Thomas De Quincey was an obsessive: he was obsessed with the Ratcliffe Highway murders and he was obsessed with William Wordsworth. Guilty Thing is an attempt to follow the growth of these twin obsessions from seed to full flowering and to trace the way in which they intertwined. Positioning his preoccupation with murderers and poets at the forefront of what follows, I have placed De Quincey’s numerous other interests in the background, and sought permission for this biographical privilege in his own example. Revising his autobiographical writings for the collected edition of his works, De Quincey dismissed as ‘wearisome and useless’ the ‘hackneyed roll-call’ of a man’s life, ‘chronologically arranged’; it was surely better, he suggested, to ‘detach’ a ‘single’ scene that would record ‘some of the deep impressions under which my childish sensibility expanded’. De Quincey never put childish things away, and the deep impressions under which his sensibility expanded tended to be scenes of terror, deluge and sudden death. These are the scenes on which I too have focused, believing that in his return to the Ratcliffe Highway murders we can find, dispersed in anagram, the story of De Quincey’s life.
Like Shakespeare, De Quincey enjoyed the idea of a play within a play and he compared the ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, the tragedy performed under Hamlet’s direction by the strolling players at Elsinore, to a room on whose wall is a picture of the room on whose wall is a picture of that room. ‘We might,’ De Quincey wrote, ‘imagine this descent into a life below a life going on ad infinitum,’ and we might see his folding of the Ratcliffe Highway murders into his possession by Wordsworth as achieving a similar effect: a story within a story within a story, a room within a room within a room, going on ad infinitum.
He was intensely aware of the spaces he occupied, the heights and widths surrounding him, the positions of windows, the number of steps on a staircase, but what were De Quincey’s own dimensions? The amount of room taken up by a biographical subject is not always relevant but in De Quincey’s case it cannot be underestimated. His opium trances describe descents into what Coleridge, in ‘Kubla Khan’, called ‘caverns measureless to man’ and his impacted writing impersonates endless growth, but De Quincey’s body itself barely grew. Like Hogarth, Pope and Charles Lamb, he was one of those called by the tiny antiquary, George Vertue, ‘the five foot men or less’. At four foot eleven inches, De Quincey was not small so much as Lilliputian – wiry, barely there. He was ‘unfortunately diminutive’, said Dorothy Wordsworth, who was the same height, ‘but there is a sweetness in his looks, especially about the eyes, which soon overcomes the oddness of your first feeling at the sight of so very little a man’. Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Joanna Hutchinson, said that De Quincey looked ‘helpless’ and ‘dissipid’, and Robert Southey referred to him as ‘Little Mr Quincey’. ‘I wish,’ Southey complained, ‘he was not so little, and I wish he would not leave his greatcoat always behind him on the road.’ Thomas Carlyle, who compared him to a pair of sugar tongs, left this description of De Quincey aged forty-two: ‘When he sate, you would have taken him, by candlelight, for the beautifullest little child; blue-eyed, sparkling face, had there not been a something, too, which said, “Eccovi – this child has been in hell.”’
It is into this hell we are to look.
Greenhay, De Quincey’s childhood home, in which he learned that there was nothing ‘but a mighty darkness and a sorrow without a voice’.
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Books
In memory of all books which lay
Their sure foundations in the heart of man
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Fifth
The first chapter of Thomas De Quincey’s life, according to the account he gave in his Autobiographic Sketches, came ‘suddenly’ to a ‘violent termination’ at noon on a midsummer’s day in 1792. It is typical of De Quincey’s sense of time that he marked his beginning by an event he described as an ending. The date was 3 June and he was six years old; his nine-year-old sister Elizabeth had died the day before, after drinking tea ‘in the house of a labouring man’ and walking back through a meadow ‘reeking with exhalations’. In De Quincey’s mind the tea and reeking exhalations resulted in hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, which explained what he saw as the swelling of her forehead. Hydrocephalus was thought to stimulate the intellect, but De Quincey would always believe that it was the other way around, that Elizabeth’s ‘intellectual grandeur’ brought on the hydrocephalus. His elder sister, he understood, died from excessive intelligence, a condition from which he also suffered.
De Quincey’s childhood home was a country mansion with a porticoed front door and three tall chimneys. It was built by Mr Quincey – the ‘De’ was not prefixed to the family name until 1797 – according to Mrs Quincey’s design, and was of a grandeur, De Quincey later noted, more suited to the fortune his father ‘was rapidly approaching than the one he actually possessed’. His mother was a ‘lady architect’, and Greenhay, as the house was called, was her coup d’essai. The De Quincey children grew up around stonemasons, carpenters, painters, plasterers and bell-hangers; while other women of her class busied themselves with gentler pursuits, Elizabeth Quincey demolished walls and improved views, expanded floors and widened windows. Thomas De Quincey was raised in a world of interiors.
Greenhay was the shell in which he nurtured his mind. He would never forget the layout of the house: there were two staircases; a grand flight at the front for the family, and a narrow set at the back for their servants. On the day in question, young Thomas waited until the maids were taking their lunch in the kitchen before creeping up the back stairs and down the corridor to the bedroom in which the body of his sister now lay. The room was locked but the key was in place; he turned it and entered, closing ‘the door so softly that, although it opened upon a hall which ascended through all the storeys, no echo ran along the silent walls’. Elizabeth’s bed, which had been moved from its usual position, now faced an open window through which ‘the sun of midsummer at mid-day was showering down in torrents of splendour’ onto her ‘frozen eyelids’. While Thomas stood gazing at the stiffening body, ‘a solemn wind began to blow – the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries.’ He fell into a reverie in which, ‘A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me. . .’
Hearing ‘a foot on the stairs’ the pulses of life began to beat again; Thomas kissed, for the last time, his sister’s marble lips and, lest he be discovered, ‘slunk, like a guilty thing, with stealthy steps from the room’. It was now that he lost his innocence: in Elizabeth’s bedroom De Quincey learned that ‘all men come into this world alone; all leave it alone’ – a hard lesson for a boy whose heart was ‘deeper than the Danube’. From this day forward he lived inside his sense of loss; there was ‘nothing on the stage but a solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief – a mighty darkness and a sorrow without a voice’. Many times since, De Quincey recalled, ‘on a summer day, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked on the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian but saintly swell: it is in this world the one audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life I have happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances, viz, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day.’
Few autobiographers have given us a more remarkable, or convoluted, childhood scene – part-memory, part-midsummer daydream, part-opium reverie – or one that propels us more swiftly into the furnishings of their imagination. It is an example of what De Quincey called his ‘impassioned prose’, which takes flight mid-sentence, and what Baudelaire called De Quincey’s ‘naturally spiral’ way of thinking, his esc
alating up and down and circling around a line of associated ideas. What De Quincey describes is terror recollected in tranquillity; he always invested in the things that he feared, such as endless time and boundless space.
His vision occurred on the outskirts of Manchester, a prosaic setting for Aeolian intonations and Sarsar winds of death, but no more so than the ‘tree filled with angels. . . bespangling every bough like stars’ seen by the ten-year-old William Blake on Peckham Rye. The Manchester in which De Quincey was born was on the cusp of the industrial revolution; not yet the great Cottonopolis it would become in his lifetime, he knew it as a ‘gloomy’ town framed by ‘mud below’ and ‘smoke above’, whose only virtue lay in the philosophical interests of its inhabitants. Two such figures, Thomas Percival and Charles White – Manchester’s most respected physicians – attended De Quincey’s sick sister and then returned, the day after her death, to perform the post-mortem. This operation added a new dimension to De Quincey’s trauma. The men, with their cases of equipment, entered his sister’s room where they sawed through her skull and inspected the liquid deposits around the brain. Elizabeth’s angelic head had been violently attacked; the room in which De Quincey had glimpsed the vaults of heaven was now a chamber of horrors. Was he on one side of the door listening, while on the other side the doctors coolly performed their task? He would recall the paradisical period of childhood as the time in which we trod ‘without fear every chamber in [our] father’s house’, when ‘no door was closed’.
An hour after Percival and White had departed, he returned to the bedroom but found it locked and the key removed. De Quincey was ‘shut out forever’. This is his version of a paraclausithyron, meaning, from the Greek, ‘lament by a shut door’; the motif, employed in Greek and Augustan love elegies, was parodied in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Pyramus and Thisbe communicate through a crack in the wall.
During Elizabeth’s funeral, the small boy ‘sank back’ into his ‘own solitary darkness’ and heard nothing except ‘some fugitive strains from the sublime chapter of St Paul’: ‘But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept.’ He watched his sister’s coffin, with its record of her name, age and date of death, ‘dropped into darkness as messages addressed to worms’. Then came the work of the sacristan, with his shovel of earth and stones, and ‘immediately the dread rattle ascend[ed] from the lid’. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ‘and the grave, the coffin, the face are sealed up for ever and ever’. De Quincey’s solitude and grief aligned with religious intimations, and throughout July and August he sought out sequestered nooks in the house and grounds where he could absorb the ‘awful stillness’ of ‘summer noons’ with their windless ‘desert air’. Gazing into the skies for a sign of Elizabeth’s face he took to ‘shaping images in the distance out of slight elements’. On Sundays, the family attended a church ‘on the old and natural model of England, having aisles, galleries, organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions majestic’. Here, unwatched, he wept in silence at the passage on children and the sick and when the organ ‘threw its vast columns of sound over the voices of the choir’ he raised his ‘streaming eyes to the upper windows of the galleries’. Through the storied glass, when the sun was shining, he saw clouds shaped as beds in ‘chambers of the air’ on which children lay ‘tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for death’. De Quincey was always drawn to what he called cloud architecture, and later claimed Wordsworth as the poet of the sky’s grand pageants.
