Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Seventh

  Number 11, North Parade was a Georgian terrace fronted with beehive-yellow stone, a stroll away from the Abbey and the Grand Pump Room. In the other direction, it leads into Pulteney Street where in Northanger Abbey – written during the years that De Quincey lived in Bath – seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland took lodgings with Mr and Mrs Allen for the winter season. Catherine found Bath disappointingly jolly, containing none of the isolation and gloom of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Assembly Rooms were over-hot and over-full, and the roads so cluttered they were impossible to cross.

  The contrast between life at Greenhay and life on North Parade could not have been greater, and this was evidently Elizabeth Quincey’s aim; she was expanding into her freedom. She now had a rented house rather than the burden of her own home, with windows that looked onto other windows rather than over lawns and across fields. She laid her carriage up in a coach house, and moved around the town by sedan chair.

  Enclosed within a lush green valley, Bath is an assemblage of squares, circuses and crescents. Tobias Smollett, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, predicted that the city would soon also have a ‘star’, after which ‘all the signs of the Zodiac’ would be ‘exhibited in the architecture at Bath’. The soft inland murmur of the River Avon could be heard from North Parade, and its presence felt in other ways too; Mrs Quincey battled with the damp and in 1799, when the river burst its banks, the damage she faced would have been immense. It was a small price to pay. Having lived amongst Northern philosophers for the sake of her husband, Elizabeth Quincey arrived here with the aim of launching her children, the youngest of whom was three, on the social ladder. No more mummified corpses in clock cases for Thomas; from now on her morbid and self-absorbed son would look outwards rather than inwards, and having formerly known only siblings, servants, family friends and private tutors, he would start to mix with the right sort. ‘What a delightful place Bath is,’ Jane Austen’s Mrs Allen repeatedly says, ‘and how pleasant it would be if we had any acquaintance here!’ Mrs Quincey wasted no time in getting to know the neighbours.

  Bath Abbey was built as the result of a dream. Bishop Oliver King had a vision of an olive tree from which ladders reached into the far blue sky. Looking up at the west front, De Quincey could see angels climbing up to the throne of God on their stone steps. At the eastern end is a vast window, extending the full height of the wall, through which the morning sun still shines in torrents of splendour, irradiating the vaulting, nave, aisles, bays and lanes. For a child used to the glass of his parish church in Manchester, the sublimity of such a scene was overwhelming; there could be no finer window through which to seek the face of Elizabeth formed by billowy clouds.

  Along the walls are 700 memorials, one of which, on the south side, commemorates Richard Nash, Master of Ceremonies and self-crowned ‘King’ of Bath. ‘Beau’ Nash, as he was known, had died in 1761, but his influence had by no means been forgotten. Every street bore his mark. Bath was Nash’s invention, and for fifty-seven years it had been his kingdom. Arriving in 1704, Nash had taken over the management of the sleepy town much as one might a private member’s club. Under his eye, Bath became a stately pleasure dome; Nash was responsible for the Assembly Rooms with their ballroom, tea room, card room, and the Octagon, where nightly concerts were held. To accommodate the influx of tourists, he oversaw the construction of the rows of Palladian revival buildings which posed as palaces but were actually lodging houses. If London, as De Quincey would discover, was the city of disappearances, Bath was the city of appearances. The classical façades of many of the finest buildings, such as North Parade itself, were designed by John Wood the elder; purchasers bought a length of John Wood frontage and then employed their own architect to construct the interior according to their own requirements. De Quincey’s new home, built in 1741, was one of many Bath houses with a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back.

  While maintaining its function as a health resort, Nash turned Bath into a centre of gossip, style and fashion. During De Quincey’s childhood waistlines were growing higher, necklines were sinking lower; fabrics were light, skirts flowed and shoes had rounded heels. Bath was the only city in England designed entirely for diversion – as Monaco is today – and the first urban centre in which aristocrats and the newly rich merchant classes mingled on an equal footing. Evenings were filled with music, fireworks and the roaring of swells: ‘Another stupid party last night,’ wrote Jane Austen to her sister during one of her visits. Smollett described the city as ‘the very centre of racket and dissipation’, a place obsessed with matrimony or what he called ‘mattermoney’. This was civilised living as spectacle, and still a work in progress. The year before the Quinceys arrived, the Pump Room had been little more than scaffolding and workmen whistling; Sydney Gardens, where Thomas went to read, was spanking new. Here he found a maze, a grotto, and the sort of sham ruined castle which would have thrilled Catherine Morland.

