On Murder (Oxford World's Classics)

by Thomas De Quincey

  Yet for all his fixation with murder, De Quincey approached the subject from a remarkably varied series of perspectives and sympathies. De Quincey undoubtedly identified with the destructive power of the murderer. Wilson observed tellingly that De Quincey’s was ‘a nature of dreadful passions subdued by reason’, and De Quincey himself often gave vent to feelings of profound hostility, as when he acknowledged himself ‘to have been long alienated from Wordsworth; sometimes even I feel a rising emotion of hostility—nay, something, I fear, too nearly akin to vindictive hatred’.35 De Quincey worried often that he might be responsible for someone’s death, such as the mysterious Malay in Confessions, or the young woman in the gig in ‘The English Mail-Coach’. He joked uneasily that if he had ‘a doppelganger, who went about personating me … philosopher as I am, I might … be so far carried away by jealousy as to attempt the crime of murder upon his carcass’.36 De Quincey projected a work entitled Confessions of a Murderer, and he exulted in the thought of retaliation: ‘revenge’, he wrote, ‘is a luxury … so inebriating that possibly a man would be equally liable to madness, from the perfect gratification of his vindictive hatred or its perfect defeat’.37 John Williams was a brutal psychopath who left large clues at the scenes of his murders, and who was not able to escape detection for more than two weeks. But De Quincey often entertained sublime and strange fantasies of vengeance, and in his mind Williams came to symbolize an agency and energy that he himself found absent in his own meek will. Maximilian is a brutal and unrepentant mass murderer, but he accesses that ‘tremendous power which is laid open in a moment to any man who can reconcile himself to the abjuration of all conscientious restraints’ (p. 99). De Quincey, so often powerless and paralysed by addiction and guilt, glories in the transgressions of the criminal, and embodies what Michel Foucault calls ‘the desire to know and narrate how men have been able to rise against power, traverse the law, and expose themselves to death through death’.38

  Yet De Quincey also sympathized with the victim, and while in ‘On the Knocking’ he instructed the poet not to look into the hearts of those cowering for fear of their own lives, in his first paper ‘On Murder’ he contradicts this directive by declaring that the ‘tendency in murder’ is ‘to excite and irritate the subject’ (p. 26). In ‘interesting illustration of this fact’, De Quincey offers the case of the ‘pursy, unwieldy, half cataleptic’ Mannheim baker who mustered the strength to go twenty-six rounds with an English boxer and assassin, demonstrating ‘what an astonishing stimulus to latent talent is contained in any reasonable prospect of being murdered’ (pp. 26, 29). Less risible examples occur in ‘The Avenger’. As terror descends upon the town, ‘some, alas for the dignity of Man! drooped into helpless imbecility’, but ‘some started up into heroes under the excitement’ (p. 51). One hero is Louisa, a 13-year-old student who hears footsteps on the stairs and later spies the murderer’s leg in the closet, but manages to save both herself and her sister through a display not of hysteria or abjection but ‘blind inspiration’ and a ‘matchless … presence of mind’ (pp. 57, 56). Similarly, in the ‘Postscript’ the young boy finds himself trapped between the two M‘Kean brothers. ‘On the landing at the head of the stairs was one murderer, at the foot of the stairs was the other: who could believe that the boy had the shadow of a chance for escaping?’ And yet he does escape, for in his ‘horror, he laid his left hand on the balustrade, and took a flying leap over it, which landed him at the bottom of the stairs, without having touched a single stair’. It was a jump from ‘a height, such as he will never clear again to his dying day’ (pp. 139, 26). De Quincey often highlighted the clarity and courage of those who found themselves face to face with murderous violence.

