Within two years of publishing ‘On the Knocking’ De Quincey had left the London Magazine, and by 1826 he had returned to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, where he had begun his career as a magazinist in 1819. Blackwood’s, with its owner William Blackwood as editor and De Quincey’s closest friend John Wilson as lead writer, was the most exuberant, popular, and unpredictable magazine of the age. It prized erudition, outrage, irony, and extremity, combining urbanity and elitism with what De Quincey described as a ‘spirit of jovial and headlong gaiety’ that meant ‘an occasional use of street slang was not out of harmony’.16 The magazine is most frequently cited for its truculent Toryism and vitriolic assaults on the so-called ‘Cockney School of Poetry’, which included Leigh Hunt and John Keats, but it also published some remarkably insightful literary criticism, especially on William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, and it was famous for the concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm which shaped its tales of terror and guilt, many of which were written by distinguished authors, including Walter Scott, John Galt, James Hogg, and of course De Quincey himself.17 De Quincey reviewed Robert Gillies’s edition of German Stories in Blackwood’s for December 1826, and offered readers a characteristic blend of mirth, scholarship, wit, and colloquiality. Several of the tales in Gillies’s collection turned upon the ‘appalling interest of secret and mysterious murder’, but in other instances De Quincey could not avoid a more humorous tack: ‘Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn.’18 In 1828 Blackwood complained that he ‘always’ had ‘a superabundance of what may be called good articles’, but what he wanted were ‘articles which have some distinctive or superior cast about them’.19 In early 1827 he published De Quincey’s engaging assessments of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Immanuel Kant, but De Quincey’s next essay—‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’—revealed how fully he could exploit the Blackwood’s context of irony, subversion, and extravagance. In the words of Edgar Allan Poe, De Quincey knew ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’.20
‘On Murder’ seizes on the satiric and artistic approach to murder that De Quincey introduced in ‘On the Knocking’, pushing the logic of such a rationale in ways that are both disturbing and seductive, and submerging the ethical to the aesthetic. ‘Everything in this world has two handles,’ he argues with the deadpan aplomb that gives the essay such energy. ‘Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle … and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically… that is, in relation to good taste’ (pp. 10–11). De Quincey was not the first to employ such a breezy and ironized attitude toward violence and crime. In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Peachum notes that ‘Murder is as fashionable a Crime as a Man can be guilty of. How many fine Gentlemen have we in Newgate every Year, purely upon that Article!’21 Denis Diderot’s narrator in Rameau’s Nephew (written 1761–74) begins ‘to find irksome the presence of a man who discussed a horrible act, an execrable crime, like a connoisseur of painting or poetry’.22 The Marquis de Sade’s Juliette (1797) features ‘the Sodality of the Friends of Crime’, while in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), Mr Flosky asserts that ‘if a man knocks me down, and takes my purse and watch by main force, I turn him to account, and set him forth in a tragedy as a dashing young fellow’.23 De Quincey’s views on murder are also buttressed by a variety of philosophical sources, including Aristotle’s notion of catharsis: ‘the final purpose of murder, considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of Tragedy, in Aristotle’s account of it, viz. “to cleanse the heart by means of pity and terror”’ (p. 32). De Quincey also reworked and extended key eighteenth-century notions of the sublime. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes a theatre audience anxiously awaiting the performance of ‘the most sublime and affecting tragedy’ when it is ‘reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square’. The theatre of course empties in a moment, demonstrating ‘the comparative weakness of the imitative arts’ and proclaiming ‘the triumph of real sympathy’.24 Art and violence are again conjoined: Shakespeare is good, but the spectacle of public execution is better. In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant defines the sublime as that which does ‘violence to our imagination’, and acknowledges that dreadful natural calamities—‘volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind’—may evoke the sublime ‘as long as we find ourselves in safety’.25 De Quincey saw clearly the openings and opportunities that such positions allowed, and he moved quickly down a very slippery slope. For ‘once natural violence was considered as a possible source of aesthetic experience,’ Joel Black observes, ‘what was to prevent human violence, which inspired perhaps even greater terror, from making aesthetic claims as well?’26 De Quincey’s reply in ‘On Murder’ is ‘nothing’, and in the essay he launches himself and his readers into an exhilarating and disorientating world of irony and aesthetics. In 1829, two years after De Quincey’s first essay ‘On Murder’ appeared, Walter Scott was approached by ‘one David Paterson’, who had worked for the Edinburgh anatomist Dr Robert Knox, and who had been involved in buying bodies from the serial killers William Burke and William Hare. Paterson asked Scott if he was interested in writing about ‘the awfull tragedy of burke and hare’, and offered ‘sketches of one or two persons who I dair say will be promenent characters’. Scott declined with immediate and heartfelt disgust: ‘The scoundrel has been the companion and patron of such atrocious murderers and kidnappers and he has the impudence to write to any decent man.’27De Quincey felt no such inhibitions. When faced with similar opportunities to explore and exploit contemporary murders, he embraced notoriety and gleefully ignored the ‘decent man’ in favour of the aesthete.
