For the next two months Grasmere became a version of Jane Austen’s Netherfield: the De Quincey ladies drank tea with the Wordsworth ladies, the Wordsworth ladies drank tea with the De Quincey ladies, the Wordsworths and De Quinceys were invited to drink tea with the Clarksons, Wordsworth interrupted a letter because ‘the Misses De Quincey have just called, and I must walk with them to the Waterfall at Ghyllsode’. Mary De Quincey gave Wordsworth a gift of two birch trees; Wordsworth reciprocated with the roots of the fern Osmunda regalis, and Mrs Quincey brought along donations from Hannah More for the Sunday school being set up by Dorothy and Mary. The two households walked, picnicked, talked garden philosophy and read poetry; the visit was considered a great success by all. After they left, Mrs Quincey wondered if Mary Dawson might be tempted to leave her son’s employ and cook for her.
Writing to her brother on 7 December, one month after they had returned to Westhay, Mary De Quincey reported that she had been ill and in her delirium found herself transported back to ‘your sweet country’. On one occasion she dreamed that she was at the tarn of Watendlath with De Quincey and Jane, where ‘we sat down by the warm stream, and ate the same mutton-bone which erst we gnawed on the descent into Borrowdale’. In another dream she ‘walked with Miss Wordsworth through Tilberthwaite on the beautiful winding road which charmed us so much’. She asked to be remembered to the Wordsworths, and for Thomas to tell Mr Wordsworth that the Osmunda regalis was planted. De Quincey’s orchard, she said, had inspired them to make improvements in their garden at Westhay, and in imitation of the moss hut they were building their own ‘little rural hut of roots and moss and pieces of knotted trees, in a warm ever-green corner’.
Mrs Quincey, who had erected greenhouses when they were all the rage, was inevitably drawn to the rustic charm of Wordsworth’s moss hut, which he had built with his own hands two years into his marriage. It was, Wordsworth informed his brothers, ‘a charming little Temple in the Orchard. . . with delightful views of the Church, Lake, Valley etc., etc.’. The simple structure, ‘circular’ like a ‘wren’s nest’, built of branches ‘lined with moss. . . and coated on the inside with heath’, was the perfect Romantic dwelling – in Lyrical Ballads, the huntsman Simon Lee lives in a similar ‘moss-grown hut’. It was here that Dorothy and William came to escape from the babies: ‘We are now sitting together in the moss-hut,’ Dorothy wrote to Catherine Clarkson; ‘William goes on rapidly with “The Recluse”.’ The moss hut became his study, and it was ‘from the moss hut at the top of my orchard’ that he had written to Sir George Beaumont on 3 June 1806 to say that he had completed The Prelude: ‘the sun is sinking behind the hills in front of the entrance and his light falling upon the green moss of the side opposite me. A linnet is singing in the tree above. . . The green fields in the level area of the vale, and part of the lake, lie before me in quietness.’
But on 3 December, four days before his sister informed him that they were building a hut of their own, De Quincey had carried his woodman’s axe up to the orchard and plunged it into the green mossy side of Wordsworth’s charming little temple, slashing at its structure until it was nothing but a ruin. He then ‘razed the ash tree in the orchard and the hedge of holly, hackberry, and hazel that had screened the spot,’ wrote Sara Hutchinson, ‘and all for the sake of the apple trees’, which he over-pruned and left half-naked so ‘instead of its being a little wood, as it used to be, there is neither shade nor shelter’. ‘Dorothy is so hurt and angry,’ Sara reported, ‘that she can never speak to him more: and truly it was a most unfeeling thing when he knew what store they set by that orchard.’
His defence would be that he was gardening. But to destroy the poet’s hut, entrusted to his safe-keeping by Dorothy, was evidently an act of iconoclasm. De Quincey knew how Dorothy felt about her orchard; he knew the lines in ‘To a Butterfly’, from Poems, in Two Volumes:
This plot of orchard ground is ours;
My trees they are, my sister’s flowers.
But he also knew the lines in ‘Nutting’, where Wordsworth had, inexplicably:
. . . dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied.