  De Quincey, however, did not stop at the murderer and the victim, for he was also fascinated by the position and anxieties of the witness. Given the insights of ‘On the Knocking’, the clear expectation in the ‘Postscript’ is that the focus will be on the psychology of the murderer Williams. But it is not. Once Williams is inside the Marr household, De Quincey makes a striking decision: ‘Let us leave the murderer alone with his victims’ and ‘in vision, attach ourselves’ to Mary, who has been sent to fetch oysters for dinner (p. 108). Williams inflicts his atrocities while we accompany an anxious innocent. And when Mary returns to the Marr front door and begins her slide into panic, De Quincey remains with her, positioning her just beyond Williams’s reach, not directly exposed to his savagery, but hovering on the periphery, a witness to the events rather than a victim of them. ‘The unknown murderer and she have both their lips upon the door, listening, breathing hard’, whispers De Quincey; ‘but luckily they are on different sides of the door; and upon the least indication of unlocking or unlatching, she would have recoiled into the asylum of general darkness’ (p. 111). What is more, in his account of the Williamson murders, De Quincey follows the same pattern. He is with neither Williams nor Williamson, but accompanies the journeyman John Turner, ‘the secret witness, from his secret stand’ who waits breathlessly on the staircase while Williams hangs over the dead body of Mrs Williamson and then searches for keys (p. 124). The murderer’s coat is lined with silk and his shoes creak, for ‘the young artisan, paralysed as he had been by fear, and evidently fascinated for a time so as to walk right towards the lion’s mouth, yet found himself able to notice everything important’. Eventually the murderer walks off ‘to the hidden section of the parlour’ and Turner, seeing ‘at last … the sudden opening for an escape’, makes his way upstairs and then out of his bedroom window and down into the street, ‘the solitary spectator’ who watched spellbound in horror but evaded Williams’s brutality (pp. 123, 125, 102). In Macbeth, we as audience witness the two murderers shortly after their killing of Duncan. In his representation of both the Marr and Williamson atrocities, De Quincey places us in the same position. Bound to the viewpoint of the witness, we listen to or watch Williams just moments after his carnage is complete. In the ‘Postscript’, De Quincey builds his aesthetic of violence from this perspective, for we look on—rather than within—Williams. The terrified bystander is endangered but ultimately released, and reader, witness, and murderer fixed together in a closed and rapt space that descends towards the brink of terror before allowing an escape for help and the reassertion of the ethical world of human action. The three scenes are closely related in terms of structure and emotion, but in Macbeth we are with the murderer while in the ‘Postscript’ we are with the witness.

  De Quincey’s sympathies, however, were divided even beyond murderer, victim, and witness, for he also paved the way for the appearance of the detective, not with the introduction of the actual figure, but by putting in place key features that helped to initiate the enormous and enduring popularity of murder mysteries and detective fiction. De Quincey aestheticized violence, transforming it into liberating and intellectual entertainment and then marketing it in a variety of fictive, impassioned, and satiric guises, where it was rapidly consumed by a reading public insatiably interested in palatable versions of murder that disturbed in order to excite and seduce. ‘From the adventure story to de Quincey, or from the Castle of Otranto to Baudelaire’, asserts Foucault, ‘there is a whole aesthetic rewriting of crime, which is also the appropriation of criminality in acceptable forms.’39 De Quincey stressed the intellectualism and design of brilliant crime. He was not interested in the murder of ‘some huge farmer returning drunk from a fair’, for while ‘there would be plenty of blood’, that can hardly be taken ‘in lieu of taste, finish, scenical grouping’ (p. 83). He delighted to piece together clues: ‘It is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps of this monster [Williams], and to notice the absolute certainty with which the silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and movements of the bloody drama’ (p. 107). His mind demanded mystery. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) is often taken as one of the first novels of detection, but De Quincey roundly condemned it because the plot was not ‘managed with a
rt, and covered with mystery’.40 Most strikingly, in ‘The Avenger’ De Quincey adopts the whole rhetoric of detective fiction. Footsteps in the chapel promise to ‘furnish a clue to the discovery of one at least amongst the murderous band’, while the terrified townsfolk grapple with ‘the mystery of the how, and the profounder mystery of the why’ (pp. 47, 52). Maximilian’s confessional letter explains the inspired ways in which he committed his acts of murderous vengeance and marks ‘the solution of that mystery which caused such perplexity’ (pp. 77–8). In his aestheticization and commodification of crime, as well as in the rhetoric, suspense, violence, reversals, and ingenuity of ‘The Avenger’, De Quincey maps in key features of detective fiction.

  De Quincey’s writings on murder were received with a great deal of contemporary enthusiasm. ‘He has written a thing about Macbeth better than anything I could write,’ remarked Charles Lamb of ‘On the Knocking’; ‘—no—not better than anything I could write, but I could not write anything better’.41 The Gentleman’s Magazine thought the first essay ‘On Murder’ ran over ‘with a ripe and laughter-moving humour from the first page to the last’, while the Eclectic Review considered it ‘as perfect a piece of pure cynicism as any in our language; not savage, like some of Swift’s or Carlyle’s pieces, but playful and full of humour’.42 In ‘The Avenger’, notes L. W. Spring, ‘the plot darkens; the crisis gathers; loud and more tumultuous waxes the fiendish tumult, until all lesser passions are swallowed up, and the empire of a blank, rayless revenge is triumphant; we are spellbound amid the successive stages of the demoniac tragedy; we start up convulsively, as from the horrors of nightmare at its ghastly catastrophe’.43 The ‘Postscript’ drew equal praise. ‘I know of no writer but De Quincey who invests mysteries of this tragic order with their appropriate drapery’, wrote H. M. Alden, ‘so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the full measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.’44 The Eclectic Review observed that ‘anything more horribly interesting cannot be imagined, than his description of Williams, and the murder of the Marrs; it has a magnetic force of attraction, a fascination which the reader vainly endeavours to dispel’.45 The British Quarterly Review declared that ‘it is long since we read’ the ‘Postscript’, but ‘its bloody horrors are still fresh, and are, even to this day, sometimes tyrannous. It is simply terrible in its power; and for long after we read it, every night brought a renewal of the most real shuddering, the palsying dread, and the nightmare impotence with which its first perusal cursed us’.46 In 1874 Leslie Stephen asserted that De Quincey’s essays ‘On Murder’ were ‘probably the most popular of his writings’.47

