GUILTY THING
GUILTY THING
A Life of Thomas De Quincey
Frances Wilson
For Quincy W
. . . it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised. . .
Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality’
CONTENTS
Maps
The Prelude
1Books
2Childhood and Schooltime
3Schooltime (continued)
4Residence in London
5Summer Vacation
6Residence at Oxford
7Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind
8Home at Grasmere
9Residence in Dove Cottage and the Revolution
10Residence in London and Grasmere
11The Recluse
12Imagination, Impaired and Restored
13Same Subject (continued)
14Postscript
The Tables Turned
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
24 Ratcliffe Highway, ‘a most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London’.
The Prelude
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
‘This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?’
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Second
A few minutes to midnight, 7 December 1811
Save for the quick light tap of Margaret Jewell’s footsteps on the cobbles, the Ratcliffe Highway had fallen silent. The publicans of Shadwell had poured their last pitchers, the sailors and stevedores had turned in to their boarding houses, the pawnbrokers, block-builders and rope-makers had bolted their doors. Black water sloshed against the steps of the Wapping wharves and behind the wall of the London Docks the rigging of the ships creaked and swung. Margaret Jewell had been sent by her master, Timothy Marr of ‘Marr’s Silk, Lace, Pelisse, Mantle and Furr Warehouse’ on 29 Ratcliffe Highway, to buy a dozen oysters for his family supper and to pay the baker’s bill. Trading continued late on Saturday nights, and Marr’s drapery was only now closing.
It was the last day of the working week and the end of the year in which a comet had been seen falling through the sky. Napoleon’s Comet, as it was known in Europe, was held to portend unnatural times and in William Blake’s miniature vision, The Ghost of a Flea, it hurls through the night between embroidered stage curtains while a monstrous creature with the face of a murderer and the legs of a man whips his tongue into a bowl of blood. Beneath the comet’s luminous tail, America would be rocked by earthquakes and the Mississippi flow backwards; in England, those for whom comets were omens observed that the war with France had dragged into its twentieth year, the old, despised and dying King George had been once more declared insane by his doctors, and textile workers in Nottingham were smashing with hammers a thousand stocking machines. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, living through the worst days of his life, recorded in his notebooks a nightmarish version of the comet’s trajectory: ‘Suppose the Earth gradually to approach nearer the Sun or to be scorched by a close Comet – & still rolling on – with Cities menless – Channels riverless – 5 miles deep.’
Margaret Jewell made her way first to the oyster shop, but finding it already shut she turned around and headed back down the road towards the baker’s. Marr had not yet put up the shutters on his freshly painted bay window – his establishment had recently undergone a refurbishment – and so she could see him as she passed by, standing at the counter on the ground floor with his young apprentice James Gowen, clearing away the rolls of cloth. Her route down Ratcliffe Highway took her past St George in the East, the most phantasmagoric and sinister of Hawksmoor’s six London churches, its 160-foot tower rising pale above the rooftops like a schooner riding a storm. Ian Nairn later called St George ‘the hardest building to describe in London’. It has the hypnotic pull of a pyramid, but resembles ‘an entity like a hand or foot, total shape and total atmosphere’. With its four pepper-pot turrets, each marking the position of a spiral staircase, St George takes us to ‘a stage beyond fantasy’ and into ‘the more than real world of the drug-addict’s dream’.
Immediately south of Margaret Jewell’s path lay the country’s largest landing stage. Every year 13,000 ships laden with goods arrived at the London Docks from India, Greenland, China and Australia. Before the docks were completed in 1806, the river had been log-jammed with 2,000 vessels at a time packing into a mooring space that could hold 500, their precious cargoes exposed to pirates. Not even the river police could control the rackets of thieves and receivers, and so a fortress-like wall, thirty feet high and defended by guards, was girdled around the ships. The architect, Daniel Asher Alexander, Surveyor to the London Dock Company, also built the Dartmoor and Maidstone prisons and his design for the docks was inspired by Piranesi’s semi-hallucinatory images of the Carceri d’invenzione, or ‘Imaginary Prisons’, etched in Rome in the late 1740s. The dock wall enclosed a citadel of merchandise, and the Ratcliffe Highway looked like a dwarf city on the other side. Vaults extending for acres beneath the streets stored Himalayan mounds of cocoa, tobacco, calico, indigo, muslin, wine, spices and coffee; as well as ostrich feathers, elephants’ tusks, rugs, ambergris, monkey skins and cages of exotic beasts. Once a Bengal tiger imported for display in an emporium on the highway escaped from its box in the warehouse and took off with a boy between its jaws.