  Until recently, Ann Radcliffe herself had been a resident of Bath and in 1801 Jane Austen and her family would move to a house in Sydney Place, overlooking Sydney Gardens. With the intersection of Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen we see one of the contradictions of the age in which De Quincey was raised. The paranoid Gothic, with its inwardly recessive architecture, rested alongside what Horace Walpole called the ‘cold reason’ of Enlightenment rationality. Nailing his colours to the Gothic, De Quincey never moved on. His daughter Emily later explained that ‘no one will make much out of my father who does not take in the extreme mixture of childish folly joined to a great intellect. The novels of his youth were of the Mrs Radcliffe order, full of mysteries, murders, highwaymen, mysterious people and dark corners. . . he never got beyond the Mrs Radcliffe stage and he was but a poor judge of a novel.’

  He would remain as unaware of Jane Austen’s novels as she would of Thomas De Quincey’s essays. And while Bath stifled Austen, who fell into silence and depression when she lived here, the city had the opposite effect on De Quincey, who absorbed all it had to offer. It has been suggested that having previously enjoyed a country childhood, living in North Parade must have been ‘purgatory’ for De Quincey. But it was the making of him.

  Twenty years earlier, 11 North Parade had been home to the Earl of Clare, patron of Oliver Goldsmith, and Goldsmith – another of De Quincey’s favourite authors – had stayed in the house. But the most recent occupant was none other than Edmund Burke, politician, polemicist and author of the decade’s most talked-about book, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke, whose wife was born in Bath and whose doctor was based here, occupied 11 North Parade for the first six months of 1797, moving out a month before the Quinceys moved in. He had been, as De Quincey put it, in ‘decaying condition’, and would die at home on his estate in July that year.

  Thomas De Quincey’s biographers pass over in a sentence the coincidence that he replaced Burke in North Parade, as though this experience made no impression on the boy who went on to become a house tourist. It was now that De Quincey’s sense of entitlement set root; he was inhabiting the former rooms of the man who was the spirit of the age. Burke was also the spirit of the house; De Quincey was charging down stairs that Burke had ascended, slamming doors that Burke himself, just weeks earlier, had opened, and sitting at the desk where Burke had penned his last pamphlet, ‘Letters on a Regicide Peace’. Not knowing that the great man had left town, the ‘crowds of inquirers’ who called to pay their respects were greeted by young Thomas at the door instead. Aged eleven, De Quincey found himself the representative of Edmund Burke.

  If Elizabeth Quincey had not already purchased Reflections on the Revolution in France she would certainly have got hold of a copy now, when a French invasion was expected at any moment. The tension was palpable; seventy miles south, in the Quantock Hills, Wordsworth and Coleridge, planning their forthcoming Lyrical Ballads as they strode the coastline, were thought by the locals to be French spies.


  ‘Reflections’, published in 1790, was an antidote to the Francophilia popular amongst English intellectuals; selling 7,000 copies in the first two weeks, it triggered a debate about liberty which split Burke’s own Whig party. His position on the French Revolution was the opposite of parliamentary colleagues such as Fox, and of fledgling poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth, visiting France in 1790, saw ‘a People risen up,/ Fresh as the Morning Star’. For Burke, the ‘morning star’ was Marie Antoinette herself, ‘just above the horizon. . . glittering [with] life and splendour and joy’. Back on earth were what Burke described as the tyrannical ‘swinish multitude’, a phrase De Quincey loved to repeat when he referred to crowds. Thomas Paine, who remarked that Burke pitied the plumage but forgot the dying bird, responded to Reflections with the Rights of Man, published the following year. ‘The very idea of hereditary legislation,’ Paine wrote in his strong, plain prose, ‘is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate.’ The murder of the French king and queen and the subsequent Terror proved Burke right in his fears for France, but then, as Fox famously said: ‘Burke is often right, only he was right too soon.’

  His lament for a country in which ‘the age of chivalry’ had been replaced by ‘sophisters, calculators and economists’ was wholeheartedly shared by De Quincey, ‘bred up’ by his mother ‘in a frenzied horror of Jacobinism’ and ‘French excesses’. Flinging a knife to the floor in a parliamentary debate, Burke had proclaimed it his ‘object to keep the French infection from this country, their principles from our minds and their daggers from our hearts. . . When they smile, I see blood trickling down their faces.’ De Quincey likewise feared the bloodthirsty French, incarnated in Bonaparte, the bogeyman of his childhood, and in the opening paragraph of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater he quoted Burke’s description of the Jacobins ‘rudely’ tearing off ‘the decent drapery of life’.

  Burke’s first book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, had been in the library at Greenhay. A beguiling treatise on the most fashionable subject of the age, the ideas expressed in the Enquiry were to influence De Quincey as much as those in ‘Reflections’. If the Enlightenment venerated the beautiful, the Romantic age would aspire to the sublime. The difference between the sublime and the beautiful had become a national obsession and Burke, the first writer to attempt a categorisation of aesthetic responses, drew the distinction along psychological lines: the sublime is linked to horror, gloom and infinity, while we find beautiful those things that are calm, safe and small. The beautiful gives pleasure and relaxes the body, while sublimity contains the destructive element. ‘Suddenness’ is sublime while ‘smoothness’ is beautiful; a parish church is beautiful, a cathedral sublime; a bull is sublime while a cow is beautiful; a king is, of course, sublime – as is everything grand and powerful. Burke’s suggestion that all subjects can ‘branch out to infinity’ chimed with De Quincey’s own thinking, as did his belief that ‘clear ideas are little ideas’ and the ‘ruling principle of the sublime’ is ‘terror’.

  To have taken over these hallowed rooms was also a feather in Elizabeth Quincey’s cap. De Quincey’s mother was a celebrity hunter and around the corner from North Parade, at 76 Great Pulteney Street, lived the celebrated Hannah More. Like Burke, Hannah More was both a household name and a moral icon. Burke had been one of Mrs More’s close friends, and Mrs More now became one of Mrs Quincey’s close friends. So Mrs Quincey balanced pleasure and prestige with a lesson in high-toned evangelicalism.

  There were two acts to More’s life, and her intimacy with Elizabeth Quincey was formed at the point where she exchanged the first for the second. In the 1770s, More, an aspiring poet and playwright, had taken herself from Bristol to London to meet the actor-director David Garrick. Under Garrick’s patronage, she had enjoyed success on the stage with her plays The Inflexible Captive and Percy. Brimful of confidence, Hannah More, said Hester Thrale, was ‘the cleverest of all us female wits’, and her fame was sealed in 1779, when, posing in a Greek toga alongside the artist Angelica Kauffman, the soprano Elizabeth Linley Sheridan, and six other female luminaries, Hannah More was included in Richard Samuel’s painting The Nine Living Muses. After a decade of gadding about in Covent Garden, she joined the Clapham Sect, a group of religious social reformers with William Wilberforce, a man much admired by De Quincey’s father, at its prow. More then returned to her native West Country to preach patience to the rural poor and provide spiritual guidance during a time of political turbulence. The focus of her work when she met Elizabeth Quincey was the moral education of the lower orders; as well as setting up schools across Somerset, More had been immersed in the writing, production and nationwide distribution of 140 ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’ whose purpose was to point out the pitfalls of drunkenness, sloth, gambling and debauchery, and show that salvation could be found in upward mobility. Despite widescale ridicule, More’s ‘Tracts’ were remarkably successful; by 1797, when Elizabeth Quincey began to introduce them to her own children, two million copies had been sold.

  De Quincey later participated in the national sport of Hannah More-baiting, but the impact on his childhood of ‘Holy Hannah’, as he referred to her, was formidable and he continued to visit her well into his twenties. He would describe several figures as his ‘first literary acquaintance’, but More claims the honour. Apart from his father, the only writer De Quincey had ever known was Dr Percival, the physician who had cut open his sister’s head. Hannah More was a definite improvement. De Quincey was always quick to reveal that his mother was an intimate of Mrs More and to mock, as only an insider could, her society. In later letters to the Wordsworths, he derided her conversation as ‘epigrammatic’ and ‘full of trite quotations’, and in a waspish essay written on her death in 1833, he remembered with pride how, in her presence, he never ‘travelled one hair’s breadth beyond the line of frigid and distant politeness’. But it is hard to see the God-fearing boy being offensive to the woman who had God, and celebrity, on her side. De Quincey’s exquisite manners were remarked upon throughout his life. His politeness was excessive and bewildering to those he met; he addressed servants, children, adults and friends in the same grave and elaborate formulations, using an English from a bygone age. The grand solemnity of his speech worked as a protective shield, his rhetorical flourishes creating a barrier between himself and the outside world.

  In addition to her own celebrity, Mrs More knew, as De Quincey conceded, ‘everybody of celebrity in the last age’, including Dr Johnson, his father’s favourite author, and Horace Walpole, godfather of the English Gothic, whose sham castle outside London, Strawberry Hill, was one of the most famous houses in England. Hannah More knew everyone of celebrity in the present age as well; De Quincey described meeting the actress Mrs Siddons in Mrs More’s drawing room, which suggests that Holy Hannah had not forsaken the theatre as entirely frivolous. Her piety never got in the way of her appreciation of glamour; in this sense More was more morally flexible than Elizabeth Quincey, who considered the theatre a den of iniquity. Compared to his mother, Mrs More was positively racy, and during his visits to her house De Quincey would draw from her anecdotes of ‘Edmund Burke – Garrick – Mrs Montague and her society – Dr Johnson &c’. It was De Quincey’s habit to scorn the people to whom he owed a debt, and he owed everything to Hannah More.

  He also owed a good deal to the mother from whom he would later distance himself. It was Elizabeth Quincey who taught Thomas to attach his life to that of the writer he most admired, to position himself as a planet orbiting a sun.

  De Quincey, who had never been to school before, now started at Bath grammar where he ‘was honoured as never was man or boy since Mordecai the Jew’. A classical scholar of note, ‘at thirteen,’ he boasted, ‘I wrote Greek with ease. . . owing to the practice of daily reading of the newspapers into
the best Greek I could furnish extempore.’ His brilliance won him the admiration of his teachers and his arrogance provoked the taunts of his peers; another schoolboy war ensued, only this time De Quincey, who had grown boisterous and spirited, fought his side alone.

  In January 1799 a teacher, aiming his cane at the shoulder of a miscreant pupil, accidentally landed the blow on De Quincey’s head instead. Preternaturally anxious since his sister’s death about damage to the skull, De Quincey was thrown into a panic, and the physicians who attended his injury were sufficiently alarmed by his expressions of pain to suggest trepanning. Instead, the boy’s hair was shaved and six sucking leeches applied to the wound. For the next three weeks, as Thomas wrote in a letter to his elder sister, Mary, currently at school in Bristol, ‘I neither read, nor wrote, nor talked, nor eat [sic] meat, nor went out of the back drawing-room, except when I went to bed. In the first week I read for a quarter of an hour per day! and eat a little bit of meat; but I did not write. I now do everything as I used to do, except dancing, running, drinking wine. I am not to go to school till Easter.’

  De Quincey was evidently in good humour. He makes a joke about his ‘unhappy pate! worthy of a better fate’, refers to ‘Mademoiselle’s ball, which was put off (as I suppose) on my account’, and to his smart new friend ‘young Lord Westport’, who will be coming soon to dine at North Parade; he signs off as ‘Tabitha Quincey’, Tabitha being the name of the woman raised from the dead by St Peter – the undead being one of De Quincey’s serious preoccupations, disguised here as a joke. The evidence suggests that before he was in his teens, Thomas was fond of dancing and drinking, and capable of manipulating a duo of doctors into being prepared to drill a hole through his skull. During his years in Bath, De Quincey was anything but the fragile melancholic he otherwise describes himself as having been.