  The essays, satires, and fictions collected in this volume have had an enormous impact that can be felt across a wide-ranging series of works. Edgar Allan Poe seized on De Quinceyan precedents to fashion the first fictional detective, Auguste Dupin, and to produce a powerful series of tales that explore murder as a fine art.48 In ‘Proem at the Paris Station’ (1849), Dante Gabriel Rossetti sees a stabbed body pulled from the Seine and conjectures that

  he who did the job

  Was standing among those who stood with us,

  To look upon the corpse. You fancy him—

  Smoking an early pipe, and watching, as

  An artist, the effect of his last work.49

  Charles Dickens encapsulates the humour and mobility of De Quincey’s aesthetic in Great Expectations (1860–1). ‘A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows’, writes Dickens. ‘He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for”, as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out”, as the murderer…. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable.’50 G. K. Chesterton declares that De Quincey is ‘the first and most powerful of the decadents’, and that ‘any one still smarting from the pinpricks’ of Oscar Wilde or James Whistler ‘will find most of what they said said better in Murder as One of the Fine Arts’.51 Similarly, Wyndham Lewis remarks that De Quincey’s ‘exaltation of the murderer’ puts him in a group of ‘distinguished diabolists’ that includes ‘Lord Byron, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Wilde, De Lautréamont. … It is a history of a century of diabolics’.52 In the twentieth century George Orwell’s ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946) is among the most famous tributes. ‘Before returning to this pitiful and sordid case’, writes Orwell, ‘… let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that “you never seem to get a good murder nowadays”.’53 Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) features the mescal-sodden Consul’s recollections of ‘Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock, knock, knock: who’s there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe’.54 In Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1966), the murderer states flatly, ‘any remorse on my part is absolutely out of the question: an artist feels no remorse, even when his work is not understood, not accepted’.55 Iain Sinclair opens his Lud Heat (1975) with a quotation from the ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder’, and observes that in the essay itself ‘De Quincey, at his speed and exhaustion of operation, fending off the monkey, digressing obsessively towards overlapping versions of the truth, couldn’t help getting in among the authentic substrata’.56 Peter Ackroyd is as fixated with the Ratcliffe murders as De Quincey, and in Hawksmoor (1985) he recalls how Williams ‘was transformed … according to De Quincey, into a “mighty murderer”’, and then buried at a crossroads, where ‘as far as Hawksmoor knew’, he lay buried still: ‘it was the spot where he had this morning seen the crowd pressing against the cordon set up by the police’.57 De Quincey’s work altered the ways in which murder was represented and recreated, taking us from Radcliffe novels to Ratcliffe highway, from Caleb Williams to John Williams, and from Edmund Burke to William Burke. His interpretations of murder frequently confound the reader between sympathy and voyeurism, but reveal the ways in which what would horrify us in life will entertain us in art. In his hands, violent crime became a subject which could be detached from social circumstances and then ironized, tamed, analysed, exploited, and avidly enjoyed by his burgeoning magazine audiences, and by generations of murder mystery connoisseurs and armchair detectives who enjoy the intellectual challenge, rapt exploration, and satiric safety of murder as a fine art.

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  THE copy text for the four essays and one tale of terror reprinted in the main section of this volume is the first published version. Details of dates and the place of publication appear in the Explanatory Notes. All five texts have been standardized in a number of ways: double quotation marks have been changed to single, quotation marks have been removed from around indented quotations, full stops have been removed from terms of address (‘Mrs’, ‘Mr’, ‘Dr’, ‘St’), a standard format has been adopted for the headings, and square brackets have been changed to round. Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Inconsistencies in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling have been retained.

  The three appendixes in this volume contain manuscript fragments intended by De Quincey to form part of the ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ series, though in each instance the fragment remained unpublished until well after his death. Head-notes to each appendix give details on manuscript location, date or probable date of composition, and any distinctive or anomalous features.

  Throughout the volume, De Quincey’s footnotes are cued by superior figures and editorial endnotes are cued by asterisks.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bibliographies

  Dendurent, H. O., Thomas De Quincey: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1978).

  Morrison, Robert, ‘Essayists of the Romantic Period: De Quincey, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb’, in Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O’Neill (Oxford, 1998), 341–63.

  Biographies

  Eaton, H. A., Thomas De Quince
y (New York, 1936).