Thomas a Kempis: Thomas à Kempis (1379/80–1471), Christian theologian and the probable author of Imitation of Christ. De Quincey’s ignorant author, however, may be confusing à Kempis with Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–74), the greatest of medieval philosopher-theologians.
Est aliquid prodire tenus, si non datur ultrà: Horace, Epistles, i. i. 32: ‘It is worth while to take some steps forward, though we may not go still further’.
Mannheim baker’s: see above, pp. 27–9.
Tros, Tyriusque mihi: Virgil, Aeneid, i. 574: ‘Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur’ (‘Trojan and Tyrian I shall treat with no distinction’).
send you … German murder … last 50 years: De Quincey is referring to his essay on Peter Anthony Fonk, which he completed around 1825. The present essay was intended as an introduction to the Fonk essay (see above, pp. 143–54).
Williamsons’: De Quincey details the murder of the Williamsons in his ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder’ (see above, pp. 118–36).
M. de Savary: De Quincey errs by twenty-one years in his dating of the event, but he clearly has in mind the May 1699 murder of Jean Baptiste Savary, brother of Mathurin Savary, bishop of Sées. De Quincey may have drawn his account in part from the Marquis de Dangeau, Memoirs of the Court of France from the year 1684 to the year 1720, now first translated, 2 vols. (London, 1825), i. 379: ‘The King was informed, that M. Savari had been assassinated at his house, in Paris. There were a valet and a female servant also killed, and the crime has apparently been committed in the day time…. It seems, by some writings, which have been found, to have been an act of revenge; nothing has been stolen in the house. M. Savari … was a virtuoso, and a man of pleasure, and had many friends.’ Cf. the Duke of Saint-Simon, Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency, 3 vols. (London, 1901), i. 157: ‘A strange adventure, which happened at this time, terrified everybody, and gave rise to many surmises. Savary was found assassinated in his house at Paris…. Few doubted but that the deed had been done by a very ugly little man, but of a blood so highly respected, that all forms were dispensed with, in the fear lest it should be brought home to him; and, after the first excitement, everybody ceased to speak of this tragic history.’
bonne bouche: the mouthful that one saves for the last, in order to savour it and have the flavour linger on the tongue.
Marrs … knocked … quarter of an hour: De Quincey details the murder of the Marr household in his ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder’ (see above, pp. 97–118).
time of the revolution: De Quincey means the first French Revolution of 1789.
first water: ‘of the highest excellence or purity’ (OED).
Thurtell … Weare: John Thurtell and William Weare feature in De Quincey’s first essay ‘On Murder’ (see above, p. 171).
‘Deipnosophilae’: properly, ‘Deipnosophitae’. The word was misspelled by the printer in the first paper ‘On Murder’ (see above, p. 21).
‘reddere excutum’: the reference is confusing because the phrase ‘reddere excutum’ does not appear in the first paper ‘On Murder’. De Quincey probably has in mind either a misremembrance or an uncorrected proof of the paper’s closing quotation from Horace, which contains the phrase ‘acutum | Reddere’ (see above, p. 34).
APPENDIX C. A New Paper on Murder as a Fine Art
Palmer & Co.: in 1844, the year De Quincey wrote this manuscript, Joseph Hume (1777–1855), radical Scottish MP, organized the building of a monument in Edinburgh to commemorate Thomas Fyshe Palmer (1747–1802) and four other ‘Scottish Martrys’ who in 1793 were convicted of writing pamphlets in support of parliamentary reform and sent to Australia.
facilitas aequalis: just facility.
curiosa felicitas: Petronius, Satyricon, cxviii, 4: ‘Homerus testis et lyrici Romanusque Vergilius et Horatii curiosa felicitas’ (‘Homer proves this, and the lyric poets, and Roman Virgil, and the studied felicity of Horace’).
Cat. in Newgate Calendar: De Quincey is thinking of the case of ‘John Bodkin, Dominick Bodkin and Others’ in Newgate Calendar, iii. 122: ‘The assassins had even been so wanton in their cruelties as to kill all the dogs and cats in the house.’
Williams … murdered the baby: De Quincey describes John Williams’s murder of the infant Timothy Marr in his ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder’ (see above, pp. 115–16).
Fielding: not identified.
Kilkenny cats: a pair of proverbial cats from Kilkenny, Ireland, who fought until only their tails were left.
Nemesis: in Greek myth, ‘Nemesis’ is the personification of retribution or righteous anger.
der erste der letzte: the first, the last.
Outis: Greek for ‘nobody’, ‘no man’, and the name famously adopted by Odysseus to dupe Polyphemus in Homer, Odyssey, ix.
wife … two children … Halifax: not identified.
vauriens: a ‘vaurien’ is ‘a worthless, good-for-nothing fellow; a scamp’ (OED).
like leaves in Vallombrosa: cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 302–3: ‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks | In Vallombrosa’.
te-totum: ‘any light top … spun with the fingers, used as a toy’ (OED).
Sir Eustace … Sir Hubert: a legend concerning Sir Eustace de Lucey and his younger brother Hubert. Whilst on the Crusades in Palestine, Hubert arranged to have Eustace killed, and then returned home to England to a life of revelry. But Eustace escaped death, and returned to Egremont Castle to sound the horn as its rightful owner. De Quincey has confused the two brothers: Hubert is the treacherous one.
‘sounded the horn which he alone could sound’: Wordsworth, ‘The Horn of Egremont Castle’, l. 112.
ring of Gyges: Gyges (c. 685–c. 657 BC), king of Lydia, was a shepherd who found a ring that made him invisible. He used it to seduce the queen and murder the king. The story is recounted in Plato, Republic, book II.
Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s: the Whispering Gallery is directly beneath the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. De Quincey’s account is inaccurate. A whisper uttered at any point is carried round the outer wall at almost its original volume, but is not amplified.
Mandeville … curses … November: Sir John Mandeville (fl. 14th century), reputed author of a collection of travellers’ tales from around the world, The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight. De Quincey, however, almost certainly draws this reference from Joseph Addison (1672–1719), essayist, poet, and dramatist, ‘No. 254’ in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1987), iii, 289–90: Addison prints ‘an Extract of Sir John’s journal’ in which words freeze in the air until a thaw brings ‘a Volley of Oaths and Curses’.
post-obits: an abbreviation for ‘post-obit bond’, ‘a bond given by a borrower, securing to the lender a sum of money to be paid on the death of a specified person from whom the borrower has expectations’ (OED).
Addison … dervise … enchanted water: Addison, ‘No. 94’ in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), i. 398–9. A ‘Dervise’ or ‘Dervish’ is a ‘Mohammedan friar, who has taken vows of poverty and austere life’ (OED).
Burke and Hare: De Quincey toasts William Burke and William Hare in his second essay ‘On Murder’ (see above, pp. 92–3).
Foote’s turnpike-keeper: De Quincey’s reference seems to be to Samuel Foote (1720–77), actor, wit, mimic, and playwright. But no Kensington turnpike-keeper with a superb memory has been traced in any of Foote’s plays.
Dr——: Dr Robert Knox (1791–1862), anatomist and conservator at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh, paid Burke and Hare £7s. for the first corpse they delivered, but soon increased the payment to £10 per body.
Daimon … of Socrates: Socrates claimed a personal demon. Plato, Apology for Socrates, 31: ‘I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward.’
Entelecheia of Aristotle: for Aristotle, see above, p. 170. ‘En
telechy’ is a term for the complete actualization or full expression of a potentiality.
Thomas Aquinas: St Thomas Aquinas (see above, p. 197, note to p. 157) wrote the Summa theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles.
Semele: in Greek mythology, Semele is a daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia. She was ambitious because she wanted to be Zeus’s wife.
royal pupil’s conquests: Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), king of Macedonia and conqueror of what was then most of the civilized world, was one of Aristotle’s pupils.
Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Ariadne: Greek heroines commemorated in the stars.
Argo: in Greek mythology, Jason and his crew (the ‘Argonauts’) went in the ship Argo to retrieve the Golden Fleece.
Trojan war: the legend of the Trojan War is the most notable theme from ancient Greek literature and forms the basis of Homer’s Iliad. The conflict was between the early Greeks and the people of Troy in Asia Minor, and is traditionally dated to the twelfth or thirteenth century BC.
Berenice: Berenice II (c. 269–221 BC), wife of Ptolemy Euergetes, king of Egypt. When he set forth to avenge the murder of his sister, Berenice dedicated a lock of her hair to his safe return. It was later transferred to heaven, where it formed a new constellation.
ten Categories!’: in Categories, Aristotle proposes ten fundamental types of predicates.
Padishah Victoria: ‘Padishah’ is ‘a Persian title’. In India, it was applied ‘by natives to the sovereign of Great Britain as the Emperor of India’ (OED). Victoria (1819–1901), queen of Great Britain and Ireland, 1837–1901.
1 Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (London, 1994), 30.
2 Leslie Stephen, ‘The Decay of Murder’, Cornhill Magazine, 20 (December 1869), 722.
3 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Marginalia IV, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (Princeton, 1998), 237–8.
4 Laurence Senelick, The Prestige of Evil: The Murderer as Romantic Hero from Sade to Lacenaire (New York, 1987), p. xviii.
5 James Hogg, De Quincey and his Friends (London, 1895), 174.
6 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Nine, ed. Grevel Lindop, Robert Morrison, and Barry Symonds (London, 2001), 46.
7 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Two, ed. Grevel Lindop (London, 2000), 146.
8 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Eighteen, ed. Edmund Baxter (London, 2001), 35–6.
9 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Sixteen, ed. Robert Morrison (London, 2003), 388.
10 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (New York, 1982), 38.
11 G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown: A Selection, ed. W. W. Robson (Oxford, 1995), 6.
12 Leigh Hunt, ‘Watchmen’, The Examiner, 212 (19 January 1812), 33; Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. J. W. Warter, 4 vols. (London, 1856), ii. 248.
13 E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols. (London, 1905), i. 163.
14 W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, 4 vols. (1988—continuing), iv. 265.
15 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1930–4), v. 10.
16 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Seven, ed. Robert Morrison (London, 2000), 80.
17 See Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine, ed. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford, 1995).
18 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Six, ed. David Groves and Grevel Lindop (London, 2000), 19, 15–16.
19 Irene Mannion, ‘Criticism “Con Amore”: A Study of Blackwood’s Magazine 1817–1834’, Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1984, 102.
20 ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1969–78), ii. 334–62.
21 John Gay, Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983), ii. 7–8.
22 Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth, 1966), 97.
23 Marquis de Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York, 1968), 417; ‘Nightmare Abbey’ in The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (London, 1924–34), iii. 52.
24 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford, 1990), 43.
25 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge, 2000), 129, 144.
26 Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (Baltimore, 1991), 14.
27 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford, 1972), 542–3.
28 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Two, 232, 54.
29 Ibid. 73–4.
30 Ibid. 10.
31 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume One, ed. Barry Symonds (London, 2000), 147.
32 Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation (London, 1992), 241.
33 T. S. Eliot, ‘A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry’, in Selected Essays (New York, 1960), 42; Angela Leighton, ‘De Quincey and Women’, in Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London, 1992), 165.
34 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), 298.
35 Mary Gordon, ‘Christopher North’: A Memoir of John Wilson (New York, 1863), 326; The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Eleven, ed. Julian North (London, 2003), 62.
36 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Sixteen, 52.
37 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Ten, ed. Alina Clej (London, 2003), 261.
38 I, Pierre Rivière, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York, 1975), 206.
39 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), 68.
40 The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Fifteen, ed. Frederick Burwick (London, 2003), 266.
41 E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols. (London, 1905), ii. 69.
42 Anonymous, ‘Thomas De Quincey’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 203 (August 1857), 111; Anonymous, ‘Thomas De Quincey’, Eclectic Review, 8th ser., 15 (August 1868), 115.
43 L. W. Spring, ‘Thomas De Quincey and his Writings’, Continental Monthly, 5 (June 1864), 662.
44 H. M. Alden, ‘Thomas De Quincey’, Atlantic Monthly, 12 (September 1863), 362.
45 Anonymous, ‘Thomas De Quincey’, Eclectic Review, 8th ser., 15 (August 1868), 115.
46 Anonymous, ‘The Works of Thomas De Quincey’, British Quarterly Review, 38 (July 1863), 22.
47 ‘Leslie Stephen on De Quincey’, in De Quincey, ed. M. R. Ridley (Oxford, 1927), 16.
48 Robert Morrison, ‘Poe’s De Quincey, Poe’s Dupin’, Essays in Criticism, 51/4 (2001), 424–41.
49 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven, 2003), 354.
50 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford, 1993), 132.
51 G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (New York, 1913), 24–5.
52 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art, ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa, Calif., 1987), 143.
53 George Orwell, Smothered under Journalism, 1946, ed. Peter Davison (London, 1998), 108–9.
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