Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  At two in the morning the carriage rolled up to the old inn door and De Quincey took his seat. On the road to London eighteen months earlier he had imagined the traffic being sucked in by the city, but he now described London as hurtling towards him, like a hysterical River Dee or a mad dog with a foaming mouth. With ‘every step’ of the twenty-eight-hour journey the metropolis was ‘coming nearer, and beckoning. . . for purposes as dim, for issues as incalculable, as the path of cannon-shots fired at random and in darkness’.

  The idea was to borrow against the patrimony he was due to receive when he reached twenty-one. Therefore, the first thing De Quincey did when he was deposited in Lombard Street in the City of London was to take himself to a money lender he had heard about called Mr Dell, and arrange a loan of £200. Unaware of the complexity involved in such a transaction, he expected to see his riches immediately and was dismayed to find himself referred to an attorney. The attorney lived at 38 Greek Street, one of the five roads leading off from Soho Square, immediately south of Oxford Street. The significance of the names cannot have been lost on De Quincey, a scholar of Greek who longed to go to Oxford. Added to which, he had spent much of his childhood on another Oxford Street – in battle with the boys from the Manchester cotton factory.

  The exterior of 38 Greek Street had an ‘unhappy countenance of gloom and unsocial fretfulness’. De Quincey knocked. A face peered suspiciously through a narrow window by the side of the front door, which then opened slowly. The attorney, a hulk of a man, led the boy through a house of ‘desolation’ and ‘deep silence’. In a room at the back which he used as an office, he enquired into his young client’s circumstances. De Quincey, who never knew if the attorney’s name was Brown or Brunell but referred to him as Brunell, now learned that it would take a dreary fortnight for the loan to be finalised. Dispirited, he found himself ‘barely decent’ lodgings at half a guinea a week in which to wait. He does not say where these lodgings were but they are unlikely to have been far from Soho. From now on his London life was organised around daily visits to Greek Street; paperwork was done, letters were paid for, promises were made; nothing appeared. Meanwhile the money De Quincey handed over in order to ‘process’ his non-existent loan drained his purse.

  For the remainder of each day, he walked. He may have returned to St Paul’s, he may have taken himself to Westminster Abbey, which he had longed to see; he may have visited the house in Holborn where Chatterton took his own life, or followed the Thames down to Wapping to see the Hawksmoor church on the Ratcliffe Highway. De Quincey left no record of his movements, but he was young and restless and filled with curiosity. He may well have followed the river to Hammersmith Terrace to find the house in which William had died four years earlier, during his own brief stay in London. Loutherbourg still lived there with his wife, Lucy, once reputed to be the most beautiful woman in England: would De Quincey have gazed through the windows at the man who had killed his brother while he was in his care? The Loutherbourgs, former occultists, had turned their home into a famous public healing clinic; a contemporary described how the poor came here in their thousands to be healed by ‘heavenly and divine influx coming from the Radix God’. When, in 1789, Loutherbourg was lampooned in The Times as ‘Dr Lutherburgo Humbuggo’ he renounced his role as public prophet and limited his healing powers to his inner circle. What did Loutherbourg do while his apprentice lay sweating with typhoid in one of his beds? William’s letters home from his days in London have not survived, but he would have enjoyed telling his family about the shadow world of Philippe De Loutherbourg, illusionist, mystic and apocalyptic artist.

  His twelve guineas soon ran out and by Christmas De Quincey could no longer afford his lodgings. He could have offered his services as ‘a corrector of Greek proofs’, but it never occurred to him to find work. In any case, to get a job he would need a recommendation and he knew no one in London except Brunell. Faced with sleeping on the streets, he now turned to the attorney to ask if he might bed down in a corner of his empty house. Brunell, who had money problems of his own and slept in a different quarter of London every night in order to avoid the bailiffs, assented and thus began De Quincey’s experience of starving in Soho, recorded in loving detail in the opening section of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. His suffering now reached its zenith: ‘extremities such as these. . . cannot be contemplated. . . without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness of the human heart’. De Quincey, who says nothing about the various other places in London where he would lay down his head, turns the house in which he squatted into the centre of his experience.

  Number 38 was a standard four-storey Georgian terrace but to De Quincey it was a ‘London mansion’, with ‘as large a choice of rooms, or even of apartments’ as he could ‘possibly desire’. Except for the ‘Bluebeard room’, as De Quincey called it, which Brunell used as his office and kept locked at all times, the house ‘from the attics to the cellars’ was ‘at our service’. It was not quite empty; also living there was a ‘plain’ and ‘hunger-bitten’ girl who was glad to have the older boy’s protection. The two small bodies slept where they fell, huddling together for warmth, bundles of law reports serving as pillows. They lived like children from a storybook, in a land where loving adults had simply dissolved. In the attics they found an old sofa cover and a piece of rug which they added to their nest. All night De Quincey listened to the rats scuttle up and down the bare stairs.

  Who was this nameless child? ‘She did not herself know,’ De Quincey said, though he suspected she was Brunell’s daughter. Dickens lifted her from the Confessions and reinstated her as the marchioness in The Old Curiosity Shop, but for De Quincey she was, like all the angels who appear and just as suddenly disappear in his writing, an incarnation of Elizabeth. Meanwhile, his own identity was evaporating. Dell now wanted proof that the ragged boy calling himself Thomas De Quincey was the same Thomas Quincey junior named as second son in the will of Thomas Quincey senior. ‘It was strange to me to find my own self. . . suspected of counterfeiting my own self,’ De Quincey recalled, as if he hadn’t already, as Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy, been pursued by the post office for a similar impersonation. His identity was hard to prove since he had made himself a missing person; not wanting to be discovered by his mother or guardians, De Quincey could not ask for their verification. Should his location be discovered he would be returned, with the full weight of the law, to Manchester Grammar – ‘a humiliation worse to me than death, and which would, indeed, have terminated in death’. He was, however, able to produce letters from Lord Altamont which satisfied Dell that his client had connections, and De Quincey continued his wait at Greek Street. Here he saw in the new year of 1803, looking forward to the day when he could again afford to eat.

  London was, and still is, composed of self-contained districts with distinct identities, and De Quincey had washed up in the Bohemian quarter. Bounded from north to south by Oxford Street and Leicester Fields, and from east to west by St Giles and Royal St James, the once aristocratic parish of St Anne’s, Soho was now known for the turbulence of its inhabitants. De Quincey later spoke of Greek Street as an obscure enclave, but it had been, until recently, the literary heart of the city. On the other side of the street stood the Turk’s Head tavern, where Dr Johnson’s celebrated ‘Literary Club’ had met for twenty years, until 1783. Members included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick and the botanist Joseph Banks, who still lived with his sister in Soho Square. De Quincey may well have sat on their front doorstep and watched as Miss Banks left the house every day with her pockets full of books, followed by a six-foot servant with a cane as tall as himself. ‘Miss Banks,’ the locals noted, ‘when she wanted to purchase a broadside in the streets, was more than once taken for a member of the ballad-singing confraternity.’ Another local was the Royal Academician, George Dawe. Known by his friends as ‘the grub’, Dawe washed once a week and then, according to Charles Lamb, applied water only to the ‘inner oval,
or portrait, of his countenance, leaving the unwashed temples to form a natural black frame’. Soho’s middling sort were indistinguishable from its paupers, and De Quincey was camouflaged by his rags.

  Forty years earlier Casanova had lodged in great discomfort at 47 Greek Street before finding himself more salubrious accommodation in Pall Mall. He was visiting his former lover, the Venetian courtesan Teresa Cornelys, whose home, Carlisle House, on the corner of Soho Square and Sutton Street, was, during the time of the Literary Club, the city’s centre of sexual intrigue. A double-fronted five-storey mansion, Carlisle House had been the scene of lavish masquerades to which thousands came. Mrs Cornelys transformed the building into a seemingly endless space; crowds flooded the Tea Room, the Gallery, the Bridge Room, the Star Room, the Stage Room, the Chinese Room and the Pavilion, which was ‘ceiled with looking glasses’ and decorated as a ‘delightful garden’ with ‘the choicest Flowers and bordered with a thicket of the most curious shrubs’. In the supper rooms diners found ‘an elegant walk, bordered with two regular green hedges’, while the tables themselves were ‘enriched with trees’. Soho Square had been an epicentre of deception and disguise. The balls at Carlisle House were occasions when high and low or, as Horace Walpole said, the ‘righteous and the ungodly’, hid behind their dominoes. Countesses dressed as courtesans, courtesans dressed as queens, and rich young men dressed as paupers.

