Definitions of words that might be unfamiliar to modern readers may be found in the Glossary.
1. demireps: Women of only partial repute, of doubtful virtue. The colloquialism was current from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth.
2. French literature… sensibility of the French: The foremost implicit reference here is to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (published posthumously in 1781), which unapologetically details the most damning as well as the most flattering details of its author’s life. Even though Rousseau was Swiss, his writings exerted a profound influence upon the leaders of the French Revolution and were a cornerstone of nineteenth-century French sensibility. De Quincey’s sneering dismissal thus ironically contradicts the focus of his own Confessions, whose title even conspicuously echoes Rousseau’s.
3. Humbly to express / A penitential loneliness: Paraphrased from William Wordsworth (1770–1850), ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’: ‘guilt, that humbly would express / A penitential loneliness’ ( 176–7).
4. the accursed chain which fettered me: Although the notion of opiate addiction did not exist in its now familiar form for most of the nineteenth century, the idea of an opium habit was not uncommon (see the Appendix). De Quincey overstates the degree of his triumph, though; he never was able entirely to give up opium, as he woefully relates in both an appendix to the first book edition of the Confessions and ‘Suspiria de Profundis’.
5. one celebrated man: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), poet, critic and philosopher who was already notorious among literati for his tremendous opium habit when the Confessions initially appeared.
De Quincey was a great admirer of Coleridge’s work and became personally acquainted with him in 1807.
6. the eloquent and benevolent… tedious to mention: In his 1856 revision, De Quincey supplied the names, complaining that ‘not through any fault of my own, but on the motion of some absurd coward having a voice potential at the press, all the names were struck out behind my back in the first edition of the book’. The ‘eloquent and benevolent—’ was William Wilberforce (1759–1833), member of Parliament, evangelical philanthropist and campaigner against slavery. ‘The late dean of—’ was Dr Isaac Milner (1750–1820), ‘nominally known to the public as Dean of Carlisle, being colloquially always called Dean Milner; but virtually he was best known in his own circle as the head of Queen’s College, Cambridge, where he usually resided’ (De Quincey’s note). ‘Lord—’ was Thomas, first Lord Erskine (1750–1823), famous legal advocate and Lord Chancellor of England (1806–7). The ‘late under-secretary of state’ was Henry Unwin Addington (1790–1870), permanent under–secretary for foreign affairs and brother of the prime minister (1801–4) and home secretary (1812–21) Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth (1757–1844). ‘Mr—’ was identified as Coleridge (see note 5 above). Of the other shadowy figure De Quincey said, ‘Who is Mr Dash, the philosopher? Really I have forgot.’ Reconstructing the list from the initials in the original manuscript (not full names, despite De Quincey’s claim), Grevel Lindop argues that in fact ‘Mr—, the philosopher’ was Coleridge and that ‘Mr—’ was Charles Lloyd (1775–1839), minor poet and novelist and sometime associate of the Wordsworth circle.
7. with a view to suicide… disputes: The widespread fear that opium was being used in poisonings— accidental or deliberate, for suicidal or homicidal purposes— led to its first regulation in 1868 as one of the Pharmacy Act’s ‘poisons’ (see the Appendix).
8. one, two, or three grains… the evening: This account of working–class opium use in Manchester was treated as gospel in a number of contexts for most of the remainder of the century. Although the reference to the number of grains is typical of De Quincey’s seeming precision regarding quantities, it is (and would have been then) difficult to translate his grains and drops into actual dosages of opiates. Different chemists used different methods and proportions in their preparations, and even different lots of raw opium could vary in the concentrations of their constitutive alkaloids.
9. That those eat now… eat the more: The lines derive ultimately from the refrain in the anonymous Pervigilium Veneris (‘Vigil of Venus’), a popular poem written probably sometime between the second and fourth centuries AD: cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet (literally, ‘may he love tomorrow who has never loved before, and may he who has loved before love tomorrow’). ‘The Vigil of Venus’ by Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) translates the lines thus: ‘Let those love now, who never lov’d before, / Let those who always lov’d, now love the more.’
10. Mead: Dr Richard Mead (1673–1754), a physician at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, whose patients included George I, Queen Anne, Alexander Pope and Isaac Newton. His A Mechanical Account of Poisons (1702) was long respected as authoritative, and it is presumably to this work that Awsiter refers in the passage De Quincey quotes.
11. ϕωνϕντα συνετοϕσι : An ancient Greek commonplace referring to ‘[sayings] that speak to the wise’.
12. the Turks themselves: Popular eighteenth-century travellers’ tales often represented Turks eating opium. In fact, the insistence in De Quincey’s title on ‘English Opium–Eater’ is undoubtedly meant in part to pre-empt the more obvious adjective, ‘Turkish’.
13. ‘whose talk is of oxen’: Misquoted from Ecclesiasticus 38:25: ‘How can he get wisdome that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talke is of bullocks?’
14. Humani nihil a se alienum putat: ‘He deems nothing that is human foreign to him.’
15. David Ricardo: (1772–1823) Former stockjobber and member of Parliament who wrote the influential On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), one of De Quincey’s favourite books, as he details later in the Confessions (see note 149).
16. A third exception: All the succeeding specifics point to William Hazlitt (1778–1830), essayist, painter and disaffected former associate of Coleridge and the Lake circle.
17. of whom indeed I know only one: John Wilson (1785–1854), professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and close friend of De Quincey’s. He later authored the popular Blackwood’s series ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ (‘Ambrosian Nights’), which featured a character called ‘the Opium–Eater’ based on De Quincey.
18. to renew the pleasurable sensations: De Quincey here alludes to the phenomenon now known as ‘tolerance’ (not yet systematically understood by medical professionals at the time), whereby larger quantities of the drug are required with each dose in order to attain the same effects. The onset of opiate tolerance is slower with more widely spaced doses (see the Appendix).
19. one of my masters… a blockhead… a respectable scholar: Respectively, John Morgan, headmaster of Bath Grammar School; the Revd Edward Spencer, Rector of Winkfield in Wiltshire and headmaster of a private school there; Charles Lawson, headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, whose appointment was in the gift of Brasenose College, Oxford.
20. ‘Archididascalus’: ‘Headmaster’.
21. a woman of high rank: Lady Susan Carbery, a De Quincey family friend with whom Thomas enjoyed a strong rapport.
22. a just remark of Dr Johnson’s… when I came to leave—: In the last of his Idler essays (no. 103, 5 April 1760), Samuel Johnson (1709–84) bids a reluctant farewell to his readers, observing that ‘There are few things not purely evil, of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, “this is the last”. Those who never could agree together, shed tears when mutual discontent has determined them to final separation; of a place which has been frequently visited, tho’ without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart.’ The dash is for Manchester Grammar School.
23. the ancient… ‘drest in earliest light’: The ‘ancient towers’ (since reconstructed) were of the fifteenth-century church of St Mary, Manchester, which became a cathedral in 1848. The quotation is from The Revolt of Islam by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822): ‘the summit shone / Like Athos seen from Samothracia, dressed / In earliest light’ (Works of Shelley Including Materials Never Before Printed in Any Edition of the Poems, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), V, xliii). The poem, quoted several times in the Confessions, had been sent to De Quincey to review for Blackwood’s in 1818. Although he did not review the volume, his letter praising the poem prompted John Wilson to write a very favourable notice.
24. ‘pensive citadel’: From the opening lines of an untitled sonnet published in 1807 by Wordsworth: ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; / And hermits are contented with their cells; / And students with their pensive citadels.’
25. a picture of the lovely—: A copy of a Van Dyck portrait of a woman (a seventeenth–century Duchess of Somerset, according to Grevel Lindop), reportedly a benefactress of Manchester Grammar School and of Brasenose College, Oxford.
26. Of Atlantean shoulders… mightiest monarchies: John Milton (1608–74), Paradise Lost, II, 306–7.
27. contretems: Today contretemps, meaning ‘an inconvenience’, ‘a hitch in plans’.
28. the Seven Sleepers: Various versions of the legend of the Seven Sleepers more or less agree that the emperor Decius (AD 249–51), on a campaign of persecution in Ephesus, walled up seven noble young Christians in a cave as they slept there in hiding. During the reign of either Theodosius the Great (379–95) or Theodosius the Younger (408–50), the cave was opened and the seven men awoke believing they had slept for only one night. The incident was regarded as new proof of the resurrection of the body. The men then died praising God and were subsequently canonized.
29. étourderie: ‘A careless mistake’ or ‘absent-mindedness’, ‘heedlessness’.
30. ‘with Providence my guide’: Adapted from the closing lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which describe Adam and Eve leaving Eden:
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
31. a favourite English poet… on other personal accounts: To meet William Wordsworth, the ‘favourite English poet’ whose volume De Quincey carried in his pocket. After several years of friendly correspondence, De Quincey travelled in 1807 to meet the poet at his home in Grasmere in the Lake District.
32. B—: Bangor.
33. ‘Not to know them… unknown’: Adapted from Satan’s speech to the Angels Ithuriel and Zephon in Paradise Lost, IV, 830–1: ‘Not to know mee argues your selves unknown, / The lowest of your throng.’
34. noli me tangere: ‘Touch me not.’
35. οί πολλοί: ‘The masses’.
36. the Bishop of—: Dr William Cleaver (1742–1815), Bishop of Bangor and Master of Brasenose College, Oxford.
37. the Head: Holyhead, which was (and still is) the port for frequent ferries between England and Ireland.
38. Llan-y-styndw (or some such name): Probably Llanystumdwy near the south coast of the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales.
39. prize-money: All members of a British naval ship’s crew received a share of the value of any goods confiscated from conquered enemy vessels during wartime. Over the course of the Napoleonic Wars, many naval officers amassed considerable fortunes by this means as the size of the share increased with rank.
