On Murder (Oxford World's Classics)

by Thomas De Quincey

  ON MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS

  First published in Blackwood’s Magazine, 21 (February 1827), 199–213. ‘The best article in the No is De Quincey on Murder’, wrote David Macbeth Moir to William Blackwood after reviewing the February 1827 issue. ‘I can easily suppose that you must have had some qualms in publishing the article, but it is blameless, and will be generally read and relished.’ Moir thought he detected the presence of De Quincey’s closest friend and fellow Blackwood’s contributor, John Wilson, for ‘in some parts’ he approaches Wilson ‘so closely that I can scarcely persuade myself of there not being a little intermingling’. De Quincey published both the present essay and ‘The Last Days of Kant’ in the same February 1827 issue of Blackwood’s (Eugene A. Nolte, ‘The Letters of David Macbeth Moir to William Blackwood and his Sons’, 2 vols. (Ph.D. thesis, Texas Technological College, 1955, i. 332).

  Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine: William Blackwood (1776–1834) edited Blackwood’s Magazine from 1817 to 1834, but the magazine also had a fictive editor, ‘Christopher North’, who was most often personated by John Wilson (1785–1854), voluminous Blackwood’s contributor and Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, 1820–51. De Quincey undoubtedly had both Blackwood and Wilson in mind when he addressed himself to the editor of Blackwood’s (see Robert Morrison, ‘John Wilson and the editorship of Blackwood’s Magazine’, Notes and Queries, 46/1 (1999), 48–50).

  Society for the Promotion of Vice: De Quincey probably parodies the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded by Thomas Bray (1656–1730) in 1698 to encourage the distribution of Christian literature and counteract the growth of vice and immorality.

  Hell-Fire Club: the first of several early eighteenth-century Hell-Fire Clubs is reputed to have been founded around 1720 by Philip, duke of Wharton (1698–1731). These informal aristocratic groups were allegedly devoted to drink, sacrilege, and sexual excess, and were bombastically condemned in the anonymous Hell-Fire-Club: Kept by a Society of Blasphemers … With the King’s Order in Council, for Suppressing Immorality and Prophaneness (London, 1721). Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–81) founded a similar but better-known Club around 1750.

  Society … for the Suppression of Virtue: De Quincey parodies the Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1802 by William Wilberforce (1759–1833), abolitionist and politician.

  ‘euphemism’.

  Bow-street: the chief magisterial business of London was for many years carried on in the Bow Street Police Court. Its officers were popularly known as the ‘Bow-Street Runners’, the first London police force. In 1829, two years after De Quincey published this article, the ‘Runners’ were officially replaced by the Metropolitan Police.

  Lactantius: Lactantius (c. AD 240—c. 320), North African Christian apologist and one of the most reprinted of the Latin Church Fathers. De Quincey quotes from Lactantius, ‘Epitome 58’ in Epitome Divinarum Institutionum, ed. Eberhared Heck and Antonie Wlosok (Stuttgart, 1994), 91. De Quincey distorts the quotation in a number of ways, including the omission of the opening question (‘What is as horrid, as foul as the murder of a man?’) and the translation of ‘voluptas’ (‘pleasure’ or ‘delight’) as ‘demands of taste’.

  ‘proemia postulavit’: ‘he has demanded rewards’.

  ‘interfectori favit’: ‘he has shown favour to the killer’.

  X.Y.Z.: see above, p. 167.

  Note of the Editor: the note is almost certainly the addition of either William Blackwood or John Wilson, and seems to have been inserted without De Quincey’s consent.

  Erasmus … Praise of Folly: Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469–1536), the greatest of the Renaissance humanists, satirized theologians and widely practised rseligious observances in his celebrated Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly (1509).

  Dean Swift … eating children: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Anglo-Irish author and Dean of St Paul’s, Dublin. In ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), Swift satirically suggested eating the children of the Irish poor.

  Williams’: for John Williams, see above, p. 166.

  pari passu: ‘at an equal pace’.

  Aeschylus … Michael Angelo: Aeschylus (525–456 BC), Greek tragedian. Michelangelo (1475–64), Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and poet.

  Wordsworth.... ‘created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’: William Wordsworth (1770–1850) declared in his ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815) that ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’ (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1974), iii. 80; Wordsworth’s italics).

  Majesty’s Judges of Assize: High Court judges who presided in county criminal and civil cases.

  Everything … two handles: De Quincey borrows from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford, 1998), 83: ‘Every thing in this world, continued my father, (filling a fresh pipe)—every thing in this earthly world, my dear brother Toby, has two handles.’

  Old Bailey: the Central Criminal Court in London.

  Kant … unconditional veracity … his reasons: in 1797 the Franco-Swiss novelist and political writer Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) accused the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) of going ‘so far as to maintain that it would be a crime to lie to a murderer who asked us whether a friend of ours whom he is pursuing had taken refuge in our house’. Kant admitted that ‘I actually said this somewhere or other, though I cannot now recall where’, and then reaffirmed his view in On the Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy (1797), in which he states that ‘if you have by a lie prevented someone just now bent on murder from committing the deed, then you are legally accountable for all the consequences that might arise from it. But if you have kept strictly to the truth, then public justice can hold nothing against you, whatever the unforeseen consequences might be’ (see Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, 1996), 611–12). Kant, however, did not argue that one should ‘point out [the] victim’s hiding-place’ (as De Quincey’s lecturer claims).

