‘Memories are killing’, said Samuel Beckett, and De Quincey, for whom there was no such thing as forgetting, believed himself cursed by memory; his mind was a palimpsest on which ‘every chaos’ was ‘stamped’ and ‘arrayed in endless files incapable of obliteration’. Jorge Luis Borges based his story ‘Funes the Memorious’ on De Quincey’s ghastly condition. Following a fall on his head, Funes can remember everything he ever saw and everything that ever happened to him. He remembers the shape and movement of every cloud, and the crevice and moulding of every house. Aged nineteen, Funes’s face is ‘more ancient than Egypt’.
De Quincey saw, standing in a clock case in Charles White’s museum, the embalmed and mummified body of a woman called Hannah Beswick, alongside which hung the skeleton of the highwayman, Thomas Higgins. There is a peculiar horror to the sight of a dead body standing upright, and De Quincey would later find his appalled reaction to this sight caught in the fifth book of Wordsworth’s Prelude, which is entitled ‘Books’. The poet recalls how, roaming the margins of Lake Esthwaite as a child, he saw a boat of men ‘with grappling-irons and long poles’ sounding the water. ‘At length’ from the depths ‘bolt upright rose’ a dead man. His face was ‘ghastly’, a ‘spectre shape’ of ‘terror’. Wordsworth claims to have felt ‘no vulgar fear’ because his ‘inner eye’ had ‘seen such sights before among the shining streams of fairyland’, but he is at his least convincing when he talks about fairyland. The tension with which he controls the scene suggests that in his terror Wordsworth became himself as rigid as the corpse.
De Quincey always remembered the stories attached to bolt-upright bodies. Hannah Beswick, born in 1688, developed a fear of being buried alive after her brother, pronounced dead, had opened his eyes when his coffin lid was being nailed down. The doctor who attended the unfortunate man – who then lived on for many years – was Charles White, and Hannah Beswick paid White £25,000 to ensure that, once her own body appeared to have expired, he keep it above ground and check it daily for signs of life. White was true to his word, and after her death, aged seventy, Hannah Beswick’s unburied corpse became known as the Manchester Mummy. Fascinated by the resurrection (he knew by heart ‘the great chapter of St Paul’, which was read at his sister’s funeral), De Quincey was doubtless also fascinated by the idea of Elizabeth herself being still alive on the other side of the bedroom door, while Percival and White cut open her head and then bandaged it up like a mummy.
‘Highwayman’ Higgins, as he was known around Manchester, had been in life a night-rider of gallantry and elegance. He was also, according to De Quincey, a ‘noonday murderer’ who was believed to have slaughtered a wealthy widow and her servant in their Bristol home. His guilt was never proved but in a typical flight of fancy De Quincey later imagined, in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, Highwayman Higgins pulling woollen stockings over the hoofs of his horses to muffle their clatter when he returned from his two-day journey from Bristol to Manchester, his pockets filled with the dead woman’s gold. Higgins was hanged, but, Thomas learned, his body was cut down prematurely and when it arrived at the surgeon’s table to be dissected, he too had not yet quite expired. A medical student was required to finish the job by plunging a knife into the still-beating heart.
Locked doors, open windows, footsteps on the stairs and guilty figures slipping away; midsummer days, Arabian Nights, echoing churches, damaged skulls and writers wielding knives: the death of Elizabeth stood at the centre of a vast web of associations for De Quincey. The summer of 1792 was the fair seed-time of his childhood, and he described his character as taking root in this strange soil.