40. Sapphics or Alcaics: Forms of ancient Greek poetry whose names come from their characteristic metres, which are associated, respectively, with the poets Sappho and Alcaeus. Both poets were from the island of Lesbos and flourished in the seventh century BC.
41. Mr Shelley… about old age: De Quincey is referring to Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, II, xxxiii (Works of Shelley, ed. Hutchinson):
…old age, with its gray hair,
And wrinkled legends of unworthy things,
And icy sneers, is….
.…cold and cruel, and is made
The careless slave of that dark Power which brings
Evil, like blight, on man.
42. the plan of Cromwell: In his History of the Rebellion (1702), Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609–74), reports that Oliver Cromwell ‘never had the same serenity of mind he had been used to, after he refused the crown’, but grew ‘much more apprehensive of danger to his person’ and ‘rarely lodged two nights together in one chamber, but had many furnished and prepared’ (XV, 143).
43. the Blue-beard room of the house: In the fairy-tale, Duke Bluebeard gives his new wife free rein of his huge castle except for one room, in which she ultimately discovers the corpses of several previous wives he has murdered.
44. Mr—: In the 1856 revision, De Quincey describes the shady lawyer, here Mr—, as ‘an attorney who called himself, on most days of the week, by the name of Brunell, but occasionally (might it perhaps be on red-letter days?) by the more common name of Brown’. Red-letter days are associated with bills coming due, so De Quincey thus coyly hints at Brunell’s assumption of aliases in order to evade creditors. Brunell also resurfaces in ‘Suspiria de Profundis’.
45. the dismal Tartarus: In Greek mythology, Tartarus was the region below Hades where the Titans were confined. It was reserved for punishment of those who most displeased the gods.
46. ‘cycle and epicycle, orb in orb’: Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, 80–4: foreseeing that God will laugh at humanity’s attempts to explain the universe through intricate models, the angel Raphael predicts
how they will weild
The mightie frame, how build, unbuild, contrive
To save appeerances, how gird the Sphear
With Centric and Eccentric scribl’d o’re,
Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb.
47. as Dr Johnson… could eat: In her Anecdotes of the Late Dr Samuel Johnson, Lld. (1786), Hester Lynch Piozzi reminisces, ‘I have heard him protest that he never had quite as much as he wished of wall–fruit, except once in his life, and that was when we were all together at Ombersley, the seat of my Lord Sandys’ (2 nd ed., p.103).
48. ‘the world was all before us’: De Quincey paraphrases from Paradise Lost: see note 30.
49. in a well–known part of London: In the 1856 revision De Quincey gave the house’s address as 38 Greek Street, Soho.
50. ‘Sine Cerere,’ &c.… more Socratico: Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus: ‘Without bread and wine lust grows cold’; more Socratico: ‘in the Socratic manner’.
51. ‘too deep for tears’: Closing words of Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’.
52. a gentleman of his late Majesty’s household: A courtier of the previous king, George III (1738–1820, reigned 1760–1820); at the time De Quincey wrote the Confessions, George IV (1762–1830, reigned 1820–30) was on the throne.
53. a 10l. Bank-note: De Quincey uses ‘l.’ here as the abbreviation for the Latin libra, meaning ‘pound’. Thus ‘10l.’ is an alternative way of writing ‘£10’.
54. a Jew named D—: In the 1856 revision, De Quincey gives the man’s full name as Dell, and adds, ‘like all the other Jews with whom I have had negotiations, he was frank and honourable in his mode of conducting business. What he promised, he performed; and if his terms were high, as naturally they could not but be, to cover his risks, he avowed them from the first.’
55. Doctor’s Commons… the second son of—: Doctors’ Commons was technically the title given to the common table and dining-hall of the College (i.e., Association) of Doctors of Civil Law in London. But in popular parlance, the name referred more generally to the site and buildings occupied by that association from 1565 to 1858, when the labyrinthine complex was demolished to make way for Queen Victoria Street and the Underground’s District Line. Located just south of St Paul’s Cathedral, Doctors’ Commons housed several courts, one of which handled testamentary affairs. Thus wills were filed there and available for public examination.— was Thomas Quincey, whose second son was De Quincey himself.
56. materialiter… formaliter: ‘Materially… formally’.
57. the Earl of —… the Marquis of—… counties of M— and Sl—: The Earl of Altamont was a schoolfellow and boyhood friend of De Quincey’s at Bath. His father, the Marquess of Sligo, had extensive land holdings, in the Irish counties of Mayo and Sligo.
58. Sherrard-street: Now Gerrard Street in Soho.
59. the Gloucester Coffee–house: A regular stop for westbound mail-coaches from London.
60. a Roman poet: Juvenal (first-second century AD). The passage in question appears in his Satires, X, 23: ‘when broke, the traveller will whistle in the robber’s face’.
61. Lord of my learning and no land beside… Lord—: The quotation is possibly adapted from Shakespeare’s King John: amidst a dispute over whether ‘Philip the Bastard’ is the legitimate son of the wealthy Faulconbridge or the bastard of Richard Coeur de Lion, Queen Elinor asks him (I, i, 134–7):
Whether hadst thou rather be a Faulconbridge,
And like thy brother, to enjoy thy land,
Or the reputed son of Cordelion,
Lord of thy presence and no land beside?
However, the phrase is more similar in sentiment, if not quite as similar in wording, to the penultimate line of ‘Character of a Happy Life’ by Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639), the final stanza of which reads:
This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not of Lands;
And having nothing: yet hath all.
‘Lord—’ in the next line is again Lord Altamont (see note 57).
62. To slacken virtue… merit praise: Slightly altered (or misremembered) from Milton, Paradise Regained, II, 455–6 (which has ‘prompt’ instead of ‘tempt’).
63. Pote’s: A well-known bookseller in Eton High Street.
64. the University of—. ‘Ibi omnis effusus labor!’: The university is Cambridge. The quotation is from Virgil, Georgics, IV, 491–2: ‘Then all his work was for nothing!’
65. the Earlof D—: Thesecond Earlof Desart, Lord Altamont’s cousin.
66. he was himself… an author: De Quincey’s father, Thomas Quincey, anonymously published a travel memoir in 1775, A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England; Performed in the Summer of 1772. Together With an Account of a Similar Excursion, Undertaken September 1774.
67. those of Lady M. W. Montague: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was a famous wit, poet and cosmopolitan. Her letters written from Turkey while her husband was ambassador there were published in 1763 and remained popular for several generations.
68. ‘good man’s table’: Probably misquoted for ‘good man’s feast’, from Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, vii, 115. The desperate Orlando enters Duke Senior’s dining hall with sword drawn. Surprised and moved to find that the Duke offers him food anyway, he says:
If ever you have look’d on better days,
If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church,
If ever sat at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear,
And know what’tis to pity and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be;
In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword. (113–19)
69. the story about Otway: In his Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson recounts an apocryphal tale of the death of the playwright Thomas Otway (1651–85): ‘He went out, as is reported, almost naked, in the rage of hunger, and finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffeehouse, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choked with the first mouthful.’
70. an address to—— in——shire: St John’s Priory, Cheshire.
71. begun: Part I of the Confessions ended here with a note from the London Magazine’s editor promising that ‘The remainder of this very interesting Article will be given in the next Number.’
72. ‘the road to the North… fly for comfort’… in that very house: The road to the north leads to Grasmere in the Lake District. Then follows a paraphrase of Psalms 55:6: ‘O that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest!’ Wordsworth was living at that time in the cottage at Town End (that very house), later known as Dove Cottage. De Quincey took up residence there in 1809, the Wordsworths having moved across Grasmere to Allan Bank, and maintained his tenancy until 1835, though he did not actually live there after 1820.
73. haunted the couch of an Orestes: Throughout the following pages, De Quincey refers repeatedly to the story of Orestes, best known from the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays (Agamemnon, The Libation–Bearers, Eumenides) by Aeschylus (c. 525–c. 456 BC), tragedian of Athens’ Golden Age. Orestes is caught in an unresolvable cycle of vengeance.
His father, Agamemnon, sacrificed Orestes’ sister Iphigenia at the behest of the gods; his mother, Clytemnestra, avenged that death by killing Agamemnon; and Orestes in turn avenged his father by killing his mother. Orestes is tormented day and night by the hideous avenging Furies, and his sole comfort through it all is the support of his sister Electra. De Quincey thus represents himself as alienated, perpetually tortured and with only one ally, his wife Margaret.
74. φίλον ΰπνου θέλγητϕον έπίχουϕον νόσου: ‘[O] sweet charm of sleep, helper in times of sickness’ (Euripides, Orestes, 211).
75. ‘sleep no more’: Macbeth, II, ii, 32. Wordsworth also used the phrase powerfully in describing his state of mind during the Terror in France in The Prelude (1850), X, 87. The passage also appears in the 1805 draft of the poem, which De Quincey probably heard or read when it was in manuscript.
76. thou art sitting… that very house: De Quincey wrote most of the Confessions while hiding from creditors in various lodgings around London. His dismal finances had kept him for months from returning to Grasmere, where his wife Margaret was still living in Dove Cottage (see note 72).
77. ήδϕ δούλευμα: ‘Sweet service’ (Euripides, Orestes, 221).
78. ϕναξ άνδϕν’ Αγαμνέμνων: ‘Agamemnon, King of Men’, an epithet used frequently by Homer in his Iliad.
79. ϕμμα θεϕσ’ εΐσω πέπλων: A slight misquotation of ϰϱϕτα θεϕσ’ ϕσω πέπλων, ‘putting her head inside her robe’, i.e., ‘covering her face with her robe’ (Euripides, Orestes, 280).
80. of manna or of Ambrosia: Food of the gods. Manna was the miraculous bread from heaven that sustained the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness (Exodus 16). Ambrosia was served along with nectar on Mount Olympus in Greek mythology.