  Howship: John Howship (1781–1841), English surgeon and author.

  Berners’ Street … men of genius: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) lived with his friends John and Mary Morgan at 71 Berners Street, London, from 1812 to 1813. Other ‘men of genius’ who lived in Berners Street include the architect Sir William Chambers (1726–96) and the painters John Opie (1761–1807) and Henry Fuseli (1741–1825).

  Plotinus from the attic lips: Plotinus (AD 205–70), Platonist philosopher. ‘Attic’ is ‘of or pertaining to Attica, or to its capital Athens’; thus, ‘marked by simple and refined elegance, pure, classical’ (OED).

  ‘those around Plato’.

  ‘Fire — fire!’ … spectacle: De Quincey invokes John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae (XIV)’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, 15 (April 1824), 382:’I call this a very passable fire.... I fear the blockheads will be throwing water upon the fire, and destroying the effect. Mr Ambrose, step over the way, and report progress.’ Revealingly, Wilson then proceeds to a discussion of John Thurtell. Cf. William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Kean’s Iago’ in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1930–4), v. 213: Shakespeare ‘knew that the love of power … was natural to man.... Why do we always read the accounts in the newspapers, of dreadful fires and shocking murders, but for the same reason?’

  additional keys: the first five and a half octave piano appeared in the late eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century piano keyboards reached six and a half octaves.

  morality … on the insurance office: fire brigades were employed by the insurance companies, and responded only to fires at premises insured by their own companies. The government was not involved in fire-fighting until 1865.

  Stagyrite … a perfect thief: Aristotle (384–322 BC) was born in Stagira and known as the ‘Stagiri
te’. In his Metaphysics, v. xvi, he defines ‘excellence’ as that which ‘cannot be surpassed relative to its genus … transferring it to the case of bad things, we speak of a complete scandalmonger and a complete thief – as indeed we even call them good: a good thief and a good scandalmonger’.

  ‘a beautiful ulcer’: De Quincey almost certainly has in mind Howship, Practical Remarks upon Indigestion (London, 1825), 155: ‘External to the cavity … was now seen, quite distinct from the fine injected membrane, the section of a small white soft tumor.... The contrast was beautiful, the natural structure well injected, that of the tumor not injected at all’.

  Nicomachéan Ethics … Magna Moralia, or Big Ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was dedicated to or edited by his son, Nichomachus. The authorship of the Magna Moralia is uncertain: it may have been written by Aristotle, or it may have been compiled from his lectures by one of his students after his death.

  Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna: adapted from Cicero, Letters to Atticus, IV. vi. 2, which itself quotes Euripides, Fragments, 723: ‘Sparta is your portion: embellish it!’

  Autolycus or Mr Barrington: Autolycus is the thief and rogue in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. George Barrington (1755–1804) was an Irish adventurer and notorious pickpocket.

  phagedaenic ulcer: ‘spreading ulcer’ (OED).

  ‘bright consummate flower’: Milton, Paradise Lost, v. 481.

  inkstand … Coleridge … Blackwood: Coleridge, ‘Selection from Mr Coleridge’s Literary Correspondence with Friends, and Men of Letters’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 10 (1821), 256: ‘What qualities and properties would you wish to have combined in an ink-stand? … The union of these desiderata will be your ideal of an ink-stand.’

  paulo-post-futurum: a grammatical term referring to the verb form used for an event that is about to happen.

  respectively, ‘it is completed’ and ‘it is done’. A molossus is ‘a metrical foot consisting of three long syllables’ (OED). De Quincey’s reference seems to be to Medea, a Greek tragedy by Euripides (c. 485–406 BC). But the word does not appear in the play. De Quincey probably has in mind Euripides, Hecuba, 1122.

  ‘abiit, evasit’: Cicero, In Catilinam, ii. 1: ‘Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit’ (‘He has gone, left us, got away, broken out’).

  Vertu: variant of ‘Virtu’, ‘a knowledge of, or interest in, the fine arts’ (OED).

  Cain to Mr Thurtell: Cain was the first-born son of Adam and Eve, and murdered his brother Abel (Genesis 4: 1–16). John Thurtell (1794–1824) believed his fellow gambler William Weare had cheated him of £300 and, after enticing Weare into the country, he murdered him. Thurtell’s trial and execution attracted enormous attention, including William Maginn, ‘The Lament for Thurtell’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, 15 (January 1824), 101: ‘What if, after swallowing brains and blood, he ate pork chops like turtle, | Sure, don’t we swallow anything? Alas! for Whig Jack Thurtell’.

  father of the art: De Quincey parodies Pierce Egan (1772–1849), sporting writer, whose Boxiana (1812) opens with a lively survey of ‘the origin, rise, and progress of pugilism in England’, and ponders ‘whether our first parent, ADAM, had any pretensions to this art’ (Egan, Boxiana, ed. Scott Noble (Toronto, 1997), 1).