Margaret Jewell walked that night through a theatre of immensity: giant ramparts, narrow passageways, fortresses, dungeons and flights of steps – like Wapping Old Stairs, which led to the river that flowed out to the sea. The ocean was part of the lives of the shopkeepers, brothel-owners, landladies, publicans and laundresses who relied on the wages of the mariners who moored between berths. You could buy the largest oysters in England here, and shellfish scraped from the bottom of ships; even the vegetables had a scaly look.
The bakery had closed for the night and so Margaret Jewell returned home, having completed neither of her tasks. She had been out for no more than twenty minutes, she later said, but found the house ‘closely shut up, and no light to be seen. I rang the bell, and no one answered. I rang repeatedly; whilst I was at the door, the watchman went by on the other side of the way.’ She rang again, more insistently, and this time heard through the keyhole the sound of footsteps on the stairs which she took to be those of her master, followed by the low cry of the Marrs’ baby.
The local watchman called the hour of one o’clock, and told her to move on. ‘I said I belonged to the house,’ she later explained, ‘and thought it very strange that I should be locked out; he then observed that they had not fastened the pin of the window.’ The watchman himself now started hammering and John Murray, who ran the pawnbroker’s next door, rose from his bed to discover the cause of the disturbance. Finding the girl locked out, Murray suggested that he might try the back entrance.
He climbed over the wall dividing the back yards of their two homes, and called out for Marr. The house remained silent but the door being open, Murray went inside. A candle burned on the first-floor landing; he went upstairs and, standing respectfully outside the bedroom door, called: ‘Marr, Marr, your window shutters are not fastened.’ No sound came from the room and so Murray went downstairs; on opening the door whi
ch led to the shop he pushed against the body of James Gowen, whose face and head had been shattered by blows so severe that his brains had splattered across the counter and up the walls; Murray could see them hanging from the ceiling like limpets. Staggering backwards, he fell against Mrs Marr, her cranium fractured and throat cut, blood draining from her wounds. Murray stumbled to the front door which he opened, shrieking ‘Murder! Murder! Come and see what murder is here!’ The watchman, Margaret Jewell and the neighbours, who had now joined them on the doorstep, crowded into the house. They found Timothy Marr lying face down behind the counter where, an hour before, Margaret Jewell had seen him standing. ‘The child, where’s the child?’ somebody cried; there was a rush to the basement, where the baby lay floating in a cradle of blood, his head battered and his neck slashed.
Four throats had been cut in a matter of moments: there had been no evident struggle and no time to scream. The scene the murderer had left behind him was as foul as the final act of a revenge tragedy, save that there was no obvious motive for revenge, or apparent reason for wanting the Marr household dead. Nothing had been stolen – £40 remained in the drawer in his bedroom – and Marr, who had only recently set up in business, having formerly worked for the East India service, had no apparent enemies.
Having your throat slashed on the open road was never as interesting to Thomas De Quincey as having it slashed in the room of a house and, 300 miles north of London, in a slow and introspective valley in the Lake District, De Quincey eagerly followed the newspaper reports of the events on the Ratcliffe Highway. Murder was an infrequent enough occurrence: only nine of the sixty-seven convicts executed in 1810 had been murderers; more common by far was theft and fraud.
The column next to the story of ‘The Murder of Mrs Marr and Family’ in the Morning Chronicle on Monday 9 December ran an announcement of the Shakespeare lecture to be given that night by ‘Mr Coleridge’. Coleridge’s Shakespeare lectures at the Philosophical Society in Scott’s Corporation Hall on Fetter Lane, behind Fleet Street and upriver from the Ratcliffe Highway, were ‘quite the rage’, as Byron put it. At his grandiloquent best, Coleridge was a mesmerising lecturer but his performances were nerve-racking experiences for the audience. Because he delivered his thoughts extempore he was liable to expound on more or less anything, and Londoners – including Byron himself and the philosopher William Godwin, who brought along his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – braved the cold to watch the bloated, despairing, opium-exhausted poet swerve violently off course. The theme of his lecture on 9 December was Romeo and Juliet, but rather than discuss the star-crossed lovers Coleridge considered the nature of friendship, particularly between ‘men of genius’. ‘What is true of friendship is true of love,’ Coleridge stated with mournful conviction. Men of genius are ‘conscious of their own weakness, and are ready to believe others stronger than themselves, when, in truth, they are weaker: they have formed an ideal in their own minds, and they want to see it realised. . . in, perhaps, the first man they meet, they only see what is good; they have no sense of his deficiencies, and their friendship becomes so strong, that they almost fall down and worship one in every respect greatly their inferior.’
Sitting amongst the audience, Charles Lamb remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson that ‘Coleridge said in his advertisement that he would speak about the nurse in Romeo and Juliet; and so he is delivering the lecture in the character of the nurse’. De Quincey understood that he was describing his relationship with Wordsworth, who said Coleridge was ‘the only man to whom at all times and in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior’.
De Quincey – Romantic acolyte, professional doppelgänger, transcendental hack – had replaced Coleridge as Wordsworth’s inferior friend. He had also replaced Wordsworth as tenant of Dove Cottage, which he turned into literature’s most famous opium den. It was here, in a house that became a ‘scene of struggle the most tempestuous and bitter within my own mind’, that he followed the reports of the Shakespeare lectures at the same time as absorbing the details of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Buildings, for De Quincey, were always crime scenes. ‘Few writers,’ says Peter Ackroyd, ‘had so keen and horrified a sense of place’ as Thomas De Quincey, who nurtured his horrified sense of place while living in the house that Wordsworth called ‘the loveliest spot that man hath ever found’.
The Marrs were buried on Sunday 15 December, in a single grave in the churchyard of St George in the East. The investigation into the identity of their killer had drawn a blank; everyone, it seemed, especially the Portuguese, French and Irish, was a potential suspect. The magistrates were in despair and the residents of the highway in a state of suspense. Was the monster living and breathing amongst them? Would he strike again? Were they safer in their homes or on the streets? Coleridge later observed to De Quincey that ‘the practice of putting the chain upon the door before it was opened. . . served as a record of the deep impression left’ by the Ratcliffe Highway murders – but he himself had not been afraid. On the contrary, Coleridge confessed, the murders had inspired in him a ‘profound reverie’ on the power available to a man once he had ‘rid himself of fear’. De Quincey, who gorged on scenes of violence, was also, so his daughter Florence said, ‘quite incapable of fear’, and unable to understand it in his children: ‘When he was chilling our marrow with awesome stories of ghosts, murders, and mysteries he only thought he was producing a luxurious excitement.’
It was De Quincey who legitimised the luxurious excitement of murder, just as he legitimised, in his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the pleasure of opiates. What took place in London in the winter of 1811 ignited his genius and became the subject of a series of essays he returned to and expanded for the rest of his life; ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, ‘Second Paper on Murder as One of the Fine Arts’ and ‘Postscript [To “Murder as One of the Fine Arts”]’ are now embedded in our culture: all subsequent literary murders have conformed to De Quincey’s taste. He had no interest in the fate of the victims or the skill of the police: De Quincey’s concern was with the mind of the murderer. ‘There must be raging some great storm of passion, jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,’ De Quincey wrote, ‘which will create a hell within him. And into this hell we are to look.’
There have been several fine biographies of De Quincey, but so far no De Quinceyan biography. A fearless biographer himself – his scandalous portraits of Wordsworth and Coleridge tell a tale of pursuit and revenge – De Quincey had trenchant views about the genre. It was not necessary, he believed, to love your subject, but a biography based on hatred alone made for a bad book. The best biographies, such as Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage, were written ‘con amore’ and also ‘con odio’. ‘Some of our contemporaries,’ De Quincey observed, ‘we hate particularly and for that very reason we will not write their lives. . . for it is too odious a spectacle to imprison a fellow in a book, lock a stag in a cart, and turn him out to be hunted through all his doubles for a day’s amusement.’ It is a striking description of the biographer’s peculiar transgression – to hunt a fellow through all his doubles – but this is precisely what is required of De Quincey, who always believed himself hunted and was inordinately preoccupied with the idea of multiplicity. ‘We should not assert for De Quincey a double personality,’ cautioned his friend and editor, James Hogg; he was ‘no Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, but he was certainly composed of multiple tendencies. At the same time as proclaiming his exemplary singularity, De Quincey modelled his character on Coleridge and his writing on Wordsworth. So while there was no one quite like Thomas De Quincey, Thomas De Quincey was quite like everyone; it was this trick of camouflage that made him such an effective autobiographer.
He wrote during what a fellow journalist called ‘the triumphant reign of the first person singular’, but there is no ego in De Quincey’s writing; the self he describes in his Confessions and other autobiographical essays is a fleeting
form on the cusp of disappearing – into a city crowd, into the chasm of a dream, or into some other body entirely. De Quincey was excessively preoccupied with his own interiority, which he mapped as though it were a building: his mind was a hall of many rooms; his dreaming self was ‘housed within himself, occupying, as it were, a separate chamber of the brain’; his waking thoughts were ‘a lock that might open a door somewhere or somehow’. He was a houser of memories but also a reader of houses. In the following pages I have pursued him through the buildings he inhabited and those that inhabited him.
De Quincey was twenty-one when he met Coleridge, twenty-two when he met Wordsworth, and twenty-six when the Ratcliffe Highway murders took place. He waited until he was thirty-six before he began to write, after which he wrote unceasingly for the next forty years, producing 250 essays which now fill twenty-one volumes of his collected works. Writing in the glory days of the literary-political magazine – The Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, The London Magazine – De Quincey helped shape a new kind of professional critic and a new literary genre, called by Walter Bagehot the ‘review-like essay and the essay-like review’. The magazines were a quintessentially Romantic form; the authority that the eighteenth century had afforded to books was replaced in the nineteenth century by these slippery, multi-authored, self-reflexive, fragmented, bold, pugnacious, parodic, combative, opinionated objects which were like books, but not quite. ‘By and by,’ imagined Thomas Carlyle, ‘it will be found that all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review.’ The image would have horrified De Quincey, but it was in these boundless, self-devouring reviews that he grew his voice.
De Quincey, whose writing was itself anarchic, thrived in the anarchic culture of contemporary journalism, where the flexibility of his editors allowed him to invent a new style: he contributed to the great age of rough house in the language of reverie. He was not an essayist in the polished manner of William Hazlitt; De Quincey did not create finished objects. The virtue of the essay is that it reflects a thought in the process of discovering itself, and De Quincey dramatised this process. He wrote in diversions, he recycled other people’s words, he produced experiments in inwardness, works in progress; instead of moving in a horizontal direction he either plunged downward or rose, as Leslie Stephen said, like ‘a bat. . . on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetic region’. Reading De Quincey’s individual essays can be a vertiginous experience; reading his collected works is like falling into Pandemonium. His subjects included the Greeks, the Caesars, the Westmorland dialect, contemporary politics, ocean navigation, velocity, philosophy, political economy, astronomy, opium-eating, China and the Opium Wars, literary style, the experiences of his childhood, the dream life and the structure of memory. A literary critic of outstanding originality, he also wrote a Gothic novel called Klosterheim, two novellas, ‘The Household Wreck’, and ‘The Avenger’, published translations from numerous German texts and, for one hectic year, he edited the local newspaper, The Westmorland Gazette, during which time he fed the Lakeland farmers a diet of Kantian metaphysics, Wordsworthian poetry and tales of the unexpected. The only literary form De Quincey did not employ was the one he most admired – poetry. Instead he made his name as a spokesman of poets, and was the first critic to separate decisively what T. S. Eliot called ‘the man who suffers’ from ‘the mind which creates’. That the poet and his poetry had distinct identities was to prove De Quincey’s greatest insight and bitterest disappointment.
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