81. a duller spectacle… Sunday in London… the stately Pantheon’: De Quincey facetiously inverts the opening of Wordsworth’s famous celebration of London’s beauty, the sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802’: ‘Earth has not anything to shew more fair.’ The Pantheon, a London landmark on the south side of Oxford Street just west of Poland Street, was a grandiose building housing fashionable public assembly rooms. The description is quoted from Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’, 3.
82. tincture of opium: Opium dissolved in alcohol, otherwise known as laudanum. (See the Appendix for more detailed information on opium in the nineteenth century.)
83. Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear: Misquoted from ‘On the Much Lamented Death of Our Late Sovereign Lord King Charles II, of Blessed Memory, a Pindarique Ode’ by Thomas Flatman (1637–88), 21–5:
But Princes (like the wondrous Enoch) should be free
From Death’s Unbounded Tyranny,
And when their Godlike Race is run,
And nothing glorious left undone,
Never submit to Fate, but only disappear.
84. ϕάϕµαϕον νηπενθές: A ‘drug that assuages sorrow’ (compare Homer, Odyssey, IV, 220–1).
85. l’Allegro… Il Penseroso: Two poems by Milton portraying, respectively, the sunny, active state of mind and the nocturnal, pensive mood.
86. anti–mercurial: The mercurial temperament corresponds to that of the Greek god Mercury, who was fleet–footed and lighthearted. But ‘mercurial’ also describes a class of medicines used in De Quincey’s time as ‘purgatives’ (i.e., laxatives). Opium is of the opposite class, as its effects are constipative. De Quincey thus uses the adjective to pun on several of opium’s effects.
87. ex cathedra: Literally ‘from the chair’, meaning by virtue of office or position rather than, for instance, reasoned argument or empirical evidence.
88. Tuesday and Saturday: When the London papers published the list of bankrupts, which both warned potential creditors of bad risks and added public humiliation to the punishment of those listed. The ‘satiric author’ is untraced.
89. meo periculo: ‘At my peril’, ‘on my head be it if I am wrong’.
90. ‘ponderibus librata suis’: ‘balanced by its own weight’ (Latin). Throughout these pages, De Quincey takes a decisive stand in a then raging medical debate surrounding opium. Some medical professionals held that opium was a stimulant while others maintained that it was a narcotic. De Quincey insists that it is a stimulant.
91. Athenæus: Author of the Deipnosophistae (Banquet of the Sophists, c. AD 200), a lengthy fictional dinner conversation among a group of intellectuals who quote extensively from earlier ancient authors.
92. ϕαυτούς έµϕανίζουσιν οϕτνες εϕσίν ‘[Men] display who they really are.’
93. of which church… the only member: In his 1856 revision, De Quincey altered the wording to ‘of which I acknowledge myself to be the Pope (consequently infallible), and self–appointed legate a latere to all degrees of latitude and longitude’, indicating the increased number of opium-eaters since 1821 (see the Introduction for discussion of De Quincey’s escalating claims to authority regarding opium).
94. Anastasius: Anastasius, or, Memoirs of a Greek (1819), a novel by Thomas Hope (?1770–1831). The relevant context is made clear by De Quincey’s succeeding quotations and explanation.
95. a surgeon: It is impossible to say for certain who was the particular surgeon De Quincey had in mind here, but he did expand upon the extenuating circumstances of the case in his 1856 revision, relating that the surgeon in question ‘had himself taken opium largely for a most miserable affection (past all hope of cure)’ which he ‘had fought for more (I believe) than twenty years; fought victoriously, if victory it were, to make life supportable for himself, and during all that time to maintain in respectability a wife and a family of children altogether dependent on him’. He also noted that it was this surgeon ‘who first made me aware of the dangerous variability of opium as to strength under the shifting proportions of its combination with alien impurities’.
96. primâ facie: ‘At first appearance’.
97. the numerous pictures of Turkish opium-eaters: See note 12.
98. The late Duke of ——: Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk (1746–1815), famed for his various excesses and eccentricities.
99. Grassini: Giuseppina Grassini (1773–1850), an Italian contralto who performed in London many times early in the century. She was admired for her beauty and acting skill as well as her singing voice, and rumour had it that she had been the mistress of both Napoleon and Wellington. The eminent surgeon Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) voiced representative sentiments in a letter of 1805: ‘It is only Signora Grassini who conveys the idea of the united power of music and action. She dies not only without being ridiculous, but with an effect equal to Mrs Siddons [see note 145]. The ‘O Dio!’ of Mrs Billington [Elizabeth Billington (?1768–1818), a very successful British soprano] is a bar of music, but in the strange, almost unnatural voice of Grassini, it goes to your soul’ (Letters [1870], 40).
100. that subject in Twelfth Night: The famous passage on music in Twelfth Night, I, i, 1–7:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
the appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor.
101. a passage in the Religio Medici of Sir T. Brown: A passage in Religio Medici, II (1642), by Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) reads ‘even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me so deep a fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of my Maker; there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers… it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God, it unties the ligaments of my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of my selfe, and by degrees, me thinkes, resolves me into Heaven.’ (1st edn., II, pp. 169–70)
102. Weld the traveller: Isaac Weld (1774–1856) was a writer of noted travel books, including Travels Through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (1799), in which he says Native American women ‘speak with the utmost ease, and the language, as pronounced by them, appears as soft as the Italian. They have, without exception, the most delicate harmonious voices I ever heard, and the most pleasing gentle laugh it is possible to conceive. I have oftentimes sat amongst a group of them for an hour or two together, merely from the pleasure of listening to their conversation, on account of its wonderful softness and delicacy.’ (3rd edn. (1800), II, p. 288)
103. Marinus in his life of Proclus: Proclus (AD ?410–485) was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher whose biography was written by one of his students, Marinus.
104. the bee… chimneys: In 1856, De Quincey added an explanatory note: ‘In the large capacious chimneys of the rustic cottages throughout the Lake district, you can see up the entire cavity from the seat which you occupy, as an honoured visitor, in the chimney corner. There I used often to hear (though not to see) bees. Their murmuring was audible, though their bodily forms were too small to be visible at that altitude. On inquiry, I found that soot (chiefly from wood and peats) was useful in some stage of their wax or honey manufacture.’
105. terræ incognitæ: ‘Unknown lands’.
106. the cave of Trophonius: According to various Greek legends, the renowned architect Trophonius was swallowed up by the earth at Lebadea in Boeotia. The resulting hole in the earth became the site of a famous oracle, which suppliants would enter in an elaborate ritual that allowed them to communicate with their own destiny. After consulting the oracle, visitors would become so profoundly dejected that it became a byword for deep melancholia that the subject had been visiting the cave of Trophonius.
107. the great town of L—: Liverpool, a suburb of which, Everton, was one of De Quincey’s favourite holiday spots.
108. mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c…. Sir H. Vane, the younger: Behmenists were followers of Jakob Boehme (1575–1624), a German mystic who believed the universe was the product of conflict between opposing pairs of forces. Quietism is a form of Christian mysticism that ennobles passive contemplation and disengagement from the sensual world as the standards of perfection. Henry Vane (1613–62) was an ardent puritan, committed republican and adroit politician. His writings, on both political and religious issues, show pronounced mystical leanings.
109. Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium!… ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel’: The first is adapted from the penultimate paragraph of the History of the World (1614) by Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1554–1618): ‘O eloquent, just and mightie Death!’ The second is from the dedicatory poem (line 36) prefacing Wordsworth’s ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’.
110. Wrongs unredress’d, and insults unavenged: Wordsworth, The Excursion, III, 374.
111. Phidias and Praxiteles… Babylon and Hekatoÿ mpylos… ‘… dreaming sleep’… ‘dishonours of the grave’: Phidias and Praxiteles were highly influential Athenian artists whose sculptures (known mostly through literary descriptions and later facsimiles) help to define the classical era of Greek art (c. 480–320 BC). The work of Phidias (c. 465–425 BC) is associated with the High Classical style of the fifth century, that of Praxiteles (active c. 375–330 BC) with the Late Classical style of the fourth. Phidias, also an architect, directed construction of the Parthenon and executed its reputedly magnificent gold and ivory statue of Athena. Praxiteles is best known for his smaller–scale statues of divinities and especially of satyrs, one of which was an inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun. Babylon was legendary for its lavish architecture, as was the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, known also as Hekatompylos (‘hundredgated’) to distinguish it from the contemporary Greek city of the same name. ‘from the anarchy of dreaming sleep’ is from Wordsworth, The Excursion, IV, 87. ‘dishonours of the grave’ is paraphrased (or misremembered) from Thomas Flatman’s ‘On the Death of the Truly Valiant George Duke of Albemarle, Pindarique Ode’, 160–1: ‘That Sanctuary shall thee save, / From the dishonours of a Regal Grave.’
112. the Bodleian: The main library of Oxford University.
113. frailer vessels… bed–makers, &c.: In the King James Version of the New Testament, women are described as ‘the weaker vessel’ (I Peter 3:7); ‘frailer vessel’ is probably either De Quincey’s own translation of the original Greek or his imperfectly remembered version of the more familiar rendering. A bed-maker was a menial chambermaid and a byword for a woman of easy virtue. (The poem ‘Nancy the Bed-Maker’ by William Pattison (1706–27), for instance, is a sort of soft–core pornographic account of a sexual tryst.) Thus De Quincey’s inclusion of bed–makers in a list of ‘frailer vessels’ he ‘once possessed’ is probably a thinly veiled bawdy joke.
114. the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1774–1854), German Idealist philosophers. The latter two were followers of Kant, whom De Quincey also studied and admired immensely.
115. honi soit qui mal y pense: ‘dishonour to him who thinks evil’, the motto of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.