  Tubal Cain: Eve ‘also bare Tubal-Cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron’ (Genesis 4: 22).

  Sheffield: Sheffield, in south Yorkshire, was in the nineteenth century the world centre of high-grade steel manufacture.

  Whereat … Par. Lost, B. XI: Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. 444–7.

  ‘It has … a large wound’: Jonathan Richardson (1667–1745), portrait painter, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost (1734), 497.

  Polypheme: in Homer’s Odysseus, Polyphemus is the most famous of a race of savage, one-eyed giants known as Cyclopes. In Book IX Odysseus narrowly escapes being killed and eaten by Polyphemus.

  Duke of Gloucester, in Henry VI.: Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI, III. ii.

  Duncan’s, Banquo’s: Shakespeare, Macbeth, ii. ii and Macbeth, iii. iii.

  age of Pericles: Pericles (c.495–429 BC), Athenian statesman, led Greece during an age of great political and cultural achievement.

  Interfectus est, interemptus est: ‘He was killed, he was destroyed’.

  Murdratus est: De Quincey playfully Latinizes German stems: ‘He was murdered’.

  Jewish school … Hugh of Lincoln … Lady Abbess: in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Prioress (not ‘Abbess’) relates the story of a choirboy in Asia who was murdered by Jews. At the end of the tale she likens him to Hugh of Lincoln (1245–55), a legendary English child martyr whose alleged murder by Jews became a focal point of medieval anti-Semitism.

  Catiline, Clodius … Cicero: Cicero (106–43 BC), statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer, was also the greatest Roman orator. Catiline (c. 108–62 BC), aristocrat and demagogue, plotted to overthrow the Roman republic and murder its leading citizens, including Cicero. He was denounced by Cicero in the Senate and died in battle shortly thereafter. Clodius (c.93–52 BC), politician and thug, was a bitter enemy of Cicero.

  Cethegus: Cethegus was the most dangerous of Catiline’s associates and undertook to murder Cicero. He was executed by order of the Senate.

  utile … cloaca … honestum: De Quincey means the useful (‘utile’) as opposed to the honourable (‘honestum’) thing. A ‘cloaca’ is a ‘sewer’.

  ‘assassin’: the ‘Assassins’, whose name derives from the Arabic ‘Hashshash’ (‘hashish smoker’), were an Islamic sect dating from the eleventh century, and infamous for their alleged practice of taking hashish to induce ecstatic visions and then murdering their religious enemies. Rashid ad-Din (d. 1192), leader of the Syrian branch of the Assassins, was known in the West as the Old Man of the Mountain.

  settled a pension on him for three lives: the anecdote has not been traced, and is probably De Quincey’s own apocryphal addition.

  William I. of Orange, of Henry IV. of France: William I, Prince of Orange (1533–84), leader of the Protestant Netherlands in their revolt against Spanish rule, was shot dead by a fanatical Roman Catholic, Franc-Comtois Balthasar Gérard. Henri IV (1553–1610), first Bourbon King of France, was stabbed to death by a deranged Roman Catholic, François Ravaillac (1578–1610).

  Duke of Buckingham … Mr Ellis: George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), statesman and royal favourite, was murdered in Portsmouth by a disaffected naval lieutenant, John Felton (c.1595–1628). Sir Henry Ellis (1777–1869), principal librarian of the British Museum, published a letter ‘announcing the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham’ in Original letters, illustrative of English History, 3 vols. (London, 1824), iii. 254–60: ‘the Duke of Buckingham … was by one Felton … slaine at one blow, with a dagger-knife. In his staggering he turn’d about, uttering onely this word, “Villaine!”’

  Gustavus Adolphus … Wallenstein: Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632), king of Sweden and champion of the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War, was not murdered, but died in battle at Lützen. Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein (1583–1634), Bohemian soldier and commander of the armies of the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years War, was stabbed to death by an English mercenary, Walter Devereux.

  Harte amongst others: De Quincey refers to Walter Harte (1709–74), miscellaneous writer, The History of the Life of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden (1759). Harte’s account does not tally with De Quincey’s: as Gustavus’s followers ‘were preparing to retreat, an Imperial cavalier advanced, unobserved … and having cried out, Long have I fought thee, transpierced his majesty with a pistol-ball through the body’ (Harte, The History of Gustavus Adolphus, 2 vols. (London, 1807), ii. 377).

  exemplaria: ‘models’ or ‘examples’.

  Nocturnâ versatâ manu, versate diurne: Horace, Ars Poetica, 269: ‘handle [them] by night, handle them by day’.

  Locke’s: John Locke (1632–1704), philosopher and author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), th
e seminal work of British empiricist philosophy.

  Galileo … Des Cartes: Galileo (1564–1642), Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. René Descartes (1596–1650), French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher.