13

Same Subject (continued)

                           . . . attired

In splendid clothes, with hose of silk, and hair

Glittering like rimy trees, when frost is keen.

Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Third

Apart from his friends and relatives and the relatives of his friends, De Quincey owed money to fifty-one tradespeople, including the tin-plate maker, the dance-master, the cobbler, the grocer, the poulterer, the cow-feeder, the brazier, the schoolmaster, the coalman, the confectioner, the glazier, and several booksellers and landlords. For debtors, Edinburgh was the best of towns and the worst of towns. The best because, by ancient Scottish law, Holyrood Abbey offered sanctuary to the pursued, and the worst because, also by ancient Scottish law, the debtor was first ‘put to the horn’ – a public humiliation whereby, with three blasts of a horn, he was denounced in the market place as a rebel to the king. If he could not then satisfy his creditors, he faced imprisonment – or sanctuary. For De Quincey, who was put to the horn on nine occasions, Holyrood Abbey became a home.

In late May 1830, however, we find him back in John Wilson’s house. According to Wilson’s daughter Mary, De Quincey turned up in a storm wanting a bed for the night and stayed for a year. She exaggerated: he stayed for six months.^* During this time De Quincey wrote like a fury, piling up pieces for Blackwood who paid him ten guineas per sheet – a sheet was equivalent to sixteen printed pages – with the promise of more money if the copy arrived early, which it never did. The Opium-Eater’s appearance in June’s ‘Noctes’ gives us a sense of how Wilson found his friend’s company. ‘Mr De Qunshy,’ says the Shepherd,

you and me leeves in twa different warlds – and yet its wunnerfu’ hoo we understaun ane anither aes weel’s we do – quite a phenomena. When I’m soopin’ you’re breakfastin’ – when I’m lyin’ doon, after your coffee you’re risin’ up – as I’m coverin’ my head wi’ the blankets you’re pitting on your breeks – as my een are steekin’ ike sunflowers aneath the moon, yours are glowin’ like twa gas-lamps, and while your mind is masterin’ poleetical economy and metapheesics, in a desperate fecht wi’ Ricawrdo and Cant [Ricardo and Kant], I’m heard by the nicht-wanderin’ fairies snorin’ trumpet-nosed through the land o’ Nod.

Carlyle once described De Quincey’s talk as consisting of a ‘diseased acuteness’ and this is precisely what is caught in the ‘Noctes’. ‘Mr De Qunshy’ is an earnest expounder of Coleridgean philosophy and Wordsworthian wisdom, delivered in a black letter English of antiquated deliberation and politeness. While he bores the Tickler to sleep, the Shepherd goads him on – ‘I would like to hear ye, sir, conversin’ wi’ Coleridge and Wordsworth – three cataracts a’ thunderin’ at once!’ – and Christopher North keeps up an academic interest: ‘You have been touching, my dear Opium-Eater, on abstruse matters indeed, but with a pencil of light.’ Wilson further teased De Quincey in a scene where the four friends debate the Wordsworthian crime of nest-robbing. ‘Some one of my ancestors,’ says the Opium-Eater, ‘– for even with the deepest sense of my own unworthiness, I cannot believe that my own sins – as a cause – have been adequate to the production of such an effect – must have perpetrated some enormous – some monstrous crime, punished in me, his descendant, by utter blindness to all birds’ nests.’ ‘Maist likely,’ responds the Shepherd. ‘The De Qunshys cam owre wi’ the Conqueror, and were great Criminals – But did you ever look for them, sir?’ ‘From the year 1811,’ replies the English Opium-Eater, ‘– the year in which the Marrs and Williamsons were murdered – till the year 1821, in which Bonaparte the little – vulgarly called Napoleon the Great – died of a cancer in his stomach. . . did I exclusively occupy myself during the spring-months, from night till morning, in searching for the habitations of these interesting creatures.’ De Quincey’s preoccupation with the Ratcliffe Highway murders had now become a Blackwood’s joke.

Back in Grasmere, Margaret and the children had, for reasons unknown, moved out of The Nab and were now installed in a farm called Lingstubbs near Penrith, whose landlady had a bevy of children of her own. The infants squabbled, the rent was late, the bills went unpaid, and Margaret wrote to her husband threatening to kill herself if he could not settle what was owed. The most he could earn from Maga was £100 a year; in response to her threat De Quincey sent William Blackwood one of his infamous begging letters, by which he made everyone other than himself responsible for his woes: ‘She assures me peremptorily that, if I do not hold out some immediate prospect of relief in my promised letter of tomorrow night, her present application shall be the last letter she’ll ever write.’ Handed the responsibility of Margaret’s continued life, Blackwood advanced the necessary funds – a practice to which he became accustomed.

In December 1830 De Quincey’s wife and bairns arrived in Edinburgh where they moved into 7 Great King Street, in the New Town; ‘a house’, De Quincey blithely explained to Lockhart, ‘of that class which implies a state of expenditure somewhat above the necessities of a needy man of letters’. The rent was £200 a year. It was here that his three-year-old daughter Florence was ‘first awakened’, as she later recalled, to the fact that she ‘had a father’.

His frozen debts began to thaw and De Quincey found himself in a fast-flowing river. In May 1831 a bookseller took action against him for the sum of £37 16/ 6d. The repayment was somehow made – presumably by Wilson. On 1 February 1832, De Quincey wrote to Wilson’s brother asking for £30 to cover another debt: ‘My extremity is complete, for unless in 6 days of course I pay this bill, I am put to the horn.’ Again, the debt was settled, presumably by Wilson’s brother. The water company now threatened to cut off his supply unless he paid their bill; De Quincey borrowed £110 from his sister, and by the summer of 1832 the family had downsized to a slate-grey Georgian terrace at 1 Forres Street. The new address was kept secret but De Quincey’s whereabouts was discovered, and before dawn on his forty-sixth birthday he went into hiding to escape arrest. This was the start of a decade of flight and disappearance as he evaded his pursuers; like all debtors, De Quincey saw himself as a victim of injustice while those to whom he owed money were villainous persecutors. ‘It would be dangerous to me, that any servant should know where I am,’ he explained to Blackwood, adding that any correspondence sent to Forres Street would be delivered to his secret abode by his twelve-year-old son, Horace.

The man who had once gazed through windows at shining fires was now himself spied upon: a solicitor called William Muir had Forres Street watched for four hours one day, but De Quincey was nowhere to be seen; the next day Muir had the neighbourhood searched but could still ‘obtain no trace of him’. Some sources suggested that the debtor might be ‘at the Lakes, and others that he was in the environs of Edinburgh’. Officers followed up every report of sightings ‘at different times of the day & upon different days, but did not fall in with him’. One officer, having waited a ‘whole day in the Meadows where in the Twilight he discovered a person corresponding to the marks given him of Mr De Quincey. . . followed and watched through many turns & windings & finally lost sight of him about the South end of Clerk Street’. Like Poe’s ‘Man in the Crowd’, De Quincey had disappeared into the tumultuous sea of human faces. He was eventually arrested ‘near the top of Montague Street’. It is the great inconvenience of poverty, as Hazlitt observed, that it makes men ridiculous.

In September 1832 De Quincey was put to the horn for the first time, for the £10 owed to the landlord of his former lodgings on Duncan Street. Unable to repay the full sum – Wilson had evidently put his foot down – he found himself imprisoned in the Canongate Tolbooth, a damp, black and airless Elizabethan jail at the end of the Royal Mile. He wrote nothing about this experience but within hours he had exploited the loophole of the sick bill, by which prisoners who were dangerously ill could be released on condition that they stayed within the boundaries of the city. He was arrested again the following month, but this time managed to repay the debt.

Throughout this hellish year De Quincey produced a roster of essays for Blackwood’s as well as the Radcliffian novel Klosterheim; or, The Masque, which Blackwood published in a single volume – making this the first independent book, as opposed to journalistic paper, that De Quincey wrote. Were Klosterheim to succeed, he believed, ‘it will deliver me from an abyss of evil into which few have ever descended’.

As a novelist, De Quincey is generally regarded as having failed. ‘He cared nothing for delineations of character,’ his daughter Florence observed, ‘and I do not think he cared much for pictures of modern life.’ He was mystified by the Brontës and by Charles Dickens, themselves great admirers of De Quincey, and avoided meeting Thackeray when given the chance. He diagnosed his own disease as one of meditating too much and observing too little; Virginia Woolf put it differently: De Quincey needed to adjust his fictional perspectives ‘to suit his own eyesight’; in a De Quinceyan landscape, nothing must ‘come too close’. While his heroines were lifeless – literally so, for the most part – and his dialogue dead on the page, De Quincey’s plots have propulsion and an anarchic energy gives his narratives a nervous pulse rate. Klosterheim centres on the ‘purloining’ of a ‘long and confidential letter’ – the idea was to inspire Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ – and the labyrinthine city in which the dramas take place becomes a metaphor for the Opium-Eater’s mind. In the novel’s midnight masquerade, De Quincey propels us into a ‘life below a life’ where ‘all was one magnificent and tempestuous confusion, overflowing with the luxury of sound and sight’. What distinguishes De Quincey’s fiction is its reflection of inward states. From the preface to the Lyrical Ballads he learned that the feeling ‘gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling’. If Southey’s poems were Gothic tales in verse, with ‘so many lines written before breakfast’, De Quincey’s Gothic tales were poems, whose length he measured with a ruler. Would Blackwood like another chapter, De Quincey asked? It would be no trouble to dash one off and fling it over to him.

Coleridge admired Klosterheim for its ‘purity of style and idiom’, and told Blackwood that De Quincey had reached ‘an excellence to which Sir W. Scott. . . appears never to have aspired’. He would like, Coleridge said, to write to his ‘old friend, De Quincey’, to tell him so.

By 1833 De Quincey had no credit in any shops and was two years in arrears for the rent of Dove Cottage. Losing this house with its hold on the past was too much to bear, and to placate the landlord, John Benson, he offered to pay double the rent, or purchase the place for £130. Benson insisted he leave, and De Quincey, consulting lawyers, won the right to ‘stay’ until Candlemas 1834. ‘For the last fifteen or sixteen days,’ he told Blackwood, ‘having a family of 12 persons absolutely dependent upon me, I have kept up with the demands upon me for mere daily necessities of warmth – light – food, etc., by daily sales of books at the rate of about 30 for 1s. In that proportion have been my sacrifices; and I have now literally no more to sacrifice that could be saleable.’ He did, however, have something more to sacrifice: during this period one of De Quincey’s children was kidnapped until a particular debt had been honoured.

On 10 February, Carlyle informed his brother that De Quincey was ‘said to be in jail’ but, ‘at all events’, remained ‘invisible’, and on the 22nd of that month Margaret gave birth to her eighth and final child, Emily. On 29 March, Carlyle told his brother that ‘Dequincey [sic], who has been once seen out this winter, sent me word he would come and see me; he will do no such thing, poor little fellow: he has hardly got out his cessio bonorum.’ Cessio bonorum was a declaration of bankruptcy, enabling the debtor to purchase immunity from prison in exchange for yielding up his worldly goods to his creditors. De Quincey’s Cessio bonorum calculated his goods at £762 9/, and his debts at £617 16/; he included in the list of monies due that Coleridge had owed him £300 since 1807, plus £393 interest. In April, Carlyle told John Stuart Mill that De Quincey had seen ‘no man, except Bailiffs, it appears, for the last eighteen months; he is said to be in the uttermost, unaidable embarrassment; bankrupt in purse, and as nearly as possible in mind . . .’ De Quincey was, Carlyle added, one of the ‘most irreclaimable Tories now extant, despising Poverty with a complete contempt’.

On 23 May both De Quincey and Margaret were put to the horn for the non-payment of rent on 1 Forres Street. The money was found, and two days later the family moved into Caroline Cottage in Doddington, on the edge of the city. Here the unbearable stress of their lives was alleviated by moments of joy. Florence remembered her father, on ‘bright summer mornings. . . capturing my baby sister, fresh from the bath. . . and dancing her about the garden, the child with its scanty white raiment and golden head, looking like a butterfly glowing among the trees’. On 14 August, the day before his forty-eighth birthday, De Quincey went ‘suddenly’ into hiding, ‘in expectation of a process of arrest’, and remained invisible until 2 September. A few days later, the De Quinceys’ youngest son, Julius, died in his mother’s arms. Most wretched of all for Margaret was that she believed the boy’s fever had broken and had not realised that his struggles, ‘which she had supposed to be expressions of resistance to herself, were the struggles of departing life’. She never ceased to reproach herself for having appeared, when Julius last looked up at her, displeased with him. There was nothing, De Quincey afterwards said, more painful than the death of a child between three and five years old; it was vital to believe that the lives of those who died young had been happy ones, and that they departed this world knowing they had been loved. This had not been the case with Julius; De Quincey was haunted by the discovery, ‘which but for the merest accident I never should have made – that [Julius’s] happiness had been greatly disturbed in a way that afflicted me much’.

With Julius in the churchyard laid, the De Quincey children were now seven. On the day of the funeral De Quincey had to flee Caroline Cottage to avoid arrest and later that month The Nab was sold by auction. Inevitably, he had missed his first mortgage repayment; his mother sent £180 to cover the second and third repayments, subtracting the sum from her son’s regular allowance, and De Quincey came up with madcap schemes to enable the Simpsons to keep their home. Foreclosure, however, was inevitable. In a vicious letter, Margaret’s brother accused De Quincey of ‘swindling’ them all, and the house that had been in the Simpson family for generations was now lost to them. Within weeks, Margaret had lost both her child and her childhood home. Shortly afterwards her mother also died, and Margaret’s father and half-witted uncle joined the De Quincey household in Edinburgh.

In November De Quincey was put to the horn once more, this time for non-payment of his daughters’ music lessons. That month he took advantage of sanctuary and placed himself in accommodation with Mr Brotherton, landlord of one of the hovels in the precincts of Holyrood Abbey. It was the second time in his life that De Quincey had made his home in a monastery.

To live without money, said Hazlitt in ‘On the Want of Money’, ‘is to live out of the world’. Holyrood was a world outside the world; it had its own government, its own court, its own prison, its own economy, its own streets and shops and small-town life; it even had its own wild terrain – Holyrood Park contained one half of Duddingston Loch and all of Arthur’s Seat, a dormant volcano with a panoramic view of the city. Having paid the bailie (or governor) two guineas, the inmates – known as the ‘Abbey lairds’ – could roam within a radius of six miles, and from midnight on Saturday until midnight on Sunday they were free to leave the precinct without fear of arrest, frequently returning in full flight from their creditors as the clock struck twelve. Architecturally, Holyrood resembled the Priory but in other ways the life of an Abbey laird was like that of an Oxford undergraduate, not least because the university operated a similar curfew. In a rare sighting of him inside the abbey, William Bell Scott described De Quincey as resembling ‘the ghost of one whose body had not received the clod of earth to entitle it to rest in peace’. Meanwhile, De Quincey’s ‘growing son’ – most likely William – was ‘getting well into his teens like an uncared-for dog’.

Caroline Cottage was on the edge of the abbey boundary, but to avoid harassment De Quincey did not return during his first few weeks in Brotherton’s lodgings. We find him back home in the spring of 1834, but after being horned once more he returned to Holyrood. Sanctuary did not come free: De Quincey needed to find twelve guineas a month to cover the rents for Brotherton and for Caroline Cottage, and both fell into (or rather, began in) arrears. He was now unable to buy either ink or opium and could not leave Holyrood ‘without very urgent danger’ as ‘emissaries are on the watch in all directions’. In April 1834 he was put to the horn again – for an unpaid book bill – and sued by a servant for her wages. In June he was sued by the grocer, and he exchanged Brotherton’s lodgings for ‘miserable’ rooms with Miss Miller, where his vast family, to save on rent, joined him. To write in peace, De Quincey rented another set of rooms within the abbey from a Miss Craig. On two occasions in 1834 he was sued in Holyrood’s own court for non-payment of rent to Miss Miller and Miss Craig, and he only narrowly avoided the shame of being imprisoned within the sanctuary itself.

On the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, William Tait, the radical son of a builder, launched a journal to rival Blackwood’s. The purpose of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine was to provide a voice for the new electorate: while Blackwood’s was for the educated elite, Tait’s was for the common man. Despite his aversion to Jacobins, De Quincey – nothing if not Janus-faced – approached Tait, and it was Tait who encouraged his new author to write about himself. Blackwood, who continued to commission De Quincey, turned a blind eye to the Opium-Eater’s duplicity.

His first essay for Tait’s, which appeared in December 1833, was an anonymous sketch of ‘Mrs Hannah More’, who had died, aged eighty-eight, in August that year. ‘I knew Mrs Hannah More tolerably well,’ De Quincey began, ‘perhaps as well as it was possible that any man should know her who had not won her confidence by enrolling himself amongst her admirers.’ The low temperature of his praise was maintained throughout. ‘Mrs H. More,’ said De Quincey, was an egotist surrounded by fawning acolytes; himself impatient of such characters, he ‘never paid her a compliment’. Nor did he express any interest in her works, and he ‘appeared’, in her presence, not ‘to know that she was an author’. As a friend and neighbour of ‘a lady’ with ‘whose family’ De Quincey ‘maintained a very intimate acquaintance’, Hannah More had been introduced to him in Wrington in 1809; nothing was said about this ‘lady’ being the author’s mother (one of the fawning acolytes) or about De Quincey’s having first met Mrs H. More in Bath in 1798. Nor was there any reference to her as the person who had introduced De Quincey to Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’. On the contrary, listed amongst Hannah More’s crimes was her boast that she had ‘foresworn’ poetry along with ‘pink ribbons’, as though poetry were a childish indulgence rather than ‘the science of human passion in all its fluxes and refluxes’.

