Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  His fortunes appeared to improve when, on Albemarle Street, De Quincey ran into a former friend of his father who furnished him with ten guineas and promised to say nothing of their encounter to Mrs Quincey. In addition, Dell now agreed to forward De Quincey £200 if Lord Westport could guarantee the loan. Buoyed up, De Quincey prepared to visit his friend in Eton. Two years ago Westport had looked up to him as a mentor and introduced him to the king; anticipating the young man’s reaction to the arrival of this derelict version of his former self, De Quincey broke into his new funds to buy some clothes. He also gave Ann a guinea, and promised to divide the full sum of the loan with her when he returned. Together they walked to Piccadilly to wait for the Bristol mail which would drop De Quincey at Salt Hill, a few miles from Windsor. They agreed to meet again in five days’ time, at the bottom of Great Titchfield Street. If De Quincey did not appear at six o’clock, Ann was to return the following evening.

  He took an outside seat, and the coach clattered past the Mayfair palaces. After the toll gate at Hyde Park, London dissolved into pastures and the road turned to rubble. De Quincey fell into the first deep sleep he had known for months.

  He awoke at midnight to find that he had missed his stop. They were now at Maidenhead, six miles west of Salt Hill; jumping down at the first opportunity he began the slow walk back to Eton. He was heading towards Hounslow Heath where, a few weeks earlier, a man called Steele had been murdered in a field of lavender; De Quincey imagined himself and the murderer approaching one another through the darkness. Overcome by the weariness, he fell asleep by the roadside and woke at dawn to find the ground covered with frost and the trees with rime. He washed the portrait of his face in a public house in Windsor, and slipped into the school where he enquired about Westport and discovered that the boy was now at Cambridge. This information must have stung even more than the realisation that his journey had been wasted. He fumbled for the names of other Etonians who might be hospitable to him in his current state. Remembering that Westport’s cousin, Lord Dorset, was also a pupil, De Quincey invited himself to breakfast. Dorset’s table groaned with food, but the starvation of the last few months had made De Quincey’s stomach fragile and he was unable to eat. He thirsted, however, for wine and after several glasses found the courage to ask his host to guarantee the loan. The schoolboy reluctantly agreed, and after three further wine-filled days De Quincey returned to London where Dell did not approve Dorset’s conditions, and Ann was nowhere to be found. She had, to use one of De Quincey’s newly minted words, ‘evanesced’ into the city. He waited at Great Titchfield Street every evening, and searched the streets every day. He knew neither her full name nor her address. Her fate, he later said, had been his ‘heaviest affliction’: ‘If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps, even within a few feet of each other . . . I may say that on my different visits to London, I have looked into many, many myriads of female faces, in the hope of meeting her.’

  De Quincey’s suffering was now complete, and when spring arrived he said goodbye to Oxford Street, his ‘stony-hearted stepmother’, and headed back to Chester to face the wrath of his stony-hearted mother. Having run away from Wales, he was now running away from London and with nowhere else to go, he ran back home. An ‘opening’ had apparently been made with his guardians, and while he does not reveal the terms of their agreement we can surmise that he returned to Chester in exchange for the guarantee that he would not also have to return to school. His challenge now was to persuade his guardians to allow him to enrol at Oxford, a move they were ‘resolutely bent’ on preventing, as De Quincey put it, until he made certain ‘concessions’. The nature of these concessions is not given, but they related to control of his finances and his choice of future profession.