He also had a lifelong love of majestic churches. In his dreams he returned to the aisles and galleries of this ancient building, to the swelling anthems of the funeral, ‘the burst of the Hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling movement of the choral passion, the agitation of my own trembling sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the wrath of the organ’, followed by ‘the priest in his white surplice waiting with a book by the side of an open grave’, and the sacristan waiting with his shovel.
Doctors Percival and White, both notable figures in the rich cultural, scientific and intellectual life of the town, were friends of De Quincey’s father. Percival was co-president of the renowned Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society; White was vice-president, and Quincey senior was a founding member. The ‘Lit & Phil’ was composed of prominent Mancunian industrialists, engineers, doctors and intellectuals who would gather to discuss matters of natural philosophy, law, literature, education and advances in chemistry and science.
Dr P, as De Quincey referred to Thomas Percival, was ‘a man, of elegant tastes and philosophic habits’ who exchanged ideas with Voltaire. He was instinctively distrusted by De Quincey’s practical and evangelical mother, who associated philosophers with infidels, and her dislike was fuelled by Percival’s habit of reading aloud extracts from his erudite correspondence. She was bored by the society of Northern philosophers, but Thomas was captivated by Dr P, who had written a collection of improving fables for children called A Father’s Instructions, a copy of which he had given to Thomas and Elizabeth. De Quincey had never before met the author of a book he admired.
His life imitated art in the fullest sense, and De Quincey’s need to read was, as he put it, ‘absolutely endless and inexorable as the grave’. He read voraciously, ravenously, for seventy years, creating layer upon layer of fictitious memory. In The Prelude, which De Quincey first read in manuscript form, Wordsworth celebrated ‘all books which lay/ Their sure foundation in the heart of man’, and the foundations of De Quincey’s most significant moments can be found in novels, poems, plays, travelogues and works of philosophy. His reading provided a guide through the maelstrom of consciousness; it gave a shape to shapeless events, and a meaning to those things – such as death – that he found terrifying in their random cruelty. Because he used the inside of a book to make sense of the outside world his experiences might be seen as only half-true, but the relationship between fact and fiction was, for De Quincey, complicated. Again and again we find, in the books he loved, accounts of the events which formed him. For example in Titan, written by his second favourite novelist, the German Romantic Jean Paul Richter, is a description of the death of a girl which is identical in atmosphere to De Quincey’s description of the death of his sister Elizabeth. Titan’s heroine, Liana, dies by an open window through which ‘the golden sun gushed through the clouds’, and ‘suddenly the folding doors of an inspired concert-hall flew open, and outswelling harmonies floated by’. For De Quincey, reading was less an escape from reality than a perilous journey to the truth, as potentially devastating as opium itself. Before he discovered drugs, it was through books that De Quincey sought to find a route back to his original self, to the person he was before Elizabeth’s death.
Accordingly, he was possessed by the power of writers and the first writer to lodge himself in De Quincey’s psyche was Thomas Percival. The impression made on him by A Father’s Instructions ‘was deep and memorable: my sister wept over it and wept over the remembrance of it, and later carried its sweet aroma off with her to heaven’. Percival’s tales, set in a contemporary Manchester which contained elements of ancient Greece, were principally about animals, the force of maternal affection, the importance of filial gratitude, and the racial superiority of Europeans. In one story, a country boy knowing nothing of life beyond his family home goes to Manchester to see an exhibition of wild beasts and is mesmerised by a Blakean tiger of sublime ‘symmetry’; another is set on a heavenly June day when the ‘clouds were dispersed, the sun shone with unusual brightness’ and ‘verdure of the meadows. . . regaled every sense’. Once absorbed into his imagination where they marinated for decades, these tales stalked De Quincey’s own writings.
In addition to being the family doctor, Charles White was an enthusiastic craniologist who passed on to De Quincey – whose own skull, in contrast to his tiny body, was enormous – his belief that the shape and size of the head was an indication of intellect. Elizabeth’s head, White pronounced, was ‘
the finest. . . in its development of any he had ever seen’ and her brain ‘the “most beautiful”’, which confirmed – or formed – De Quincey’s view of her as a superior being. ‘For its superb developments,’ De Quincey proudly recorded, his sister’s skull ‘was the astonishment of science’. Lord over life and death, Charles White was fascinating to De Quincey, who compared him to ‘some mighty caliph, or lamp-bearing Aladdin’. Of all his childhood books, Arabian Nights was De Quincey’s touchstone; his Manchester was less like ancient Greece than an Arab city. White had turned a room of his own house into a museum of medical curiosities consisting of body parts which he used to illustrate his lectures, and when De Quincey came here as a child it was he who was Aladdin, entering the magic cave.
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