriptions of the crimes in newspapers and pamphlets thoroughly shape his account, yet De Quincey also omits and distorts events in order to intensify the sense of panic. The black humour of the first two essays returns fitfully, as when De Quincey observes that ‘it is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps of this monster’. But in the main he replaces satire with horror: ‘Rapidly the brave man passed onwards to the shop, and there beheld the carnage of the night stretched out on the floor, and the narrow premises so floated with gore, that it was hardly possible to escape the pollution of blood in picking out a path to the front-door.”15 In its coherence, intensity, and detail, the ‘Postscript’ is De Quincey’s most compelling investigation of violence. Opium, he once declared, had ‘killed Coleridge as a poet’.16 With the publication of Volume Four, De Quincey – now sixty-nine years old – could justly claim that the drug had not had the same effect on him.
[ii]
The philosopher Shadworth Hodgson was a ‘cousin’ of Margaret, Florence, and Emily, and he visited Mavis Bush on at least two occasions, including once in the summer of 1853. There was a ‘precise resemblance’ between De Quincey’s ‘uttered’ and his ‘written speech’, Hodgson recalled, and he used to like to pace up and down with his copy of Bruno’s De Monade, Numero et Figura in his hand, ‘repeating from it and referring to it’. Further, after surveying De Quincey’s works, Hodgson observed with some justice that De Quincey’s mind ‘is stationary; there is no growth, no enlargement, of his intellectual basis, as he advances in life. He speaks in his later essays from the same platform of ideas as in his earlier ones.’17 Yet De Quincey was also ‘a keen, omnivorous reader of the newspapers’, and his thought was very often inflected by events in the contemporary world, whether it be ‘the great Crystal Palace’, the Crimean War, the recent determination of the height of Mount Everest, or the ways in which telegraphs were ‘overthrowing Space and Time’.18 ‘It has been said that he had no interest in the passing topics of the day,’ Hogg junior asserted. ‘No greater mistake than this has ever been committed in the description of the character of Thomas De Quincey.”19
The young novelist and editor James Payn wished to meet the English Opium-Eater, but unfortunately travelled to Lasswade on a day when he was ‘in very bad spirits’. De Quincey had ‘a face like death in life’, reported Payn, though the instant he began to speak ‘it lit up as though by electric light’. At the meal table, Payn went to pour himself some port wine, only to discover that ‘it was in fact laudanum’. Life, De Quincey explained, was ‘a mere misery to him from nerves’, and could only be rendered ‘endurable by a semi-inebriation with opium’. As Payn took his leave, he asked if De Quincey ever journeyed to Edinburgh by coach. ‘Certainly not,’ De Quincey replied with some sharpness, for he had a horror of ‘commonplace people and their pointless observations’. ‘Some years ago’, he declared, ‘… I was standing on the pier at Tarbet, on Loch Lomond, waiting for the steamer. A stout old lady joined me’, and ‘pointing to the smoke of the steamer … she said: “La, sir! if you and I had seen that fifty years ago, how wonderful we should have thought it!”’ De Quincey shuddered. ‘The same thing … might happen to me any day, and that is why I always avoid a public conveyance.’20
He remained deeply interested in the plight of the poor. ‘To upper class funerals he never went,’ Emily asserted, but he often attended those of the working class. Florence detailed how ‘his presence at home was the signal for a crowd of beggars, among whom borrowed babies and drunken old women were sure of the largest share of his sympathy’. Oliver White, an American journalist, visited Mavis Bush and was asked by one of De Quincey’s daughters for his opinion of the Scots. Before he could answer, though, De Quincey turned to him and observed ‘in a kindly, half-paternal manner’ that the servant who ‘waits at my table is a Scotch girl. It may be that you have something severe to say about Scotland. I know that I like the English Church, but I never utter anything that might wound my servant. Heaven knows that the lot of a poor serving-girl is hard enough.’21
Margaret, now thirty-five years old, had for several years played the primary role in overseeing her father’s life at Lasswade. Now she had some big news: she was getting married. Robert Craig, a Lasswade neighbour, was the son of John Craig, a well-known Scottish Whig who had taken an active part in the movement for parliamentary reform. The De Quincey sisters had known Craig ‘most intimately’ since 1842, and by the time he formally proposed to Margaret, she had loved him ‘for nearly ten years’.22 The couple were married on 13 December 1853 – ‘a bright frosty day’ – in St Mary’s Church, Dalkeith. ‘The church was crowded with spectators, chiefly Presbyterians,’ Emily noted, ‘for which I was very glad, as even episcopalians said they had never seen such a solemn wedding.’23 Shortly thereafter the newlyweds went to live in Ireland at Pegsborough and then at Lisheen in Tipperary, where they ran two farms, one of which Robert rented from his sister. Nine and a half months after the marriage, on 25 September 1854, Margaret gave birth to a baby girl, Eva Margaret Craig.24 De Quincey was elated. ‘As to the particular name chosen, it is to my feeling a very pretty one,’ he wrote to Emily, who with Florence had travelled to Ireland to see the new baby. Eva, he added, was the name of the heroine of Edward Bulwer’s A True Story of Light and Darkness (1842), and of Charles Maturin’s Women; or, Pour et Contre (1818). Indeed, ‘simply through the power of Maturin … the name of Eva has shaped itself to my symbolizing fancy in the image of a white rose’.25
With Margaret gone, the running of the household fell chiefly to Florence, who managed with the same competence and cheerfulness as her eldest sister. In June 1854, however, De Quincey decided he needed to be back in Edinburgh. There were a number of reasons for his decision. He wanted a change. He wanted to be nearer the libraries and his publisher Hogg as he laboured on his Selections. He wanted ‘to be rid of the continual interruptions to which he was liable at home’, as Florence explained in a letter to Hawthorne. And there was yet another, more telling, reason: ‘a desire which perpetually haunted him to fly from himself’.26
He moved back into 42 Lothian Street, where he had first lodged in 1837 following the death of his wife, and where he may have continued to pay rent on rooms for months or even years after he left in the spring of 1838. The house, now demolished, stood originally in ‘a dense street of shops’ and other rather dingy tenements in the Old Town, close to the university. It was ‘entered from the street by an arched passage’, from which a ‘stone staircase’ ascended ‘to the several half-flats’ into which the whole was divided, ‘each with its independent door and door-bell’. There were ‘six such half-flats above the ground-floor; and that in which De Quincey had his rooms was the left half-flat on the second floor’.27
The house was now run solely by Christian Wilson, whose husband Frances had died. There were several other lodgers staying with her, including ‘two gentlemen students’ and her unmarried sister, Jane Stark, a tall, stout woman who suffered from deafness, and who from her ‘simple and temperate life’ was ‘particularly healthy’.28 When De Quincey arrived, he was ‘without any preparation in the way of luggage or otherwise’, but Mrs Wilson, ‘a conscientious and careful woman, had preserved for him a quantity of clothing which he had left on his former sojourn’, possibly as much as sixteen years earlier! Lothian Street cost De Quincey ‘as nearly as possible twenty shillings a week, washing included’, although he admitted that this total did not take into account his expenses for ‘laudanum, brandy, and library subscription’.29
No doubt De Quincey had sought a place where he felt he would be well looked after, and indeed ‘in many things’ Miss Stark soon took on the role of waiting upon him ‘like a baby’. She arranged his books, sat up with him as he corrected proofs, and delivered countless notes from him to Hogg concerning the production of the Selections. More than once she ‘put him out’ when ‘he had fallen asleep with his head on the table, and overturned a candle on his papers. She used to buy his apparel for him piecemeal: now a pair of socks, now a pair of boots, now a coat, now a waistcoat – never a whole suit.’ She even called for him when he was out for the evening, ‘lest he should forget to come home at the hour fixed’. In return for her assistance, De Quincey ‘used sometimes to hire a carriage and drive her and her niece out to Lasswade to spend the day, and at other times he escorted them to the theatre’.30
If De Quincey had in fact hoped that his move to Lothian Street would give him some respite from socializing, he was to be disappointed. Robert and Anne Chambers were in touch, and he wrote to tell them of his ‘overwhelming’ labours on his Selections. Hill Burton may have been responsible for keeping him out so late one evening that he arrived back at his own door – ‘or what he believed to be … his own door’ – to find himself locked out. De Quincey first tried to rouse either Mrs Wilson or Miss Stark with prolonged knocking, but when that failed, he ‘scrambled over a wall, and [took] his repose in a furrow’.31 Gilfillan called, and reported that John Wilson’s death in April 1854 ‘seems to have touched [De Quincey] deeply’, though he remained in two minds about his friend, and only a few months later ‘ridiculed the sickly, false sentiment’ of Wilson’s works. After several conversations, Gilfillan drew up a list that reveals the remarkable breadth and complicated nature of De Quincey’s intellectual sympathies: he ‘did not admire Macaulay, nor Carlyle, nor Brougham, nor Goethe’, but ‘his love of Burke, Coleridge, Schiller, Jean Paul Richter … Wordsworth, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Wilson, was profound’.32
Perhaps the most frequent visitor to Lothian Street was Findlay, who discovered De Quincey on one occasion with a ‘small glass of laudanum in one hand’ and a ‘teacup in other’. Findlay recalled his friend’s many eccentricities: De Quincey ‘rarely laughed’; he still ‘seldom rose till four or five’ in the afternoon; he wore a large white flannel jacket in bed (‘something like a cricketer’s coat’); and he sometimes grew a beard because shaving was a ‘grand difficulty’, and the smell of a barber’s fingers was ‘intolerable’.33 One evening, as the two men paced back and forth between Dean Bridge and the west end of Princes Street, De Quincey reflected on the ‘stale, flat, and unprofitable’ course of his life, and turned away from it ‘shuddering and ashamed’. A ‘little wine or spirits’ was occasionally necessary to raise him up to ‘something like the common level of humanity’. Nothing, however, ‘but a large dose of laudanum gave him relief’.34
After six months in Lothian Street De Quincey could report to Florence that he had not run up even ‘a fraction of debt’. Yet former creditors still occasionally harassed him. Apparently he owed rent on the rooms he had guaranteed in 1838 for his Holyrood landlady Miss Craig, and it may have been another Holyrood proprietor, either Jane or Mary Miller, who claimed that he still owed her ‘one hundred guineas “and upwards”’. De Quincey appeased Miller with the payment of about ten guineas over the course of three months, and then wrore to Emily in Ireland asking if Margaret could throw any light upon the exact nature of the debt.35
More pressing from his point of view was the fact that Miller held ‘papers and books of mine’. And she was not alone. In one instance, a woman in possession of some of his manuscripts simply wanted them delivered into the proper hands, though De Quincey was ‘under some hallucination as to indebtedness to her’.36 This woman may have been his Clerk Street landlady Miss Carrick, with whom he lodged in order to see Suspiria through the press; or a ‘Mrs Harris’, who at one point was ‘confidently supposed to be the possessor’ of Suspiria manuscripts. On another occasion, a person extorted money from De Quincey for one package of papers, and then came to him again ‘professing to have found more papers of great value’. De Quincey paid the sum demanded, and was then ‘left a worthless packet, mostly of straw neatly done up in many folds of papers’.37 This trick may have been the work of the McIndoes, who continued their harassment of him. In the autumn of 1854, Mrs McIndoe died after drinking to excess and then falling backward ‘on the area steps of a house in George Square’. In order to raise money for the funeral, her son offered to sell De Quincey the last of the papers in his family’s possession. De Quincey agreed. Then, in May 1855, Mr McIndoe died, ‘entirely broken down by drink’. This time two McIndoe sons descended, and besieged De Quincey ‘with applications the most violent’ for money to bury their father. De Quincey, however, ‘refused to interfere’, and the persecution seems at last to have stopped.38
Throughout the autumn of 1854, meanwhile, Florence and Emily enjoyed their time in Ireland with Margaret, her husband, and baby Eva. De Quincey missed them all, and was beset by gloomy dreams. In one of them,
a door opened: it was a door on the further side of a spacious chamber, I myself standing on the foreground, i.e. on the hither side of that chamber. For a few moments I waited expectingly, but not knowing what to expect. At length a voice said audibly and most distinctly, but not loudly, – Florence and Emily, with the tone of one announcing an arrival. Soon after but not immediately, entered Florence, but to my great astonishment no Emily … A shadow fell upon me, and a feeling of sadness – which increased continually as no Emily entered at the door.