  Across the square stood the White House, a high-class brothel masquerading as a house of horror. A set of lavishly themed rooms contained springs, traps and various other contrivances; skeletons sprung forward from behind curtains, coffins rose from the ground. Carlisle House had closed in 1788, but the White House stayed open until the year De Quincey arrived here. His Soho Square was a ghost town where Mrs Cornelys was a folk memory, and the White House a creepy reminder of Mr White’s Manchester museum. Since then the Duke of Portland, who owned the Square, had sold the freeholds and the residents now managed the garden themselves. Standing at its centre, the once handsome statue of Charles II had adopted the local uniform of desiccation and abandonment.

  The area was teeming with prostitutes, and as a ‘peripatetic’ De Quincey ‘naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are called street walkers’. He romanticised ‘the outcasts and pariahs of our female population’, not least because those he met pitied him and took his part ‘against watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps where I was sitting’. He says nothing about the appearance of his defenders but the radical tailor, Francis Place, described London’s prostitutes as wretched figures in ‘ragged dirty shoes and stockings and some no stockings at all. . . their gowns were low around the neck and open to the front, those who wore handkerchiefs had them always open to the front to expose their breasts. . . but numbers wore no handkerchiefs at all in warm weather and the breasts of many hung down in the most disgusting manner, their hair among the generality was straight and “hung in rat tails” over their eyes, and was filled with lice, or at least was inhabited by considerable colonies of insects. Drunkenness was common to them all.’ One of these figures, a fifteen-year-old girl called Ann, became De Quincey’s friend. He never knew her surname – De Quincey’s London was a blur of anonymity – and he tells us nothing about her save that she was kind, innocent and plain. Stressing Ann’s plainness was De Quincey’s way of reassuring his readers that he did not take advantage of her, but their relationship may well have been sexual. De Quincey, longing to prove himself a man, had hinted to his mother already that he knew ‘women of the town’ while he was at Manchester Grammar. Enjoying Ann’s undernourished body would account for the crippling guilt he would always feel about her, and explain his drawn-out insistence on her saintly virtue. A child of the outdoors, Ann was like Wordsworth’s ‘Ruth’, but De Quincey did not want to be seen as the villain who abandoned her to madness.

  De Quincey fantasised about saving Ann, but it was she who saved him. One night, having wandered the length of Oxford Street, they turned wearily into Soho Square. Here they sat, as they were wont to do, on the steps of one of the mansions; she with her persistent hacking cough and he weak with hunger. Lying in her arms, De Quincey collapsed and ‘without some powerful and reviving stimulus’ he would ‘have died on the spot’. Ann ran into Oxford Street and returned with a glass of port wine and spices, which instantly restored him. She had purchased it with her earnings, and had no expectation of the money being repaid. It was an act of kindness that he would never forget, and whenever he found himself ‘by dreamy lamplight’ in the ‘great Mediterranean’ of Oxford Street and heard again ‘those airs played on a common street organ’, De Quincey ‘shed tears’ at Ann’s memory.

  De Quincey’s stories lead back not to events but to other stories, and his account of roaming the labyrinthine city with Ann as his world-weary guide echoes the legend of young Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage.