  Life for De Quincey was either angels ascending on vaults of cloud or vagrants shivering on the city streets. It was being earthbound that he found hardest to describe. Despite the vivid account he gives of this period in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey’s four months on the doorsteps of Soho mansions are the time when he is least visible to the reader. In his Autobiographic Sketches, where he variously presents himself as a dreamy child, a precocious schoolboy, a neurasthenic adolescent and a young man in a hurry, De Quincey ensures that he is distinguished from the other faces. But Confessions, written twenty years earlier, is about his disappearance into the swinish multitude rather than his shining singularity, and it is this that was picked up by Edgar Allan Poe in his short story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, published in 1840. Poe’s narrator sits in a coffee house in one of London’s ‘principal thoroughfares’, watching the ‘tumultuous sea of human heads’. His attention is arrested by the countenance of a ‘decrepit old man’ which contains ‘ideas of vast mental power. . . of blood thirstiness. . . of excessive terror, of intense – of extreme – despair’. The man to whom it belongs is ‘short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble’, and the narrator stalks his frail form for a day and a night as the figure treads a meaningless circuit through the city’s streets and squares. Tired almost to death of walking, the narrator eventually faces his victim and sees in his features ‘the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.’ The form he has followed is described as being like a ‘book that . . . does not permit itself to be read’.

  At the time of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey regarded his experience in London as the central scene of his life. His sufferings smack of theatre but was he, in the winter of 1802/03, playing a part? Was his winter on the streets a work-in-progress, a rehearsal for a future dominated by homelessness? De Quincey’s London was a book in which he turned the pages of Thomas Chatterton, Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, and in which he imagined the story of William Quincey, but also written into his experiences were the poems he had carried in his pocket since he left school that summer. If he began his voyage on the high seas of the city with the innocence of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, he returned to the Priory having imbibed the introspective wisdom of ‘Tintern Abbey’.

  The Priory, Chester. Elizabeth Quincey had purchased a ruined cottage in the grounds of Tintern Abbey.

  5

  Summer Vacation

  I love a public road: few sights there are

  That please me more; such object hath had power

  O’er my imagination since the dawn

  Of childhood . . .

  Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Twelfth

  It was Elizabeth Quincey’s habit, when her sons became too much for her, to put them into the hands of someone else and this is what she had in mind for Thomas, whose delinquency now exceeded that of his elder brother. No sooner had he found his way back to the Priory than he was dispatched to the cottage in Middle Lane, Everton, with orders to pull himself together. It was a sensible move; Thomas, badly in need of mothering, could not have been in better hands than those of his landlady, Mrs Best. Known in the village as ‘a good and kind matron’, Anabela Best was the local Samaritan. Her neighbours remembered how she ‘attended and cherished, with care and tenderness, the sick, the infirm, the delicate of constitution, and the convalescent, and at all times administered to the comforts, wants, conveniences of those who occasionally lodged under her roof’.

  Late March 1803 saw De Quincey once again in the cabin on the hilltop village. Stretched to one side of him lay Liverpool with its surrounding necklace of windmills, before him unrolled the Mersey estuary, the Wirral peninsula, the northern coast of Lancashire, and the round ocean. Liverpool was a pleasant walk away, and De Quincey came here every day to dine at the house of his mother’s friend, Mr Cragg. He also went to the theatre, the newspaper rooms, the libraries, the coffee shops and, on Sundays, to church.

  Liverpool, like Bristol, was a place of masts and sails. To a stranger, warned The Liverpool Guide in 1801, it might seem as though ships were ‘afloat in the
heart of the town, without discovering any communication with the sea’. A sailor could ‘step into and out of his ship with as much ease as he passes the threshold of the door to his house’. The city was hemmed in with wet docks, dry docks, basins, twenty-five-foot-high floodgates, towers, giant warehouses, piers, buoys, ropes, and – to prevent the drunks from falling into the water – rows of chains. The nearby prison held French prisoners of war and around the corner of the tobacco warehouse, on a street called ‘Wapping’ (named after its twin in London), were clusters of roperies, anchor smiths, block-makers and sail-makers. Deep underground, the wet docks communicated by tunnels so that by opening and closing their sluices they could lick one another clean, like lionesses caring for their cubs. De Quincey spent afternoons lounging on the pier at the end of St George’s Dock, watching the ships set sail or return from their voyages. The Peace of Amiens, fragile from the start, was over. In May, England declared war on France and the soldiers and sailors dusted down their uniforms. Soon afterwards, sitting on a stone and ‘lost in thought’, De Quincey ‘heard the rushing of a crowd of people behind me. I started up. . . and found that the tumult was occasioned by the circumstance of a press-gang bringing down their booty to a boat.’ The press-ganging of men around Liverpool was a common enough sight but ‘never’, De Quincey wrote, ‘did I behold such exquisite sorrow contend with such manliness of appearance’. The man’s expression recalled for him the ancient mariner’s description of his dead shipmates: ‘The look with which they look’d on me/ Had never passed away.’