De Quincey condemned this dream as ‘too monotonous’, but it contains in a less impassioned form that combination of the familiar and the menacing that underwrites some of his most famous dream sceneries.39
Florence and Emily returned to Lasswade in the New Year, much to the delight of their father, who promised to come and visit them soon, and who sent long letters from Lothian Street, ‘a somewhat pathetic sign’ – as Florence observed – ‘of a struggle between his perfect trust in us and a consciousness that it was not a usual course of action to leave two young women so entirely alone in a solitary country place’. In late February the two sisters travelled into Edinburgh to visit with their father, who emerged ‘from the gloomy depths of the street’ to greet them ‘like some revelation from another world’. Later that same night, De Quincey escorted them to a concert by the ‘celestial pianofortist’ Marie-Félicité-Denise Pleyel. A few weeks later ‘Misses Florence and Emily’ were back in Edinburgh, this time to accompany their father to an evening party given by the Findlays.40
Spring came and the sisters were off again, this time to visit at Boston in Lincolnshire, from where Florence wrote to her father with some exciting news. She too was getting married. De Quincey, with his gift for spotting ambiguity, originally thought that she had unwisely rejected her suitor, Colonel Richard Baird Smith, but he was not about to play the tyrannical father: ‘a woman is not only the best judge, but in the last resort is the sole judge of what is likely to promote her own happiness’. In re-reading Florence’s letter, however, he was very pleased to discover that he had been in error, and he went on to voice his high approval of his future son-in-law, ‘whom we have all so much admired for his strength of character and the unassuming dignity of his manners’.41
Florence, ‘always remarkable for her pale, statuesque beauty’, had probably been engaged to Smith for several years, and it seems likely that they would have married earlier had it not been for her ‘duty to Papa’. He is, as she explained to Smith, ‘so quaint and eccentric and requires so much arrangement that we have long since agreed that one of us alone is not equal to it’. Yet Florence was ultimately able to overcome these reservations, encouraged no doubt in various ways by her sisters and her fiancé. Within weeks of formally accepting him she was preparing to travel to India, where Smith was stationed. De Quincey shared in her excitement: ‘I take for granted that your route will be the usual overland one through Egypt. What a fine thing to see the Pyramids, the Red Sea, &c!’42
That autumn Margaret and Eva came to stay at Lasswade, and De Quincey and his granddaughter – ‘a little sunny picture, with her golden hair and dark blue eyes’ – quickly became ‘thick cronies’. Observed De Quincey: ‘She is the only baby of twelve months old that ever struck me as arch.’ The pleasure he took in her company, however, characteristically darkened into anxiety when she and her mother returned to Ireland. ‘How many times I am not sure’, De Quincey wrote to Margaret, ‘more than 3 to a certainty, 5 I should think, – dear little Eva has been seen by me in dreams drinking from the spout of a boiling tea-kettle, or (as once) of a boiling teapot.’43
In order to prepare herself for the separation from her family, Florence commissioned the famous James Archer portrait in which Margaret and Emily are preoccupied with Eva, while De Quincey leans forward in a chair beside them, his attire formal but scruffy, his body relaxed yet alert, and his blue eyes striking in their intensity amidst the domesticity and informality of the scene. ‘Papa … is capital,’ said Emily of the portrait. ‘When talking he very often leans forward in that way’, with his elbow resting on his leg. Later, Florence added that ‘people think that it is the best likeness we have of my Father’.44
Figure 7: James Archer’s portrait of Thomas De Quincey, with his daughters Emily and Margaret, and his granddaughter Eva, 1855
Plans for Florence’s journey were gradually agreed upon. She would travel as far as Calcutta by herself, where she would be met by her fiancé and her brother Fred. ‘I have the very heartiest and warmest approval of Papa, and all the friends I care for of my marriage,’ she wrote on her birthday, 6 November, ‘so that with the exception of the long lonely journey and the great separation from so many that are dear to me, I feel myself to be a very favoured women.’ Setting out ‘by the middle November mail’, her trip to the East seems to have passed without incident, and on 10 January 1856 Florence Elizabeth De Quincey married Richard Baird Smith in the cathedral at Calcutta. Two months later Emily reported that her sister was ‘living a very nice life’ in India, though before long Florence’s circumstances were to change drastically.45
[iii]
Since completing work on Volume Four of the Selections, De Quincey’s health had been only so-so. A ‘malady’ of ‘sudden sickness, fever, and light-headedness’ forced him to his bed for days. ‘He complained of pain in his left arm which, as he described it, seemed like rheumatism.’ After a bout of influenza his eyes gave him a great deal of trouble – ‘some days all but blind, and on some nights roused up for hours by the pain’.46 He was taking various medicines for these ailments, including ‘sulphate of zinc’ and, on one evening of experimentation, a cocktail from an almost exhausted stock of medicine bottles that he found in the guest room of an Edinburgh friend. Often laudanum relieved his sufferings. Sometimes it had ‘no effect’.47 Walking was still part of his daily routine, but he could no longer manage the distances he had walked with ease for decades. Usually his route took in ‘the quietude of the Meadows and Morningside’, as well as the Queensferry road. Perhaps too on some evenings he carried on further to the west end of Princes Street and St Cuthbert’s churchyard, where he could visit the grave of Margaret. In total he walked for about seven miles. ‘Not much certainly,’ he confessed; ‘but as much as I can find spirits for.’48
He had been ‘off and on’ at Lothian Street for fourteen months (and a total cost of fifty guineas) when he found his strength failing him, and made the decision to return to Mavis Bush.49 On 15 August 1855 – his seventieth birthday – he told guests who had travelled out to see him that he ‘did not feel a day older than when he was seventeen’, but in the autumn he was struck down by some unknown ailment that prostrated him for weeks. ‘I found De Quincey the other day had not moved out of his house since Xmas day,’ Lushington wrote to Tennyson on 3 March 1856, ‘& his feet were becoming excessively painful, no doubt from this, but he took a walk of 4 or 5 miles with me & seemed rather the better for it.’50