What had inspired De Quincey’s outburst? A year before, he was running out of ways of pleasing the Wordsworth family. He did not record the incident, which we only know about through Sara Hutchinson, and nor do his biographers pay it much attention. Some fail to mention it at all, while others trivialise it as the ‘storm in the apple orchard’. Yet it was an act of tremendous symbolic importance which altered forever the relationship between De Quincey and the Wordsworths.
Would De Quincey have destroyed the moss hut had he not read The Prelude? He and Coleridge were the only people outside Wordsworth’s immediate family to have seen the manuscript, and it had a devastating effect on them both. Coleridge, in his last great poem, ‘To William Wordsworth, Composed on the Night after His Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind’, described himself as having ‘culled in wood-walks wild’ his own ‘genius’ and De Quincey’s response was to do some woodland culling of his own. He decided now that he too would write a major philosophical work, to be called De Emendatione Humani Intellectus (On the Correction of the Human Intellect), which would proclaim Thomas De Quincey as ‘the first founder of a true Philosophy’. This project, only marginally more ambitious than the one described by Wordsworth for ‘The Recluse’, was left similarly unrealised.
De Quincey was determined to be more than disciple-in-residence at the Wordsworth museum, custodian of a monument ‘crowned’ with ‘historical dignity’. Not only did he also want to write but he wanted a home of his own, and if that meant making a style statement then so be it; he was used to his aesthetic interventions being greeted by the poet with what De Quincey called ‘inhuman arrogance’. One of Wordsworth’s most unappealing characteristics was his ownership of the ‘whole theory of picturesque beauty’, and any opinions offered by De Quincey were ‘treated almost as intrusions and usurpations’. Nothing was more guaranteed to offend Dorothy or insult William than De Quincey’s imposing his own taste in Dove Cottage, and nothing was more significant to De Quincey than the emotion attached to houses.
He had always been clear on this subject: in his ‘Sources of Happiness’ De Quincey explained that his home should be a place of stability to allow for ‘the growth of local attachment’. Currently he was unattached to anything except the Wordsworths; every experience he had was related in some way to the Wordsworths. It was impossible to make an imprint on a house whose purpose was to preserve the hallowed imprint of another, especially such an other. De Quincey later wrote that the ‘little cottage was Wordsworth’s from the time of his marriage and earlier. . . Afterward, for many a year, it was mine.’ His lightness of touch disguises the effort that went into achieving that personal pronoun.
A coastal shelf of indignation had built up inside him. De Quincey lived for the Wordsworths, he was forever running errands on their behalf; he was used as a library, a babysitter, a tutor, a secretary, and even at times, when Mary needed ready cash, as a bank. Any intellectual ambitions of his own had been discarded; he would never be anyone so long as he was Wordsworth’s courtier, and it had not occurred to Wordsworth that De Quincey might have any other ambition. Despite treating Wordsworth with ‘more than filial devotion’ a friendship had not ‘sprung up’ between them like ‘a wildflower’. De Quincey had tried rationalising his way to forbearance: ‘I have been ill-used to a certain extent; but do I think that a sufficient reason for giving up all my intimacy with a man like Wordsworth? If I do not, let me make no complaint. . . The result. . . if I pursue this matter, will be to rob me of Wordsworth’s acquaintance. . . I will, therefore, rest contentedly where I am.’ The poetry and not the poet, he sadly conceded, contained the visionary gleam. This realisation put him ‘in a strange sort of contradictor
y life; feeling that things were and were not in the same instant; believing and not believing in the same breath’.
Even before the orchard episode, De Quincey’s bid for independence had been noted by Sara Hutchinson, who complained that he ‘reads the newspapers standing, or rather stooping with [the infant] Catherine on his back – he is very fond of her but yet does not like to be plagued with her when he feels anything like a duty which as he has engaged to teach her to read etc., towards her – but he will contrive somehow or other to shake this off for he lives only for himself and his books. He used to talk of escorting Mary into Wales but I do not believe that she will have his company.’
It does not seem too great a crime to read a newspaper in the presence of a child, but De Quincey had similarly complained about Sally Green’s lack of attentiveness to Catherine. This was a child-centred community. So offended was the mild-mannered Mary by De Quincey’s new ‘selfishness’ that she refused to have him accompany her into Wales on a visit to her brother: the Wordsworth women, who moments before had taken tea with his mother and sisters, were now united against their former friend. The sea change in De Quincey’s relations with them had been brought on by The Prelude but also by his family visit; the presence of his mother had acted like a trip switch, and we are left to imagine what went on beneath the surface of those late summer tea parties. Doubtless he found the collision of his real and his adopted families stressful in the extreme, and De Quincey’s sisters would have been on the lookout for signs of romance between Thomas and his ‘sweetheart’, Miss Wordsworth. Perhaps they pushed their teasing too far and touched a nerve in their brother; perhaps Dorothy was embarrassed by the interest she excited in Mary and Jane De Quincey. Perhaps De Quincey, realising that his relations with Dorothy might look dangerously like a courtship, decided to sever once and for all any intimacy between them.
Whatever happened during the two months that De Quincey shared Dove Cottage with his mother and sisters, rather than bolt from his life in Grasmere when things began to go wrong, he decided to stake his claim and instead he pushed away the Wordsworths. The destruction of the moss hut took reckless courage, and it must have shocked De Quincey as much as it did Dorothy.
Between themselves the Wordsworth women now referred to De Quincey as ‘Peter Quince’. It was an insightful joke, doubtless the work of Sara Hutchinson. Quince, the bookish carpenter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directs ‘the rude mechanicals’ in his play ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, a parody of the lament behind a locked door. There is a great deal that was Quince-like about De Quincey, who always enjoyed the idea of the play within a play, and who belonged, of course, in a midsummer dream.
John Turner, journeyman, suspended from the bedroom window. ‘Like chorus and semi-chorus, strophe and antistrophe, they work against each other. Pull journeyman, pull murderer.’
10
Residence in London and Grasmere
Year follows year, the tide returns again,
Day follows day, all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once;
And in such way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried
To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more.’
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Tenth
On 7 December, the day that Mary De Quincey wrote to her brother about the moss hut they were planning for the garden at Westhay, Timothy Marr and his household were slaughtered in the draper’s shop at 29 Ratcliffe Highway. ‘Horrid and Unparalleled Murders’, announced the Morning Chronicle the following Monday. ‘We almost doubt,’ reported The Times, ‘whether, in the annals of murders, there is an instance on record to equal the atrocity of those which the following paragraphs will disclose.’ Journalism was a rapidly developing trade; by 1811 over 240 different newspapers were in circulation in the country; the number had doubled since De Quincey’s childhood and his appetite for them was insatiable. As a schoolboy he had translated them into Greek, as an adult he had read them while he carried Catherine on his back. He loved the animation of the Courier building with its iron-framed hand presses, and the romance of the mail-coach was bound up in its distribution ‘over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heartshaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo’. It was, De Quincey found, possible to watch a news story grow before your eyes, and thus he watched the growth of events on the Ratcliffe Highway.
On 10 December The Times reported that ‘a large shipwright’s mallet, its head weighing from two to three pounds, and its handle about three feet long’ had been found at the crime scene, along with ‘a ripping chisel; and a wood mallet about four inches square, with a handle of about 18 inches long, made of iron, and is such as is generally used for ripping sheathing off from ships’. Marr’s house backed onto a yard, beyond which lay an area of common land which led into the other back yards. On ‘being alarmed by the ringing of the bell’ the murderer went through the small yard at the back of the house and got over the gateway into the enclosed space of ground. After this, ‘all trace’ of him ‘was lost’.
Twenty-nine Ratcliffe Highway had instantly become a tourist sight. On 11 December, The Times reported that ‘the sensation excited by these most ferocious murders has become so general, and the curiosity to see the place where they were committed so intense, that Ratcliffe Highway was rendered almost impassable by the throng of spectators before ten o’clock yesterday morning’. The washed, re-clothed and decaying bodies of the Marr family and their young apprentice were laid out in the bedrooms for the traffic of visitors (a tradition which continued well into the twentieth century). The inquest into their deaths took place on 12 December and occupied a whole column of the paper. Margaret Jewell’s testimony was printed in full:
I lived servant with Mr Marr. I went to the counter to my master, who was behind it; he gave me a pound note; it wanted a few minutes to twelve; I left him busy behind the counter; I went out of the door, and turned to the left to Taylor’s; they were shut up, and I returned again past the window, and still saw him behind the counter; I went to St John’s hill, to pay the baker; they were shut-up likewise; I went with the intent to get some oysters, but found the shops were shut up; I returned again to the door of my master’s house. I found it closely shut up, and no light to be seen; I think I was out about twenty minutes; I rang at the bell, and no one answered; I rang repeatedly; whilst I was at the door, the watchman went by on the other side of the way, with a person in charge; I certainly heard someone coming down stairs, which I thought was my master coming to let in me; I am certain I heard the child cry very low; I rang again, and knocked at the door with my foot repeatedly, when a man came up to the door and insulted me: I thought I would wait till the watchman came, which he shortly did, and called the hour of one, at the same time desired me to move on, not knowing who I was; I said I belonged to the house, and thought it very strange I should be locked out; he then observed they had not fastened the pin of the window; the watchman then knocked, rang at the bell, and called Mr Marr through the keyhole; Mr Murray, the next door neighbour, then came out and asked what was the matter, the watchman then told him that I was locked out. I continued at the door with the watchman till Mr Murray came out again, and said there was a strong light backwards, while another watchman, who had joined the first, made an alarm; Mr Murray got into the house backwards and opened the street door, when the watchman and myself entered.
Mr Murray’s testimony was then quoted in the third person:
About 10 minutes past 12 on Sunday morning [8 December] he was sitting at supper, and heard a noise in the shop-floor of the next house, which resembled the falling of a shutter, or the pushing of a chair: he also heard the sounds of a human voice, as if proceeding from fear or correction; the voice he thought to be that of a boy or woman. All this happened in one minute. A little before one o’clock he heard a continued ringing at Mr Marr’s bell; this ringing continued till nearly half pa
st one; he at length went to the door to know what was the matter; the watchman said, that the pin was not fastened, and that the girl was shut out; he told the watchman still to ring the bell, and that he would go to the other side, and make them open the door; he did go backwards, and called Marr three or four times, but got no answer; he then went again to the front of the house, told the watchman that he saw a light on one of the back windows, and that he would endeavour to get in backwards; he got over the fence, and finding the yard door open, he went in; he went up one pair of stairs, and he took the candle in his hand, which was on the landing place; the two doors of the chamber in which Mr Marr usually slept were open . . .
As more information was gathered it became possible for De Quincey to build up a picture of the crime scene. Marr was improving his shop and builders had recently replaced the front window. A Mr Pugh, supervising the work, had borrowed an iron chisel from a neighbour for the use of his carpenter, Cornelius Hart. By the time Hart had finished his job, three weeks previously, the chisel had been lost. Hart claimed to have last seen it on the premises, but Marr had painstakingly searched the house and found nothing. At twenty inches long, it was an easy enough object to spot. The next time the chisel was seen, The Times revealed, was the ‘morning of the fatal massacre when it was found lying by the side of Mr Marr’s body’, its head matted with hair and blood. After the inquest nine men were taken into custody, including Cornelius Hart himself and a drunk who had already incoherently confessed to all four murders.
On 13 December the Morning Chronicle ran a long report on Coleridge’s Romeo and Juliet lecture and the adjacent column carried a brief update on the murder investigation. It transpired that the mother and sisters of Mrs Marr had come in from the country to visit the new baby on Sunday 8 December; it was only when they arrived for lunch that they heard the horrific news: ‘The effect which the intelligence had on them it would be vain to describe.’ The suggestion now, from ‘the print of some feet in the yard’, was that two men were involved. ‘The footsteps are marked with blood and sawdust, which is accounted for by there being some carpenters at work in the shop on the same day, and the sawdust mixing with the blood, it is supposed, stuck to the shoes of the murderers.’ Three men had apparently been seen near Marr’s drapery on the night of the murders, one of whom was observed looking through the new shop window. He was ‘a tall’ and ‘lusty’ man, dressed in a long coat. The other was smaller and scruffier, in a torn blue jacket and with a small-brimmed hat, while the third had no remarkable features at all.
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