Once again De Quincey was on the run from Wordsworth, but he was also nervous about his developing relationship with Dorothy. Added to which, the thought of ‘his’ cottage – its windows newly curtained, walls freshly painted, and deal bookcases standing empty – filled him with terror. His sister Jane wrote on 17 May to remind him that he had promised some time ago to be with them in ten days. ‘I observe you always say ten days, a distance which as regularly recedes so that it is constantly at the same standing.’ The only news they had of Thomas came ‘from your favoured friend, Miss Wordsworth. . . When shall we hear anything more of this beautiful cottage? I can’t approve of the sitting-room being upstairs.’ Jane’s letters to her brother were always teasing. ‘I should like to know,’ she said of his future in Grasmere, ‘how you will pass your time – whether you mean to bury yourself in total seclusion, or only in an elegant retirement, embellished with every unsophisticated pleasure. I can tell you that you will never endure it alone for two months.’ The only news she had from home was that Hannah More had published a novel called Coelebs in Search of a Wife, ‘which we have read; – very good advice to masters and misses, but quite out of your way’.
De Quincey’s time in London was currently spent bingeing on opium and books, both great stoppers of clocks. The thought of boxing up his new volumes – he had accumulated 300 more in the last few months – made him torpid. Coleridge described how any duty, once opium had been taken, would ‘in exact proportion’ to its ‘importance and urgency. . . be neglected’, and similarly how ‘in exact proportion, as I loved any person or persons more than others, & would have sacrificed my life to them’, they would be ‘barbarously mistreated by [my] silence, absence, or breach of promise’. De Quincey claimed that he was, at this point, still ‘a dilettante eater of opium’ but the evidence suggests he was more than this, and that opium was becoming preferable to reality. His inertia led to guilt, guilt led to opium, opium led to inertia, inertia led to guilt: he later described how the ‘oppression of inexpiable guilt’ lay upon him with ‘the weight of twenty Atlantics’.
On Saturday nights he would douse himself and make his way across the city, walking far beyond his known boundaries, ‘for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time’. He found himself in ‘knotty problems of alleys’ with ‘enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of coachmen’. These he imagined to be terrae incognitae, of which he was the ‘first discoverer’. He paid ‘a heavy price in distant years’ for his metropolitan excursions, ‘when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep’. Now, when he slept, he saw Piranesian cities and palaces, and ‘silvery expanses of water’, from seas and oceans to ‘translucent lakes, shining like mirrors’.
In his sentient hours, De Quincey visited another peripatetic: Walking Stewart. This was the same bushy-haired traveller he had observed in Bath, and who, in his diary, he had compounded with the ancient mariner to form an impression of Coleridge. Stewart, a figure in the semi-mythical mould of Sir John Mandeville, had apparently walked through India, Persia and Turkey, across the deserts of Abyssinia and Arabia, through northern Africa, into every European country as far east as Russia, as well as over to the new United States and into the upper reaches of Canada. Whether his peregrinations were real or metaphorical it is hard to know – sometime he referred to them as journeys of the mind. In his essay, ‘Walking Stewart’, De Quincey repeated some advice the old man had given him about the preservation of books: ‘he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work, properly secured from the damp, &c, at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who, in their turn, were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation’.
Burying books was a gratifying thought for a man like De Quincey, who imagined himself being buried beneath them. Some years later, parting from Walking Stewart at Somerset House on the Strand before making his way through Soho to Tottenham Court Road, De Quincey recalled that he ‘stopped nowhere, and walked fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham Court Rd I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible), but overtook, Walking Stewart’. There must, De Quincey said, ‘have been three Walking Stewarts in London’, as he overtook him again and then again. Walking Stewart was as multiple as the figure of the artist in the Piranesi print.
Duplication was in the air. In the spring of 1809, De Quincey’s brother Richard reappeared after six years at sea. Having run away aged fourteen, Richard had joined the navy, been captured first by pirates and then by the Danes, and was now coming home as part of a prisoner exchange. Making his way down Greek Street one evening, Thomas ran into a family friend called John Kelsall who had come to London to legally confirm Richard De Quincey’s identity, but found himself barred from doing so when the young man declared himself not well enough for visitors. Richard’s reluctance to see visitors threw Mrs Quincey into a panic: this was a sign, she believed, that the released prisoner was not her son at all but a ‘pretender’ assuming his position in order to claim his inheritance. The ‘real’ Richard would have come straight home to his loving mother rather than secrete himself in London; this filial ingratitude was most unnatural. The ‘real’ Richard, she surmised, had ‘probably lost his life’ in a mutiny and this other person was a sailor ‘assuming his name and character’. The bundle of letters she had believed to be from Richard were, Mrs Quincey now concluded, ‘forgeries’. It is a bewildering story which reveals something of the mindset of the family, and puts into a different perspective De Quincey’s own anxieties about counterfeit and multiple identities. Was his fear of identity fraud inherited from his mother, who had given the family a false name?
De Quincey alone understood that Richard was who he said he was, and that he needed to adjust to shore life before reintroducing himself to the mother from whom he had run away. ‘It is a great satisfaction to me that my Feelings and actions are intelligible to you,’ Richard wrote to Thomas, adding that ‘There seems to be something very whimsical in Mr K[elsall’s] ideas of my non-identity.’
De Quincey eventually left London in July, and made his way not to Grasmere but to the wooded vale of Wrington, twelve miles from Bristol, where his mother had spent £12,500 (the equivalent of £700,000) on a house called Westhay, for which she was planning radical improvements. His sisters, who had been amused by De Quincey’s request for a floorplan, were equally amused by his comments on the floorplans they sent to him: ‘We could not help laughing when we observed the truth of your remark as to all the rooms at Westhay being 12ft by something, for we have never remarked the circumstance before.’ He arrived to find the usual chaos of builders and carpenters, and he described the scene to Dorothy as though it were one of his dreams:
when I first came here we had below stairs only one room habitable, besides the kitchen. . . and in every other part of the house and even after the bedrooms were finished, it was impossible to make use of them in the daytime; for there being no front stairs yet erected – and there being no road to the backstairs but through the hall which the workmen used as a workshop, there was no getting upstairs without displacing all their benches, etc, which was a complete ceremony and process; and, being up one was a complete prisoner – which did not suit me at all: – since then we have migrated successively into a parlour of the neighbouring farmhouse; – into a greenhouse with no floor; – into a room with a floor but no ceiling; – into a closet 6 feet by 6; – and finally, after having been hunted round the house by painters and paperers, we have resolved into our original sitting-room. . .
While De Quincey was in a greenhouse with no floor, and a room with a floor but no ceiling, Dorothy was ‘musing’ in the moss hut behind Dove Cotta
ge. Always concerned about the maltreatment of trees – ‘malice has done the work’, she wrote to De Quincey of the felling of ancient trees under Nab Scar – she was dreaming of the continued life of her garden. ‘Pleasant indeed it is,’ she mused in her reply, ‘to think of that little orchard which for one seven years at least will be a secure covert for the Birds, and undisturbed by the woodman’s axe. There is no other spot which we may have prized year after year that we can ever look upon without apprehension that next year, next month, or even tomorrow it may be deformed or ravaged.’ Dorothy’s suggestion was that De Quincey was to be custodian of her memories rather than tenant of the cottage. The house was still in every sense hers, and the orchard remained her ‘perfect paradise’.
While her son was rearranging his life around the Wordsworths, Elizabeth Quincey was rearranging hers around Hannah More, whose own home, Barley Wood, was now less than a mile away. More’s fame had reached the next level with Coelebs in Search of a Wife, which was the topic of all fashionable conversation. De Quincey, who had been unable to get beyond page forty, saw her regularly throughout the summer and described his visits in satirical letters to Dorothy. Hannah and her sisters, who were for Napoleon and against Wordsworth, sparred with De Quincey on all subjects. He ‘tormented them to the utmost of my power’ or so he said, and gave ‘extreme pain to all the refined part of the community here’. But De Quincey remained a favourite of the More household, who thought he had the makings of a bishop; one of the sisters referred to him afterwards as ‘that sweet young man’, which suggests that they had been charmed rather than pained by their guest.
A month ago, wrote Dorothy to De Quincey on 1 August 1809, you had ‘talked of being at Grasmere in three weeks’. ‘When are we to see you?’ a despairing Mary asked him on 12 September. ‘All has been in readiness for you, and everyone of us wishing to see you for a long long time.’ But Richard had arrived at Westhay on 8 September to be reunited with his siblings. The sailor was brimful of stories, some of which De Quincey relayed in a letter to Johnny:
He has been in cold Countries where there is no daylight for many many weeks. He has been amongst great Forests where there were only Lions and Bears and Wolves. And up Rivers and Lakes where nobody lived. And amongst many nations of Black men and men that are the colour of copper. He has also been past the country where Giants live: they are called Patagonians. He has been in Battles and seen great Towns burning: And sometimes the men that he fought against caught him and put him in prison. Once he was in that Island where Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday lived: I dare say your Mother or your Aunt has told you about them.
It was another six weeks before he caught the mail to the north and opened the door to the cottage. ‘It was,’ De Quincey recalled, ‘on a November night, about ten o’clock, that I first found myself installed in a house of my own – this cottage, so memorable from its past tenant to all men, so memorable to myself from all which has since passed in connexion with it.’ Wordsworth had lived here during ‘perhaps, the happiest period of his life – the early years of his marriage, and of his first acquaintance with parental affections’. De Quincey would do the same, but ‘in that very house’, he confessed, ‘the second birth of my sufferings began’.
Wordsworth, ‘The Deserted Cottage’, frontispiece illustration by Birket Foster
‘. . . Margaret
Went struggling on through those calamitous years
With cheerful hope . . .’
9
Residence in Dove Cottage and the Revolution
I could not always lightly pass
Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,
Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old,
That garden of great intellects, undisturbed.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Third
His sufferings began almost immediately. Until a permanent housekeeper could be found, Dorothy had arranged for thirteen-year-old Sally Green, whose parents had perished in the snow on Easedale, to come in and cook De Quincey’s breakfasts, but he dismissed the ‘little orphan maiden’ and returned to Allan Bank.
What could have gone so wrong with Sally Green that De Quincey, who had kept his distance from Wordsworth for the past six months, now placed himself once again under the poet’s roof? Dorothy, however, was delighted to have him back. ‘Mr De Quincey,’ she said in a letter to a friend, ‘has been above a month with us, and is like one of our own Family.’ While he perched at Allan Bank, a procession of wagons and carts, all advancing in measured movements, delivered his cargo of books to the lawn of Dove Cottage. ‘I can tell you that he has already received 9 or 10 chests,’ wrote Dorothy of the volumes dumped like loads of coals, ‘and that 19 more are on the road.’ The bulk of the books would need to remain in their chests, she realised, ‘on account of the smallness of the house’.
Despite his fascination with the death of Sally’s parents – ‘in so brief a period as one fortnight’, De Quincey enthused in ‘Lake Reminiscences’, the Green family ‘came to be utterly broken up’– he thought the girl ‘lazy, luxurious and sensual’. Sally was also being employed as a nurse for little Catherine Wordsworth, and as far as De Quincey was concerned more of her time was spent thinking about boys than protecting her ‘youthful charge’. He had always entertained powerful fantasies around servants: his first sister, De Quincey believed, had been killed by a servant, while Elizabeth had died after being taken to visit a servant’s father.
His dislike of Sally Green was not the only problem. De Quincey was uncomfortable in the cottage for a number of reasons. Jane had said that her brother would be unable to manage on his own for more than two months, and we know from his time in Everton that De Quincey threw himself on people – almost anyone – in order to break his solitude. Possibly the house, emptied now of children, felt eerie; quite possibly he saw himself as an intruder and needed reassurance from the Wordsworths that he was welcome; almost certainly he was overwhelmed by the responsibility he had been handed. When his family lived in North Parade it had not been at the personal invitation of Edmund Burke, and nor had Burke been concerned with whether his former home was being treated by its new occupants with sufficient respect. In many ways, it was De Quincey who was now the housekeeper at Dove Cottage, and he was made aware of his lowly position.
Added to which, he had a quite different perspective on the place to the one shared by the Wordsworths. For William and Dorothy, Dove Cottage epitomised the picturesque, but to De Quincey it was, like all houses, sublime. Compare their descriptions of the hill on which the cottage was built: Wordsworth’s ‘little domestic slip of mountain’ was De Quincey’s ‘vast and seemingly never ending series of ascents’. The Wordsworths saw the exterior walls as ‘embossed’ with flowers, and De Quincey saw them as ‘smothered’. For the Wordsworths the cottage was a hidden nest; for De Quincey there was nowhere from which it could not be seen. He had gazed towards it from Oxford Street in 1803, he had looked down on it from the gorge of Hammerscar in 1805, its ‘glare’ wheeled into view around bends in the road, and gleamed like a lighthouse amongst the rocks and stones and trees.
During the autumn De Quincey helped John Wilson to write an essay for The Friend called ‘The Letter to Mathetes’, in which a student explores his need for a Wordsworthian moral guide. It was De Quincey who came up with the signature ‘Mathetes’, meaning follower of Christ. By Christmas, Dorothy had found a replacement for Sally Green and De Quincey was reinstalled in his home. His new housekeeper, Mary Dawson, had originally worked for the Wordsworths and then moved on to Brathay where she cooked for Charles Lloyd and his family. She was, Dorothy enthused, a ‘proud and happy Woman’ who ‘will suit the place exactly, and the place exalts her to the very tip-top of exaltation’. De Quincey enthusiastically suggested that the Wordsworth household – including Coleridge and the enormous John Wilson – return to the cottage for Christmas dinner, but the number proved too many for the parlour and the feast was moved to Elle
ray. Wilson, an ebullient entertainer who, the previous summer, had hosted a week-long fishing party for thirty-two men at Wast Water, would not have flinched at the last-minute change of plan. De Quincey opened up the cottage instead for the new year, when he put on a firework display for the children of the vale. ‘Mr de Quincey’s House was like a fair,’ wrote the ever-watchful Sara Hutchinson.
The year 1810 was a good one for De Quincey and a bad one for Coleridge. De Quincey settled into cottage life and found his pace. He taught Latin to Johnny, read everything he could find about circumnavigating the globe, and played with the toddler, Catherine, who possessed, according to her Aunt Dorothy, ‘not the least atom of beauty’, but for De Quincey was the ‘impersonation of the dawn’. In April, while being tended to by Sally Green, Catherine ate raw carrots and began to vomit. This, De Quincey felt, was ‘criminal negligence’ on Sally’s part. A fit of convulsions followed which left the child’s left hand and leg partly paralysed.
De Quincey and Wilson stood godfather to the Wordsworths’ new baby (born on 12 May), a boy called William and known as Willie; De Quincey and Wilson climbed mountains together, explored the valleys together, and attended soirées dansantes hosted by the Lloyds – the tall man and the small man cultivating the relationship that would last for the rest of their lives. Wilson would be, De Quincey later said, ‘the only very intimate friend I ever had’.
With Lloyd, De Quincey spent happy hours by the River Brathay listening to the water rising from the rocky bed, like ‘the sound of pealing anthems. . . from the open portals of some illimitable cathedral’. When he was alone he read, drank laudanum, night-walked and night-watched. As dusk fell he would leave his fireplace to ‘trace the course of the evening through its household hieroglyphics from the windows which I passed or saw’. Gazing into ‘blazing fires shining. . . in nooks far apart from neighbours’ and ‘in solitudes that seemed abandoned to the owl’, he caught ‘the sounds of household mirth; then, some miles further. . . the gradual sinking to silence of the house, then the drowsy reign of the cricket’. And he was in ‘daily nay hourly intercourse’ with Wordsworth, who granted him the privilege of reading The Prelude, which he planned to be published only after his death. Then referred to as the ‘Poem to Coleridge’, or ‘the poem on the growth of my own mind’, De Quincey found here a work whose power went beyond anything he had hitherto read by Wordsworth.
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