  Planning to live by his pen, Johnson had newly arrived in London when he befriended Savage, a poet and convicted killer. Too poor to afford food or lodging, the shambolic, bear-like Johnson and the battered, nimble Savage spent their nights walking the London squares, talking politics and exchanging life stories. Savage’s history was barely credible, and De Quincey would later ridicule Johnson’s belief in its veracity. Claiming to be the illegitimate son of high-born parents, Savage blamed his current poverty on the cruelty of his putative mother, Lady Macclesfield, who had disowned him at birth. Pining for her love and recognition, he haunted her house in the hope of seeing her glide past a window or climb into her coach and on one occasion, finding the front door open, Savage crept upstairs to her bedroom. Assuming that he had come to kill her, Lady Macclesfield raised the alarm. It was not an unreasonable fear; Savage had killed a man in a pub brawl and consequently been imprisoned. Since his release he had written an accusatory autobiographical poem called ‘The Wanderer’, and condemned his mother in another verse polemic called ‘The Bastard’.

  De Quincey, who picked quarrels with Dr Johnson at every turn, took him to task in his Life of Savage for treating the poetry seriously and being conned by Savage’s obvious ‘hoax’. Johnson saw Savage as a boy ‘defrauded by his mother. . . of the fortune his father had allotted him’, and De Quincey saw Johnson as a man taken in by Savage’s own ‘fraud’. Johnson, who described Savage as the spokesman for pariahs everywhere, including those ‘beauteous Wretches’ who the ‘nightly Streets annoy’, celebrated his friend as a ‘Man of exalted Sentiments, extensive Views and curious Observations’. Such a figure slept ‘among the Riot and Filth of the meanest and most profligate of the Rabble; and sometimes, when he had no Money to support even the Expences of these Receptacles, walked about the Streets till he was weary, and lay down in the Summer upon a Bulk, or in the Winter with his Associates in Poverty, among the Ashes of a Glass-house’. Johnson’s Savage was trapped in his own inner darkness; he had ‘lulled his Imagination’ with the ‘ideal Opiates’ of self-exoneration. Savage was a man who, by ‘imputing none of his miseries to himself. . . proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle’. His friends – Johnson among them – suggested that he ‘exile himself from London’ and ‘retire into Wales’ to live the rest of his days on money they raised for him by subscription. Dragging his heels, Savage sloped off and stuck it out for a year, complaining throughout that his income was not sufficient. He then absconded to Bristol where, living off the generosity of further friends, he wrote a poem satirising the city and its inhabitants. Here he died, in a debtors’ prison.

  Dr Johnson’s delicate, complex portrait of his strange friend became, as De Quincey put it, the young author’s ‘nest-egg’. The beauty of biography was that the author could couple himself to his subject: Dr Johnson found fame by linking his name to that of Savage, just as Boswell was spoken of in the same breath as Johnson. De Quincey, who would write his own lives of the poets, took note.

  Oxford Street, the threshold between London’s low and high life,
was the centre of De Quincey’s new world. From here he would ‘on moonlight nights. . . gaze up every avenue in succession which pierces through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and the woods; for that, said I, travelling with my eyes up the long vistas which lay part in light and part in shade, that is the road to the North and therefore to [Wordsworth], and if I had the wings of a dove, that way would I fly to comfort’. He and Ann wandered the pavements, past the ‘Stately Pantheon’, as Wordsworth called the theatre, past watchmakers, fan stores, drapers, silversmiths, confectioners and fruiterers. The shops stayed open until eleven o’clock and the road and pavements teemed with life. Streetlights blazed and black, lacquered coaches clattered along, two abreast.

  Fourteen years earlier, a German visitor, Sophie von La Roche, had described looking through the illuminated windows of Oxford Street to the living rooms of the shopkeepers, where ‘many a charming family scene [was] enacted: some are still at work, others drinking tea, a third party is entertaining a friendly visitor, in a fourth parents are joking and playing with their children’. De Quincey, a seasoned watcher of windows, would have done the same. When, in later years, he returned to London he would revisit the house in Greek Street, which was ‘now in the occupation of some family, apparently respectable’. Through the glass, ‘no longer coated by paste composed of ancient soot and superannuated rain’, he saw a chamber brightly lit with candles in which ‘a domestic party’ was ‘assembled, perhaps, at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay’. They had inherited the rooms of the famous Thomas De Quincey, just as he had inherited those of Edmund Burke, Joseph Cotton and William Wordsworth.