116. X.Y.Z., esquire… Custos Rotulorum: The first was De Quincey’s alias for the Confessions and other early articles. The custos rotulorum is a county’s chief Justice of the Peace and custodian of the rolls and records.
117. in the straw: ‘In childbed’.
118. Dr Buchan: William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine; or, the Family physician… Chiefly Calculated to Recommend a Proper Attention to Regimen and Simple Medicines (1769) was immensely popular, having gone through more than twenty editions by the time De Quincey wrote the Confessions, and continued to be republished until the mid-nineteenth century. The recommendation regarding laudanum dosage sarcastically alluded to here is first mentioned in De Quincey’s footnote on p. 45.
119. a very melancholy event: The death of William and Mary Wordsworth’s daughter Kate. An awkward child, she was something of a black sheep in the Wordsworth family and enjoyed an unusually strong attachment to the small and self-conscious De Quincey. When she died of viral encephalitis in June 1812 before she was four years old, De Quincey caused something of a scandal in Grasmere with the intensity of his grief.
120. à force d’ennuyer, by mere dint of pandiculation: ‘From sheer boredom’, by the mere force of yawning.
121. Eudæmonist: Believer in the pursuit of happiness and personal well-being above all else.
122. the Stoic philosophy: A school of thought emphasizing strength of will and control of passions, emotions and appetites. Zeno of Citium (335–263 BC), mentioned in De Quincey’s note, established the philosophy through his teaching in the ‘Painted Stoa’, a public colonnade in central Athens.
123. ‘sweet men… to give absolution’: Recast from lines 221–2 of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400): ‘Ful swetely herde he confessioun, / And pleasant was his absolucioun.’
124. opium that has not been boiled: In its raw form, opium is the dried milk of the poppy seed-pod. Its preparation usually includes boiling and filtering. This process removes a number of impurities and heavier components, some of which can be semi-poisonous, but some impurities typically remain until the opium is further refined. For many years, De Quincey boiled crude opium himself and mixed the resulting extract with wine or brandy to make his own laudanum.
125. ‘with a snow-white beard,’… ‘…the pernicious drug’: Another reference to Hope’s Anastasius (see note 94).
126. Lent or Ramadan: Christian and Moslem periods of religious observance, marked by several weeks of fasting.
127. from 320 grains of opium… to forty: De Quincey acknowledges several barriers to such precision in the accompanying note, but the situation was even more complex than he details (see note 8 above and the Appendix).
128. νυχθήμεϕον: ‘A night and a day’, or twenty-four hours.
129. That moveth altogether, if it move at all: Adapted from Words–worth, ‘Resolution and Independence’, 77.
130. Adelung’s Mithridates: Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde: mit dem Vater unser als Sprachprobe: in beynahe Fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten (Mithridates, or the Universal Table of Languages: with the Lord’s Prayer as a Language Sample in Five Hundred Languages and Dialects, 1806), by Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806), German philologist.
131. A French surgeon… hydrophobia: De Quincey’s medical history is rather loose here, perhaps even wholly apocryphal. The French surgeon might be, as Grevel Lindop speculates, a ‘Dr A. White, who inoculated himself with plague in Alexandria in 1798’. But the most that is known of the other two medical heroes is what De Quincey added in his 1856 revision: the third ‘was a surgeon who lived at Brighton’. Hydrophobia is another name for rabies.
132. Let there be a cottage… ‘a cottage with a double coach-house’: The description is of Dove Cottage in the vale of Grasmere. The quotation is from Coleridge, ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, 21.
133. And at the doors… secure in massy hall: James Thomson (1700–48), The Castle of Indolence, I, xliii, 6–9. (De Quincey substitutes line 5 for line 7, which is properly ‘The demons of the tempest, growling fell.’)
134. (as Mr— says) ‘…like a post’: In his 1856 revision, De Quincey attributed the remark to ‘Mr Anti-slavery Clarkson’, otherwise known as Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), the famous English abolitionist.
135. fee-simple: Full legal ownership.
136. St Thomas’s day: 21 December, the winter solstice, the longest night of the year.
137. I would have joined… Jonas Hanway: Samuel Johnson criticized the Essay on Tea (1757) by Jonas Hanway (1712–86), which attacks the beverage as unhealthful. The dispute continued through a series of published letters. A bellum internecium is a war of extermination.
138. ‘a double debt to pay’: Oliver Goldsmith (?1730–74), ‘The Deserted Village’, 229–30: ‘The chest contrived a double debt to pay, / A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.’
139. à parte ante and à parte post: ‘Beforehand and afterwards’.
140. her arms… like Hebe’s: Aurora was the Roman goddess of the dawn, whose rosy arms brought morning light to the world. Hebe was the goddess of youth and the charming cupbearer who served nectar to the gods.
141. as when some great painter… eclipse: Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, V, xxiii, 8–9.
142. the hands… of an amanuensis: Those of his wife, Margaret.
143. feelings such as… at my command: The feelings to which De Quincey here alludes are now known as the withdrawal syndrome (see the Appendix).
144. ‘in medias res’… acmé: ‘Into the thick of things’… ‘the highest point’.
145. — reads vilely: and Mrs—: John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) and his sister, Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), two of the most celebrated actors of the age. De Quincey filled in their names in the 1856 revision and added that ‘Neither Coleridge nor Southey is a good reader of verse. Southey is admirable almost in all things, but not in this. Both he and Coleridge read as if crying, or at least wailing lugubriously.’
146. overstep the modesty of nature: Adapted from Hamlet’s exhortation to the troupe of players who are to perform at the court of Denmark: ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, ii, 17–19).
147. at her request and M.’s… W—’s poems: M. is Margaret; W— is Wordsworth.
148. De emendatione humani intellectûs: On the Correction of the Human Intellect. The unfinished work, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, was by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77).
149. Mr Ricardo’s book… ‘Thou art the Man’: John Wilson sent a copy of Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (see note 15 above) for De Quincey to review in Blackwood’s. The quotation is from 2 Samuel 12:7.
150. à priori: Derived by deductive reasoning— rather than experiment or evidence, for instance— from elementary propositions.
151. ‘the inevitable eye’: The phrase occurs in an obscure poem by Shakerley Marmion (1603–39), ‘Cupid and Psiche: Or an Epick Poem of Cupid, and his Mistress, As it was lately presented to the Prince Elector’, II, 120–1: ‘What darknesse can protect me? what disguise / Hide me from her inevitable eyes?’ It might also be adapted from Wordsworth’s ‘When, to the attractions of the busy world’, 82, which speaks of ‘an inevitable ear’.
152. A Scotchman of eminent name has lately told us: De Quincey presumably refers here to a personal communication, probably from one of his many learned friends in Edinburgh.
153. Œdipus or Priam… Tyre… Memphis: Oedipus was a king of Grecian Thebes immortalized in Sophocles’ (c. 496–406 BC) most famous tragedy; Priam was king of Troy during the siege recounted in Homer’s Iliad; Tyre was an ancient Phoenician city in what is now southern Lebanon; Memphis, south of Cairo, was the capital of ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom (3100–2242 BC).
154. Livy: Titus Livius (?64 BC–AD 17). His history of Rome from its foundation to his own age has long been regarded as a literary masterpiece as well as an essential historical document.
155. Parliamentary War: The English Civil War (1642–51), between Parliamentarians and Royalists.
156. Marston Moor… Newbury… Naseby: All battles of the English Civil War. Marston Moor (2 July 1644) and Naseby (14 June 1645) were Parliamentary victories. Two battles were fought at Newbury: the first (20 September 1643) was won by the Parliamentarians, the second (27 October 1644) by the Royalists.
157. ‘sweeping by’… paludaments: The quotation is from Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, 97–8: ‘Sometime let Gorgeous Tragedy / In Sceptred Pall come sweeping by’; paludaments are Roman military cloaks.
158. alalagmos: Transliteration of the Greek word άλαλαγμός, meaning ‘shouting’.
159. Piranesi’s… Dreams: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), Italian engraver, chiefly of subjects inspired by ancient Roman architecture. The plates De Quincey calls his Dreams are Piranesi’s famous Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, 1745), surreal representations of vast classical dungeons.
160. The appearance… a cerulean sky. &c. &c.: From Wordsworth’s nine–book poem The Excursion, II, 834–51.
161. Dryden… Fuseli… Shadwell… Homer: The poet, dramatist and poet laureate John Dryden (1631–1700); the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), most famous for striking dream images such as The Nightmare and The Shepherd’s Dream (see cover); the poet and dramatist Thomas Shadwell (1642–92), who was well known to have used opium regularly. Homer’s famous passage on the drink that brings forgetfulness is often taken as a reference to opium (see note 84).
162. the last Lord Orford: Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford (1717–97), whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) originated the fantastic gothic novel genre to which De Quincey’s style is in many ways indebted.
163. some part of my London life… this: In his 1856 revision, De Quincey added parenthetically that the specific part of his London life he blamed here was ‘the searching for Ann amongst fluctuating crowds’.
164. officina gentium: Literally ‘the factory of nations’, the place where peoples are made.
165. Brama… Vishnu… Seeva… Isis… Osiris: In Hindu tradition, Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. Ancient Egyptians worshipped the married siblings Isis and Osiris as the female and male productive forces in nature, respectively. Osiris also ruled the land of the dead.
166. cœteris paribus: ‘Other things being equal’.
167. a child whom I had tenderly loved: Kate Wordsworth (see note 119).
168. Coronation Anthem: George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) composed four anthems that were performed at the coronation of George II at Westminster Abbey in 1727. They have since been popularly regarded as some of Handel’s most sublime music.
169. ‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded’: Shakespeare, The Tempest, III, iii, 100–01: ‘my son i’ th’ ooze is bedded; and / I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, / And with him there lie mudded.’
170. when the incestuous mother… death: In Milton’s Paradise Lost, X, 602, Sin, Satan’s daughter, is referred to as ‘th’ incestuous Mother’ because she has borne him a child, Death. She describes her cataclysmic utterance of the name in II, 787–9: ‘I fled and cri’d out Death; / Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d / From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.’
171. an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence: Robert Morrison convincingly argues that the eminent surgeon in question was George Bell (1777–1832), known frequently to prescribe tincture of valerian for similar conditions (‘“An Edinburgh Surgeon of Great Eminence” in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium–Eater’, Notes and Queries 46 (1999), 47–8).
172. proof that opium… may still be renounced: De Quincey again overstates his case (see note 4).
173. William Lithgow: Scottish author (1582–1645) of A Most Delectable, and True Discourse, of an Admired and Painefull Peregrination from Scotland to the Most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Affricke, etc. (1614). A collection of his writings called The Travels and Adventures of William Lithgow in Europe, Asia, and Africa, During Nineteen Years (1814) was reprinted several times in the nineteenth century. Thus De Quincey’s reference to his ‘Travels, &c.’.
174. Jeremy Taylor: In the 1856 revision, De Quincey admitted this attribution was erroneous, noting that ‘the exact passage moving in my mind had evidently been this which follows, from Lord Bacon’s “Essay on Death:”— “It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant perhaps the one is as painful as the other.”’Francis Bacon (1561–1626), first Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans, was a famous lawyer, philosopher and essayist sometimes credited with the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
175. With dreadful faces throng’d and fiery arms: Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 644.
1. Suspiria de Profundis: ‘Sighs from the Depths’.
2. Daguerreotype, &c.: One of the earliest means of preserving photographic images, introduced in France by Louis Daguerre in 1839.
3. præmissis præmittendis: ‘Assuming the appropriate presuppositions’.
4. sine quâ non: ‘An absolutely necessary element’.
5. a striking incident in a modern novel: The succeeding plot summary could formulaically describe many of the popular but ephemeral gothic novels that influenced De Quincey’s own writing.
6. Holy Office: The Inquisition; the official body within the Roman Catholic Church charged with protecting morals and the faith in general and eradicating Protestantism in particular.
7. in extenso: ‘At length’.
8. τò brevity: ‘The very idea of brevity.’ De Quincey here uses (rather gratuitously) a Greek device for creating abstract nouns.
9. caduceus: A staff encircled by two snakes and bearing wings at the top. It is associated with the god Mercury, messengers and physicians.
10. Cheapside: A street in the City of London (the original square mile enclosed by Roman walls), near St Paul’s Cathedral. A bustling market-place in Saxon and medieval London, it had evolved by De Quincey’s day into a centre for jewellers, goldsmiths, haberdashers, drapers, perfumers, lacemakers and other up-market shops.
11. ‘viridantem floribus hastas’: Literally, ‘making [his] spears verdant with flowers’, i.e., ‘binding his spears with fresh flowers’. The phrase is lifted from the Argonautica (VI, 136) of Valerius Flaccus, a minor epic poet of the first century AD. It refers to a distinguishing characteristic of the Thyrsagetae, one of the Scythian tribes arrayed against the Colchians and the Argonauts.
12. Cicero… Ethics: In his De Officiis (On Moral Obligations), I, 42, Cicero claims the dealer cannot succeed unless he is deceitful— the most disgraceful thing it is possible to be. A large-scale importer can be respectable, he says, if he is honest in the distribution of his goods and retires when he has made enough money to be comfortable.
13. The prayer of Agar: Agur’s prayer, Proverbs 30:8.
14. the model of the emperor Marcus Aurelius: In his Meditations (the ancient title translates simply as To Himself), a collection of Stoic-influenced reflections on moral, ethical and metaphysical issues, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–80) details, among other things, the modest blessings of his childhood.
15. The first who died was Jane: An echo of Wordsworth’s ‘We are Seven’, 49: ‘The first that died was sister Jane’.
16. Dr Percival… Condorcet, D’Alembert… Mr Charles White: The physician Thomas Percival ( 1740–1804) and the surgeon Charles White ( 1728–1813), both of Manchester, were distinguished for furthering the cause of public health, among other professional achievements. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet ( 1743–94), and Jean le Rond d’Alembert ( 1717–83) were eminent mathematicians and philosophers. Condorcet made significant contributions to probability theory and the structure of the French educational system. D’Alembert also made important discoveries in physics and was co-editor (with the philosopher Diderot ( 1713–84)) of the Encyclopeÿdie, a focal point of the French Enlightenment.
17. If God should make another Eve’: This (misquoted) line and the following quotations from Milton’s Paradise Lost are taken from the latter part of Book IX.
18. ‘Love… was most intense’: Misquoted from Wordsworth’s ‘Tribute to the memory of the same dog’, 27–8: ‘For love, that comes wherever life and sense / Are given by God, in thee was most intense.’
19. John Paul, (Richter): Johann Paul Friedrich Richter ( 1763–1825), German author who published under the pen-name Jean Paul and was known to English audiences partly through De Quincey’s translations. It is not clear what specific passage in his works De Quincey has in mind here.
20. ex-officio: ‘Proceeding from office’, ‘by virtue of position’.
21. Speech of Alhadra in Coleridge’s Remorse: Coleridge, Remorse, IV, 411.
22. the guard: The protective screen in front of the fireplace.
23. Memnonian: Memnon, king of Ethiopia and semi-divine son of Eos (goddess of the dawn) and Tithonus (a prince of Troy), was killed in the Trojan War and commemorated by a statue near Thebes in Egypt which was said to moan at sunrise.
24. Æolian intonation: Aeolus was the Greek god of the winds. A favourite Romantic symbol of a unifying spirit suffusing creation was the Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that made music when the wind blew across it.
25. some Sarsar wind of death: The Arabic ÇarÇar is a cold wind. In Robert Southey’s ( 1774–1843) popular ‘Oriental’ romance Thalaba the Destroyer, I, xxxvi, ‘the Sarsar’ is called ‘the Icy Wind of Death’.
26. ϕυγή μόνου πϕός μόνον: Literally, ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone’, perhaps the most famous words (vol. VI, Ennead 9, ch. 11, line 51) in all the writings which make up the Enneads of the neo-Platonist Plotinus (third century AD). The phrase refers to the mystical union between the true devotee of the philosophical and spiritual life, who has succeeded in escaping from the emptiness of the sensory world, and the ultimate first principle of the cosmos, ‘the One’ or ‘the Alone’.
27. everlasting Jew: As the most familiar version of the legend has it. Ahasuerus heckled Jesus as he carried the cross and consequently was cursed to wander the earth until the second coming. The Wandering Jew was a familiar motif in gothic novels in particular and Romantic literature in general.
28. The thoughts… in final notes: De Quincey planned a larger scope for ‘Suspiria’ than was ever realized and the notes referred to here never appeared.
29. a beautiful boy, eighteen years old: In 1834, De Quincey’s son William died of encephalitis, the same illness that had killed De Quincey’s sister Elizabeth in 1792 (the death he recalls so vividly in this first portion of Suspiria).
30. sublime chapter of St Paul… illustrious Laureate: The chapter referred to is 1 Corinthians 15: 42–4. The ‘Laureate’ is Wordsworth.
31. a passage in The Excursion: From IV, 153–61:
For who could sink and settle to that point
Of selfishness; so senseless who could be
As long and perseveringly to mourn
For any object of his love, removed
From this unstable world, if he could fix
A satisfying view upon that state
Of pure, imperishable, blessedness,
Which reason promises, and holy writ
Ensures all believers?
32. the lilies… feed their young: An allusion to Luke 12: 24–7.
33. Agrippa’s mirror: In his De Occulta Philosophia, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa (German occultist philosopher, 1486–1535) compares the air to a looking-glass that receives images of all things and so provides bases for dreams and divinations.
34. shafts of Apollo: In Greek mythology, Apollo was the bright and shining patron deity of music and poetry. He was also an unerring archer.
35. (in Shakspeare’s fine expression) to ‘dislimn’: From Antony and Cleopatra, IV, xiv, 10.
36. composing-stick: A tray in which a compositor assembled type.
37. ***: It is not known what was omitted here; the same is true of the similar asterisks below and on p. 182.
38. ubi Cæsar, ibi Roma: ‘Where Caesar is, there is Rome’.
39. Mr Alston: Washington Allston ( 1779–1843), American artist, friend and portraitist of Coleridge, painted The Dead Man Revived by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha ( 1811–14) while living in London. Often regarded as Allston’s masterpiece, the painting (13 by 10 feet) is not actually an altarpiece, as De Quincey claims.
40. nympholepsy: According to Greek myth, a mortal who had seen a nymph was stricken with a diseased frenzy.
41. Obeah magic… Three-finger’d Jack: The plot of the novel Belinda (1801) by Maria Edgeworth ( 1768–1849) involved obeah (or obia), a form of witchcraft similar in many respects to voodoo, that originated in Africa and thrived in the Caribbean. Three-Fingered Jack was the nickname of Jack Mansong, a Jamaican bandit who, like Dick Turpin, became one of the notorious outlaw-heroes of eighteenth-century popular culture.
42. ‘On the sublime attractions of the grave’: From Wordsworth, The Excursion, IV, 238.
43. the Erl-king’s Daughter: The popular German legend was the subject of several poems including the one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ( 1749–1832) which De Quincey quotes here in translation. Franz Schubert composed what was to become a popular musical setting of the same poem in 1815.
44. one of my guardians… English Church: Samuel Hall, vicar of St Peter’s, Manchester. A family friend named as a guardian in Thomas Quincey Snr’s will, Hall christened young Thomas while vicar at St Anne’s, Manchester, and tutored Thomas and his brother William in Latin and Greek from 1793 until the Quincey family moved to Bath in 1796.
45. ego et rex meus: ‘I and my patron’.
46. Iræque leonum / Vincla recusantum… caveæ: The complete passage reads (as De Quincey correctly indicates in his footnote) ‘iraeque leonum / vincla recusantum et sera sub nocte rudentum’: ‘The raging growls of lions straining against their chains and roaring at midnight’ (Virgil (Roman poet, 70–19 BC), Aeneid, VI, 15–16). The caveae were the cages or stalls where lions were housed in Roman amphitheatres.
47. ab urbe condita: ‘From the city’s foundation’. Roman dating was relative to the establishment of the city of Rome, which Romans dated at 753 BC (in modern terms).
48. vis medicatrix… kilcrops: vis medicatrix means ‘healing force’; kilcrops were ravenous children thought to be demon changelings. The Southey poem in question is ‘The Killcrop. A Scene Between Benedict, a German Peasant, and Father Karl, an Old Neighbour’.
49. coup-de-main: Literally a ‘blow of the hand’; a sudden, all-out attack.
50. ode of our great laureate: Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.
51. the geometry of Apollonius: Apollonius of Perge, a Greek mathematician who flourished in Alexandria c. 200 BC, was known as ‘the Great Geometer’ and wrote a ground-breaking treatise on conic sections.
52. a lovely sketch… by Mr Wordsworth: ‘Water Fowl’, which includes the lines ( 10–14):
Their jubilant activity evolves
Hundreds of curves and circlets, to and fro,
Upward and downward, progress intricate
Yet unperplexed, as if one spirit swayed
Their indefatigable flight.
53. the Vatican, the Bodleian, and the Bibliothèque du Roi: Three of the world’s great book collections: the Vatican Library, the main library of Oxford University and what is now the National Library of France.
54. the Œdipus: Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus the King), which was probably written and first performed in the 420s BC. The title character ultimately discovers that, despite strenuous attempts to avoid it, he has fulfilled a prophecy of the oracle at Delphi (see note 58 below): he has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. At the end of the play, after his mother/wife has committed suicide, he blinds himself and resolves to go into exile from Thebes for the rest of his life.
55. Brutus and a thousand years of impossibilities: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century history attributed the foundation of Britain to Brutus, supposed great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy. According to Monmouth, Brutus landed in southwest England, conquered a race of giants inhabiting the island, founded London as New Troy, and sired a line of noble descendants including King Arthur, accounts of whose exploits were equally fanciful. Despite a complete lack of historical support, the legends proved remarkably persistent and continued to appear in histories for centuries.
56. Beza’s Latin Testament… the great chapter… resurrection: Theÿodore de Bèze ( 1519–1605) was a French theologian who succeeded John Calvin as leader of the Protestant Reformation centred in Geneva. His Latin translation of the New Testament served as a source for both the Geneva Bible and the King James Version. the great chapter of St Paul is I Corinthians 15, in which St Paul proclaims that the faithful are resurrected after death, then attempts to prove logically that it is impossible for his proclamation not to be true.
57. Alcaics and Choriambics: Alcaics are odes of the type originated by the Greek lyric poet Alcaeus ( 620–580 BC), usually consisting of four stanzas (or strophes) of four lines each. Each strophe is based on a strict and intricate pattern of long and short syllables. A choriambic is another complex verse form in which each line consists of one trochee (a long syllable followed by a short one), three choriambs (a long syllable followed by two short syllables and another long one) and an iambus (a short syllable followed by a long one).
58. priestess of the oracle: The ancient Greeks believed that the Pythia, the priestess of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, spoke the words of Apollo himself. Delphi was the most important oracle in the ancient Greek world, and the Pythia was consulted by individuals and states on a wide range of issues from cult practices to the foundation of colonies.
59. the Stationers’ Company: The printers’ guild. Popular works sometimes carried warnings that they were registered with the Stationers’ Company, that unauthorized copiers would be punished, etc.
60. ‘star-y-pointing’: From Milton, ‘On Shakespear,’ 4.
61. the ticking of a death-watch: The death-watch beetle makes a noise like a watch ticking. Popular superstition had it that the noise foretold a death.
62. ‘foremost man of all this world’: From Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV, iii, 22.
63. ‘Into what depth thou see’st, / From what height fallen’: Slightly misquoted from Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 91–2: ‘into what Pit thou seest / From what highth fall’n’.
64. like the superb Medea… senseless to the ground: The sorceress Medea helped Jason steal the golden fleece from her father in return for his pledge of eternal fidelity. When he violated that pledge by falling in love with the princess of Corinth, she killed the two sons she had borne him.
65. ‘Him that sate thereon’: Slightly misquoted from Milton, ‘At a Solemn Music’, 8: ‘him that sits thereon’.
66. masculine reader: It was customary until well into the twentieth century for only middle-class and more affluent boys to receive a classical education (a curriculum emphasizing Latin and Greek). Thus De Quincey’s patronizing attitude towards women here reflects the biases of his culture.
67. as Cowper so playfully illustrates: William Cowper ( 1731–1800), in The Task, I, 1–102.
68. Pisistratus: Peisistratus, ‘tyrant’ in Athens 545–527 BC. His domination of the Athenian political scene was continued by his sons Hippias and Hipparchus until 510 BC, when they were forcibly expelled from the city. The reforms that sowed the seeds of democracy in Athens followed about three years later.
69. Dr Whately, the present archbishop of Dublin: Richard Whately ( 1787–1863), Oxford professor of political economy, educational reformer and philosopher most remembered for his writings on logic and rhetoric.
70. Hermes Trismegistus: ‘Thrice-Great Hermes’, a mythical ancient sage associated with the Egyptian god Thoth, and the supposed author of foundational works on alchemy, astrology and magic.
71. ‘my Cid,’… Cœur de Lion… Sir Tristrem… Lybæus Disconus: Examples of the ‘knightly romance’ De Quincey cites as the next literary fashion leading to the recycling of vellum sheets. ‘My Cid’ is ‘El Cantar de mio Cid’ (usually translated as ‘The Lay of the Cid’ but more literally, ‘The Song of My Cid’; ‘Cid’ derives from the Arabic for ‘Lord’), a twelfth-century Spanish verse romance about the Castilian warrior hero, Rodrigo Diÿaz de Vivar (? 1043–99). Richard I of England (reigned 1189–99) was nicknamed ‘Coeur de Lion’ (‘Lion-Hearted’) chiefly because of his bravery in the Crusades, and appeared in several chivalric romances. Tristram of Lyonesse was a legendary knight of King Arthur’s court most famous for his doomed love affair with the beautiful Iseult (or Isolde), the story of which appears in several Arthurian romances. ‘Libeaus Desconus’ is a late fourteenth-century English romance about Gingelein, the son of Dame Ragnell and Sir Gawain, the famous knight of Arthur’s court. As his name is unknown, he is knighted by Arthur as Libeaus Desconus (le bel inconnu, ‘the fair unknown’). The romance concerns his rescue of the imprisoned Lady of Sinadoune. Chaucer also includes it in a list of representative (and implicitly ridiculous) romances in ‘Sir Thopas’ of The Canterbury Tales.
72. Insolent vaunt of Paracelsus… combustion: In his De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), VI, German alchemist and physician Paracelsus ( 1493–1541) gave instructions for regenerating vegetable matter from its own ashes.
73. Erictho of Lucan: The Roman poet Lucan (AD 39–65) wrote the epic Pharsalia, in the sixth book of which appears Erictho, a witch who feeds on rotting corpses and is able to entomb living souls and raise the newly dead.
74. the well-known passage in the Prometheus: ποντίων τε ϕνμάτων/’ Aνήϱιθμον γέλασμα ‘the boundless laughter of the ocean waves’ (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 89–90). The words form part of an address to nature, Prometheus’ first utterance after being chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans.
75. the destined apostle on his road to Damascus: As the story is told in the New Testament, Saul of Tarsus, afterwards St Paul, was engaged in a campaign of persecution against Christians when Jesus appeared to him in a blinding light on the road to Damascus, inspiring his conversion to Christianity and subsequent ministry (Acts 22: 6–11; 26: 12–18).
76. Part I.: De Quincey’s terminology is confusing here; by ‘Part I.’ he presumably means the previous instalment in Blackwood’s, which fits his description of the content, rather than the designated ‘Part I’ of ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, which is not yet concluded at this point. Even at that, however, De Quincey seems further confused, as the instalment matching his description was the second rather than the first.
77. Euclid: Perhaps the greatest mathematician of the classical world (flourished c. 300 BC in Alexandria, Egypt), Euclid is best known as the father of geometry.
78. a boy on the foundation: A boy attending Eton on an Eton-sponsored scholarship.
79. I restore to Mr Wordsworth… day and night: Wordsworth, ‘Conclusion: To—’, 9–11, from ‘Miscellaneous Sonnets’: ‘Life flies: now every day / Is but a glimmering spoke in the swift wheel / Of the revolving week.’
80. Graces… Parcæ… Furies… Muses: These trios of Greek and Roman goddesses were responsible for bestowing beauty, charm and grace (Graces), spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of human life (Parcae or Fates), punishing crimes beyond the reach of human justice (Furies) and inspiring artists, musicians, writers and astronomers (Muses, of whom there were ultimately nine).
81. Rachel weeping… its nurseries of Innocents: Matthew 2: 16–18.
82. within the bedchamber of the Czar: The Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna, youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas I ( 1796–1855), died in 1845 only a year after her marriage to the Prince of Hesse-Kassel. According to his biographer, the Czar loved Alexandra ‘as the image of her mother’, who was also near death at the time. (W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1978), p. 272).
83. Norfolk island: Thousands of convicted British felons were sent to Australian penal colonies between 1788 and 1868. The infamously harsh punishment centres in Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) and Norfolk Island (northeast of Sydney) were reserved for those who committed further crimes after being transported to one of the other settlements.
84. the tents of Shem: Genesis 9:27.
85. Cybèle: A Phrygian goddess imported by the Greeks and Romans, known as ‘the Great Mother’ or ‘Mother of the Gods’. De Quincey’s reference to her turreted head relates to her appearance in ancient sculpture, where her mural headdress represented her role as protectress of cities.
86. the Brocken of North Germany: A peak in the Hartz Mountains.
87. Whitsunday: The Anglican name for the day of Pentecost, the festival observed on the seventh Sunday after Easter, a traditional time for baptisms. Whitsunday = ‘White Sunday’, after the white clothing worn by the newly baptized.
88. the Lady Echo of Ovid: In Book III of the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-AD 17), Echo hides from Narcissus, merely repeating back to him portions of his calls to her. When she finally shows herself, he spurns her, after which she refuses to be seen ever again.
89. ‘And art thou nothing?… that which he pursues’: From Coleridge, ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’, 25–32. The last two lines of the published version are ‘The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, / Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!’ (The Complete Political Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912)). De Quincey claims to be quoting from a ‘corrected copy’, though, so perhaps his version reflects his friend Coleridge’s thoughts at some time after the poem’s publication in 1826.
90. after the example of Judæa (on the Roman coins): To commemorate the capture and destruction of Jerusalem by his son Titus in AD 70, the emperor Vespasian (ruled AD 69–79) struck coins picturing Judea as a woman mourning beneath a palm tree.
91. Phantasus: One of the sons of Hypnos, god of sleep in Greek mythology, Phantasus (Phantasos) was responsible for bringing dreams of inanimate things. His brothers, Morpheus and Ikelos (or Phobetor), brought dreams of men and animals, respectively.
92. Savannah-la-Mar: A port in Jamaica engulfed by a hurricane in 1780.
93. Fata-Morgana: A mirage effect observed over water in which objects appear doubled, elongated and suspended in the air. It is seen most often in the Straits of Messina in Italy and over the Great Lakes in the United States. Popular legend has it that fairies are responsible for these images.
94. jubilates: Songs of religious exultation.
95. clepsydra: A water clock.
96. sanctus: The part of Christian liturgy spoken or sung (‘Holy, holy, holy’, in English) before the prayer of consecration and the administration of the sacrament.
97. ‘male and female created he them’: Genesis 1:27.
98. ‘in to-day already walks to-morrow’: Coleridge, The Death of Wallenstein, V, i, 102.
99. the Roman retiarius: A gladiator who attempted to ensnare his opponent by swinging a net at him.
100. Facit indignatio versum: ‘Indignation inspires my poetry’, from Juvenal, Satires, I, 79.
101. ‘Te nimis austerum… flagello’: ‘You, who violate the compacts of the sacred table with your excessive severity, I pursue with the reverberating scourge of satire.’
102. mea sæva querela… nocte procellam: ‘My raging plaint shall take root in your waxy ears, even if those ears cannot hear a storm on a wintry night.’
103. stylites: The Stylites were an idiosyncratic sect of Christian ascetics who sat atop pillars, often for years at a time. De Quincey’s reasons for using the word here— where he apparently intends it as a synonym for a satire, harangue, or other form of harshly critical utterance— are obscure.
104. Mordecai the Jew: Mordecai was lavishly and publicly honoured for averting an attempted assassination of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6: 2–11).
105. aposiopesis: The omission of the end of a thought by a sudden breaking off, usually for rhetorical effect.
106. inter alia: ‘Among other things’.
107. Earl of A—t: The Earl of Altamont (see Confessions, note 57).
108. solatium: ‘Consolation in a time of emotional distress’.
109. Sus. per coll.: ‘Suspendatur per collum’, ‘Let him be hanged by the neck.’
110. found his way to Australia: Meaning he was sent there as a convicted criminal (see note 83).
111. caravanserai: An inn surrounding a courtyard where camel caravans would rest for the night.
112. her Majesty’s coronation: The coronation of Queen Victoria on 28 June 1838, just over seven years before ‘Suspiria’ was published.
113. Ayah: A Hindu nursemaid employed by European families living in India.
1. Mr Palmer, M.P. for Bath: John Palmer (1742–1818), whose fortune was founded on his thriving theatres in Bath and Bristol, successfully enlisted the support of Prime Minister Pitt in 1784–6 to establish a mail service with uniform government stage-coaches instead of mounted post-boys and other irregular conveyances. Launched between Bath and London, the service soon connected all of England’s major cities, bringing about unprecedented speed, economy and safety of communication. Palmer’s subsequent attempts to gain power and remuneration from his scheme were fraught with controversy, but he was elected twice as mayor of Bath and four times as MP for the district. The Dictionary of National Biography, however, does not mention his marriage to Lady Madeline Gordon (who was married to a Charles Palmer) or any other duke’s daughter.
2. of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo: British victories in the Napoleonic Wars.
3. Te Deums: The Te Deum is the part of the Christian liturgy that praises God: Te deum laudamus, ‘Thee, God, we praise.’
4. delf ware: A cheap variety of earthenware, also known as Delft, originally produced in that region of Holland.
5. salle-à-manger: ‘Dining room’.
6. Lord Macartney: The Macartney embassy of 1795 travelled to Peking in the hope of improving Anglo-Chinese trade relations. The relationship had been strained by British attempts to market Indian opium in China against the wishes of the imperial government, a situation that ultimately led to the opium wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Although De Quincey embroiders his tale of the gift coach, it is based in fact; the entire visit was plagued by the question of who would take precedence (see the Appendix, under ‘Opium and the Orient’).
7. hammer-cloth: A cloth covering the coach box.
8. Ca ira: ‘Ça ira, Ça tiendra’ (‘That will go, that will hold’) was the chorus of a popular song of the French Revolution and became a popular revolutionary cry.
9. bills at ninety days after date: Bills that had come due and thus rendered the debtor liable to collection or, if he was unable to pay, imprisonment.
10. snakes in Von Troil’s Iceland: When revising his works for the collected edition in 1854, De Quincey added this note: ‘The allusion is to a well-known chapter in Von Troil’s work, entitled, “Concerning the Snakes of Iceland”. The entire chapter consists of these six words– “There are no snakes in Iceland.”’
11. læsa majestas: ‘Violated majesty’, lèse-majesteÿ, a flouting of what should be revered authority.
12. ‘Jam proximus ardet / Ucalegon’: ‘Now his neighbour Ucalegon is aflame’ (Virgil, Aeneid, II, 311–12). Here ‘Ucalegon’ means ‘the house of Ucalegon’, a famous example of metonymy cited by both Horace and Juvenal. The passage appears in the section of the Aeneid describing the sack of Troy by the Greeks. Ucalegon was a friend of the Trojan king, Priam.
13. ‘False echoes’… Talleyrand: The ‘false echoes of Marengo’ are the words De Quincey quotes (‘Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?’), which, as he says, were erroneously attributed to Napoleon upon the death of his officer Desaix at the Battle of Marengo (1800). Le Vengeur was a French warship that sank after being captured by the British in 1794. The popular French account had it that, after being reduced to splinters, the ship fired one last broadside as the crew cried ‘Vive la Reÿpublique! (‘Long live the Republic!’). ‘La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas’ means ‘The Guard dies, but does not surrender.’ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Peÿrigord (1754–1838) was Napoleon’s foreign minister and a career statesman and diplomat to whom were ascribed many legendary witticisms.
14. à fortiori: ‘With stronger reason’.
15. the tombs of Luxor: The phrase often refers in general to the unparalleled archaeological finds (including many notable hieroglyphic inscriptions) in the area encompassing Luxor, Thebes and Karnak to the east of the Nile in Egypt.
16. ‘which they upon the adverse faction wanted’: Adapted from Shakespeare, Richard III, V, iii, 12–13: ‘Besides, the King’s name is a tower of strength / Which they upon the adverse faction want.’
17. the 10th of Edward III chap. 15: De Quincey is here pulling the Welshman’s leg, as no such law exists. He may also have fabricated the ‘story from one of our elder dramatists’ about the Oriental king, the hawk and the eagle.
18. Non magna loquimur… magna vivimus: ‘We do not speak great things… we live great things.’
19. the glory of Salamanca: In conjunction with Spanish guerrilla forces, the British army defeated the French at Salamanca in 1812, hastening France’s loss of the Peninsular War in 1813 and the ultimate British victory.
20. galvanic cycle: A galvanic cell was the nineteenth-century forerunner of the modern battery. It was often used in spectacular scientific demonstrations, sometimes to animate dead limbs by attaching the battery to muscle tissue. Thus when De Quincey speaks of the galvanic cycle having been broken, he casts the horseman and his reins as the battery and leads that used to animate the ‘ministers of his locomotion’, the horses. This circuit has been broken in the new system of train travel, with its ‘iron tubes and boilers’.
21. Ulysses… his accursed bow: In Homer’s Odyssey, XXII, Ulysses fights off the suitors of his wife Penelope, succeeding against overwhelming odds through his famous skill with bow and arrow, a dubious distinction in ancient Greek culture as archery was considered a cowardly alternative to hand-to-hand combat.
22. mais oui donc: ‘But of course’.
23. ‘Say, all our praises why should lords’: Altered from ‘But all our praises why should Lords engross?’, Alexander Pope (1688–1744), ‘Epistle III, To the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst, Of the Use of Riches’, 249. De Quincey playfully rewrites the line in the next sentence.
24. ex abundanti: ‘From an abundance’.
25. Mr Waterton: Charles Waterton (1782–1865), a wealthy eccentric and naturalist perhaps most enduringly famous for the nature reserve he established at his estate, Walton Park, in Yorkshire. In his Wanderings in South America (1825, 1st edn.), pp. 231–2, he described capturing a cayman (a tropical American crocodilian closely related to the alligator) during his third expedition in 1820: ‘I… jumped on his back, turning half round as I vaulted, so that I gained my seat with my face in the right position. I immediately seized his fore legs, and, by main force, twisted them on his back; thus they served me for a bridle… Should it be asked, how I managed to keep my seat, I would answer,— I hunted some years with Lord Darlington’s fox hounds.’
26. monokeras: Greek for ‘one horn’. De Quincey is probably misremembering a bit of natural history when he asserts that such an animal lives in the Himalayas and Africa. The kraken is a huge sea monster of Scandinavian legend most familiar to modern audiences from the poem of the same name by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92).
27. the old fancy… Spenser: The Faerie Queene by Sir Edmund Spenser (?1552–99), I, iii, 5–6, describes a lion submitting to a virgin:
It fortuned out of the thickest wood
A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
To have attonce deuour’d her tender corse:
But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.
In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
As he her wronged innocence did weet.
The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum
Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor
Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford, Ray
Heffner, 10 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1932–49).
28. the cowardly and cruel lion called Wallace: In A History of Warwick and Its People (1905), Thomas Kemp reports that a lion named Wallace killed two bulldogs in a fight on 30 July 1825. The event was so celebrated that a street in that part of Warwick was later named after the lion.
29. Soult: Marshal Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult (1769–1851), Duke of Dalmatia, was one of Napoleon’s most able and respected commanders and a prominent figure in French politics and diplomacy even after supporting Napoleon during the infamous ‘Hundred Days’ after his return from Elba. The British admired his bravery and ability in the Peninsular War, and even his arch-nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, greeted him with respect when he represented France at Victoria’s coronation in 1837.
30. attelage: Harness, coupling, hitch.
31. en flagrant delit: French (today, deÿlit) for the Latin in flagrante delicto, ‘in the act of committing a misdeed’, ‘red-handed’.
32. Badajoz… Salamanca for ever: The night attack on the medieval fortress town of Badajoz in April 1812 was one of the more savage battles of the Peninsular War. Wellington also defeated Marmont’s Army of Portugal in July of the same year at Salamanca (see note 19).
33. Barnet: On the main road between London and St Alban’s, Barnet was a popular stopping point for coaches. In 1965 the name was given to a borough of northwest London that includes the area.
34. fey: ‘Marked for imminent death’, in one common Scottish usage, but also ‘otherworldly’, ‘fairy-like’, ‘crazed’.
35. Bengal lights: Blue flare-like lights used for signalling and illumination.
36. Talavera: Wellington’s victory at Talavera (1809) was marred by the fact that he afterwards had to retreat to Portugal, having been abandoned by Spanish reinforcements. Nevertheless, it was as a reward for this achievement that he was created Viscount Wellington.
37. aceldama: Aceldama (Akeldama is the Greek rendering of an Aramaic phrase meaning ‘field of blood’) was the name later given to the plot of land Judas bought with the money he earned by betraying Jesus. According to Acts 1:15–19, Judas fell in the middle of the field, bursting open so that his bowels and blood gushed out over the ground.
38. The Vision of Sudden Death: ‘The English Mail-Coach’ was published in two instalments in Blackwood’s (in October and December 1849), and the second began here with a bracketed note, clearly by De Quincey, immediately following the section title:
The reader is to understand this present paper, in its two sections of The Vision, &c., and The Dream-Fugue, as connected with a previous paper on The English Mail-Coach, published in the Magazine for October. The ultimate object was the Dream-Fugue, as an attempt to wrestle with the utmost efforts of music in dealing with a colossal form of impassioned horror. The Vision of Sudden Death contains the mail-coach incident, which did really occur, and did really suggest the variations of the Dream, here taken up by the Fugue, as well as other variations not now recorded. Confluent with these impressions, from the terrific experience on the Manchester and Glasgow mail, were other and more general impressions, derived from long familiarity with the English mail, as developed in the former paper; impressions, for instance, of animal beauty and power, of rapid motion, at that time unprecedented, of connexion with the government and public business of a great nation, but above all, of connexion with the national victories at an unexampled crisis,— the mail being the privileged organ for publishing and dispersing all news of that kind. From this function of the mail, arises naturally the introduction of Waterloo into the fourth variation of the Fugue; for the mail itself having been carried into the dreams by the incident in the Vision, naturally all the accessory circumstances of pomp and grandeur investing this national carriage followed in the train of the principal image.
39. Cæsar the Dictator, at his last dinner party: The incident is reported by Plutarch (c. AD 46–120) in his Life of Julius Caesar.
40. βιαθάνατος… βίαιος: ‘Violent death’ and ‘violent’ respectively.
41. laˆcheteÿ: ‘Cowardice’.
42. ‘Nature from her seat… all is lost’: Adapted from Milton, Paradise Lost, IX, 782–4: ‘Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost.’
43. jus dominii… jus gentium: jus dominii means ‘property right’; jus gentium means ‘law of nations’, a phrase used by ancient Romans meaning that part of private law applying to citizens and non-citizens alike, or a ‘universal’ or ‘natural’ law applying to all peoples, or laws prevailing between states. De Quincey seems to invoke the second sense here.
44. Effendi… Stamboul: ‘Effendi’ was an honorific title for a man of property, education or authority in eastern Mediterranean countries; Stamboul is a hilly peninsula at the heart of the ancient city of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), abutting on to the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara.
45. Chrysippus… any son of Othman: Chrysippus of Soli (c. 280–207 BC) came to Athens c. 260, then succeeded Cleanthes as head of the Stoa in 232. His voluminous writings, which survive only in fragments, helped to define and refine orthodox Stoic belief, being second in importance only to those of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism (see note 122, Confession). Cicero (106–43 BC, Roman orator, statesman and man of letters) reports in his De natura deorum (The Nature of the Gods), II, Chrysippus’ view that life was bestowed on the pig as salt to keep it from spoiling. Son of Othman means scion of the Ottoman dynasty, native of Turkey.
46. Dr Johnsons… Deodand: Samuel Johnson wrote a critical, at times sardonic, ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’ (1740). A deodand was originally an offering to the gods of a belonging that had caused someone’s death, but later a fine levied against the owner of such an object.
47. Morcellus: Stefano Antonio Morcelli (1737–1822), Italian Jesuit renowned as an authority on Latin inscriptions.
48. simple breakfast… extraordinary: One of opium’s effects is to suppress both appetite and sensitivity to fatigue, which is presumably why De Quincey cites the distance he had travelled on a small breakfast as the reason for taking laudanum on this occasion.
49. ‘Monstrum… ademptum’… the Arabian Nights: The quotation is from Virgil, Aeneid, III, 658, and refers to the Cyclops Polyphemus (see note 54 below). De Quincey integrates a translation of all the elements of the quotation into the following sentence. The three calendars (wandering ascetic dervishes) in the Arabian Nights tell of how they lost their eyes, but for only one of them was curiosity the cause: entering a forbidden room as the princess did in the tale of Bluebeard, he found a winged horse who impaled his eye with its wing.
50. Al Sirat: Arabic for ‘the path’, the bridge to Paradise in Muslim tradition. Narrower than a spider’s thread and sharper than a sword, it is navigable only by the morally pure, who pass easily. The wicked who attempt to cross fall to damnation below.
51. gage d’amitié: ‘Token of friendship’.
52. aurigation… Aurora: The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘aurigation’ as ‘the action or art of driving a chariot or coach’, citing De Quincey’s usage here. Among his other responsibilities, the Greek god Apollo pulled the sun across the sky with his chariot, a task no other god had sufficient skill to perform. Aurora was the Roman goddess of the dawn (Eos, in the Greek Pantheon), and is often depicted riding her chariot and horses across the sky.
53. Giraldus Cambrensis: Welsh historian and geographer (c. 1146–c. 1220), chiefly of Ireland and Wales.
54. Polyphemus: The giant Cyclops that Odysseus tricked and blinded in order to escape from his cave in the Odyssey, IX. Aeneas also encounters Polyphemus in the Aeneid, III.
55. the shout of Achilles… Peleus… Pallas: Achilles’ ‘loud cry’ or ‘terrible cry’ is mentioned several times in Homer’s Iliad (especially in Books XVIII–XX), including once when it is heard by his mother Thetis and her sisters at the bottom of the sea (XVIII). Peleus, king of the Myrmidons of Thessaly, was Achilles’ mortal father. Pallas is an epithet of Athena, goddess of war, who fights on the side of the Greeks and often aids Achilles in the Iliad.
56. Tumultuosissimamente: ‘With the greatest tumultuousness’. De Quincey here parodies stylistic indicators in concert music scores, which are conventionally in Italian.
57. corymbi: De Quincey borrows the word from the Latin form of the Greek korumbos (ϰóϱνμβος), meaning ‘peak’ and, by extension, ‘a cluster of ivy flowers’ or ‘a cluster of flowers/fruit’ generally. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a second definition of the word ‘corymb’ as ‘a cluster of ivy-berries or grapes’ and cites De Quincey’s usage here as one of only three.
58. Gloria in excelsis: ‘Glory in the highest’.
59. ‘Chaunt the deliverer’s praise… in heaven and earth were sung’: Misquoted from Wordsworth’s ‘The Siege of Vienna Raised by John Sobieski’ (11. 11–14):
Chant the Deliverer’s praise in every tongue!
The cross shall spread, the crescent hath waxed dim;
He conquering, as in joyful Heaven is sung,
He conquering through God, and God by him.
60. Creÿci: The Battle of Creÿcy, or Cressy (1346), in which Edward III’s army triumphed over the French, was the first great English victory of the Hundred Years War.
61. Clinging to the horns of the altar: In the Old Testament, the sacrificial altar is represented as having horns. Clinging to them was apparently a rough equivalent of the later custom of seeking sanctuary within a church. In I Kings 1:50–53, for instance, Adonijah grasps the horns of the altar until Solomon swears he will not harm him.