Beneath the mockery of Hannah More lay depths of nostalgia. De Quincey’s prose is propelled by his pleasure in returning to the subject of his youth, his pride in having rubbed shoulders with fame. The full texture of his tone only becomes apparent when we remember the conditions under which he was writing: this was a man in freefall recalling the days when he had nothing to lose.

In ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth had moved back and forth between the quiet present and the turbulent past. In Holyrood Abbey, De Quincey did the opposite. Liberated from Maga’s macho pugilism, from now until the end of his life De Quincey’s subject was a lost paradise.

In February 1834 he began a series of twenty-five essays which would run in Tait’s over the next seven years. Initially called ‘Sketches of Men and Manners from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater’, they were eventually known as Autobiographic Sketches. De Quincey’s childhood was a fairy tale: ‘I was born in a situation the most favourable to happiness of any, perhaps, which can exist; of parents neither too high nor too low; not very rich, which is too likely to be a snare; not poor, which is oftentimes greater.’ His father was a merchant with a copious library and his mother was well born; his boyhood days were passed in large houses with an abundance of servants, and the family income was £6,000 a year. De Quincey recalled his disruptive elder brother; how Greenhay had been sold at a loss; how his guardians had ‘grossly mismanaged’ his fortune; how his mother had moved to Bath; how, on the ‘most heavenly day in May’, he ‘beheld and first entered’ the ‘mighty wilderness’ of London; and how he had travelled across a turbulent Ireland.

De Quincey’s most striking feature as an autobiographer was his romanticisation of first times. Here he was in tune with the age he was recalling. Coleridge’s mariner had been ‘the first that burst into that silent sea’; Keats had described ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; and Hazlitt had recorded in his 1823 essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, how, as a youth, he had walked ten miles in the mud to hear, for the first time, Coleridge preach. The Autobiographic Sketches contain a catalogue of first times – ‘It was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly in the summer season, and certainly in the years 1807, that I first saw [Coleridge]’; ‘It was in the year 1801, whilst yet at school, that I made my first literary acquaintance’; ‘It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of 1803, that I first entered Oxford. . .’; ‘It was on a November night, about ten o’clock, that I first found myself installed in a house of my own – this cottage, so memorable from its past tenant to all men’; ‘It was at Mr Wordsworth’s house that I first became acquainted with (then Mr) Wilson, of Elleray’. De Quincey described the first time he experienced loss as a child, his first coach journey as a boy, the first time he read Lyrical Ballads and, for the first time, he mentioned the death from hydrocephalus of his sister. It was at that point, he revealed, that he had become a ‘nympholept’.

He would write several versions of his autobiography, each one more impassioned than the last. Here, in the pages of Tait’s, there are no wheels announcing the arrival of his dying father, and no zeniths, vaults, or Sarsar winds accompanying the death of Elizabeth, an event then seen as less important than the loss of the family income.

All of De Quincey’s writing grew out of Wordsworth but it was The Prelude that provided the seed for his Autobiographic Sketches. De Quincey’s theme, like that of Wordsworth, was the history of ‘what passed within me’. Wordsworth’s revolutionary France became De Quincey’s revolutionary Ireland, the ‘blank confusion’ of Wordsworth’s London defined De Quincey’s chaotic city; De Quincey’s essays on Oxford rework Wordsworth’s ‘Residence at Cambridge’. ‘Writing where I have no books,’ De Quincey confessed, ‘I make all my references to forty years’ course of reading, by memory’. A relic of English Romanticism imprisoned in Victorian Scotland, De Quincey’s memories were in full flow when, in July 1834, he heard that Coleridge, his role model in failure, had died.

Since 1816 Coleridge had been living in the Highgate home of his doctor, James Gillman. Here his opium intake was monitored, he was pampered by Mrs Gillman, and he was whisked off by the family on seaside breaks. His friends had initially complained at his withdrawal from the world, but Coleridge needed a sanctuary. He would never be entirely free of opium, but under the Gillmans’ loving care he reduced his intake and, piece by piece, let go of the past. For the last chapter of his life he experienced stability, and his thinking took on renewed energy. In 1819 his reputation was sealed by a review in Blackwood’s. ‘The reading public of England,’ wrote Lockhart, ‘. . . have not understood Mr Coleridge’s poems as they should have done.’ Coleridge was ‘the prince of superstitious Poets. . . he stands absolutely alone among the poets of the most poetical age’.

Visiting Coleridge in 1824, Carlyle had found ‘a fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange, brown, timid, yet earnest looking eyes, a high-tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair’. From Highgate Hill, Carlyle later wrote, this figure looked ‘down on London and its smoke-tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there’. Seeming twenty years older than he was, Coleridge had become a legend of a bygone age. Admirers made their pilgrimage to Highgate, just as De Quincey had made his own pilgrimage to Bridgwater. ‘To the raising spirits of the young generation,’ said Carlyle, Coleridge ‘had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma.’

When Lamb, his oldest friend, heard of the death of Coleridge, ‘it was without grief. It seemed to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world – that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve.’ Did De Quincey grieve, or did he grieve that he could not grieve? He later claimed that he and Coleridge had not been friends, ‘not in any sense, nor at any time’, but this was untrue. Only two years before his death, Coleridge had described De Quincey to Blackwood as his ‘old friend’. A fragile early friendship had developed into a relationship which was more strange and less easy to define. As Richard Holmes puts it, De Quincey saw in Coleridge something ‘dangerous and elemental, a demonic elder brother or doppelgänger’.

During his Shakespeare lectures at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, Coleridge had described how, at sunset or sunrise on the highest of Germany’s Harz Mountains, climbers could see a giant spectre surrounded by a glowing halo. The ‘apparition of the Brocken’, as the spectre is called, is a vast projection, caused by light and cloud, of the climber’s own shadow: his terrifying vision is of himself. The experience, Coleridge concluded, is akin to being in the audience of a Shakespeare play: here too, ‘every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so. . . you only know it to be yourself by similarity of action’. He had also described his own effect on De Quincey: when De Quincey looked at Coleridge, he knew it to be himself by similarity of action.

De Quincey’s most immediate reaction on hearing of Coleridge’s death must surely have been that the poet owed him money. He, who had once helped Coleridge without waiting to be asked, was now reduced to begging. While De Quincey was on the run from creditors, Coleridge’s shirts had been laundered, his dinners cooked, and his health fussed over by devoted friends in a handsome house overlooking Hampstead Heath. However bad things became for Coleridge, there had always been a mattress for him to fall upon. He had enjoyed the patronage of the Wedgwoods, the hospitality of the Morgans, the devotion of the Gillmans. As Coleridge span around Germany and Malta and the British Isles, his wife and children were warm and comfortable at Greta Hall, being tended to by Southey. De Quincey, equally erudite, equally articulate, equally troubled, had never been supported by anyone, and his own wife and children had been snubbed by his friends.

The month after Coleridge’s death, De Quincey’s eldest son, William – the ‘uncared-for dog’ – was taken ill. First he lost his hearing and then he lost his sight; his eyes protruded and were covered by a ‘film of darkness’. The feverish boy had terrible dreams where, De Quincey believed, ‘the recollection of some family distresses seemed to prey upon his mind’. He died on 25 November 1834. De Quincey believed that William had hydrocephalus, but the surgeons who opened his skull were unable to diagnose the cause of death. He had only just turned eighteen, dying at the same age as the uncle he was named after. A scholar of Greek and a lover of books, William was the child who most resembled his father. ‘Upon him,’ De Quincey said, ‘I had exhausted all that care and hourly companionship could do to the culture of an intellect.’ He considered publishing his son’s commentary on Suetonius but his ‘heart retreated under the hopelessness’ of the scheme. All said and done, William’s accomplishments were no greater than those of young men ‘of every generation for the last two centuries’, who have had ‘their names murmured over’ before sinking ‘into everlasting silence and forgetfulness’.

Instead, De Quincey threw himself into work: ‘I believe that in the course of any one month since that unhappy day I have put forth more effort in the way of thought, of research, and of composition, than in any five months together selected from my previous life. Thus at least (if no other good end has been attained) I have been able to instruct my surviving children in the knowledge that grief may be supported.’ One month before the death of William De Quincey, William Blackwood had also died, and the following year the death of James Hogg would bring to an end the golden age of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’.

De Quincey’s essays on Coleridge, which ran from September 1834 until January 1835, might have diverted from the theme of his Autobiographic Sketches but instead they continue the story, describing how the Opium-Eater went from being a maker to a destroyer of icons. It was here that De Quincey described his evening with Thomas Poole in 1807, where Coleridge was unmasked as a man who presented the ideas of others as his own. Having revealed Poole’s doubts about the originality of Coleridge’s table talk, De Quincey provided his readers with a lengthy list of further ‘borrowings’ from German philosophers that he alone had been able to detect in Coleridge’s works. He was right about Coleridge’s thefts – scholars still grapple with the reasons why an intellect as magnificent as his should lean so extensively on the thoughts of others – but to unmask him in this way was an act of violence on De Quincey’s part, born of utter despair. Having desecrated the church, however, he continued to worship: ‘I will assert finally, that, after having read for thirty years in the same track as Coleridge, – that track in which few of any age will ever follow us, such as German metaphysicians, Latin schoolmen, thaumaturgic Platonists, religious Mystics, – and having thus discovered a large variety of trivial thefts, I do, nevertheless, most heartily believe him to have been as original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man ever as existed; as Archimedes in ancient days, or as Shakespeare in modern.’

Moving from scholarly competitiveness to backstairs gossip, De Quincey suggested that Coleridge had always preferred the company of Dorothy Wordsworth to that of his own wife, Sarah. Dorothy, De Quincey conceded, had ‘no personal charms’ but ‘still, it is a bitter trial to a young married woman to sustain any sort of competition with a female of her own age, for any part of her husband’s regard, or any share of his company’. De Quincey himself, meanwhile, owed ‘no particular civility’ to Mrs Coleridge, who had once ‘insulted. . . a female relative of my own’, a woman vastly her ‘superior’ in ‘courtesy and kindness’. The relative was Margaret. De Quincey rolled relentlessly forward: ‘I am the last person in the world to press harshly or uncandidly against Coleridge, but I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations – for his constitution was strong and excellent – but as a source of luxurious sensations.’ Self-indulgence rather than physical suffering was therefore the cause of Coleridge’s addiction. As for his lectures on the fine arts, his black-lipped performance at the Royal Academy ‘was a poor reflection of jewels once scattered on the highway by himself’.

De Quincey told the truth about Coleridge and in doing so gave us an angel riven by demons, a figure in whom fatal weakness combined with preternatural power. Excepting Hazlitt, no one understood Coleridge’s thought so well as De Quincey, who navigated without difficulty through the mists of the mariner’s mind. In 1825 Hazlitt had published a collection of twenty-five portraits called The Spirit of the Age. Nothing was said, in his sketch of Coleridge, about Hazlitt’s own friendship with the poet, which had turned sour over politics. Instead he gave a brilliant account of his subject’s intellectual development which reached a devastating conclusion: ‘What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in The Courier.’ De Quincey, another mighty heap of hope reduced to hackery and the pursuit of oblivion, trumped Hazlitt by creating a likeness of such vibrancy that other portraits appear pallid by comparison. Coleridge had died a ‘ruin’, De Quincey concluded, but he was nonetheless irreplaceable: ‘Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss. . . Like the sea it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving bell will bring up again.’ De Quincey’s Coleridge is touching, troubled, haunted; he is a man you want to meet and who, for a moment, you feel that you have met.

The responses of Coleridge’s family and friends were various. For Sara Coleridge – to whom De Quincey had betrothed himself when she was a little girl – her father’s mind was ‘too much in the mirror of [De Quincey’s] own’. Refusing to believe that he ‘had any enmity’ towards Coleridge, Sara praised De Quincey for characterising his ‘genius and peculiar mode of discourse with great eloquence and discrimination. . . indeed he often speaks of his kindness of heart’. For her brother, Hartley, De Quincey was ‘an anomaly and a contradiction. . . he steals the aristocratic “de”; he announces for years the most aristocratic tastes, principles and predilections, and then goes and marries the uneducated daughter of a very humble, very coarse, and very poor farmer. He continues to be, in profession and in talk, as violent a Tory and anti-reformer as ever, and yet he writes for Tait. He professed almost an idolatry for Wordsworth and for my father. . . and yet you see how he is treating them!’ Thomas Poole himself complained that De Quincey’s memory ‘must be incorrect’ because he, Poole, had ‘never considered Coleridge a plagiarist’. Southey, erupting in what Carlyle described as ‘Rhadamanthine rage’, denounced De Quincey as ‘one of the greatest scoundrels living’. ‘I have told Hartley Coleridge,’ Southey fumed to Carlyle at a dinner party, ‘that he ought to take a strong cudgel, proceed straight to Edinburgh, and give De Quincey, publicly in the streets there, a sound beating – as a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth.’ De Quincey’s crime, according to Southey, was against hospitality. Wordsworth’s response, expressed to Coleridge’s literary executor, J. H. Green, was that De Quincey was a stalker: ‘It is not to be doubted that [De Quincey] was honoured by Mr C’s confidence, whose company he industriously sought, following him into different parts of England: and how he has abused that confidence, and in certain particulars, perverted the communications made to him, is but too apparent from this obnoxious publication.’

From his mother De Quincey received a scolding for writing ‘in a disreputable magazine on subjects and in spirits afflicting to your real friends’. His lapse of taste, Mrs Quincey assumed, was down to ‘opium delirium’.

De Quincey’s final word on his relationship with Coleridge can be found buried in an essay for Tait’s on ‘Milton v Southey’, which appeared in 1847. ‘Any of us,’ he wrote, ‘would be jealous of his own duplicate; and, if I had a doppelgänger, who went about personating me, copying me, and pirating me, philosopher as I am, I might. . . be so far carried away by jealousy as to attempt the crime of murder upon his carcass. But it would be a sad thing for me to find myself hanged; and for what, I beseech you? for murdering a sham, that was either nobody at all, or oneself repeated once too often.’

The subject of this passage was ostensibly Wordsworth, who had no equal. ‘If you show to Wordsworth a man as great as himself, still that great man will not be much like Wordsworth – the great man will not be Wordsworth’s doppelgänger.’ De Quincey, meanwhile, now had his own American duplicate, a man who went about personating, copying and pirating him. His name was Edgar Allan Poe.

Now resuming his Autobiographic Sketches, De Quincey explained that he had ‘not mentioned, in the “Opium Confessions”, a thousandth part of the sufferings I underwent in London and in Wales. . . Grief does not parade its pangs, nor the anguish of despairing hunger willingly count again its groans or its humiliations.’ His current grief, anguish and despairing hunger were more real and far worse than anything he had known in 1802, but De Quincey would never describe them in his journalism.

He eventually gave up the lease of Dove Cottage in the summer of 1835. The house rendered up for him, he wrote, ‘echoes of joy’, of ‘festal music’ and ‘jubilant laughter’, the ‘innocent mirth of infants’ and the ‘gaiety, not less innocent, of youthful mothers’, but alongside the ‘reverberation of forgotten household happiness’ were the ‘re-echoing records of sighs’. Closing the door of the cottage after his final visit, De Quincey felt ‘the weight of a world’ fall from his shoulders. ‘I now possess my mind,’ he told Tait, ‘heretofore I was under a possession.’

His precious books, papers and letters were taken to Lingstubbs, the Penrith farmhouse in which Margaret had been so unhappy, where they snowed up another set of rooms. Three years later, having despaired of receiving any rent, the landlord of Lingstubbs put them up for sale. De Quincey’s letters to Margaret, and quite possibly his diary from Everton days, were perused by prospective purchasers, and his library was sold.

‘Yet in the lowest deep,’ he would write in his tale ‘The Household Wreck’, ‘there yawns a lower deep.’

The death that year of Uncle Penson filled him with hope: he would surely be remembered in the old man’s will. It was not to be. The £100 annuity he had already been receiving he continued to receive, added to which he inherited his uncle’s clothes, household linen and crockery. Furious, De Quincey lashed out at his mother: ‘Not only has she absorbed 2/3rds of my father’s fortune, but she has intercepted the whole of a second, and almost the whole of a 3rd (my uncle’s). All these it is true come eventually. . . to myself. . . Now if all men had mothers living to ages so excessive and mothers by strange coincidence of accident absorbing one estate after another, who would escape embarrassment?’ For Tait, De Quincey submitted an uncharitable account of his time in Everton in the company of William Roscoe, James Currie and William Shepherd.

His family were back in Holyrood in November 1836 where Margaret caught typhus, commonly known as jail fever. On 7 August 1837, aged forty-one, she died; later that day, De Quincey was sued for the sum of £12 1/ 8½d. Florence, aged ten when she lost her mother, described her father as ‘unhinged’ by sorrow and by ‘the overwhelming thought of being left with a family of such differing ages and needs, and with no female relative at hand to help him’. He had been drinking in Eton when Ann disappeared and taking laudanum in London when Catherine Wordsworth died: De Quincey was at least with his wife when her life ended in the debtors’ sanctuary, miles away from her Lakeland home.

