I was the Dreamer, they the Dream.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Third
There are many descriptions of the cottage where De Quincey’s letter arrived after a six-week delay in London, but the one in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is the finest. It comes from the passage where De Quincey defines his idea of happiness:
Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 18 miles from a town – no spacious valley, but about two miles long, by three quarters of a mile in average width. . . Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3 and 4,000 feet high; and the cottage a real cottage. . . Let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the windows, through all the months of spring, summer and autumn – beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with Jasmine.
The cottage was then known as the house at Town End, because it was the last dwelling on the road that led out of Grasmere and up towards the village of Ambleside, three miles away. The name Dove Cottage, bestowed in 1890 when the building was bought for the nation, harked back to the previous century when it had been a roadside inn called the Dove and Olive Bough. It amused Wordsworth that a ‘simple water-drinking Bard’ should inhabit a former tavern, and De Quincey would always associate the house with doves.
De Quincey’s letter had created a flurry in the household; it was, Dorothy exclaimed, ‘A remarkable instance of the power of my brother’s poems over a lonely and contemplative mind, unwarped by any established laws of taste’. Less excitable than his sister, Wordsworth penned a polite reply on 29 July, saying that ‘it would be out of nature were I not to have kind feelings towards one who expresses sentiments of such profound esteem and admiration of my writings as you have done’. He added that ‘you are young and ingenuous, and I wrote with a hope of pleasing the young, the ingenuous and the unworldly above all others’.
Wordsworth was happy to accept his role as De Quincey’s teacher, but in requesting friendship the boy had touched on one of the poet’s sacred subjects. The man who described himself to Coleridge as ‘naturally slow to love, and to cease loving’, cautioned De Quincey that ‘My friendship is not in my power to give. . . this is a gift which no man can make. . . a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive, like a wildflower when these favour, and when they do not, it is in vain to look for it’. A further caution warned De Quincey that a poet lived another life separate from that of his poetry, and he must not expect to find in Wordsworth an incarnation of his words: ‘How many things are there in a man’s character of which his writings however miscellaneous and voluminous will give no idea.’ Admitting that he ‘was the most lazy and impatient letter writer in the world’, Wordsworth then explained that he was imminently ‘going with my friend Coleridge and my sister upon a tour of Scotland for six weeks or two months’, adding that if De Quincey replied ‘immediately, I may have the pleasure of receiving your letter before our departure’. Beneath his signature he penned, probably at the request of Dorothy, a quick postscript apologising for any impression he may have given of ‘coldness’, and stressed that should De Quincey ever find himself in Grasmere, Wordsworth would be ‘very happy’ to see him.
The arrival of De Quincey’s letter coincided with the beginnings of two important new friendships in Wordsworth’s life. The first was with Sir George Beaumont, a landowner and amateur painter who was currently renting part of Greta Hall in Keswick, where Coleridge was also now living. Sir George and his wife had come in June, said Coleridge, ‘half-mad to see Wordsworth’; not only were they admirers of Lyrical Ballads but Beaumont, as Walter Scott put it, ‘understood Wordsworth’s poetry, which is a rare thing’. Coleridge, whose politics the Beaumonts were not disposed to like, soon charmed the couple; ‘as far as I can judge,’ Sir George conceded, ‘a more amiable man with a more affectionate & kind heart does not exist’. Lady Beaumont, so Coleridge told Wordsworth, could not ‘keep the tears in her eye’ when his poetry was read aloud, and when she ‘was reading your Poem on Cape RASH JUDGEMENT [‘A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags’] had you entered the room, she believes she should have fallen at your feet’.
In tribute to Wordsworth, Sir George presented him with the deeds to a plot of land at the head of Bassenthwaite, between Grasmere and Keswick: ‘Plant it delve it’, Beaumont told him, ‘– & build upon it or not, as it suits your convenience, but let me live & die with the idea of the sweet place with its rocks, its banks, & mountain streams in possession of such a mind as yours’. De Quincey’s offer of a bended knee had been trumped. Wordsworth did not build a house on the land, but it was through the influence and example of gentle Sir George that the poet found himself, as Byron put it, ‘a Tory at last’. ‘There can be no valuable friendship,’ Wordsworth wrote to Beaumont, ‘where the parties are not mutually capable of instructing and delighting one another.’
The second valuable friendship to spring up like a wildflower was with Walter Scott himself, whom Wordsworth would meet on his tour of Scotland. So immediate was the sympathy between the two writers that Wordsworth signed himself, in a letter written to Scott on his return, ‘Your sincere friend’, stressing that he was ‘slow to use a word of such solemn meaning to any one’.