Beyond the walls of the house, the country was responding to events in France. Three years earlier, the fall of the Bastille had been welcomed as the overthrow of absolutism and slavery. ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the World! & how much the best!’ cried Charles James Fox, leader of the opposition. ‘With freedom, order and good government,’ cautioned William Pitt, leader of the government, ‘France would stand forward as one of the most brilliant Powers in Europe; she would enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate.’ But order quickly broke down. In 1791 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had fled Versailles and were placed under guard in a Paris prison. The French National Assembly was dissolved and a legislative assembly established. Three months before the death of little Elizabeth Quincey, France had declared war on Austria and Prussia and it was now widely feared that Britain would be drawn into the hostilities. France was declared a republic, and Louis XVI was put on trial. English newspapers were filled with French horror stories from across the Channel – mob rule, mountains of carcasses, massacres in the Tuileries, massacres in the prisons. In late January 1793 the king was executed: regicide was open season. The Revolution had become the Terror. Dehumanised in France, the British turned Louis into a hero facing death with fortitude: his last night on earth was reconstructed by the British press as a tender domestic moment in which the noble king instructed his fainting wife and weeping children in the will of God. The following October, Marie Antoinette was also guillotined: in the French royal family, De Quincey found his first example of a household wreck. On 1 February 1793, France declared war on England.
Thomas De Quincey was the fourth of eight children. The eldest, William, was probably born in 1782; Elizabeth was born in 1783 and died, as we know, aged nine; Mary was born in 1784, a year before Thomas himself, who was born on 15 August 1785 and was therefore a Leo. (Lions would play a rich part in his imaginative life, and one of De Quincey’s earliest dreams was of lying down before one.) Jane, who arrived in 1786, died aged three; Richard, known as ‘Pink’, appeared in 1789, to be followed by a second girl called Jane, and finally, in 1793, a boy eight years younger than Thomas, called Henry. The death of the first Jane, two years before Elizabeth, was ‘scarcely intelligible’ to Thomas – ‘summer and winter came again. . . Why not little Jane?’ – and in his Autobiographic Sketches he described her as his older and not his younger sister; De Quincey evidently believed himself to be his mother’s fifth and not her fourth child. More disturbing to Thomas, then aged four, than the mystery of his position in the family, or of Jane’s current whereabouts, was the rumour that went around the house that she had been treated cruelly by the servant who was nursing her. The effect on him of this suggestion was ‘terrific. . . the feeling which fell upon me was a shuddering horror, as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife’.
For Thomas, birthdays, anniversaries and the dates of deaths would always be of great significance. His future editor, David Masson, who was introduced to him in the 1840s, remembered De Quincey’s animated response to hearing that it was the birthday of another of the guests in the room: ‘“O,” he exclaimed, “that is the anniversary of the battle of So-and-So”; and he seemed ready to catch as many birthdays as might be thrown him on the spot, and almanac them all round in a similar manner from his memory.’ Also born on 15 August, sixteen years before Thomas himself, was Napoleon Bonaparte. Sharing a birthday can be both a bonding and a threatening experience, implying that we are in some ways twinned with that other person, destined to progress along parallel lines. Sharing his birthday with a man simultaneously regarded as a murderer, a genius, a usurper and a hero could only increase De Quincey’s sense of destiny, and Bonaparte’s presence as a nemesis would shadow his life.
‘What is to be thought of sudden death?’ De Quincey asked in his most famous essay, ‘The English Mail-Coach’. Suddenness fascinated him: ‘Wonderful it is to see the effect of sudden misery, sudden grief, or sudden fear. . . in sharpening the intellectual perceptions,’ he wrote, and sudden death was a subject about which he had thought a great deal. The French king and queen had died suddenly, and at the hands of the lower classes. Did Thomas think that Jane had been killed by her violent nurse? He certainly associated Elizabeth’s death with the visit, also in the care of a servant, to the house of the servant’s
father; and another of his earliest memories involved saving ‘fugitive’ spiders from the angry broom of a bloodthirsty housemaid, who stopped his campaign of salvation by telling him ‘of the many murders that the spider had committed and next (which was worse) would commit if reprieved’. Servants would always play an important role in his internal dramas, but however De Quincey understood Jane’s death, his grief had remained hidden like stars in the daylight until he found himself standing by Elizabeth’s bedside.
His parents, also called Thomas and Elizabeth, had married in 1780 in Queen Square, London, at the heart of Bloomsbury. His mother’s people, the Pensons, were a cut above his father’s: she came from a military family and both her brothers served with the East India Company in Bengal. Elizabeth Penson was a snob; the ‘De’ in ‘De Quincey’ was an affectation she added as a widow in order to keep up appearances; her husband would have disapproved of such a flourish. De Quincey’s father, known as Thomas Quincey, was another upright figure – a friend described him as being ‘the most upright man I ever met with in my life’. Quincey started his working life as a draper in London’s Cheapside before moving in 1780 to the burgeoning industrial centre of Manchester where, on a steep, half-timbered road called Market-Street Lane (under where the Arndale shopping centre now stands), he opened a shop selling ‘printed Linens, Musslins, Furnitures, and other Cottons’. It was in a room above the shop that Thomas came into this world. He was keen to pin down for his readers the precise ‘tier in the social scaffolding’ occupied by his family: the Quinceys belonged to the urban middle-classes. By the time Thomas was born, his father had made the decision to exchange retail for importing Irish linen and West Indian cotton, and he was therefore a merchant and no longer a draper. While his children may have grown up in ‘circumstances of luxury’, with servants and underservants who were maintained, because his father was a moral man, in even more ‘luxury’, the family were not, De Quincey stressed, ‘emphatically rich’. They might have become so had Thomas Quincey not been, unusually for a trader in the West Indies, a ‘conscientious protester’ against slavery, and had he not died aged forty from tuberculosis.
Soon after De Quincey’s birth the family moved from Market-Street Lane to a larger house on the outskirts of the city. It was called The Farm, and described by De Quincey in Wordsworthian terms as ‘a pretty rustic dwelling’. It was then fashionable for the homes of the elite to include a greenhouse, later known as an orangery or conservatory, and Mr Quincey’s ‘daily pleasure’ lay in his books, his garden and his greenhouse. A sickly child, Thomas was lovingly nursed; he was always drawn to the nurturing qualities of women and, a lifelong hypochondriac, he never tired of describing, in baroque detail, the malfunctions of his body. Of the memories which date back to this time, the most powerful was his father’s illumination of the house in 1789, when King George III recovered from his first attack of madness.
When Thomas was six the Quinceys moved to ‘Greenhay’, whose substantial greenhouse formed ‘the principal room’ for family life. By then he had seen so little of his father that he doubted whether he ‘would have been able to challenge me as a relative; nor I him, had we happened to meet on the public roads’. Mr Quincey’s work, together with the weakness of his lungs, meant that his days were increasingly spent in warmer climes: ‘he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra, next in Madeira, then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in St Kitts’, wrote De Quincey, who would never travel further than Ireland. Thomas Quincey senior’s membership of the Literary and Scientific Society, which he joined in the year that he moved to Manchester, suggests that he was held in high esteem by men of learning. He kept a small collection of Italian Renaissance paintings and a growing library; his favourite authors were Cowper and Dr Johnson. His reverence for them was such, De Quincey said, that had these great men visited Greenhay, his father ‘might have been tempted to express his homage through the Pagan fashion of raising altars and burning incense’. Thomas would share his father’s veneration for writers. Two aspects of the household library later struck him as significant: the first was that his father’s books were all in English, and the second was that he had nothing from the ‘Black Letter’, or Gothic script, period, which spanned the twelfth to the seventeenth century. It was a book collection, De Quincey concluded, for the purposes of ‘instant amusement’ as opposed to prolonged study.
Aged twenty-three, Quincey senior had written a book of his own, a topographical study called A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England, Performed in the Summer of 1772, which had previously been published in five parts in the Gentleman’s Magazine. It was by reading his father’s accounts of the state of draining, mining, farming and manufacturing in the Midlands that De Quincey later came to know something of the man, and his own first book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which similarly began its life as magazine instalments, would also describe a short English tour.
De Quincey’s chief memory of his father was of learning, aged seven, that he was coming home from the West Indies to die. The invalid was expected on a summer evening of ‘unusual solemnity’ and the children and servants had assembled on the front lawn to greet his carriage. The experience was recorded by De Quincey as a ‘chorus of restless images’: sunset came and night fell; still they stood listening for the sound of the wheels which, because the house was isolated and the roads empty, would be heard from a distance. As midnight approached, the silent party walked up the lane where, out of the gloomy stillness, horses’ heads slowly appeared; the carriage was moving at such a hearse-like pace that the wheels made no sound at all. Inside, against a ‘mass of white pillows’ lay ‘the dying patient’. Were it not for ‘the midsummer night’s dream which glorified his return’, De Quincey would not have remembered his father at all.