Margaret De Quincey, like Mary Wordsworth, has come down to us as a phantom wife. De Quincey leaves little sense of her character, but from Florence we have a moving description of her mother’s effect on the few who knew her: ‘Delicate health and family cares made her early withdraw from society, but she seems to have had a powerful fascination for the few friends she admitted to intimacy, from an old charwoman who used to threaten us, as though it were guilt on our part, “Ye’ll ne’er be the gallant woman ye’re mither was”, to a friend who had seen society in all the principal cities of Europe, and who, with no reason for exaggeration, has told us he had never seen a more gracious or a more beautiful lady than our mother.’

Grief, De Quincey wrote in the introduction to his series of ‘Letters from a Modern Author to his Daughters’, cannot be shared. Like opium, it locks us up inside our own citadels. The sole consolation for ‘those who weep in secret for the vanished faces of their household’ is ‘love’.

De Quincey’s love was countered by guilt and Rhadamantine rage, which found expression in his now open hatred of Wordsworth. In a letter to Tait, he described how, twenty-five years ago, his voice had ‘trembled with anger’ toward this man ‘because he could not see the loveliness of a fair face now laid low in the dust’. Wordsworth had been ‘indifferent’ to ‘an angelic sweetness in that face and an innocence as if fresh from Paradise which struck my own eyes with awe as well as love. I may say that I perfectly hated him for his blindness.’ He might have been talking about little Catherine Wordsworth, whose beauty he also accused Wordsworth of having been blind to: De Quincey’s dead loved ones all blend into one angelic form. Margaret’s life had been hard, but not because Wordsworth was blind to the loveliness of her face. Whether or not she took tea with Mary Wordsworth will have been of less concern to Margaret than whether her children had enough to eat, but De Quincey fixated on the idea that his wife’s suffering was due to social exclusion. The contrast between Wordsworth’s treatment of the abandoned Margaret in The Excursion and his treatment of her soul sister, Margaret De Quincey, was too much for De Quincey to bear. He now idealised his married life, seeing it as a lost Eden. He forgot that Dorothy had been kind to Margaret in her hour of need, and that Wordsworth had called on at least two occasions and been refused entry. All De Quincey remembered was that his wife had been cut and that he, who had shared in the Wordsworths’ own family sorrows, received no consolation from Rydal Mount following the wreckage of his own household.

De Quincey was now on the run from Holyrood, where he owed rent to Miss Craig and Miss Miller, and from his filial responsibilities, ‘a burden which I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off’. His eldest surviving child, eighteen-year-old Margaret Thomasina, took over the care of her siblings while her father hid in the second-floor apartment of 42 Lothian Street, the home of a Frances Wilson and her sister, Miss Stark. The building contained six similar apartments, accessible by a common staircase. From now on, the city of Edinburgh became De Quincey’s sanctuary from the abbey. He was blessed in his new abode; Lothian Street was in a seedy part of the Old Town, composed of dwelling houses and worn-out shops, but Mrs Wilson and Miss Stark were cultivated and kind, and they treated their bereaved tenant with maternal tenderness. Left alone to write until six o’clock, De Quincey enjoyed ‘insulated’ evenings where, in ‘the soft splendour’ of lamplight, he sat in the company of his landladies. His month here was described by him as the happiest he had ‘known in a long, long time’. For Florence, left behind in the Holyrood ‘hole’, her father had ‘deserted’ his family, escaping ‘for his own enjoyment’. His whereabouts was eventually discovered by a former washerwoman at the abbey who ‘pursued’ De Quincey’s son Fred through the streets. De Quincey did not reveal his next address to his children, ‘for they have too little presence of mind and too little discretion’.

He found solace in blame, but also in writing. From his Lothian Street hideaway he poured his complex of emotions into ‘The Household Wreck’, which was published by Blackwood’s in January 1838. The hero of the story, whose name we are not given, has a tall and ‘dovelike’ wife called Agnes who hails from the mountains. Described, using Wordsworth’s phrase, as ‘A perfect woman, nobly planned,/ To warn, to comfort, to command’, Agnes is seventeen when they marry and the couple move to a town many miles from her home. They are as happy as Adam and Eve, and the husband, who owes ‘no man a shilling’, reads to his wife from Paradise Lost. But beneath their joy is unrest: he has ‘never ridded myself of an overmastering and brooding sense, shadowy and vague, a dim abiding feeling. . . of some great calamity travelling towards me. . . perhaps even at a great distance, but already dating from some secret hour – already in motion upon some remote line of approach’. He describes this calamity as ‘the juggernaut of social life’, a thing which ‘pauses not for a moment to spare, to pity, to look aside, but rushes forward for ever’. This juggernaut careered into their lives on a spring day when Agnes went into town to do some errands. In an hour, it ‘accomplished the work of years’.

Waiting for Agnes to return home, her husband becomes increasingly anxious. Hours pass by until ‘suddenly a sound, a step: it was the sound of the garden gate opening, followed by a hasty tread. Whose tread? Not for a moment could it be fancied the dread step which belonged to that daughter of the hills – my wife, my Agnes. No; it was the dull, massy tread of a man; and immediately there came a blow upon the door, and in the next moment, the bell having been found, a furious peal of ringing. . . Who will go to the door? I whispered audibly. Who is at the door?’

It is a policeman with the news that Agnes has been accused of stealing lace in a haberdashery. She is thrown into a Piranesian jail, ‘vast, ancient, in parts ruinous’, where debtors and criminals live cheek by jowl, and whose population is further swollen by the presence of the debtors’ families. While she awaits trial, her husband contracts typhus from the mobs around the prison gates and sinks into a fever. During his two months of delirium their son dies of the same fever and his wife’s fame grows to the point where all the world is talking of her case.

Did Agnes steal the lace? Theft, her husband reflects, is a crime of the lower classes which reflects badly on the man who should be the family’s provider. Nonetheless he finds himself doubting her innocence. ‘She is, or she is not, guilty,’ he tells himself, ‘there is no middle case.’ The court finds her guilty and sentences her to ten years hard labour, but her then husband learns that Agnes was set up by a villain called Barratt whose sexual advances she had rejected. ‘Wrath, wrath immeasurable, unimaginable, unmitigable’ now burns at his heart ‘like a cancer’. Aided by an under-jailer called Ratcliffe, he helps his wife to escape but she dies soon afterwards. Barratt then confesses his crime and is lynched by the mob. ‘My revenge,’ says the hero, ‘was perfect.’

‘The Household Wreck’ is a tale of terror whose strength lies in the husband’s half-conscious sense that it is he and not Agnes or Barratt who is the guilty party: the cause of his wife’s suffering and death. In Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey would describe how as a child ‘the crime which might have been was in my mind the crime which had been’ and the vertiginous possibilities of this scenario are dramatised here. Wanting to tell a tale of grief, he describes instead only impotence and rage; rather than protect his wife, his narrator wallows in self-pity: ‘misery has a privilege,’ he says, ‘and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing’. He battles with the past ‘as though it were a future thing and capable of change’. As in a dream, ‘The Household Wreck’ refigured the elements of De Quincey’s waking life: Agnes is found guilty of the crime De Quincey had accused Coleridge of committing; when his wife needs him, her husband is absent, coming ham-fisted to her rescue only when it is too late. The presence of a man called Ratcliffe is a reference to the other household wrecks by which De Quincey was haunted.

Hamlet-like, the hero of ‘The Household Wreck’ is an avenger unable to act. De Quincey now wrote another tale for Blackwood’s on the same theme, which he called ‘The Avenger’. Here the hero, Maximilian Wyndham, returns to his native Germany from fighting at Waterloo. A series of vicious murders takes place in the city where he lives, one of the victims being Maximilian’s own young wife, who is called Margaret. In each case the murderer enters the house of the victim and slaughters its occupants. With a killer at large, the fear of the locals is compared to ‘that which sometimes takes possession of the mind in dreams – when one feels one’s-self sleeping alone, utterly divided from all call or hearing of friends, doors open that should be shut, or unlocked that should be triply secured, the very walls gone, barriers swallowed up by unknown abysses, nothing around one but rail curtains, and a world of illimitable night, whisperings at a distance, correspondence going on between darkness and darkness, like one deep calling to another. . .’

Thus De Quincey brings the terror inward, turning it into an opium trance. The murderer is revealed to be Maximilian himself, avenging the slaughter of his Jewish family, carried out by the same dignitaries many years earlier. As in ‘The Household Wreck’, the city has two faces; what seems to its other inhabitants to be a ‘perfectly average’ place is experienced by Maximilian as ‘a place of dungeons, tortures and tribunals of tyrants’.

While their father made himself invisible, De Quincey’s children delivered his messages and manuscripts. They were instructed to be light on their feet but on ‘three separate times’, he complained to Tait in April 1838, ‘in three separate lodgings, I had been traced by the emissaries of my creditors; and always through the carelessness of my children, who suffered themselves to be followed unconsciously’. His winged offspring became a familiar sight: one bookseller recalled how ‘Mr De Quincey’s young, fair-haired English laddies’ came on their father’s behalf to ask for loans, and his copy was delivered to Tait by a daughter who would throw the package into the room and shout ‘There!’ before rushing off.

What can it have been like to have De Quincey as a father? Florence, on whom ‘the main burden fell’, left a vivid description. Running his errands, she got to know the ‘north and south banks of the Canongate, George the Fourth Bridge, the cross causeway &c as hideous dreams, my heart rushing into my mouth with the natural terrors of footsteps approaching and rushing down again into my shoes when left to quiet and the ghosts’. The fear he had of his children being followed was, Florence felt, a source of pleasure to De Quincey. ‘It was an accepted fact among us that he was able when saturated with opium to persuade himself and delighted to persuade himself (the excitement of terror was a real delight to him) that he was dogged by dark and mysterious foes.’ This way her father absolved himself of guilt for absconding from Holyrood, a ‘home without any competent head where truly no home should have been, and where as truly he could by no possibility have done any work had he remained’.

As far as De Quincey’s children were concerned, there was no ‘reality’ to his ‘groanings unutterable about creditors and enemies’. We know from the records that there was a great deal of reality to these groanings, but Florence’s sense of things reminds us that, for those who knew him, De Quincey lived in a paranoid world of his own construction. This same love of ‘concealment and lurking enemies’, she believed, explained why her father would allow no help in arranging his financial affairs. Some of De Quincey’s friends ‘gave up under the impression things were too bad to be meddled with, others that there was nothing to be arranged, others – which was the truth – that he didn’t like to have them arranged as it disturbed the prevailing mystery in which he delighted’.

Throughout these years, Wilson’s life had been running alongside De Quincey’s on parallel tracks. In the year that Margaret died, Wilson lost his own wife, after which he left Edinburgh, and from now on he and De Quincey saw one another only sporadically. For Florence, their friendship was ‘an illustration of Coleridge’s, “Alas, they had been friends in youth”, each indebted to the other at critical periods of their improvident lives for kindly help, perhaps not admitted as generously as they might have been by Professor Wilson when he was the successful man’.

The January 1839 edition of Tait’s opened with an essay called ‘Lake Reminiscences, from 1807–1830, By the English Opium-Eater, No 1 – William Wordsworth’. Building on the success of his portrait of Coleridge, De Quincey now promised to provide his readers with ‘sketches of the daily life and habits’ of the whole Wordsworth circle. What followed would cross-pollinate biography with gossip, literary criticism and local history, but it was as autobiography that De Quincey saw his ‘Lake Reminiscences’, which he later grouped together in his collected work under the title Autobiographic Sketches with Recollections of the Lakes. A black comedy about a Messiah who rejects his disciple, the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ might be seen as a parodic inversion of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

It was now that De Quincey, the avenger, described the deep, deep magnet of William Wordsworth, his longing to meet the poet, his delay of four and a half years, his first sighting of Dove Cottage, the day on which he saw his hero descending down the garden path and the night that followed, ‘the first of my personal intercourse with Wordsworth’, which was also ‘the first in which I saw him face to face’. ‘In 1807 it was,’ De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’ began, ‘at the beginning of Winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth.’

Autobiographic Sketches had borrowed The Prelude’s narrative frame, but in ‘Lake Reminiscences’ De Quincey used his first-hand knowledge of the poem to prove his intimacy with the poet. Despite Wordsworth’s current ‘slovenly’ appearance, wrote De Quincey, he had ‘assumed the beau’ at Cambridge, donning silk stockings and powdering his hair, and the first time he got ‘bouzy’ was when he visited the Christ College rooms which had once been occupied by Milton. Wordsworth’s own college rooms, De Quincey revealed, had been above the kitchen, where from ‘noon to dewy eve, resounded the shrill voice of scolding from the female ministers of the head cook’. These Boswellian details, presented as the fruits of private conversations, were gleaned from ‘Residence at Cambridge’, Book Third of the unpublished Prelude.

De Quincey’s moment of glory was yet to come. ‘And here I may mention,’ he revealed to the readers of Tait’s, ‘I hope without any breach of confidence, that, in a great philosophic poem of Wordsworth’s, which is still in M.S., and will remain in M.S. until after his death, there is, at the opening of one of the books, a dream, which reaches the very ne plus ultra of sublimity.’ He was referring to the dream of the Arab in Book Fifth. In De Quincey’s account of these lines the poet, reading Don Quixote by the sea, falls asleep and dreams that coming towards him across the sands is an Arab on a dromedary. In his hands are two books. One is Euclid’s Elements and the other ‘is a book and yet not a book, seeming, in fact, a shell as well as a book, sometimes neither, and yet both at once’. Applying the shell to his ear, the dreamer hears a prophecy that the world will be destroyed by flood. The Arab is on a ‘divine mission’ to bury the books and thus save ‘two great interests of poetry and mathematics from sharing in the watery ruin’. Thus he continues on his way, ‘with the fleet of waters of the drowning world in chase of him’.

De Quincey’s readers will have found in his various writings versions of Wordsworth’s dream before. The Malay who appeared at Dove Cottage was another Arab dream, while in the London Magazine De Quincey had recalled Walking Stewart advising him to bury his most precious books ‘seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth’. De Quincey doubted that his betrayal of Wordsworth’s trust, which today would land him in court, could ‘in any way affect Mr Wordsworth’s interests’, but few things could be more irritating to the poet than to discover that the contents of his yet unpublished masterpiece had been stolen from him and spilled out in a piece of popular journalism.

The first of the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ ended with a cliffhanger: ‘I acknowledge myself,’ De Quincey revealed, ‘to have been long alienated from Wordsworth. Sometimes even I feel a rising emotion of hostility – nay, something, I fear, too nearly akin to vindictive hatred.’ His great ‘fountain of love’ for the poet and ‘all his household’ had dried up, and he found himself ‘standing aloof, gloomily granting (because I cannot refuse) my intellectual homage’. On whose side did the fault lie? On Wordsworth’s, ‘in doing too little’, or on De Quincey’s ‘in expecting too much’? Both were to blame, De Quincey suspected. He then announced that for the next instalment he would ‘trace, in brief outline, the chief incidents in the life of William Wordsworth’: few biographies have begun in such a manner.

De Quincey was not, like Hazlitt, a great hater. In his essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, Hazlitt argued that ‘Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.’ But had De Quincey felt hatred alone towards Wordsworth he could never have described his colossal ego with such clarity, nor could he have explored so well the impact of colliding with such a thing. His subject in the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ is not vindictive hatred but disappointed love. In one passage he described:

The case of a man who, for many years, has connected himself closely with the domestic griefs and joys of another, over and above his primary service of giving to him the strength and the encouragement of a profound literary sympathy, at a time of universal scowling from the world; suppose this man to fall into a situation in which, from want of natural connections and from his state of insulation in life, it might be most important to his feelings that some support should be lent to him by a family having a known place and acceptance, and what may be called a root in the country, by means of connections, descent, and long settlement. To look for this, might be a most humble demand on the part of one who had testified his devotion in the way supposed. To miss it might – but enough. I murmur not; complaint is weak at all times; and the hour is passed irrevocably, and by many a year, in which an act of friendship so natural, and costing so little, (in both senses so priceless,) could have been availing.

Wordsworth has never been granted the same biographical immediacy as Coleridge, and without De Quincey he would have remained for us a distant figure in a black coat. The comic details in the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ allow him that vital extra dimension: Wordsworth, De Quincey revealed, had not been an amiable child, and nor did he make a performance of gallantry around women: ‘a lover. . . in any passionate sense of the word, Wordsworth could not have been’. There are memorable portraits of him slicing through the uncut pages of De Quincey’s new copy of Burke with a buttery knife, beating down the rent of Allan Bank when the chimneys smoked, and growing prosperous on the back of benefactors, patrons, legacies and bequests. Any need for money, De Quincey noted, was met by a convenient death; when Wordsworth’s family began to increase, a wealthy uncle, feeling ‘how very indelicate it would look for him to stay any longer’, promptly departed this world. Those standing in Wordsworth’s way politely ‘moved off’, for fear of being bumped off. Wordsworth’s business sense was immaculate: ‘Whilst foolish people supposed him a mere honeyed sentimentalist, speaking only in zephyrs and bucolics, he was in fact a somewhat hard pursuer of what he thought fair advantages.’ Hazlitt’s sketch of the poet in The Spirit of the Age described, without De Quincey’s personal animosity, the same chill arrogance (‘He admits of nothing below, scarcely of anything above, himself’), the same dismissal of other writers (‘He condemns all French writers. . . in the lump’), and the same disengagement with the world beyond nature (‘If a greater number of sources of pleasure had been open to him, he would have communicated pleasure to the world more frequently’). Hazlitt was indifferent to Wordsworth’s indifference towards him; his mastery lay in evaluating the poet’s character as though it were lines of verse. De Quincey’s own mastery lies in the vulnerability of his anecdotes, the friction between biographer and subject, the focus on himself as the receiving consciousness. For all his Greek, he was a born journalist. ‘The truth and life of these Lake Sketches,’ gasped Mary Russell Mitford when she put down her copy of Tait’s, ‘is wonderful.’