De Quincey’s timing was unfortunate. Had he written to Wordsworth a few months earlier he might have gained more attention; had he written a few years earlier, he would have caught the poet in his hot youth rather than his staid middle age. Nor was De Quincey’s letter the first from an admirer to arrive at the cottage; the previous summer Wordsworth had begun a correspondence with John Wilson, a robust, hearty and back-slappingly confident student at Oxford University. ‘The Beau’, as Dorothy proudly called him, was ‘a very amiable young man. . . a friend and adorer of William and his verses’. Under the pseudonym ‘Christopher North’, Wilson would become famous as a merciless reviewer for Blackwood’s Magazine, and he approached Wordsworth now as both critic and ‘adorer’. ‘In your poems,’ Wilson wrote, ‘I discovered such marks of delicate feeling, such benevolence of disposition, and such knowledge of human nature as made an impression on my mind that nothing will ever efface.’ His tribute paid, Wilson then assumed the fact of Wordsworth’s friendship – ‘I may, perhaps, never have the happiness of seeing you, yet I will always consider you as a friend.’ He addressed the poet as a man speaking to men, and as a man to whom it was possible to point out what Wilson felt were ‘errors’ in his work: ‘no feeling, no state of mind ought, in my opinion’, he wrote, ‘to become the subject of poetry, that does not please. . . you have described feelings with which I cannot sympathise, and situations in which I take no interest’. The offensive poem was ‘The Idiot Boy’, and everyone he knew, John Wilson claimed, hated it as much as he did. De Quincey later described himself and John Wilson as the only ‘two persons’ ‘intrepid’ enough to ‘attach themselves to a banner not yet raised and planted’.
Coleridge had discovered Greta Hall in May 1800, during a visit to Grasmere. A large bay-windowed, three-storey house on the outskirts of Keswick, it gleamed through the trees at the foot of monumental Skiddaw, one of the highest mountains in the country. The River Greta flowed behind, while Derwentwater lay in front. The mountains beyond the lake had the effect, said De Quincey, of cutting the county into ‘great chambers’. By the end of June, Coleridge, his pregnant wife Sarah, his young son Hartley, and an endless trail of book chests, were settling in. Sarah, who had never before left Bristol, felt cautious about inhabiting this strange new landscape with the Wordsworths – who considered her shallow and vain – as her only friends. Coleridge, who had married Sarah to please Southey, rejected her to please William and Dorothy. Sarah was the elder sister of Southey’s own wife, Edith, and Coleridge was now in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth’s wife; his sister complex was one of the many things he would have in common with De Quincey. Increasingly in thrall to opium, Coleridge’s next three years saw the disintegration of his marriage, his health, his relationship with Wordsworth, and his belief in his powers as a poet.
In August 1803, after their first child had died from hydrocephalus, Southey and Edith also made the journey from Bristol to Greta Hall. ‘Nothing in England can be more beautiful than the site of this house,’ Southey exclaimed, and having come for a visit they stayed for the rest of their lives. No sooner were the Southeys ensconced than Coleridge took off, first to Scotland with the Wordsworths, then to Malta by himself, and after that to London. Southey’s punishment for pushing Coleridge into an unhappy marriage was to become pater familias to his young family. He was sanguine about his brother-in-law’s revenge: no man, Southey conceded, was less suited to domestic life than Coleridge. And few men were more suited to its responsibilities and routines than Southey himself.
Also at Greta Hall that summer was the young William Hazlitt, who had met Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, when Coleridge was living in Nether Stowey, and Dorothy and William had moved to nearby Alfoxden. Like John Wilson, Hazlitt was to be always one step ahead of De Quincey. He had seen Lyrical Ballads in manuscript form on Wordsworth’s kitchen table, and heard Coleridge recite both ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, the poem ‘composed in a sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium’. Now a twenty-five-year-old art student, Hazlitt accepted a commission from Beaumont to paint portraits of the poets in their respective homes. Wordsworth’s features, Hazlitt noted, were ‘as a book where men might read strange matters’; he had ‘a convulsive inclination to laugh around the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face’. Neither likeness has survived; instead we have his pen portraits of the poets in Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt made a tempestuous guest that summer; Wordsworth dismissed him as an upstart, too quick to have his own opinions, but the vivid description left by Coleridge shows remarkable prescience. It also shows how, despite his verbosity and psychological abstraction, Coleridge was acutely attuned to those in his company:
William Hazlitt is a thinking, observant, original man, of great power as a Painter of Character Portraits. . . his manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive– : brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange . . . he is jealous, gloomy, & of an irritable pride – & addicted to women, as objects of sexual indulgence. With all this, there is much good in him – he is disinterested, an enthusiastic Lover of the great men, who have been before us – he says things that are his own in a way of his own – & tho’ from habitual Shyness & the Outside & bearskin at least of misanthropy, he is strangely confused & dark in his conversation, & delivers himself of almost all his conceptions with a Forceps, yet he says more than any man, I ever knew. . . He sends well-headed & well-feathered Thoughts straight forwards to the mark with a Twang of the Bow-string.
Both Romantic essayists and satellites of the Wordsworth circle, De Quincey and Hazlitt would write on the same subjects for the same editions of the same journals, but neither sought out the other’s company. While De Quincey acknowledged Hazlitt’s genius, Hazlitt would act as though De Quincey were invisible.
With Wordsworth’s letter tucked safely in his pocket, De Quincey returned as scheduled to the Priory on 3 August, where his mother, feeling the force of her son’s conviction and increasingly irritated by his company, at last caved in to the ‘Oxford scheme’. His guardians also conceded: De Quincey could go to the university provided that he live within his school allowance of £100 a year; no further money from his father’s legacy would be released until he came of age. When, on 6 August, he penned his reply to Wordsworth, De Quincey put the situation rather differently: ‘Unfortunately. . . I am not yet my own master,’ he explained, ‘and (in compliance with the wishes of my mother and my guardians) I am going, in a month or two, to enter myself at Oxford.’ By coincidence, De Quincey added, he too had ‘an intention of making a tour of the Highlands this autumn; but now, just at the time when I find that I should have a chance of meeting you there, my plans (I fear) will be traversed’.
De Quincey’s second letter to Wordsworth began with an account of the anxiety he had endured during the last two months. Fearing that the poet might have found ‘disgusting’ his expression of ‘languor and despondency’, De Quincey explained that he had ‘given up almost every hope’ of receiving a reply; as for the specific request in his earlier letter: ‘What foolish thing I said of friendship I cannot now recollect.’ He defended his former praise of Lyrical Ballads, claiming that nothing ‘which the world has yet seen can so well claim the title of pure poetry’, that he could ‘rest on no other poems with such permanent and increasing delight’, and ‘from the wreck of all earthly things which belong to me, I should endeavour to save that work by an impulse second to none but that of self-preservation’. Referring to Wordsworth’s invitation to call on him, were he to ever visit Grasmere, De Quincey wrote that ‘I scarcely know how to reply: it did indeed fill up the measure of my joy. . . Henceforward I shall look to that country as to the land of promise: I cannot say how many emotions the land of the lakes raises in my mind of itself: I have always felt a strange love for everything connected with it; and the magic of the Lyrical Ballads has completed and established the charm’ (it was Ann Radcliffe, De Quincey wrote in his Autobiographic Sketches, who initially brought the mountains and ruins of the region into ‘sunny splendour’). He would, De Quincey concluded, ‘bend [his] course to the lakes’ in the summer and have then ‘the happiness of seeing those persons whom above all the world I honour and amidst those scenes too which, delightful as they are in themselves, are much more so on their account’. His final line contains an unmistakable echo of the final line of ‘Tintern Abbey’, in which the poet asks his ‘dear sister’ to not forget that ‘these steep woods and lofty cliffs,/ And this green pastoral landscape, were to me/ More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!’
Carried away and quite forgetting Wordsworth’s sober warning about friendship, De Quincey added a postscript in which he tried to elbow his way further into the community: ‘You mention Miss Wordsworth (I speak at a venture) and Mr Coleridge; and this emboldens me to use the privilege of a friend and take a liberty which I should not otherwise have done – when I beg you to convey my most sincere and respectful good wishes to them both.’
On 15 August 1803, De Quincey’s eighteenth birthday, the triumvirate of Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge departed for their Scottish tour. He ‘had never yet’, Coleridge told Southey, ‘commenced a journey with such an inauspicious heaviness of heart before’. Meanwhile, 85,000 French soldiers were encamped at Boulogne, and England waited for Napoleon to invade.
Wordsworth, who had been in France during the early days of the Revolution and had an illegitimate French daughter, now grieved for the country he once loved, and on his return from Scotland enrolled in the Grasmere home defence volunteers. ‘Surely there was never a more determined hater of the French,’ Dorothy wrote proudly to her friend, Catherine Clarkson, ‘nor one more willing to do his utmost if they really do come.’
The previous Christmas had been spent by De Quincey on the streets of London. Now, in late December and in the middle of a snowstorm, he arrived at last in Oxford. ‘No longer absorbed into the general unity of a family, I felt myself, for the first time, burthened with the anxieties of a man, and a member of the world.’ Important changes to the general unity of his family had taken place in the weeks before he left home: his younger brother, Richard, had run away from school to work as a cabin boy on a South Sea whaler, and his mother had sold the Priory and moved temporarily to Hinckley in Leicestershire before returning to Bristol. In the domestic upheavals, the finer details of De Quincey’s enrolment at the university had been overlooked and he arrived in the city without arranging entry to a particular college. Had he stayed at Manchester Grammar he would have been eligible for a bursary at Brasenose, but De Quincey was now faced with a bewildering number of options. Wanting a college large enough in which to disappear, and preferably attached to a cathedral and choir, he knocked on the door of Christ Church. Here he was interviewed by the dean who informed him that immediate entry was impossible, there being not so much as a spare dog kennel in which to sleep. De Quincey was recommended the smaller and less distinguished Worcester College, which was ‘Singularly barren of either virtue or talents or knowledge’, and lacked its own chapel.
De Quincey, who did not consider himself among the usual run of roaring undergraduates, found the social life of the university infantile and the intellectual life non-existent. His fellow students – except John Wilson, who he had not then met – ‘knew nothing at all of English Literature’, let alone modern poetry. The reason De Quincey gave for the ‘morbid excess’ of his antisocial behaviour was that his ‘eye had been couched in a secondary power of vision, by misery, by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, by experience too early won, and by the sense of danger critically escaped’. He had, in other words, been through the journey prescribed for Dorothy in ‘Tintern Abbey’. His small income was spent on acquiring the books which would form the basis of the vast and impressive library which would later be carted around the country; his increasingly threadbare appearance was excused on the grounds of his evident genius. De Quincey spoke not more than ‘one hundred words’ during his first two years, and his sole encounter with his personal tutor consisted of a chance meeting during which three sentences were exchanged, ‘two of which fell to his share, one to mine’. Asked what he had been reading, De Quincey replied ‘Paley’, referring to the utilitarian clergyman philosopher and advocate of natural theology. (He had actually been reading Plato’s Parmenides but imagined his tutor would not know ‘so very unusual’ a book.) ‘Ah! An excellent author,’ was the don’s response to Paley. ‘Excellent for his matter; only you must be on your guard as to his style; he is very vicious there.’ De Quincey’s own understanding, on the contrary, was that while Paley was a ‘master’ of style, as a philosopher he was ‘the disgrace of the age’. His tutor had shown himself ‘a stiff lover of the artificial and the pompous’, and no further meetings took place. For the next five years, De Quincey simply continued with his programme of self-education. His later paean to the university – ‘Oxford, ancient Mother! Hoary with ancestral honours . . . – I owe thee nothing!’ – was not an exaggeration.
When spring came he moved out of his college rooms and took lodgings in the nearby village of Littlemore. By now De Quincey had ‘entered the cave of Trophonius’; the image referred to the Greek architect who was swallowed up by the earth.
Thus it was that six months would pass before he wrote again to Wordsworth. ‘When you gave me permission to write you must have wondered, (when you remembered me) that I made so little use of it,’ De Quincey’s next letter began. His silence was due to being absorbed in ‘little, & then unknown cares’ and only now that he had ‘retired to this little village’ could he ‘marshall [his] thoughts afresh’. Afraid that Wordsworth might think his admiration for Lyrical Ballads had been exaggerated, he described his first ‘acquaintance’ with the poems. Like everything De Quincey said to Wordsworth, the story he now told was tailored to make their friendship seem as inevitable as a breaking wave.
‘Some years ago spending my holidays at Bath I was shewn the poem of We are Seven which was handed about in manuscript. Between this period & that when I afterwards discovered the volume from which it was taken, a long time intervened.’ During this long interval, De Quincey explained, he had become ‘intoxicated’ with the ‘delirious and lawless pleasures’ of literature as low as ‘German drama’. He would have lost himself in a ‘frenzy’ of melodrama had it not been for the ‘purer & more permanent pleasure’ he had, from his ‘infancy’, found in the ‘Love of Nature’. In his attempt to ‘wean’ himself from Gothic turbulence, he ‘looked round for some guide who might assist to develop & tutor to new feelings, & then it was that from a recollection of the deep impression made on me by the short poem I have mentioned I knew where to seek that guidance, & where I sought, I found it’.
De Quincey’s way of paying homage was to claim complete identification with his idols. Wordsworth had no idea that his pupil was not quite the reflective mirror he presented himself as being, that he quite happily balanced a love of the Gothic alongside the ‘purifying pleasures’ of contemporary poetry. He was now, De Quincey explained to Wordsworth, awaiting the hour when he too could become his ‘own Master’ and ‘live with those Brothers & Sisters who still remain to me, in solitary converse with Nature’. Of De Quincey’s surviving siblings, Richard had run away to sea, Henry was still at school, and Jane and Mary had shown no interest in setting up house with their delinquent brother.