De Quincey was gearing up for the completion of his last major project, an expansion of the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater as Volume Five of his Selections. He had begun work on the revisions as early as 1854, when he made desultory changes in an 1852 Fields edition of the original text. In April 1855 he was convinced that the work needed ‘endless alterations and corrections’, and seemed ‘sorely troubled’ about ‘how to do it’. A month later, however, he was ‘very busily engaged’ in the revision process, and over the next year he gradually amassed – through intermitting and ‘despairing effort’ – a substantial body of amendments and extensions. With the new manuscript largely completed by the end of May, De Quincey moved back into Lothian Street, where he prepared to see the work through the press.51
Like the recasting, the printing was to prove an ordeal. ‘I have been in constant expectation of hearing that Hogg and Son, his luckless publishers have been conveyed to a lunatic asylum in consequence of Papa’s procrastination,’ Emily observed drily.52 And procrastination was only one of several problems. Whitewashers needed access to his room, and reared a scaffold against a set of drawers which contained the manuscript papers he was working on. He had to give up an extra room he was using to make way for a new tenant. Twice in one day he was interrupted by unexpected American visitors. He was sick ‘for want of laudanum’. He was ‘partially delirious’ from ‘want of sleep and opium’.53
Further, when he could work, the sheer number of proofs, manuscripts, and revises often reduced him to perplexity. Typically, ‘I have come upon a layer or stratum of which I was seeking – but written so confusedly and stenographically – that as yet, (11 A.M. on Wednesday) I am in a mist.’ Scores of notes passed between him and the Hoggs, for De Quincey was ‘in terror of mutual misunderstandings’, and as confounded as ever by the paradox that ‘to evade misinterpretation … requires a redundancy of words’.54 Throughout the autumn the Hoggs patiently encouraged him while he pushed the task forward, and on 13 November, after six months ‘of labour and suffering that, if they could be truly stated, would seem incredible’, they published the revised version of De Quincey’s Confessions.55
It was now three times its original length. In part, this was De Quincey’s decision. The 1821 Confessions ‘had never received any strict revision’, and he seized this opportunity to integrate into the new version ‘what had been left imperfect’ in the old. In part, however, De Quincey also expanded the work for commercial reasons. Unrevised, the Confessions would have run to about 120 pages in the Selections format, whereas Volumes One through Four had already averaged from 320 to 360 pages. ‘Such being the case,’ he explained, ‘no remedy remained but that I should doctor the book, and expand it into a portliness that might countenance its price.’56
De Quincey made a number of notable additions, from accounts of his youthful experiences in St Paul’s Whispering Gallery and along the River Dee, to digressions on insurance companies, ‘our great national literature’, and the ‘self-conflicting’ Victorian age.57 Coleridge comes up a great deal, and while De Quincey might have been expected to opt for charity in this summation, he decides instead to insist on his former friend’s shortcomings, perhaps in response to previous criticisms of him by the Coleridge family, perhaps in a final peevish display of anger towards a man who in so many ways had been his rival. As a reader of poetry, Coleridge sounds as though he is ‘crying, or at least wailing lugubriously’. As a conversationalist, his ‘capital error’ was in ‘keeping the audience in a state of passiveness’. As an opium addict, he was a self-deluded slave ‘not less abject than Caliban to Prospero – his detested and yet despotic master’. De Quincey had originally intended to close the revised Confessions with a ‘crowning grace’ of ‘some twenty or twenty-five dreams’, but all of these had either been lost or accidentally burned, with the exception of ‘The Daughter of Lebanon’, an impassioned account of a youthful prostitute, and an apposite conclusion to a narrative ‘in which the case of poor Ann the Outcast formed … the most memorable and the most suggestively pathetic incident’.58
Perhaps the most remarkable additions to the narrative, however, are those in which De Quincey reflects on his experience with drugs and addiction. For over forty years he has performed ‘manoeuvres the most intricate, dances the most elaborate, receding or approaching, round my great central sun of opium. Sometimes I ran perilously close into my perihelion; sometimes I became frightened, and wheeled off into a vast cometary aphelion, where for six months “opium” was a word unknown. How nature stood all these see-sawings is quite a mystery to me: I must have led a sad life in those days.’59
Yet despite the enormous toll the drug has exacted, De Quincey sings its praises more fulsomely in the revised Confessions than in any other place in his work. Indeed, in addition to retaining the celebratory sections from the 1821 version, he retracts ‘all passages, written at an earlier period under cloudy and uncorrected views of the evil agencies presumable in opium’.60 The drug, he now contends, is a ‘blessing’. It provides ‘relief from … taedium vitae’ – a weariness or loathing of life. It supports ‘preternatural calls for exertion’. It has astonishing powers over the ‘shadowy world of dreams’. Beyond all other known agents, it is ‘the mightiest for its command, and for the extent of its command, over pain’. Taken daily, and under steady regulation, it seems to provide the only means of adequately controlling ‘nervous irritation’, that ‘secret desolator of human life’.61 Finally, it is ‘the sole known agent – not for curing when formed, but for intercepting whilst likely to be formed – the great English scourge of pulmonary consumption’, the disease which had killed his father, and which had seemed so clearly in his youth to be stalking him. But for opium’s ability to block tubercular advance, De Quincey swears, ‘thirty-five years ago, beyond all doubt, I should have been in my grave’.62 Expectedly, his letters and table-talk for this period make it clear that the drug continued to ravage him, but before the public, and in his final commentary on the subject, he maintained that opium, and all its many blessings, had given him years of life.63 For an audience that perhaps saw him first as an opium-eater and second as an author, De Quincey was working hard to rewrite his own history, and to establish himself, not as a slave to the drug, but as a beneficiary of it.