Mr Quincey’s life exhaled in July 1793, a year and one month after the death of little Elizabeth and six months after the beheading of the French king. From now on De Quincey would always associate the sting of death with ‘the endless days of summer’. Summer deaths, he suggested, were more affecting than winter deaths because the heavens were more distant, ‘more infinite’, and the clouds seemed grander and ‘more towering’.
Mrs Quincey inherited the house – which her husband advised her not to sell until prices had risen – plus half the income that would come from the sale of his businesses, a share in the New Linen Hall in Chester, and a share in a ship called the Isabella Brigantine of Drogheda. The total income at her disposal was £1,600 a year. It was a fair sum; not Mr Darcy’s ten thousand but enough to ensure the family’s comfort. When the boys reached twenty-one they would receive a patrimony of their own, and until then their moral and financial welfare was left in the care of four unbending guardians: a clergyman, a magistrate, a merchant and a banker, named, respectively, Samuel Hall, James Entwhistle, Thomas Belcher and Henry Gee.
Like a stage direction, his father’s exit was followed by the arrival back from school of De Quincey’s ‘horrid pugilistic’ eleven-year-old brother, William, whom he also barely knew. William is given more space by far in the Autobiographic Sketches than the adored Elizabeth, who features only as a corpse. All we know of Elizabeth in life is that she read books, drank tea and fell ill, while William – a rider of ‘whirlwinds’ and director of ‘storms’ – is endowed with many dimensions in page after page of vividly recalled, rolling anecdote. The role played by his older brother was of profound significance to Thomas, who always ‘had a sort of feeling, or omen of anticipation, that possibly there was some being in the world who was fated to do him. . . a great and irreparable injury’. The identity of this being would shift with the years, but in the nursery it was William. Not yet at school, Thomas had no knowledge of children other than his own siblings, and William was the only boy he knew who had seen the world beyond Greenhay. An excessively energetic child, family lore put William Quincey down as a disrupter of the peace and Mrs Quincey sent him away at the first opportuni
ty. School only nurtured his love of conflict, and by the time William returned home he ‘would have fastened a quarrel upon his own shadow for presuming to run before him’.
William despised Thomas, and Thomas had ‘a perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing.’ This pertinent observation goes to the heart of De Quincey’s nature. He also had a craze for being afraid, which was fed by William on a nightly basis. Between the ages of seven and twelve, De Quincey was dominated by his brother. He pictured himself, under William’s tyrannical rule, as an ‘Irish hodman’ running up and down a ‘vast Jacob’s ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league’, trying to reach the ‘top of any Babel’ his assailant might ‘choose to build’. Whether he was seeking the face of his dead sister or keeping up with the demands of his living brother, De Quincey saw himself as a figure on a perpetual staircase.
William, he said, was a ‘tiger’. He was everything that Thomas was not: William was masculine while Thomas was, as he put it, ‘effeminate’; William was wilful, athletic, bossy, noisy and boisterous while Thomas was fragile and introverted. Unlike Thomas, William ‘detested all books excepting only such as he happened to write himself’, one such work being ‘How to raise a Ghost; and when you’ve got him down, how to keep him down’. There was seemingly nothing that William could not do and he ruled over the nursery like a sorcerer. Literally so: William practised necromancy, ‘legerdemain’ – or sleight of hand – and ‘thaumatology’, the study of miracles. As well as magic and illusion, he fascinated his siblings with lectures on natural philosophy and displays of pyrotechnics; to demonstrate the laws of physics he strapped cats into parachutes and dropped them from great heights. He boasted that he could walk on the ceiling like a fly and blamed his failure to do so on the friction from the plaster of Paris; if the ceiling were coated with ice, he insisted, it would be different. He then constructed an apparatus for getting himself launched like a humming-top in the hope that he could ‘spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis – perhaps he might even dream upon it’. These performances only ended after one of his sisters orchestrated a mutiny, at which point William devoted himself to the writing and production of a bloody tragedy in which his siblings were all massacred in the first act.
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