  In July the Levy en Masse Act was passed, which required lords lieutenant to make lists of all men aged between seventeen and fifty-five who were eligible to be called up. Under this law, should there be too few volunteers De Quincey would be yoked in to defend his country. As it was, the levy was never needed but De Quincey was now not only on the run from school but also from the prospect of being rounded up and marched into battle.

  The next three months represented a crucial threshold in his life, and the survival of the diary he kept during this time makes it possible for us to see De Quincey as he currently saw himself rather than as he painted himself to his readers many years later. Like the Confessions, his diary tells a tale of exile. But because it was not written to be read by others, there is no romanticising of suffering, no narrative tension, no flirtation with the reader, and no sense of moving through time. A record of despondency and boredom, its purpose was to provide De Quincey with an occupation and allow him an outlet. It is also a story of loneliness; there is no man on earth except Wordsworth, De Quincey believes, with whom he can share his thoughts. Having nothing to do and no one to discipline him, he idled away his time in the harbour, walking along the pier, taking tea, coffee and wine with Mr Cragg and his friends, sexually experimenting with the local prostitutes, and bingeing on library books. He documents every face he meets – De Quincey was haunted by ‘the tyranny of the human face’ – details the precise quantities of alcohol consumed, the titles of everything he read, and the topics of every discussion that took place during the long, slow Liverpool evenings. He was measuring his life in coffee spoons. His copious reading was, as ever, both eclectic and contemporary. He kept abreast of the monthly magazines, read the most recent celebrity memoirs and popular novels, bought his poetry hot off the press, chewed over modern philosophy, wrestled with the latest literary theories, and imbibed the current vocabulary of ‘pathos’, ‘sublime’ and ‘melancholy’. He kept notes on his inner weather, queried the meanings and spellings of words (‘Ancient – antient?’), and wondered about correct pronunciation. His diary also served as a notebook in which he drafted letters, such as those he sent to his mother which had to be carefully phrased if he was to win the argument over the ‘Oxford scheme’. Buried like plovers’ eggs are his thoughts on poets and other writers: ‘Bacon’s mind appears to me like a great abyss, on the brink of which imagination starts and shudders to look down’; ‘in Stewart we may observe that he always gives us one strong and comprehensive word as the hinge on which the rest of the sentence hangs and turns’. The image of the mind as an abyss down which imagination fears to look, and of strong words as hinges on door-like sentences, formed the centre of De Quincey’s critical theory.

  Once again he was living opposite Mr Clarke but there is no mention in De Quincey’s diary of his former friend or of the biographers, Shepherd, Roscoe and Currie. He does not say why the literary coterie has been dropped, but it is presumably to do with the ‘profane way’ in which they had spoken of Coleridge (as a politician rather than a poet) two years earlier. It is always curious to see what information diaries contain and what they omit; in Grasmere, Dorothy Wordsworth had recently been keeping a journal which detailed the movements of the sky but made no mention of her brother’s forthcoming marriage, an event whose impact on her life she was dreading. De Quincey recorded only those things he could say to no one other than himself. He writes nothing about the war with France because his thoughts on Napoleon, an ‘idol of fear’, were being well aired in his daily conversations: ‘Of that gilded fly of Corsica – Bonaparte – I said just now (what I have applied to others too – using it as a general curse) “May he be thirsty to all eternity – and have nothing but cups of damnation to drink”.’