We are also indebted to De Quincey for the best portrait of Dorothy that we have. ‘A happier life, by far, was hers in youth,’ he rightly said, comparing the woman whose dawn had ‘fleeted away like some golden age’ to ‘the Ruth of her brother’s creation’. The man to whom Ruth had ‘dedicated her days’ had abandoned her, and De Quincey implies that Wordsworth did the same. ‘Miss Wordsworth suffered not much less than Coleridge,’ De Quincey boldly declared.

He was able to reveal a good deal about the Wordsworths, but there was a good deal De Quincey did not know. He was unaware of Wordsworth’s French mistress, Annette Vallon, and his illegitimate daughter, Caroline; he knew nothing of Coleridge’s love for Sara Hutchinson; he believed – wrongly – that Dorothy had spent much of her childhood with the royal family in Windsor Castle. He depicted himself as both inside and outside the magic circle: at one point he called himself Wordsworth’s ‘sole visiting friend’ in the tight community of the vale, and at another he described the surfacing of a memory which brought with it a ‘pang of wrath’: walking with Wordsworth and Southey, the subject of Charles Lloyd, then seriously ill, had arisen. Wordsworth said something which De Quincey did not hear; when asked to repeat his comment, Wordsworth replied that ‘in fact, what he had said was a matter of some delicacy, and not quite proper to be communicated except to near friends of the family. This to me! – O ye gods – to me. . .’

It is easy to imagine De Quincey alone in his Lake adventures, but he is accompanied throughout by a huge yellow-haired man who shares his every experience and mirrors his every attitude. Whether they were travelling together, sharing a room, or sharing a bed, De Quincey and Professor Wilson would fall into ‘a confidential interchange of opinions upon a family in which we had both so common and so profound an interest’. ‘Let me render justice to Professor Wilson as well as myself,’ De Quincey writes after describing Wordsworth’s ingratitude: ‘not for a moment, not by a solitary movement of reluctance or demur, did either of us hang back in giving the public acclamation which we, by so many years, had anticipated. . .’ ‘I shall acknowledge then on my own part,’ De Quincey says elsewhere, ‘and I feel that I might even make the same acknowledgement on the part of Professor Wilson,’ that while they both treated Wordsworth ‘with a blind loyalty of homage’ which had ‘something of the spirit of martyrdom’, to ‘neither’ has he repaid such ‘friendship and kindness’. Of the poet’s marriage, ‘to us who. . . were Wordsworth’s friends, or at least intimate acquaintances – viz., to Professor Wilson and myself – the most interesting circumstance. . . the one which perplexed us exceedingly, was the very possibility that it should ever have been brought to bear’. Of Dorothy: ‘All of us loved her, by which us I mean especially Professor Wilson and myself. . .’ It is with a tribute to the poet’s sister that the essays on Wordsworth end: ‘Farewell, impassioned Dorothy! I have not seen you for many a day – shall never see you again, perhaps; but shall attend your steps with tender thoughts, so long as I hear of you living: so will Professor Wilson.’

Wordsworth would claim not to have read De Quincey’s recollections of him in Tait’s, which ran between January and August 1839, and he was probably telling the truth. His response to their appearance was to state that De Quincey had forced himself upon the family from the start: ‘My acquaintance with him,’ said Wordsworth, flicking away an afternoon fly, ‘was the result of a letter of his own volunteered to me.’

On a Sunday evening in the late summer of 1839, De Quincey called at the home of one of his creditors, a solicitor called McIndoe who lived at 113 Princes Street. Two of De Quincey’s sons had lodged here from February to May that year, and he still owed the McIndoes rent. While Mrs McIndoe repaired their guest’s torn coat, the men talked. By twelve o’clock the coat was not yet mended; it was too late to ‘leap the boundary’ of sanctuary and so De Quincey was given a bed for the night in a chamber next to the dining room.

The following month he was still there. Mrs McIndoe now sued him for the unpaid rent and De Quincey bolted back to Holyrood, where Miss Miller was also in pursuit of payments. Ricocheting between irate landladies, De Quincey returned to Princes Street with his hoards of books, letters and manuscripts – including ‘about 8 separate works’ by Giordano Bruno, bought back in 1809, and ‘one or two’ other books, ‘equally rare’ – where he stayed for the next three years. During this time he developed a horror of the McIndoes, whom he regarded as his jailers. The McIndoes felt equally trapped by De Quincey. Were he to have sold his editions of Bruno, De Quincey would have been a free man, but he would not part with them for ‘a thousand guineas’.

While he described himself as ‘persecuted’ by McIndoe’s ‘hostile attitude’ and his ‘violent attempts’ at ‘ejection’, McIndoe hung on De Quincey’s promises of payment. So bitter were relations in the Princes Street household that at various points the two parties communicated only by letter, and in the third person. ‘Mr McIndoe. . . requests that Mr De Quincey shall remove tonight for he is resolved that no further communication shall take place between them on this subject and that before 10 o’clock, so as to prevent any unnecessary steps being taken,’ wrote McIndoe, pushing the missive beneath De Quincey’s door. McIndoe’s object, De Quincey explained in desperation to Blackwood’s son, Robert, who was now editing Maga, was to ‘possess himself of my papers, and hold those as a means of extracting money ad libitum’. It was stalemate. ‘If I am to go away at this moment,’ argued De Quincey, ‘I should draw upon myself a sort of legal persecution which at present would be ruinous. I wish to stay a month longer.’ And if McIndoe put him to the horn, De Quincey would simply bounce back into and out of sanctuary. De Quincey saw himself not as a betrayer of trust but as a victim of extortion: McIndoe received whatever money his tenant earned, often directly from Blackwood himself, but he always demanded more. ‘I spend months after months in literary labour,’ De Quincey told Blackwood in despair:

I endure the extremity of personal privations; some of which it would be humiliating to describe; (but by way of illustration I may mention – that having in a moment of pinching difficulty for my children about 10 months since pawned every article of my dress which could produce a shilling. I have since that time had no stockings, no shoes, no neck-handkerchief, coat, waist-coat, or hat. I have sat constantly barefoot; and being constitutionally or from the use of opium unusually sensible of cold, I should really have been unable to sit up and write but for a counterpane which I wrap round my shoulders).

Blackwood, ‘pained beyond measure’ by this letter, sent De Quincey £4.

The McIndoes, on their own downward slope, were also pawning their belongings: ‘I suppose that a more absolute wreck of decent prosperity never can have been exemplified,’ De Quincey grandly observed of the couple. ‘If I give him nothing, he will immediately take occasion to write me a violent letter full of abuse. He will insist on my leaving his house. No matter what rights I may afterwards establish in law, he will obtain his immediate object of retaining my Papers – now a vast body, far above portability.’ Back in Holyrood, Miss Miller – ‘for vindictive purposes’ – held out the same threat.

Tracing the growth of one of his debts as it is recorded in Miss Miller’s passbook, which contains records of De Quincey’s accounts between 3 May 1836 and 14 August 1840, Horace Eaton, the best of his biographers on the business of money, allows us to watch a seed sprout into Jack’s beanstalk:

Beginning with the small sum of £2 3s., small considering that De Quincey had apparently been living under her roof for two years, the amounts owed varied from month to month. It was increased by charges for milk and vegetables, by small loans, by the use of Miss Miller’s credit with grocers when De Quincey’s credit was nil. It reached £33 in April 1837, in spite of occasional payments; falling to £12 in May, rising through 1838 and 1839, until when the rooms were finally surrendered, it reached the not inconsiderable sum of £175 4s. 2d. This debt troubled De Quincey until his death and was finally settled by his executor.

To get a sense of the scale of De Quincey’s difficulties, we must imagine acre upon acre of similar saplings.

‘Caught and chained’ by his papers, De Quincey dared not leave his room. The scene is reminiscent of his childhood in Greenhay, when he had been placed under arrest by his brother William (‘Who could put you under arrest?’ he had then imagined his guardian saying; ‘A child like you?’) A relative of the McIndoes, visiting their house as a girl, remembered with awe the closed door behind which the mysterious tenant sat writing. ‘The last body who went into that room,’ the servants teased, ‘was put up the lum [chimney] and never came out.’ De Quincey’s door creaked open only to receive his meals which, because his teeth were mostly gone, consisted of tea, coffee, sops of bread and tender slivers of mutton. Fascinated, the girl once managed to peep inside the room and see the famous ocean of paper. Meanwhile, Mrs McIndoe, whom De Quincey suspected of ‘tampering with locks, listening, eaves dropping’, shook any letters that arrived for him in case they contained money. One of these was from Branwell Brontë: affected by Confessions and himself now an opium-eater, Brontë sent De Quincey a poem and some translations of his own. The previous year Branwell had made the pilgrimage to Grasmere where he knocked on the door of Hartley Coleridge, the present incumbent of The Nab. Too preoccupied to take much notice of his young acolyte, De Quincey did not reply.

It was while he was imprisoned by the McIndoes that De Quincey returned to the subject of household murder. His ‘Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, composed as a letter from XYZ to Christopher North, appeared in Blackwood’s in November 1839, at the same time as Tait’s was running De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’. For those subscribing to both journals, the murder story and the Wordsworth story could be read alongside one another.

‘A good many years ago,’ XYZ began, ‘you may remember that I came forward in the character of a dilettante in murder.’ Few readers will have remembered De Quincey’s first murder essay, written twelve years before. Fewer still will have remembered the Ratcliffe Highway murders to which he once again referred. XYZ reveals that he has a ‘horribly ambitious’ nephew who fancies himself ‘a man of cultivated taste in most branches of murder’; the boy’s ideas on the subject, says his uncle, are all ‘stolen from me’. Not all murders, XYZ goes on to explain, are in ‘good taste’; like statues, paintings and ‘epic poems’, they each ‘have their little differences and shades of merit’. A career as a murderer is a downward path, ‘for if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination’.

One of the connoisseurs, known from his misanthropical disposition as ‘Toad-in-the-hole’, despairs of modern murder: ‘Even dogs are not what they were, sir – not what they should be. I remember in my grandfather’s time that some dogs had an idea of murder. . . but now. . .’ Holding the French Revolution responsible for the degeneration in his art, Toad-in-the-hole retires from society in 1811. It is widely assumed he has hanged himself, but one morning in 1812 he is seen cleanly shaved and gaily attired, ‘brushing with hasty steps the dews away to meet the postman’. The cause of his jollity is ‘the great exterminating chef-d’oeuvre of Williams at Mr Marr’s, No 29 Ratcliffe Highway’. What took place twelve nights later, at Mr Williamson’s, was by ‘some people pronounced even superior’, but Toad-in-the-hole demurs. ‘One, perhaps, might suggest the Iliad – the other the Odyssey: what do you get by such comparisons?’ In celebration of Williams’s achievement, a splendid dinner is given by the society to which all the connoisseurs are invited. Toasts are drunk to ‘the sublime epoch of Burkism and Harism’, to ‘Thugs and Thuggism’, to the Syrian assassins, and the Jewish Sicarii.

Jaded and depressed, De Quincey was recycling earlier work: returning to the paper turned down by Blackwood in 1828, he re-hashed his joke about murder being the tip of the moral iceberg. In the rejected paper, Williams had been described by a Frenchman as a ‘plagiarist’; here it is the nephew of XYZ who steals his uncle’s ideas.

But if ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ had been an imitation of a Blackwood’s essay, De Quincey’s ‘Second Paper on Murder’ was an imitation of the first. The ‘Second Paper’ was no more than nostalgia: his friendship with John Wilson was exhausted and Christopher North, to whom XYZ’s letter was addressed, belonged to a bygone age. Like Toad-in-the-hole, De Quincey was looking back to his golden years and in publishing the piece, Blackwood’s was doing the same. The jubilation of the connoisseurs following the Thurtell case, described in ‘On Murder’, is repeated in the ‘Second Paper’ as jubilation at the Williams murders. The difference between the two published papers is plain: in ‘On Murder’ the murderer is a poet; in the ‘Second Paper’, the murderer is a plagiarist. No longer a portrait of Wordsworth, the murderer looked more like De Quincey himself, in his motiveless malignity.

Throughout 1840 De Quincey continued to write his ‘Lake Reminiscences’. Having told the story of his first acquaintance with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, he now wrote four essays on the ‘Society of the Lakes’, which appeared in Tait’s between January and August. Here the vale described by Wordsworth as a maternal embrace was unveiled as an assemblage of ‘afflicted households’. Along with De Quincey’s account of Charles Lloyd’s ‘utter overthrow of happiness’ are a litany of other grim Lakeland tales, including the story of a man named Watson who murdered his mother ‘by her own fireside’; a Miss Smith who was saved from falling down a ravine by a figure in white who she assumed to be her sister but discovered was a ghost; and the dream described to De Quincey by a local woman in which ‘a pale and bloodless’ footman ‘appeared to be stealing up a private staircase, with some murderous instruments in his hands, towards a bedroom door’. He told the tale of the Maid of Buttermere, seduced and abandoned by a fraud posing as ‘The Hon. Augustus Hope’, and explained that the mountainous landscape inspired some ‘remarkable suicides’, including that of a ‘studious and meditative young boy, who found no pleasure but in books, and the search after knowledge’. The history which made the greatest impact on De Quincey was that of Sally Green’s parents, who fell down a ravine on Easedale during a storm, leaving in the snow ‘the sad hieroglyphics of their last agonies’. Six children were still living at home; and Sally, their twelve-year-old daughter, was taken on by the Wordsworths – fatally, so De Quincey believed – as a servant.

The ‘Lake Reminiscences’ end with the death of Catherine Wordsworth, whose ‘nature and manners’ contained a ‘witchery’, which made De Quincey ‘blindly, doatingly, in a servile degree, devoted’. The child, he revealed to his readership, ‘in a manner lived with me at my solitary cottage; as often as I could entice her from home, walked with me, slept with me, and was my sole companion’.

De Quincey’s account of his estrangement from Wordsworth appeared not in the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ but as diversion in an essay for Tait’s on ‘Walking Stewart’, which appeared later that year. By attaching himself so unthinkingly to his idol, De Quincey explained, he had ‘committed a great oversight. Men of extraordinary genius and force of mind are far better as objects for distant admiration than as daily companions.’ There were traits of Wordsworth’s character which were ‘painful and mortifying’. A man was entitled to his pride, but ‘something there was, in the occasional expression of this pride, which was difficult to bear’. Wordsworth would allow no one’s opinion but his own; on occasions when others spoke ‘he did not even appear to listen’.

De Quincey was floundering. Refusing to recognise the role played by opium, he pinned the breakdown in relations on the business with Mary Dawson, his ‘selfish housekeeper’ who in 1812 had denied Dorothy access to the cottage during one of De Quincey’s trips to London. How could the Wordsworths have believed these orders came from De Quincey himself? And ‘why . . . upon discovering such forgeries and misrepresentations’ did they not ‘openly and loudly denounce them for what they were?’ Having been falsely accused by the Wordsworths, De Quincey’s innocence was never acknowledged. But then again, he conceded, ‘after the first year or so’ his friendship with Wordsworth had hardly developed anyway. Wordsworth had ‘no cells in his heart for strong individual attachment’, as ‘poor Coleridge’ also realised, whose rupture with his former collaborator was now described by De Quincey in detail and at length. Other reasons were proffered for the waning of his ‘blind and unquestioning veneration’: Wordsworth did not like Mrs Radcliffe’s novels or Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein’, he had not even read Walter Scott. De Quincey might, he concluded, have left Grasmere altogether were it not for Margaret Simpson.

This is the last he says, in any of his writings, about his adult life. De Quincey, whose experiences were always pre-scripted, had no script for what happened next. Having described his London adventures in his Confessions, his childhood and youth in his Autobiographic Sketches, and his early acquaintance with Wordsworth and Coleridge in his ‘Lake Reminiscences’, his tale now comes to a sudden end. It is as if, having reached the top of the stairs, he found himself looking down a void and from this point on he referred to himself in terms only of his dreams and reveries. The reason he says nothing more about the external world is because, from 1813, De Quincey no longer lived there: from now on he inhabited a word-packed world within himself and drowned in rivers of oblivion.

Edinburgh was killing him. In late February 1841, as the sky was beginning to crimson, he packed into a single trunk as many of his papers as would fit, hired a porter to help him with the load, and slipped like a fugitive out of the McIndoes’ house. A free man at last, De Quincey launched himself into the dawn of a new day.

*Referring to this passage of Mary Wilson Gordon’s Memoir of John Wilson, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcroft, ‘I wish I could make you as long a call as De Quincey made North.’