Only after posting the letter did De Quincey discover, to his frustration, that Wordsworth had written to him twice since August. The first of the letters had been forwarded from the Priory to Bristol, and then on to Oxford, and the second had been waiting for him at Worcester College. Amongst the information contained, Wordsworth told De Quincey that he was writing a poem ‘on his own life’, and that Coleridge had become separated from them during the Scottish tour due to illness. De Quincey, now dashing off a supplementary letter, expressed delight in the prospect of the anticipated poem and suggested that should Coleridge try the waters at Bath, he could find him lodgings in the city. He then replied in detail to Wordsworth’s query about his moral virtue. Intemperance, De Quincey explained, was ‘disgusting’ to him; he was immune to the dissolute temptations of college life; he had ‘not much to reproach [himself] with’, and nothing in his conduct could make Wordsworth ‘repent the notice you have taken of me’. His description of himself was, for the moment, true.
That summer, 1804, De Quincey celebrated his nineteenth birthday. On the same day, the newly crowned Napoleon spent his thirty-fifth birthday reviewing his troops stationed in Boulogne. His ancient throne was placed on the top of a hill, surrounded by 200 bullet-riddled and bloodstained banners brought from his victories at Lodi, Marengo and Areola, a piece of theatre reported in detail in the English papers.
In the autumn De Quincey returned to London for reasons unexplained, but which were almost certainly to do with borrowing money against his patrimony. As the interminable negotiations with Mr Dell once more creaked into action, he awoke with rheumatic pains in his face. These he attributed to his morning ritual of immersing his head in cold water. After twenty-one days of agony a fellow student recommended opium and soon afterwards, on a ‘wet and cheerless’ Sunday afternoon, De Quincey found himself back on Oxford Street and entering a druggist’s shop. The druggist was a ‘dull and stupid’ man, but in De Quincey’s mind he became a ‘beautific vision . . . sent down to earth on a special mission to myself’. His first taste of ‘eloquent opium’ produced one of the most celebrated passages in his Confessions:
In an hour, oh! Heavens! What a revulsion! What an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: – this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me – in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was the panacea. . . for all human woes, here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked-up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallows to the mail-coach.
Opium was the making of De Quincey. Under the pseudonym of ‘the Opium-Eater’ he would find the ‘character’ he had been searching for in the pages of his diary, and in the drug itself he discovered the ‘master key’ to the ‘diviner part of his nature’. With opium by his side, his ‘moral affections [were] in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all [shone] the great light of the majestic intellect’. He could dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, divest himself of fear and anxiety. He found the peace which had eluded him since that midsummer day in 1792. He could ‘run away’ from his ‘torments’; he was no longer pursued by whispers, footsteps, hysterical rivers, angry mobs or mad dogs. As George Gilfillan put it in his portrait of De Quincey, opium ‘shut him up (like the Genie in the “Arabian Tales”) in a phial filled with dusky fire’.
De Quincey tried to return to the experience of this rainy afternoon for the rest of his life; his future addiction was born of the hope that he might feel once again this initial euphoria. But like everything to do with Oxford Street, it simply evanesced. So too did the druggist himself: ‘I sought him near the stately Pantheon and found him not: and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one) he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford-street than to have removed in any bodily fashion.’
We have always been in awe of opium. Fossilised poppy seeds found at the remains of a lake village in Zurich suggest that the drug was consumed in the late Stone Age; Egyptian scrolls reveal that Ra recommended it for headaches; Homer relates how Helen, pitying the dejection of Telemachus and his men after Troy, pours an ointment into their wine called ‘no sorrow’; Sibyl sedates Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog at the gates of Hades, with an opiate, and Galen prescribed opium as an antidote for ‘confusion’ in the elderly. ‘It is time, poppy, to give up your secrets,’ said Diocles of Carystus in the fourth century AD, and for his next fifty-five years De Quincey remained convinced that the poppy allowed him access to the ‘inner world of secret self-consciousness’ in which ‘each of us lives a second life apart and with himself alone’.
While crude opium, the juice of the seed heads, forms a sticky brown cake which can be chewed, smoked or injected, a tincture dissolved in wine or brandy produces laudanum, a bitter-tasting ruby-coloured liquid which, sweetened with nutmeg or another spice, can be served from a wine decanter. Like Coleridge and many of his contemporaries, De Quincey was a laudanum-drinker rather than an opium-eater, which raises a question about the sensational title he gave his Confessions. The effects of laudanum, De Quincey noted, were the opposite of drunkenness. While wine ignited a fast-burning fire, laudanum created a steady gemlike glow; wine aggravated what laudanum sedated; wine disordered the faculties that laudanum focused. What De Quincey discovered that day was that the doors of perception could be cleansed by experiences other than poetry, that opium also offered ‘an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected amongst men’.
At first he would plan his indulgences in advance, and take himself to London once every three weeks for a debauch of opium and opera. He felt his world now ‘spiritualised and sublimed’; having swallowed the magic potion, he would purchase a cheap seat high up in the gallery of the King’s Theatre and, shivering with pleasure, absorb the experience of the contralto, Giuseppina Grassini, singing Neapolitan revivals of Andreozzi’s La vergine del sole, Nasolini’s La morte di Cleopatra and Fioravanti’s Camilla. Opium gave De Quincey a form of synaesthesia, allowing him to see in the ‘elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras-work, the whole of my past life’.
He then walked, ‘without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages’. Laudanum London bore no relation to the cruel city he had known two years before. ‘Like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of chimneys,’ his tonic ‘overruled’ the differences between wealth and poverty. Imagining himself invisible, he walked amongst the crowds, taking in ‘the motion of time’ and the rhythm of talk. ‘Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion.’ His mother had once described herself as his steering map; now, when the city fell silent, De Quincey would ‘steer’ his own way ‘homewards upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage’. Since John Cabot was sent by Henry VII in 1497, Arctic voyages to discover a north-west passage to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been plentiful. Navigating back to his lodgings through the labyrinthine streets, De Quincey identified himself with a whole host of ancient mariners feeling their way forwards through the emerald green ice. When the terrible isolation of addiction took hold, these walks amongst the multitude became a happy memory.
As an ‘opium-eater’, De Quincey found not only found a literary identity, but a subject suited to his style. He was never to be, like Dorothy Wordsworth, a miniaturist. He thought in terms of accumulation and he piled his sentences high; he observed distortion rather than detail, crowds rather than individuals. A face, for De Quincey, rarely had features. ‘It was my disease,’ he said, ‘to meditate too much and to observe too little’; he ‘suffered’, said Virginia Woolf, ‘from the gift of seeing everything a size too large, and of reproducing his vision in words which are also a size too large’. But his writing could always support the weight of his reveries, and opium gave voice to De Quincey’s stylistic insatiability.
During his London visits, he introduced himself to Charles Lamb, another of London’s night-walkers and a friend of the poets. A clerk at the East India House on Leadenhall Street, Lamb lived in the Temple with his sister, Mary, who in a fit of lunacy eight years earlier had fatally stabbed their mother at the supper table. The same height as De Quincey, Lamb was gentle and teasing, with a great deal of eclectic learning, a love of puns and a severe stammer. De Quincey professed to admire his writing and so Lamb invited him to supper, only realising when the conversation turned immediately to his knowledge of Coleridge, that he was being used. Irritated by De Quincey’s duplicity and by the reverential manner in which he couched his enquiries, Lamb had fun at his guest’s expense by ridiculing the authors of Lyrical Ballads, ‘their books, their thoughts, their places, their persons’. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ – a poem Lamb pretended to dislike – also came into his line of fire, leaving De Quincey to gasp: ‘But, Mr Lamb, good heavens! How is it possible you can allow yourself such opinions? What instance could you bring from the poem that would bear you out in these insinuations?’ ‘Instances!’ said Lamb: ‘oh, I’ll instance you, if you come to that. Instance, indeed! Pray, what do you say to this –
The many men so beautiful
And they all dead did lie – ?
So beautiful, indeed! Beautiful! Just think of such a gang of Wapping vagabonds, all covered with pitch, and chewing tobacco; and the old gentleman himself, – what do you call him? – the bright-eyed fellow?’
De Quincey placed hands over his ears in ‘horror’. When Lamb had finished, he assumed a ‘sarcastic smile’ and told his guest that had he known they were going to talk ‘in this strain’ they should ‘have said grace before we began our conversation’.
It was probably Lamb who let him know that Coleridge was currently living in Malta. De Quincey later joked that when he heard this news he ‘began to inquire about the best route’ to the Mediterranean, ‘but, as any route at that time promised an inside place in a French prison, I reconciled myself to waiting’. Introducing himself to Coleridge, however, was never as important as introducing himself to Wordsworth and it was the passage north which still preoccupied De Quincey. It had, inexplicably, been a year since his last letter to the poet: how much longer was he going to wait before taking up the offer to call on the household in Grasmere?
Eventually, in the spring of 1805, De Quincey screwed his courage to the sticking place. His love for the hills and forest lawns of Westmorland had long been determined, he suggested, by ‘a sense of mysterious pre-existence’, which was De Quincey’s version of Wordsworth’s ‘gleams of past existence’. Not only had he haunted the lakes in the form of ‘a phantom-self’, but as a Lancastrian he felt some ‘fraction of denizenship’ with the ‘mountainous labyrinths’ and silent glens whose names – Scafell Pike, Bowfell, Pillar, Great Gable, Fairfield, Grisdale, Seat Sandal, Blencathra, Glaramara, Borrowdale, Buttermere, Derwent – had cast their spell over him. The journey from London is 300 miles, and his preferred mode of transport was the outside of the mail.
The English mail-coach was, to De Quincey, a ‘spiritualised object’ which revealed for the first time ‘the glory of motion’. The mail-coach owned the road. Nothing could delay its progress; other vehicles scurried to the side at the blast of its horn. Drawn by horses of great ‘beauty and power’, it covered vast distances at speeds of up to thirteen miles an hour. De Quincey enjoyed the velocity, but also the sense of inviolability and escape. ‘A bedroom in a quiet house’ was vulnerable to robbers, rats and fire, but the box of the mail was the safest place a man could be – ‘nobody can touch you there’. Some travellers called the top the ‘attic’ but to De Quincey the top was ‘the drawing-room’ and ‘the box was the chief ottoman or sofa in that drawing-room’. The interior of the coach, generally considered the most civilised place in which to sit, was the ‘coal cellar in disguise’.
He was dropped eight miles south of Grasmere in the village of Coniston, between the slender reach of Coniston Water and the vast fell of Coniston Old Man. The thrill of the journey over, De Quincey now faced the ordeal ahead. It had been too long, he feared as the mail thundered away, to appear unannounced on Wordsworth’s doorstep; indeed the very image of Wordsworth, ‘as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye’ crushed his ‘faculties’. What happened next was what De Quincey called ‘foolish panic’ and what we might today call a panic attack; an orchestration of symptoms left him petrified. De Quincey usually signals anxiety with an image of intense motion rushing towards him and stopping him in his tracks; in ‘The English Mail-Coach’ he described the sensation as one in which, ‘when the signal is flying for action’, the ‘guilty weight of dark unfathomed remembrances’ hung upon and stalled his ‘energies’. Here, in Coniston, the signal was flying for action and he found himself weighted to the spot. Consumed by self-loathing, he turned around and returned to Oxford.
A year later, in the spring of 1806, he set out once again, this time breaking his journey at Mrs Best’s cabin in Everton. He had, in the intervening twelve months, still not written to Wordsworth. The Everton air always buoyed up his confidence, and so he now composed a letter to the poet apologising for his ‘long silence’, explaining that he was on a ‘tour’ of the Lakes, and asking whether ‘it would be agreeable to you that I should call at your cottage’. Between this letter and his last he had suffered, De Quincey explained, a ‘long interval of pain’. He had been ‘struggling with an unconfirmed pulmonary consumption’ – presumably the undiagnosed effects of opium – but the ‘great affliction was the loss of my brother’. Richard had run away to sea at the same time as De Quincey had departed to Oxford, but ‘in losing him I lost a future friend; for, besides what we had of alliance in our minds, we had passed so much of our childhood together (though latterly we had been separated) that we had between us common remembrances of early life’. His reference to Richard was another stab at identification; De Quincey, who followed Wordsworth’s every move, had read in the newspapers the previous February that the poet’s brother John Wordsworth, captain of the East Indiaman The Abergavenny, had drowned when his ship sank off Portland. ‘These things,’ De Quincey continued of Richard’s whereabouts, ‘have shed blight upon my mind and have made the last two years of my life so complete a blank in the account of happiness that I know not whether there be one hour in that whole time which I would willingly recall.’
Wordsworth sent a warm reply confirming that De Quincey was still welcome to visit, and suggesting that he come in late May. But by June, De Quincey had still not appeared. He wrote again to Wordsworth, providing another jumble of excuses for his change of plan, but he was still in Everton in ‘daily expectation of hearing some final account of the Cambridge, the ship in which my brother sailed’. The Cambridge, which he expected to dock in Liverpool, did not appear either. Giving up on the return of his brother, De Quincey told Wordsworth that it was ‘almost certain’ he would ‘come into Westmorland before the end of this month’. Meanwhile, he spent the long summer nights in his cabin, drinking laudanum and gazing out of ‘an open window’. The sea, a mile below, was ‘brooded over by a dove-like calm’ while the great spread of Liverpool seemed to him to be ‘the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind’. His trances ‘called into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties’ and all those ‘blessed household countenances’ which in the graveyard lay.
Memories, long buried, streamed to the surface. When he slept, ‘dream form[ed] itself mysteriously within dream’, and ‘the nursery of my childhood expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed. . . I was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself.’ Continually he returned to the ‘trance in my sister’s chamber’: vaults, shafts and billows transported him to the realm he had glimpsed through the window on that midsummer day. ‘Again I am in the chamber with my sister’s corpse, again the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of the summer, the Syrian sunlights, the frost of death.’