  For a man who preferred his own company, De Quincey was dependent on a host of people with whom he threw himself into talk: ‘talk about the war – the immense wealth of England and the proportionate superiority of honour on her part to that of other nations in thus risking her wealth – talk of free will – origin of evil – association of ideas – the incompatibility of eternal punishment – talk about Rousseau, love etc.’. One night, to relieve his own apathy, he talked about ‘the clouds which hang thick and heavy on my brain’. Did he talk to Everton society about his recent experiences as a down-and-out? There is no mention of London in these pages; poor Ann – if she ever existed – has been, for now, forgotten. As an autobiographer, De Quincey would write obsessively about his past and coat every experience with meaning, but as a diarist he is fixed in the present tense.

  Mrs Best provided him with breakfast and tea, but De Quincey spent his evenings either with Mr Cragg – asked by Elizabeth Quincey to keep a close eye on the truant – or with Cragg’s friend, James Wright, one half of the Liverpool printing house, Merritt and Wright. De Quincey referred to the two men as W and C, but they were not the W and C he wanted to spend his time with. While he suffered their ignorance in literary matters, they suffered a good deal in the company of their guest. Surly and arrogant, De Quincey enjoyed the combat of conversation and the sense of his own superiority. His companions, he noted with pride, assumed that he ‘looked down’ on them ‘with contempt as inferior beings’. When not fighting his corner, he employed the frigid and distant politeness he claimed to have rehearsed in the company of Hannah More; otherwise he adopted a chilly silence which was broken only to deride his host’s literary opinions. Like all adolescents, De Quincey was aware of the image he projected, and he recorded in his diary the occasions on which he felt that his rudeness had triumphed. One evening James Wright suggested that ‘seeing a play well performed. . . [is] the greatest pleasure human nature is susceptible of’. ‘“Do you think so, Sir?” said I.’ Silence followed. Another time, Mr Cragg asked if De Quincey liked The Odyssey, ‘which he himself thought mightily entertaining’. ‘“No,” said I coolly.’ Silence again. Sometimes they were joined by ladies, who De Quincey amused by ‘saying that there was some road down to hell by which I might descend for a short time’. The bright-eyed boy who had charmed the whole of Ireland was nowhere to be seen.

  His identification with Chatterton was now sealed: ‘Last night my Chattertonian melancholia. . . returned for the 1st time this two years,’ De Quincey noted in April. He does not feel suicidal or depressed: he feels ‘Chattertonian’. He later described a vision in which ‘I see Chatterton in the exceeding pain of death! In exhausted slumber of agony I see his arm weak
as a child’s – languid and faint in ye extreme. . . stretched out and raised at midnight.’ De Quincey’s thoughts often formed themselves as pictures. A few days later, under the heading ‘POETS’, he listed the individuals he considered the most important, from the seventeenth century to the present day:

  Edmund Spenser;

  William Shakespeare;

  John Milton;

  James Thomson;

  William Collins;

  Thomas Chatterton;

  James Beattie;

  Robert Burns;

  Robert Southey;

  S. T. Coleridge;

  William Wordsworth!!!

  Q. Gray?

  A. NO

  The exclamation marks after Wordsworth denote wonder, but also warning.

  He was concerned about his persona. ‘What shall be my character?’ De Quincey wondered, ‘wild – impetuous – splendidly sublime? Dignified – melancholy – gloomily sublime? Or shrouded in mystery – supernatural – like the “ancient mariner” – awfully sublime?’ When he thought of ‘character’, Coleridge increasingly came to mind.

  But what were De Quincey’s characteristics? He made a new heading, ‘Notes on my own character’: ‘A few days ago. . . I became fully convinced that one leading trait in my mental character. . . is – Facility of impression. My hopes and fears are alternately raised and quelled by the minutest – the most trivial circumstances – by the slightest words. . . witness the strong effects which striking descriptions of a new sort have . . . To me these are always paintings. Thus is my understanding triumphed over by my heart.’ This is a sound account of his rapid responses, sensitivity to language, proximity to fear and powerful visual imagination. On 28 April he made another list: