It was enough (what matter for a home?)
That owned me. . .
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Seventh
No sooner had he returned to Oxford in the late November of 1807 than De Quincey fell ill with ‘a determination of blood to the head’. Always anxious about this part of his body, he consulted a London surgeon who advised him to stay off wine and avoid bending his neck. So for the next few months he transported himself like an automaton, his chin rigid, his shoulders stiff, his eyes, when not aimed straight ahead, flicking to the left and right. It was in this guise that he re-engaged with Coleridge, whose lecture series on ‘Poetry and the Fine Arts’ had now begun. De Quincey had promised Dorothy that he would attend and report back.
Coleridge was also ill. De Quincey found him living in the Courier offices in the Strand, a guest of the editor, Daniel Stuart, where he was ‘enveloped in night caps’ and ‘surmounted by handkerchiefs endorsed upon handkerchiefs’. To quell the racket of the printing press outside his door and the roar of the street coming up through the window, he was taking ‘more than ordinary doses of opium’. The first of his lectures – which De Quincey missed – had been on ‘Taste’ in poetry, and the next two were postponed due to his health. The second lecture took place on 5 February 1808 and De Quincey sat in the audience at the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street and watched Coleridge ‘struggling with pain and overmastering illness’. The steep, semi-circular theatre had magnificent acoustics but Coleridge, whose habit was to propound without notes, ‘seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower’. He fumbled and froze in a ‘feverish heat’, his lips were baked ‘black’; he drank glass after glass of water but nothing could quench his thirst (De Quincey’s imagery comes from ‘The Ancient Mariner’: ‘Water, water, everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink,’ and ‘With throats unslaked, with black lips baked’). What Coleridge said lacked heart and when, to the relief of the audience, he read aloud from one of the books piled on the podium he chose, at random, passages of interminable duration. This was the effect not of opium, but of its withdrawal. The mariner’s performance, De Quincey concluded, was ‘a poor faint reflection of jewels once scattered in the highway by himself’.
Walking home that night, De Quincey repeated to himself lines from the soliloquy of Milton’s blind Samson.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
All further lectures were cancelled until 30 March. It is a dismal description of Coleridge and impossible to miss De Quincey’s relish, in his ‘Lake Reminiscences’, in the comic horror of it all, from the excess of handkerchiefs to the blackened lips. He does not mention that Coleridge recovered enough to give twenty of the twenty-five scheduled talks, or that he had taken meticulous notes beforehand and thought deeply about their content.
Hearing reports that his friend was dying, Wordsworth arrived at the Courier offices on 24 February. ‘Wordsworth the great poet,’ teased the mischievous Lamb, ‘is coming to Town. He is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a mind to try it. It is clear then nothing is wanting but the mind. Even Coleridge a little checked at this hardihood of assertion.’ The diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, who now met Wordsworth for the first time, left a memorable portrait of him during this visit: the great poet was a ‘sloven’ whose ‘manners though not arrogant yet indicate a sense of his own worth. He is not attentive to others and speaks with decision of his own opinion. He does not spare those he opposes.’ On 3 March, Coleridge gave a tea party from his bed, inviting Wordsworth, Lamb, the radical philosopher William Godwin and De Quincey as his guests. De Quincey’s first foray into London salon society was a stolid affair. Coleridge was muted and Wordsworth cold; the occasion was saved by the playfulness of Lamb, who now redeemed himself in De Quincey’s eyes.
Two days later De Quincey was back in Oxford, preparing for his own great challenge. He had been persuaded to sit for the honours examination, where he could at last prove himself the superior of his tutors. His recent wanderings had set back his studies and in order to be prepared, he told Dorothy, he needed to read thirty-three Greek tragedies in one week. This he could do with the help of a book stand sent by his mother, which allowed him to turn the pages without bending his neck. Anxiety prevented him from sleeping; when he did he dreamed of ‘finding the whole university on tiptoe for the approaching prize-fighting and myself in a state of palsy as to any power of exertion’. He was reminded of a recurring dream he had as a child, in which he was pursued by a lion and unable to move. He worried about the effect of all this study on his brain, fearing that it would bring on the dreaded hydrocephalus. He did not reveal to the Wordsworths how much of his pride and self-worth were invested in getting his degree. Instead, he told Dorothy that he was motivated by duty alone: ‘having been treated with very great kindness by my college, I cannot endure to disappoint their expectations’.
De Quincey’s first examination, on 14 May, went triumphantly. ‘You have sent us today the cleverest man I ever met with,’ one of the examiners told the Worcester College dons. ‘If his viva voce examination tomorrow correspond with what he has done in writing, he will carry everything before him.’ The viva was to be in Greek, and De Quincey had been looking forward to it. At the last minute, however, the rules were changed and he learned that while the questions would be asked in Greek, he was expected to answer in English. Oral examinations were public events where the examinees performed before an audience, and De Quincey had been speaking Greek since his schooldays: if he could not distinguish himself now, his honours degree would be ‘without honour’. All the examination would prove was that he was able to do what any other undergraduate was able to do. He pronounced himself disgusted by his examiners, who were not worthy of his respect.
So the night before his viva De Quincey bolted. He leaves no account of the circumstances around his departure, but his thought processes must have been similar to those that accompanied his moonlight flit from Manchester Grammar. ‘Leave this house,’ he had then told himself, and ‘a Rubicon is placed between thee and all possibility of return.’ Now, once again, his conscience spoke in ‘sullen whispers’ against his ‘irrevocable’ action, and having left the city of Oxford, De Quincey never went back.
He took himself to London, home of runaways, where he joined the audience for Coleridge’s final lecture on 8 June.
De Quincey told Dorothy that he had left Oxford because he was ill, but the most likely explanation for his departure lay in his growing relationship with laudanum. Hoping that the drug would calm his nerves and improve his thought, he may have dosed himself up with Coleridgean quantities and found himself unable to function. Coleridge’s recent appearance served as a deterrent: were De Quincey to go ahead with the viva, his performance might resemble the chaos on the podium at the Royal Institution. Another of laudanum’s effects is to open the mind to suggestion: why, De Quincey must have asked himself, suffer fools when he had found himself a superior university in Grasmere? The only praise worth having came from Wordsworth. But there was another possible reason for his flight: what if he did not distinguish himself in his viva? He had gone through his life promoting himself as singular: there was too much to lose in putting his superiority to the test.
He moved into the rooms of a former college friend at 5 Northumberland Street in the parish of St Marylebone, at the other end of Oxford Street. His windows looked onto a workhouse which was built to accommodate a thousand tramps and ‘casual poor’, including any foundling abandoned on the doorstep.
From here, De Quincey made himself indispensable to Coleridge, who was still living at the Courier offices. He visited the invalid every day, found him rare books, and discussed his work in progress. Coleridge’s respect for De Quincey is apparent in the letters he dispatched across London: ‘I do therefore ask
you as proof of Friendship,’ he implored, ‘that you will so far get over your natural modesty and timidity as without reserve or withholding to tell me exactly what you think and feel on perusal of anything I may submit to you.’ By February 1808, Coleridge was sufficiently dependent on De Quincey’s visits to feel panic when he did not see him. ‘I have suffered considerable alarm,’ he wrote one Tuesday evening, ‘at not having seen you for so many days. . .’ It was probably now that the event took place which De Quincey described in his Confessions. The two men were leafing through Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, when Coleridge told De Quincey about another a set of plates by Piranesi called ‘Dreams’ which recorded ‘the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever’.
Some of them (I describe only from the memory of Mr Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. expressive of enormous power to pull forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.
Piranesi did not produce a series called ‘Dreams’, and De Quincey is almost certainly describing the Carceri d’invenzione (‘Imaginary Prisons’). Never seen by him, the images came from the ‘memory’ of Coleridge. Perhaps Coleridge had not seen them either and only knew them from the memory of someone else, in which case De Quincey’s description is of what he imagined Coleridge to have imagined Piranesi to have imagined; the memory of the Piranesi becomes a form of palimpsest in which De Quincey imposes an impression on the surface of Coleridge’s impression, which is itself imposed on another impression.
The series of thirteen prints, published in 1750, depict a gargantuan dungeon without entrance or exit, floor or ceiling; the building is simply an infinite interior of stairs, chains, vaults, bridges, pulleys and chasms. De Quincey’s purpose in describing the image in his Confessions is to compare Piranesi’s ‘dreams’ with the ‘endless growth and reproduction’ of the architecture in his own opium dreams, but he saw architecture like this everywhere. His whole world was a stage-set designed by Piranesi: the most modest domestic interiors are given by him vertiginous climbs and perilous descents. While Wordsworth found poetry in nature, for De Quincey a building was a poem, and nature itself a Piranesi prison. Gowbarrow Park, at Ullswater, contains an ‘aerial dungeon . . . frightful to look down’; retreat for the walker is ‘impossible’, the ‘chasm’ is the only escape from danger. In relation to Grasmere, Easedale is ‘a chamber within a chamber, or rather a closet within a chamber – a chapel within a cathedral – a little private oratory within a chapel’.
More fascinating than the endlessly repeated staircase in the non-existent Piranesi engraving is the figure he imagines ascending them. While De Quincey describes the climber as Piranesi, it is himself he sees here pursuing his ‘aspiring labours’. These are De Quincey’s own thwarted journeys, the abysses only he looks down. This scene recurred in De Quincey’s nightmares: he is trapped; every staircase he climbs ends with the same ‘abrupt termination’, but instead of falling into the depths below he simply reappears on another staircase, facing another abrupt termination, the brink of another abyss, and so on. Each of his experiences would be duplicated, not once but an infinite number of times.
The ‘Imaginary Prisons’ capture De Quincey’s style as an autobiographer. The story of his life is one of labour and repetition: this is how much I mourned when my sister died; this is how hard I worked to get to Oxford; this is what I went through in order to meet Wordsworth. And on each occasion, when it seems he can go no further in his agony, when he depicts himself looking with terror over a literal or a metaphorical gorge of Hammerscar, he appears on another staircase making another dramatic ascent. In meeting Wordsworth, De Quincey was nearing the pinnacle of his ambition; and with no more stairs to climb, he had only the depths below.
It was Dorothy, of course, who invited him to return to Grasmere. The Wordsworths had left Dove Cottage and moved into Allan Bank, the abomination on the other side of the lake. They had little choice in the matter; if they were to stay in the vale they had to take what was available. Their household now consisted of Wordsworth, Mary, Dorothy, Sara Hutchinson, two servants and the three young children. Coleridge soon moved in as well (looking, said Southey, ‘about half as big as the house’) and Hartley and Derwent joined them all for weekend visits. Allan Bank had ten rooms rather than six, and more breathing space – just. But, Dorothy complained, the house was uninhabitable, having chimneys which wouldn’t draw. The problem was severe and apparently insurmountable; smoke blackened the windows, soot covered the dishes, and to keep themselves warm the women and children were forced to their beds in the middle of the day.
Coleridge stayed in bed all day anyway. A famously difficult guest, he now excelled himself. Rising with the owls, he worked throughout the night on his latest project, a philosophical periodical to be called The Friend. Rejecting the Wordsworths’ frugal fare, he put the maid to the trouble of preparing him a separate dinner of meat and roast potatoes, and was otherwise either mired in opium or withdrawing from its effects. In comparison, the porcelain-mannered De Quincey could do no wrong. ‘Mr De Quincey,’ Dorothy enthused in a letter to her friend, Mrs Clarkson, ‘will stay with us, we hope, at least till the Spring. We feel often as if he were one of the Family – “he is loving, gentle and happy”.’ Sara Hutchinson was, as ever, drier in her praise: ‘Mr de Quincey has been here 3 weeks & I daresay will make a long stay – he is a good tempered amiable creature & uncommonly clever & an excellent scholar – but he is very shy & so reverences Wm & C that he chats very little but is content to listen.’ As always, his shyness disappeared around the children, who adored him for his willingness to play and tell stories. Johnny, with whom he shared a bed, was, Dorothy noted, ‘passionately fond of him’ but the child De Quincey loved most was baby Catherine, born in September 1808. Called by Wordsworth his ‘little Chinese maiden’, Catherine may have had Down’s Syndrome. (The suggestion, made by Grevel Lindop, is convincing: Mary was thirty-eight when Catherine was born, and the child’s health problems – convulsions, difficulty with swallowing – are consistent with the condition.) De Quincey bonded himself to Catherine, bouncing her on his knee, sharing her mother’s concerns about her sleep, and extracting a promise, Dorothy told Mrs Clarkson, that he was to be ‘her sole tutor, so that we shall not dare to show her a letter in a book. . . If, however, he fails in inspiring her with a love of learning, I am sure that he cannot fail in one thing. His gentle, sweet manners must lead her to sweetness and gentle thoughts.’
When Wordsworth looked up from his desk he saw a creature cooing at babies, drawing dragons for Johnny, and fussing with the womenfolk over every little cough in the nursery. De Quincey was neither one thing nor the other; no longer a child, he could not be described as an adult, but nor was he fully masculine: as far as Wordsworth was concerned, his houseguest was effeminate, particularly in contrast with his other young acolyte, John Wilson, who had also moved to the Lakes and who De Quincey now met for the first time one evening at sunset, when Coleridge was preparing for breakfast.
Wilson, whose fan letter to Wordsworth had preceded his own, cut a striking figure. Twenty years later he was described as ‘a sixteen stoner. . . a cock
er, a racer, a six bottler, a twenty-four tumbler – an out-and-outer – a true, upright, knocking-down, poetical, prosaic, moral, professorial, hard-drinking, fierce-eating, good-looking, honourable, and straight-forward Tory’, and we must add to this picture the energies of youth. A six-footer in a sailor suit with wild, yellow hair, De Quincey’s first impression of him was of a man ‘in robust health’ with an expression of ‘animated intelligence’ and ‘an intense enjoyment of life’. Wilson, who won the Newdigate poetry prize at Oxford and left the university at the same time as De Quincey, but with a degree, lived off a sizeable inheritance with which he had bought, to be close to Wordsworth, an estate called Elleray which looked down on Windermere. Here he hunted, fished, rowed, wrestled with farmers and wrote Wordsworthian verse. In his later journalism he would be equally pugnacious. Wilson was, as Thomas Carlyle put it, one of those tropical trees that exhales itself in ‘balmy odours’ instead of ‘producing fruit’.
Wilson’s appearance in his life was exactly what De Quincey most dreaded. He had a horror of being rejected by Wordsworth for someone ‘more brilliant. . . who might have the power (which I feared I should never have) of talking to him on something like equal terms, as respected the laws and principles of poetry’. But rather than set himself up as Wilson’s rival, De Quincey became his brother-in-arms. While Wilson has come down to us as a Rabelaisian extrovert and De Quincey as an introspective dreamer, the two men had a good deal in common. Born in the same year, Wilson also lost his father at an early age, also inherited money, also came to the Lakes to be near Wordsworth, and had been resident a full year before having the courage to call on his idol. Another Gothic novel-reading night-walker, Wilson had what De Quincey called a ‘furious love for nonsense – head-long nonsense’. They were bonded by their humour. Wilson’s reputation as a man of letters has not survived, but he was a journalist of high jinks and knock-about brilliance. (The pleasure of reading his ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ in Blackwood’s Magazine is hard to equal.) John Wilson excelled in the three areas considered during the Regency period to be the most important: personality, physiognomy and parody. The parodies of his literary friends and rivals are priceless, and he even wrote parodies of himself. He was, as De Quincey memorably said, ‘the very sublime of fun’.
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