With this ‘drowsy syrup’, De Quincey said, combining imagery from Othello and Macbeth, a ‘guilty man’ could regain ‘for one night. . . the hopes of his youth and hands washed pure from blood’. But opium became itself a source of guilt: ‘In the one CRIME of OPIUM,’ wrote Coleridge, ‘what crime have I not made myself guilty of!’
De Quincey eventually left Everton and spent 15 August 1806, his twenty-first birthday, on the road to Grasmere. He was now the recipient of a modest fortune of £2,600, of which £600 was already accounted for in debts accumulated over the last three years, including the costs incurred by his sister, Mary, when she searched these same roads for her brother after he ran away from school. By 18 August he had, once again, reached Coniston. Here, at the Black Bull Inn, De Quincey gathered his thoughts as we do when we arrive at a turning point in our lives. What were his future goals? A new list was drawn up in his diary, titled ‘The Constituents of Happiness’. The ‘Sources of Happiness’ he had listed three years before had begun with ‘Poetry’ and ended with ‘Music’. De Quincey’s requirements were now more specific:
1.A capacity of thinking – i.e., of abstraction and reverie
2.The cultivation of an interest in all that concerns human life and human nature
3.A fixed and not merely temporary residence in some spot of eminent beauty: – I say not merely temporary because frequent change of abode is unfavourable to the growth of local attachment which must of necessity exercise on any (but more especially on the contemplative mind) a most beneficial influence. . .
4.Such an interchange of solitude and interesting society as that each may give to each an intense glow of pleasure.
5.Books. . .
6.Some great intellectual project to which all intellectual pursuits may be made tributary. . .
7.Health and vigour
8.The consciousness of a supreme mastery over all unworldly passions (anger – contempt – and fear). . .
9.A vast predominance of contemplation varied with only so much of action as the feelings may prompt by way of relief. . .
10.. . . emancipation from worldly cares – anxieties – and connexions – and from all that is comprehended under the term business
11.The education of a child
12.. . . a personal appearance tolerably respectable. . .
Opium would help him in the achievement of numbers 1, 8, 9 and 10, but would work against 7 and 12. Regardless of any effort he made, De Quincey’s clothing would always require improvement. Throughout his life, as Michael Neve puts it, he would continue to ‘look dreadful while keeping up appearances’. Number 3 revealed his exasperation with his mother’s domestic arrangements and his longing for stability; 5 and 6 were within his reach, and 11, a fashionable Romantic hobby, would be realised in the next few years. What is striking is not just the certainty with which De Quincey understood his own needs, but how little his requirements would change from now on. Also remarkable is how near he had already come, through sheer endeavour, to fulfilling the ambitions of a lifetime. Meanwhile his overruling desire, to meet Wordsworth, was within hours of completion.
Master of his own destiny, with money to spend and no one to answer to, De Quincey pushed forwards to the gorge of Hammerscar where he shuddered to look down into the vale of Grasmere. The ‘loveliest of landscapes’ broke ‘upon the view in a style of almost theatrical surprise’. He took in the dimensions: here was the lake, ‘with its solemn bend-like island of five acres in size, seemingly afloat on its surface’, and ‘just two bow-shots from the water’ at the foot of ‘a vast and seemingly never-ending series of ascents’, gleamed the ‘little white cottage’ which he knew to belong to the poet. Standing a few miles above the building, he was positioned like Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – and De Quincey was also revisiting the view. Beneath him lay his future. Eight years earlier, in anticipation of such a moment, Coleridge had bounded the forty miles from his home at Nether Stowey to Wordsworth’s home at Racedown, where he leapt over a gate and tore through an unmown field to embrace the man who would become the greatest friend of his life. But De Quincey once again turned around – and ‘retreated like a guilty thing’.
The image he used to describe his second flight from Wordsworth was the same as the one he used to describe his departure from Elizabeth’s bedroom in Greenhay, when he heard footsteps on the stairs. The phrase was from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, where the poet ‘Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised’, and Wordsworth himself had taken it from Act 1 of Hamlet, where the murdered king’s ghost is described by Horatio as disappearing with the dawn, ‘like a guilty thing/ Upon a fearful summons’. It was Hamlet, indecisive, philosophising, obsessed by another world, whom De Quincey was starting to resemble.
Within days of De Quincey’s second retreat from Grasmere, and his return to Oxford, Coleridge’s ship was docking on the Medway. After two and a half years, the mariner had come home – except that he no longer knew where in the world such a place might be. His trunk of books got lost in Wapping and after a fruitless search of the warehouses along the Ratcliffe Highway, he took himself to London. Three months of procrastination followed before Coleridge returned to his family at Greta Hall. ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so,’ he famously observed.