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William Makepeace Thackeray was in Edinburgh delivering his lectures on The Four Georges during the same month that De Quincey published his revised Confessions. Findlay hoped to bring the two writers together at a party on 22 November, but at the last minute De Quincey sent a note saying he was too ill to attend. Thackeray regretted that the introduction did not take place, as ‘nothing would have pleased him more than to have met a man whose writings he so much admired’. Findlay showed him De Quincey’s note, which Thackeray praised for ‘the extreme neatness of its style, and penmanship, and antique courtesy of its tone’. A few days later Findlay tried again to effect a meeting between the two men. This time De Quincey seems to have been well enough to attend, but chose instead to remain in Lothian Street correcting proofs with Hogg junior.64
His lack of interest in Thackeray belies a broad interest in ‘current literature’, which he borrowed often from Mudie’s Circulating Library.65 De Quincey enjoyed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) ‘exceedingly’, took ‘pleasure’ in the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and praised Tennyson’s poetry for its ‘rich pictorial effects and inwrought elaborate jewellery of phrase’, though he desiderated ‘dramatic strength, direct human interest, and grandeur of imagination in opposition to mere opulence and vitality of fancy’.66 Elizabeth Gaskell’s controversial Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) also caught his eye. All three Brontë sisters ‘had some very noble features in their characters’, he declared, ‘but not many that were amiable’, and he highlighted in particular Charlotte’s ‘preternatural timidity, shyness, and shrinking from notice’, which he attributed to ‘a morbid basis of self-esteem nourished almost into insanity by solitude’. As for the sisters’ father and brother, they were ‘scamps’, especially ‘leathery Herr Papa’, an ‘intolerable monster of selfishness’ who turned his daughters ‘out of doors to get their own bread in a far worse service … than that of a housemaid: for surely it is better by much to go down on one’s knees to scour the front doorsteps, with the prospect at night of creeping to an undisturbed bed – in humble respectability, than to make one in a crowd of most vulgar Belgian girls’.67
De Quincey’s interest in murder continued unabated, as he pored over newspaper accounts of various crimes in an attempt to track down ‘the missing links in the chain of evidence’. In the early summer of 1856, the so-called ‘Rugeley Poisoner’ William Palmer stood trial in London for murdering John Cook, a racing buddy with whom Palmer was financially entangled. ‘Never for one moment have I doubted Palmer’s guilt,’ De Quincey informed Emily. ‘And until he, manifestly desiring to benefit by a quibble, said, “Cooke did not die” (or “was not poisoned”) “by strychnia”, I (like all others) held as a matter of certainty that the murderer and the mode of murder were equally manifested. Since Saturday last, however (when in second and third editions of the Scotsman and the Express I read telegraphic accounts of the execution), I have been shaken in that opinion.’68
Just over a year later, De Quincey was wrapped up in the sensation surrounding the case of Madeleine Smith, who was put in the dock in Edinburgh for allegedly poisoning her lover Emile L’Angelier. Public interest ran ‘higher by far than in any case’ that De Quincey had ever heard of, and while the Lord Advocate was ‘confident (almost, I should say, exultingly confident) of winning the game against Miss Smith’, De Quincey was deeply suspicious of the Crown’s evidence and conduct. ‘To me it seems that from the very first Miss Smith has been cruelly treated,’ he stated. ‘Never in the world was a young woman summoned to face an agony so frightful as that of hearing her letters read in an assembly of men and boys – oftentimes coarse, brutal, scoffing – and read for what purpose?’69 Smith’s trial lasted ten days and, on 9 July 1857, the jury returned a majority verdict of not guilty, undoubtedly to De Quincey’s delight.
His preoccupation with events at home, however, was often eclipsed by the momentous state of affairs abroad. In late 1856, De Quincey’s blood began to boil as China and Britain entered into the so-called Second Opium War. First in the pages of Hogg junior’s recently founded Titan (a continuation in enlarged form of his father’s Instructor), and then in a separate pamphlet entitled China, De Quincey mounted ferociously racial attacks on the ‘arrogant pretensions of the East’.70 He wants military conflict with the Chinese (indeed they are ‘unmanageable’ without it), and implores the British commanders to act ‘before any trader in “moderation” or pacific measures’ arrives from England. Gone even is the notion of Christianity as a civilizing force. The Chinese, he now suggests, are beyond redemption, for ‘few of us who read this chapter of Chinese spoliation altogether go along with these Missionaries in their proselytising views upon a people so unspiritual as our brutal friends the Chinese’.71 Old age had mellowed De Quincey in several respects, but his chilling faith in British superiority still made him very volatile.
Worse, his writings on the Second Opium War turned out to be only the first instalment in an extended examination of Eastern affairs, for in June word reached Britain of the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny, a widespread rebellion against British rule by Indian troops (sepoys) that began in Meerut, and quickly spread to Delhi, Agra, Cawnpore, and Lucknow. In the best of circumstances, De Quincey would have been furious at this attack on British imperial interests, but his emotions in this instance were endlessly exacerbated by the fact that he had family in harm’s way. Fifteen years earlier he had lost Horace in China. Now ‘the Daily News … says that the Mutiny has … broken out at Ferozepore’, De Quincey reported to Emily on 29 June. That is ‘Fred’s station, is it not?’72 More urgently, Florence and her husband were living at Roorkee, only one hundred miles north of Delhi. On 18 May, just eight days after the outbreak of the Mutiny, Florence gave birth to a daughter, Florence May Baird Smith, in the fortified workshops of the town.73
De Quincey became increasingly hysterical as news of sieges and bloody counter-resistance made its way to Britain over the course of the next several weeks. ‘Oh Emily I have no heart now for any one thought but what concerns poor insulated Florence and her baby,’ he wrote on 9 September. Two months later he was suffering in his nervous system ‘to an extent that … had not experimentally been made known to me as a possibility’, ‘except once in 1812’, when Catharine Wordsworth had died.74 Night after night he was haunted by the same dream: ‘a vision of children, most of them infants, but not all, the first rank being girls of five and six years old, who were standing in the air outside, but so as to touch the window; and I heard, or perhaps fancied that I heard, always the same dreadful word, Delhi’. This ‘fierce shake’ to his nerves also ‘caused almost from the beginning a new symptom to expose itself … viz, somnambulism; and now every night, to my great alarm, I wake up to find myself at the window, which is sixteen feet from the nearest side of the bed. The horror was unspeakable.’75
As his private anxieties mounted, De Quincey concentrated on producing a series of public pronouncements in the Titan in which he brutally denounced the mutineers. ‘From the foundations of the earth, no case in human action or suffering has occurred which could less need or less tolerate the aid of artificial rhetoric than that tremendous tragedy which now for three months long has been moving over the plains of Hindostan.’76 The British had done nothing to provoke the outrage: ‘no conquering state was ever yet so mild and beneficent in the spirit of its government’. The ‘true originators’ of the Mutiny were the ‘Indian princes and rajahs’, while the sepoys were ‘childish’, ‘base’, ‘treacherous’, ‘infatuated savages’ who had embarked on ‘this most suicidal of revolts’ with the same ‘defect of plan and coherent purpose as have ever characterized the oriental mind’.77 Now these Indian soldiers must be hunted down as part of what De Quincey viewed as the inevitable restoration of British rule. Soon ‘prisoners will begin to accumulate by thousands; executions will proceed through week after week; and a large variety of cases will yield us a commensurate crop of confessions’. De Quincey’s sympathies often extended to the weak and the abused, but rarely when it came to foreign affairs, where he simply believed that Britain was entitled to a colonialist project. ‘There is no known spot of earth which has exerted upon the rest of the planet one-thousandth part of the influence which this noble island has exercised over the human race.’78 The incalculable suffering caused by the forced infliction of that influence did not trouble him.
In addition to his work for the Titan, De Quincey published Volumes Six and Seven of his Selections during the autumn of 1857. Sales were strong. ‘Two at least, but I think three, of the six volumes already published have silently gone into second editions,’ De Quincey told Emily in November, while ‘the London publishers, Messrs. Groombridge, say, that, as the collection advances, the volumes show a tendency to sell more rapidly’.79 Of even more interest, perhaps, was the fact that De Quincey was now making very good money. On 23 January 1858, he sold all his writings – as they had initially appeared in the magazines, and as they now stood in the Selections – to Hogg for just over £808. Combined with the proceeds to come from the seven volumes of the Selections not yet published, and the money that continued to accrue from the sale of the American edition, De Quincey may have made as much as £2000 during the last decade of his life.80 Past creditors still sought him out, but now he seems to have been in the position of loaning them money, rather than owing it to them.81
‘For a year or two before he died, Mr De Quincey rarely moved out of doors,’ Findlay recalled.82 Embargoed in the ‘anchorage of No. 42 Lothian Street’, and surrounded in his room by ‘superfluous furniture’ and a floor ‘covered 2 feet deep with papers’, De Quincey sat writing ‘at the very extremity of one corner’ of his work table in an area not larger than a postchaise. To at least one guest he looked ‘like Cato seated on the ruins of Carthage’.83 Volume Eight appeared on 30 April 1858. Work on it had kept him tied to his desk for ‘many successive months’, and created a certain pungency in his rooms. ‘He thinks that he has pitched on the cleanest lodgings in Edinburgh but they are even dirty for Scotch lodgings,’ Emily later protested. ‘It used to be a filial exercise to go and penetrate into the den for it goes sorely against the grain to face a smell or odour or whatever the correct thing is for a lady to say.’84
Despite his close confinement, Emily reported that her father was doing ‘uncommonly well’. ‘In fact he seems to grow better and more interested in things than he used to be when he was thirty years old. He had much more the decay of old age then than he has now.’85 De Quincey, however, was nowhere near as sanguine, and continued to chronicle the many blights to his health, including lumbago, ‘nervous misery’, inflammation in his eyes and, most seriously, purpura in his right foot. ‘You will ask me – Why I do not consult a surgeon?’ he wrote to Lushington. ‘The brief answer is – that wishing to be sure of a sound opinion in the first place, and (in the event of any operation being requisite) – secondly of a first-rate operator, I think of going to London.’86
It is unlikely he made such a trip, but that summer he did feel well enough to journey to see Margaret and her family in Tipperary, his first visit to Ireland since he had travelled there with Westport nearly six decades earlier. Accompanied by Emily and Fred (who was on leave from India), he enjoyed visiting with his daughter, and especially with his granddaughter and new grandson, John Francis Craig, who had been born on 26 July 1856. ‘He sat in his own room here, just as he does at home’, Margaret recounted, ‘and whenever … there was a sudden lull in the house’ the children were ‘discovered discoursing with him’. Yet at nearly seventy-three years old, De Quincey found the upheaval and strain of travelling ‘very trying’, and by August he was glad to be back quartered in the familiar chaos of Lothian Street. Margaret noticed a marked decline in him, especially as regarded his conversational powers. ‘He was only with us a month, and I can’t help hoping that during that time he had never got over the fatigue of travelling,’ she remarked with some concern.87
Hogg continued to call regularly at Lothian Street, where he consulted De Quincey about editorial matters at the Titan, and steered him back to the task of revising the Selections on innumerable occasions. De Quincey usually drank moderately when they were together. ‘As a stimulant’, Hogg remembered, ‘he preferred a particular preparation of brandy; and his maximum allowance of this during an evening … was measured in a manner peculiar to himself – two wine-glasses two-thirds full.’ Laudanum he also ‘regularly took largely diluted in water’, for as supplied by the chemist the drug now caused ‘a very annoying and even painful itching in the nostrils’. When preparing the dosage, De Quincey seldom required a spoon or measure. From long habit, he simply held the wine-glass up to the light and added the required quantity. In at least one instance, however, he accidentally took more in the night than he had intended, and the next morning a Lothian Street attendant found him in ‘a state of stupor’.88
‘I was a good listener,’ Hogg declared, and for hours he sat close by as De Quincey ranged freely over his favourite topics. On music: ‘Hundreds of times I must have heard him dwell with impassioned force upon the capacity of the violin as a musical instrument.’ On past friends: ‘“If ever you meet Carlyle, will you tell him from me –” and he charged me with a solemn and moving message’ that referred ‘to Mrs Carlyle’. On contemporary authors: ‘on countless occasions, [he] expressed to me his high opinion of Hawthorne’. On delight: ‘nothing … afforded De Quincey such frequent and intense amusement’ as the thought of Kant wearing an elaborate contraption to hold up his stockings because he feared garters would hinder ‘the circulation of the blood’. On violence: ‘Of all the subjects which exercised a permanent fascination over De Quincey, I would place first in order Thuggism in India … The far-reaching power of this mysterious brotherhood … exercised an influence on his mind which seemed never to wane.’89
The publisher and author spent an enormous amount of time going over manuscripts and proofs. After gazing ‘with a sort of anxious, affectionate, almost frightened look upon his manuscript treasures’, De Quincey would deliver a ‘grave reminder that in order not to delay the press, it was absolutely necessary … that any slip, or note, or matter not yet forwarded to the printer, should be perfectly within reach of his hand at a single moment’s notice’. Yet, as Hogg came gradually to recognize, De Quincey was partially performing these anxieties. For however solemnly he expanded upon them, ‘he would almost invariably look up with just the faintest smile and twinkle of the eye, as much as to say, “Do you really believe it all?” or, “Will it not be all the same a hundred years hence?”’90
He remained astonishingly productive. Volume Nine of the Selections appeared on 18 October 1858, and was followed by his final burst of productivity: Volume Ten on 10 February, Volume Eleven on 6 May, Volume Twelve less than a week later on 12 May, and Volume Thirteen on 11 July 1859. On 24 May, he wrote a sketch of a typical day. At three forty-five in the morning he is wide awake, but as ‘a miserable suffering cripple – not daring to stoop, or to stretch out [his] arm’ – it takes him over three and a half hours to dress. At seven thirty he is brought his breakfast, which consists of tea and two or three biscuits. Half an hour later the newspapers arrive – ‘villainous compounds, full of malice and of endless mis-constructions’ – followed at eight thirty by a letter from Margaret. At nine he sets to work on the Selections, and it is noon before he pauses for his ‘trifle of a dinner’. Shortly thereafter a stranger summons him away and it is ten minutes after three before he returns to Lothian Street, where Hogg’s messenger boy Johnny is expected ‘every minute to fetch the Proofs’, upon which ‘no progress is made’. Near four De Quincey falls asleep, but he is up by just after seven, when he returns to work.91 It is probably well into the evening before he retires again to bed.
Over the summer he toiled on the fourteenth and final volume of the Selections, but he was growing steadily weaker, and in the autumn he took to his bed. At first Mrs Wilson and Miss Stark were probably able to attend to him, but in early October Hogg sent for Emily, who immediately cut short a visit to Margaret in Ireland to return to Edinburgh, where she moved into rooms in Lothian Street, as her father was already too ill to be moved out to Lasswade. On Saturday, 22 October, Dr Warburton Begbie called for the first time, and found De Quincey ‘in the parlour, sitting on a sofa, but resting his head on a cushion placed on a chair before him; this posture was assumed not from pain, but by reason of feebleness’. De Quincey gave Begbie an account of his symptoms, and ‘readily acknowledged the perniciousness of habitual indulgence in opium; though he was equally ready to claim for the potent drug effects eminently beneficial’. Begbie prescribed a series of ‘remedies’ and soon noted in De Quincey ‘a decided and ready power of rallying’, though De Quincey wryly rejoined that a ‘life that was to be floated on stated doses of beef-tea did not seem … worth the struggling for’.92
Through the ‘days of dull November … with all its gloominess and more than ordinary fog’, Findlay, Burton, and Hogg stopped in to visit with him. De Quincey was still ‘clear enough’ to converse ‘with fluency about anything in the newspaper that interested him’, and ‘to the last he was able to read without the help of spectacles’. Yet he was becoming very frail. ‘I used to lift him in my arms like a child’, and ‘he told the doctor I was a “female Hercules’”, Emily recalled. ‘He did not know how light he was.’93 What is more, his mind was beginning to wander. One night he complained to Emily that ‘his feet were feeling very hot and tired. I pulled off some blankets from them and put them into what I thought would be a more comfortable position. “Is that better Papa?” I asked. “Yes, my love, I think it is. You know my dear girl that these are the feet that Christ washed.”’94 On 19 November, Lushington told Emily Tennyson that he had seen ‘poor De Quincey’, who was ‘somewhat seriously ill with a sort of delirious fever: his daughter told me he was now better, but one cannot quite be sure how much the better means – he was taking rather more opium than the Dr seemed to approve’.95
As the end neared, his childhood and his children were constantly before him. He referred to his ‘dear dear Mother’, and was ‘sure a better, kinder, or juster man’ than his father ‘could never have existed’. He called out loudly for Florence, and spoke often of his sons as if they were his brothers. When Margaret arrived from Tipperary, he soon viewed her as someone who ‘had been all along with him, and if she went out of the room’ he would say ‘Go and call Maggie back.’ Once towards evening he sighed, ‘They are all leaving me but my dear little children.’ Eva, his granddaughter, he called ‘in some measure the child of my old age’. ‘Is that you Horace?’ he asked one night. ‘No, Papa it is me, Emily.’ ‘Oh, I see, I thought you were Horace for he was talking to me just now.’96
In early December he was suffering from bed sores, and Emily arranged for a water bed to be brought to Lothian Street. ‘I feel so much better my dear,’ he said after being tucked into his new bed, ‘and I shall soon feel a very great deal better.’ But by the morning of 7 December it was evident that he was dying. ‘His breathing seemed very laborious and there was a great deal of rattling in it.’ Begbie assured Margaret and Emily that their father was not in pain, and that he would die without a struggle. In the afternoon De Quincey gazed at those around him and – polite to the last – said ‘thank you’, before lapsing into a drowsy and then insensible state.97 His daughters hovered round, convinced he would last only a few more hours, but he lingered on through the night.
When dawn came, Margaret and Emily ‘did not like to let in the … light’, and so the room remained illuminated by ‘only a candle’. In Suspiria de Profundis, written fifteen years earlier, he had declared his belief that his traumatic experience as a young boy in the bedchamber of his dead sister Elizabeth would rise again before him ‘to illuminate the hour of death’, and he asked Elizabeth to plead for us with God, that we may pass over without much agony’. Perhaps he got his wish. For as death came upon him, he threw up his arms, as if in great surprise, and exclaimed distinctly, ‘Sister! sister! sister!’98 Then his loud breathing slowed to a last few sighs, terrible from their very softness. Thomas De Quincey died at nine thirty in the morning on Thursday, 8 December 1859.
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‘Is what I hear true?’ Findlay asked. Mrs Wilson, who opened the door, did not answer, but ushered him ‘at once into the chamber of death. On the simple uncurtained pallet … the tiny frame of this great dreamer lay stretched in his last long dreamless sleep. Attenuated to an extreme degree, the body looked infantile in size – a very slender stem for the shapely and massive head that crowned it.’ Said Emily: just before and just after death ‘he looked more like a boy of fourteen, and he looked very beautiful’.99
Under ‘Cause of Death, and how long Disease continued’, the Death Certificate reads, ‘Catarrh with fever seven weeks.’ Begbie wrote that De Quincey died from ‘exhaustion of the system’ rather than from any ‘specific disease’. A postmortem examination was performed, but all that is known of the results is a rumour ‘to the effect of De Quincey’s organs having received no damage from his prolonged opium eating indeed being exceptionally sound’.100
‘Like other men, I have particular fancies about the place of my burial,’ De Quincey had written in 1822, when he was residing at Fox Ghyll, and exactly halfway through his life of seventy-four years: ‘having lived chiefly in a mountainous region, I rather cleave to the conceit that a grave in a green church yard amongst the ancient and solitary hills will be a sublimer and more tranquil place of repose for a philosopher than any in the hideous Golgothas of London.’ But as so much of the second half of De Quincey’s life was spent in Edinburgh, it is fitting that he is buried there, beside Margaret (and, it is to be hoped, Julius and William), beneath a simple circular-headed gravestone, in St Cuthbert’s Churchyard.101
The obituaries were mixed. ‘Death has brought a close to the sad and almost profitless career of “the English Opium-Eater,”’ The Athenaeum opined, ‘removing from the world an intellect that remained active to the last, but had never at any time been of much service to his fellow-men.’ The Scotsman took a very different view: ‘This announcement will excite a deeply sympathetic interest among all lovers of English literature throughout the world. With his departure almost the very last of a brilliant band of men of letters, who illuminated the literary hemisphere of the first half of our century with starry lustre … is extinguished.’ The Times reprinted The Scotsman obituary.102
There was no will, but on 6 January 1860 an official from the City of Edinburgh took an ‘Inventory of the Personal Estate of the deceased Thomas De Quincey’. In Scotland, books and other effects in Lothian Street, plus property he was apparently still storing in Holyrood, and money that was soon to fall due to him from Hogg, came to a total of just over £218. In England, ‘Books in the possession of Mr Harrison, Penrith’, and dividends and rents that formed part of his mother’s estate, comprised nearly £45, making a grand total of £262.13s.9d. In addition, property left to him in trust by his mother now came into the possession of his children.103 On 26 January, Thomas Nisbet, auctioneer, sold De Quincey’s library, which featured over seven hundred volumes, and included writings by Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Wilson, Lamb, Mill, Macaulay, Emerson, Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson. That same day Hogg published the final volume of the Selections.104
Margaret wrote to Lushington to ask him if he would like to choose one of her father’s books. ‘Any one referring to the subjects we used so often to talk about, mental philosophy or the old English writers, would be a highly prized memorial of him,’ he informed her, and ‘all the more if there happened to be any notes by himself scattered about the pages.’ Fields sent a letter to Florence, who had returned to Britain too late to see her father for a final time. ‘Dear old man!’ he exclaimed. ‘Some of the best moments of my life I owe to him, the great Master of English Prose.’ Perhaps most memorably, hearing, during the composition of Les Paradis artificiels, of De Quincey’s death, Baudelaire spoke of him as having ‘one of the most original’ minds in ‘all of England’.105