Yet De Quincey’s subversion of morality is perhaps not as clean or complete as he would have us believe. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater he grappled with similar issues, dismissing morality and attempting to slip into the freedom of aesthetics. ‘Let no man expect to frighten me, by a few hard words, into embarking … upon desperate adventures of morality,’ he declares. Earlier, he confesses it, ‘as a besetting infirmity of mine, that … I hanker too much after a state of happiness…. I cannot face misery’.28 But De Quincey cannot escape misery either, and is repeatedly staggered by his own suffocating sense of humiliation and paralysis. ‘I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it’, he writes; ‘and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.’29 As hedonism collides with shame, De Quincey often half admits the very sin he is bent on denying: ‘Guilt … I do not acknowledge: and, if I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the present act of confession.’30 A similar dynamic is at work within ‘On Murder’. De Quincey wants the liberation and fun that comes from a temporary release from social values, and he achieves this through a blandly outrageous misappropriation of language, and a prolonged series of ironic deflations, substitutions, and inversions that enable him to keep morbidity at bay and graze the brink between comedy and horror. His remark that ‘every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it’ initiates a hilarious survey, often tinged with fact, in which he observes that René Descartes was almost murdered by ‘professional men’, Thomas Hobbes ‘was not murdered’ but ‘was three times very near being murdered’, Nicolas Malebranche was in fact murdered by George Berkeley, and Immanuel Kant ‘had a narrower escape from a murderer than any man we read of, except Des Cartes’ (pp. 16, 20, 23). In a discussion of artistic preconception, De Quincey bemoans the fact that ‘people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist, in our line, is generally embar
rassed by too much animation’ (p. 26). Such outrageously poker-faced lamentations run riot throughout the essay but, as in Confessions, De Quincey in ‘On Murder’ only stays or upends ethical judgement: he does not escape it. As editor of the Westmorland Gazette, he justifies including dozens of assize reports of murders and rapes because they teach ‘the more uneducated classes’ their ‘social duties’, and ‘present the best indications of the moral condition of society’.31 In ‘On Murder’, De Quincey insists that the victim ‘ought to be a good man’, and ‘severe good taste’ demands that ‘the subject chosen ought also to have a family of young children wholly dependent on his exertions’. The better the person, the more aesthetically satisfying the murder: ‘how can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?’ (pp. 31–3). The murderous narrator in Philip Kerr’s thriller A Philosophical Investigation (1992) writes that in ‘On Murder’ the ‘moral issue is neatly disposed of by De Quincey’.32 But ‘you can never draw the line between aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism,’ T. S. Eliot observed; ‘however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into something else sooner or later.’ In ‘On Murder’ the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral is ‘one of ironic connection rather than of mutual exclusion’, as Angela Leighton puts it. ‘Text and context, style and reference, are dialogically related, so that the one frets against the other…. Aesthetic pleasure is challenged by ideological guilt.’33
De Quincey extended his 1827 thoughts ‘On Murder’ a year later in a manuscript essay that was apparently designed to introduce another manuscript fragment that he seems to have written around 1825, and that concerned the German murderer Peter Anthony Fonk. De Quincey’s source for his account of Fonk is the Conversations-Lexicon, published in Leipzig in 1824, and the relatively straightforward and reportorial tone of the essay suggests that it was written before he developed the extravagant conceit of the 1827 Blackwood’s essay. The 1828 manuscript, however, is directed ‘To the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine’ and builds on the ironies and inversions of the published essay, as when the narrator who is ‘most decidedly for goodness and morality’ warns a servant of a dreadful downward slide from ‘Murder … to highway robbery; and from highway robbery … to petty larceny. And when once you are got to that, there comes in sad progression sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and late hours; until the awful climax terminates in neglect of dress, non-punctuality, and general waspishness’ (p. 157). Both papers are of considerable interest but William Blackwood was apparently unimpressed and declined to publish either of them, perhaps fearing too much of a good thing. De Quincey, however, remained keenly interested in the satiric treatment of murder, and in 1839 he offered Robert and Alexander Blackwood (managers of the magazine since the death of their father in 1834) a ‘Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, which exploited the same satiric topsy-turviness of the 1827 essay, and which duly appeared in Blackwood’s in the November issue. The essay centres on a dinner for murder connoisseurs who celebrate the achievements of practitioners from the Jewish Sicarii and the Old Man of the Mountain to more recent adepts such as the Edinburgh killers William Burke and William Hare. It features the curmudgeonly Toad-in-the-hole, who is given new life when he learns of John Williams’s sensationally murderous career in the Ratcliffe Highway, for ‘“this is the real thing—this is genuine—this is what you can approve, can recommend to a friend”’ (p. 86). De Quincey’s 1844 manuscript, ‘A New Paper on Murder’, is yet another spirited turn on this familiar pattern. William Burke, De Quincey reliably informs us, was ‘a man of fine sensibility’, but his partner William Hare was ‘a man of principle, a man that you could depend upon—order a corpse for Friday, and on Friday you had it’ (p. 164).
De Quincey’s obsession with murder and mystery, however, did not always involve extravagance, deflation, and satire. In 1838, a year before the appearance of his ‘Second Paper on Murder’, he took a very different approach to crime and violence in his tale ‘The Avenger’, which he published in Blackwood’s, and which drew on and extended the magazine’s well-established preoccupation with terror fiction. ‘The Avenger’ is a story of suspense and retribution in which De Quincey offers a ‘moral lesson’ that ‘deserves the deep attention of coming generations’, though the corrupt and bloody world of the tale makes it difficult to determine what exactly that moral lesson is (p. 35). Maximilian Wyndham is an idealized hero who returns from the Napoleonic Wars to settle in a quiet town in north-eastern Germany. Before long a series of brutal murders takes place in which the killer plants himself within a house and then exterminates all occupants. The townsfolk are gripped by panic and an acute sense of vulnerability, ‘like that which sometimes takes possession of the mind in dreams—when one feels oneself sleeping alone, utterly divided from all call or hearing of friends’ (p. 36). The murderer is eventually revealed to be Maximilian himself, who is Jewish, and whose mother was publicly flogged to death in the town when Maximilian was a boy. He swears vengeance for her death, and then returns to the town as an adult to embark on his ruthlessly ingenious career of vindictive assassination. Yet while ‘The Avenger’ features a brilliant military hero who murders as a fine art, De Quincey often deviates from his own aesthetic injunctions for heightened effect as articulated in his first essay ‘On Murder’. Many of Maximilian’s victims are not young but old, and De Quincey goes so far as to note that in one of the recent murders ‘there had not been much to call forth sympathy. The family consisted of two old bachelors, two sisters, and one grand-niece. The niece was absent on a visit, and the two old men were cynical misers, to whom little personal interest attached’ (p. 52). Similarly, while the 1827 essay ‘On Murder’ emphasizes that the emotional impact is far greater when ‘good’ people die innocently, De Quincey debunks such effects in ‘The Avenger’ by revealing the seemingly peaceful and innocent inhabitants of the town as bigots and fanatics who killed others for the crime of their race (p. 31). Murder for murder’s sake is the disinterested aesthetic ideal, but in ‘The Avenger’ Maximilian wages a personal vendetta with clearly established interests and objectives. What is more, as Maximilian’s secret career is gradually unfolded, he comes to occupy a highly ambivalent position within the tale as outcast and god, protector and destroyer, saviour and suicide. He is Kurt Hiller’s ‘intelligent terrorist’ whose argument is, ‘if I do not kill I shall never establish the world dominion of justice’.34 As a vigilante Maximilian soon comes to seem at least as cruel as his victims, though he continues to insist that their wrongs create his rights. When his vengeance careens so far out of control that he accidentally takes the life of his wife Margaret, he regards her death not as a confirmation of the dead-end futility of violence, but as a final sacrifice that affirms the divinity of his mission.
De Quincey is similarly sombre in his brilliant 1854 ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder’, where he returns again to the scene of the crime that had preoccupied him over the course of more than forty years, for the essay offers his most detailed and searching exploration of the Williams murders. The ‘Postscript’ is rooted in contemporary accounts of the crime in newspapers and pamphlets (as the endnotes to this volume demonstrate), yet De Quincey also omits and distorts events in order to intensify the sense of panic, terror, and defencelessness. He draws plainly on his previous work on the Williams case. In ‘On the Knocking’, he was prompted by his recollection of the moment in the Marr murders when the servant girl Mary returned from an errand, rang the outside bell ‘and at the same time very gently knocked…. Yet how is this? To her astonishment, but with the astonishment came creeping over her an icy horror, no stir nor murmur was heard ascending from the kitchen’ (p. 109). The black humour of the first two published essays ‘On Murder’ returns fitfully, as when De Quincey observes that ‘it is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps of this monster’, or that ‘our present murderer is fastidiously finical in his exactions—a sort of martinet in t
he scenical grouping and draping of the circumstances in his murders’ (pp. 107, 129). Like Maximilian in ‘The Avenger’, De Quincey’s attitude toward Williams is highly ambivalent: he is a ‘solitary artist’ who ‘walked in darkness’, yet he is also ‘one born of hell’ and an ‘accursed hound’ (pp. 98, 104, 114). Both the ‘Postscript’ and ‘The Avenger’ plumb the particular horror of unknown assailants descending on an urban household which is surrounded by unsuspecting neighbours. Both also insist on the strange and aesthetic allure of a clean and catastrophic fell swoop. It is one of Maximilian’s trademarks, for he is behind ‘ten cases of total extermination, applied to separate households’, while Williams seeks Mary because, ‘if caught and murdered’, she ‘perfected and rounded the desolation of the house…. The whole covey of victims was thus netted; the household ruin was thus full and orbicular’ (pp. 36, 111). The ‘Postscript’ concludes with De Quincey’s account of the M‘Kean brothers’ botched attempt to rob an isolated inn just outside Manchester, and includes the gruesome description of a servant who is stabbed but not killed: ‘Solemnly, and in ghostly silence, uprose in her dying delirium the murdered girl; she stood upright, she walked steadily for a moment or two, she bent her steps towards the door’ (p. 139). In its coherence, intensity, and detail, the ‘Postscript’ is De Quincey’s most lurid exploration of violence.
On Murder (Oxford World's Classics) Page 2