The writing was interrupted by a knock on the door and Coleridge ‘was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock’. When he returned, ‘with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images’ the dream had vanished from his mind like ‘the surface of a stream in which a stone has been cast’.
Margaret Simpson, like Mary Dawson, had become pregnant and in November she gave birth to a boy whom they named William, after De Quincey’s late brother. ‘Such,’ Wordsworth wrote loftily to Lamb, ‘are the fruits of philosophy ripening under the shelter of our Arcadian Mountains. A marriage is expected by some; but from the known procrastination of one of the parties, it is not looked for by others till the commencement of the millennium.’ But the great tomorrower married Margaret Simpson in Grasmere church on 15 February 1817. ‘Mr De Quincey is married,’ Dorothy told Catherine Clarkson, ‘and I fear I may add he is ruined.’ The newlyweds, she added, were ‘spending their honeymoon at our cottage at Grasmere’. De Quincey had by this point been tenant for seven years. ‘I am very sorry for Mr De Quincey,’ commiserated Mary Lamb from London. ‘What a blunder the poor man made when he took up his dwelling among the mountains.’
While there is no cache of letters to prove that De Quincey’s marriage was the same ‘lively gushing thought-employing spirit-stirring passion of love’ enjoyed by William and Mary Wordsworth, there is no reason to doubt it. De Quincey left a wonderful description of himself and Margaret, ‘hand locked in hand’, descending the fells on their way home one night, ‘thinking of things to come at the pace of a hurricane; whilst all the sleeping wood about us re-echoed the uproar of trampling hoof and groaning wheels’. He had probably not planned on making Margaret his wife – the delay in the nuptials suggests a hesitation on his side – but he would be appalled at the prospect of abandoning a pregnant girl. He might ruin himself with drugs, but he would not be the cause of a woman’s destruction. Plus he adored children and had longed for a family. It was De Quincey’s wife for whom Mary Lamb should have felt sorry; a depressive by nature, Margaret had, before she met De Quincey, attempted suicide, and her husband’s extended absences would drive her again to the edge of despair.
The bride and groom found in one another, as lovers always will, antidotes to their parents. In Margaret, De Quincey embraced a spouse who differed in almost every way from his mother. And Margaret took a husband whose politics were the polar opposite to those of her father, a silent man described by his son-in-law as ‘a rank Jacobin’. When De Quincey looked up he saw a nurturing and sweet-tempered woman with no notion of the land beyond the vale; when Margaret looked up (or down) she saw a gentle, generous, raddled, emaciated, drug-addicted dreamer, who had squandered his inheritance, wasted his health, lost his friends, blown his social standing, and was being kicked around by the Wordsworths like – as he put it – a ‘mere football of reproach’. Margaret married De Quincey when he was at his least eligible and his most vulnerable. She saw in him a man-child filled with stories, who unswervingly, unreservedly, needed to love and be loved; and he saw in her an incarnation of a Wordsworthian heroine.
De Quincey was now consuming 10,000 drops of laudanum a day and Margaret nursed him through the worse stages of his addiction, wiping his forehead and pressing water to his black-baked lips as he lay, to use Carlyle’s memorable phrase, ‘invisible in bed’. Margaret, like Ann of Oxford Street, saved De Quincey’s life. When he ‘awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, “I will sleep no more”,’ his lady was by his side, asking in her gentle voice: ‘Oh, what do you see, dear? What is it that you see?’ De Quincey saw many brain-sickly things. Sometimes ‘a city of sepulchres’, lying like a ‘purple stain upon the horizon’ rose before him, trembling ‘through many changes, growing into terraces and towers of wondrous altitude’. Rising on every side were ‘vast sarcophagi’, ‘towers and turrets that strode forward with haughty intrusion, that ran back with mighty shadows into answering recesses’. He was in a carriage hurtling headlong down the aisle of an ‘infinite cathedral’ – St Paul’s, Bath Abbey, St Mary Redcliffe – forty leagues, seventy leagues they ran; in the ‘little chapels and oratories to the right hand and left of our course, the lamps, dying or sickening, kindled anew in sympathy with the secret world that was flying past’. He was at the funeral of his sister, where the golden organ ‘threw up columns of heart-stopping music’ and a voice from the heavens issued a decree: ‘Let there be no reflux of panic – let there be no more fear, and no more sudden death!’
When he closed his eyes he was in hell, but his waking hours were happy ones: ‘Candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample drapery on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.’ When baby William learned to stand he would stack up the philosophy books and fire at them with his bow and arrow; his father sometimes joined him. Another baby, a girl called Margaret Thomasina, was born on 5 June 1818 – in the same midsummer week that Catherine Wordsworth and young Elizabeth Quincey had both died. Little Margaret would later refer to her father’s ‘medicine’ as ‘yaddonum’.
Like Wordsworth, De Quincey was beginning his life as a husband and father in the wainscoted rooms of Dove Cottage, but unlike Wordsworth he had married the mother of his illegitimate child. The similarity, and difference, between the two situations was doubtless noted in Rydal Mount. Also noted was De Quincey’s likeness to Coleridge: an unfortunate marriage, a love affair with yaddonum. But rather than feel relieved that the fragile De Quincey was in the care of a good woman, the Wordsworths never ceased to condemn his choice and to rehearse amongst themselves the impertinence of his having brought such a figure to their former home. Mary and Dorothy, who had once poked fun at Sarah Coleridge for seeming conventional, made it plain that they would not take tea with the new mistress of Dove Cottage, and nor should Mrs De Quincey expect to take tea with them. De Quincey was just able to bear the arrogance of the Wordsworths when he was the target, but he would not suffer their ‘criminal’ rudeness to his wife. And this from the very people who praised the nobility of rustic life and stressed the superiority of those who were native to the vale. The Wordsworths, who accused De Quincey of barring them from his house, now barred their own front door to his sainted wife.
The newlyweds lived like pariahs, rarely going beyond their gate. The coffers were now empty; Elizabeth Quincey sent £100 which was swallowed up by debts. De Quincey was in no state to keep on top of the accounts; without Margaret, ‘all records of bills paid, or to be paid, must have perished: and my whole domestic economy. . . must have gone into irretrievable confusion’. The debtors’ prison beckoned, but in 1818 Wordsworth recommended De Quincey as editor of the new Tory paper, the Westmorland Gazette, founded, in advance of the local election, to oppose the Whig Kendal Courier. In backing the appointment of De Quincey, Wordsworth admitted to the paper’s proprietors that their new editor did not do well ‘on the score of punctuality’, and a good deal has been made of De Quincey’s general lack of qualification for a position of this sort. But in many ways running his own newspaper could not have been a more suitable job. De Quincey now belonged in the world of journalism, and he brought to the post the freshness and flavour he injected into all his writing. Each edition of the Gazette came roaring bare-fisted into the ring, ready for combat with the Courier.
Politics aside, the Gazette allowed De Quincey’s readers access to his obsessions. Selecting his news from the London press, he might report on the discovery of a feral child in a German forest, an ‘Incombustible Man’ who chewed burning coal and licked red-hot pokers, the Stockholm labourer who used his wife’s dead body as bait for wild animals (successfully trapping one wolf and two foxes), or the suicide who walked into a barber’s and asked for his throat to be cut. One Saturday he described the attempt by Dr Ure of Glasgow to galvanise, with electronic rods, the corpse of a murderer: ‘Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horro
r, despair, anguish, and ghastly smile.’ For a dying man bitten by a rabid dog, ‘a drop of liquid was as difficult as the ocean, and a breath of air as terrible as a blast of Simoon’. As newspaper editors tend to do, De Quincey justified his choice of content on moral grounds. If he prioritised all things sensational, he patiently explained, it was in order to monitor the national morality. Lingering lovingly over the details of macabre deaths, De Quincey’s Gazette resembled Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, where John Wilson was now based and where, in August 1818, Wilson had published a tale called ‘Extracts from Gosschen’s Diary’ about a man who murders his mistress. ‘Do you think there was no pleasure in murdering her?’ the killer confesses on the eve of his execution. ‘I grasped her by that radiant, that golden hair, – I bared those snow-white breasts, – I dragged her sweet body towards me, and, as God is my witness, I stabbed, and stabbed her with this very dagger, ten, twenty, forty times, through and through her heart. . . My joy, my happiness, was perfect.’ Here, years before De Quincey made the subject his own, Wilson presented a killer who gloried in his crime as an artist glories in the execution of an image, or a poet in a poem.
As an editor, De Quincey was pugnacious, eccentric, opinionated and unpredictable, and he accordingly reduced his laudanum intake to between 1,000 and 4,000 drops a day. If his work was not sufficiently appreciated, he scolded the readers. His report on Queen Caroline’s funeral, De Quincey complained, ‘had cost the Editor a whole day’s labour – with no reward in prospect beyond the hope of furnishing an interesting subject of reading for one winter’s evening to the cottagers of Westmorland’. Sometimes he fell out with his readers altogether: ‘The Editor of the Gazette differs in many points from many of his correspondents, in some respects perhaps from all of them.’ Both schoolmasterly and childish, he exercised his ‘anxious yet dilatory’ characteristics. His job was made more difficult because he lived eighteen miles from the paper’s offices in Kendal, a commute De Quincey did as rarely as possible due to his growing fear of death. He assumed during this time that a headache meant hydrocephalus, while a dog bite was the onset of hydrophobia. Working from ‘beneath a drift of paper cuttings, he sent his copy to the press on Thursday nights for printing on Friday and distribution on Saturday. If he missed the mail-coach from Ambleside, more or less anything would need to be found by the subeditor, John Kilner, to fill the empty pages. The appearance of the Gazette increasingly depended on the reliability of Kilner, who was paid £109 by De Quincey out of his own annual earnings of £160.’
At times the Gazette ran news stories about De Quincey himself. He kept his readers informed about his health, for example, especially when he was suffering from a particularly ‘painful indisposition’, and on 28 January 1819 he reported that ‘an accident occurred at the house of Mr De Quincey in Grasmere, which providentially terminated without injury to any member of his family’. In the early hours of the morning, while his wife and children were asleep and he was busy preparing the paper, a ‘great fork of flames’ sprung up from the hearth, ‘extending to a place of about four feet distant’. It was in the pages of the Westmorland Gazette that De Quincey’s life as a confessor began.
His attitude to journalism was always vexed. Deadlines, De Quincey later reflected, ‘drive a man into hurried writing, possibly into saying the thing that is not. They won’t wait an hour for you in a Magazine or a Review; they won’t wait for truth; you may as well reason with the sea, or a railway train. . .’ The prospect of errors horrified him just as the prospect of horrors electrified him, and in one particularly unbuttoned Gazette editorial De Quincey described how:
more than once, under anxiety at the recollection of some error uncorrected or some thought left open to misconstruction (which being sent off by Friday morning’s post would be sure to face him in print the following day) he has fervently wished that some Eastern magician would, a few hours before publication, loosen the ‘Gazette’ Office from that rock on which we trust it is built – raise it into the air with all its live and dead stock – and would transport it for one week, – not – (as angry people are apt to say) into the Red Sea, but some comfortable place on its shore, Arabia Felix for instance.
It was not a literary style that Westmorland cottagers would be used to, but in a few years’ time De Quincey’s flights of fancy would make him famous.
Deadlines created anxiety, but they also enabled him to write. Without the limits they imposed De Quincey’s essays would possibly never stop, and certainly never start. Deadlines allowed him to ‘express himself rapidly’, to create a ‘more burning logic, a perfect life of cohesion, which is liable to be lost or frozen in the slow progress of careful composition’. The transitory nature of journalism both excited and alarmed him. ‘A newspaper is not like a book in its duration,’ De Quincey explained in one of his distinctive editorials. ‘Books are immortal; for some of them last for ten or even fifteen years: but newspapers must content themselves with an existence almost literally ephemeral.’ His letter of resignation, written after eighteen months at the Westmorland Gazette, was accepted and following De Quincey’s departure, John Kilner was appointed editor.
By 1820 the cottage felt weighed down by books and babies – Mary was expecting her third child, Horatio, who would be known as Horace – and De Quincey took a six-month lease on a larger house, Fox Ghyll, one mile north of Ambleside. ‘Mr De Quincey’s Books have literally turned their master & his whole family out of doors,’ mocked Sara Hutchinson. His move set the pattern for the rest of his life: De Quincey accumulated paper in its various forms until the space became, as his daughters put it, ‘snowed-up’ and there was no longer room in which to sit, stand or open the door, at which point he started again somewhere else. He did not relinquish the lease on Dove Cottage; instead the house became a cupboard.
When Wordsworth visited Fox Ghyll he described the downstairs rooms as so dark that they resembled ‘a well or dungeon’. This is the only image we have of the interior of De Quincey’s new home. As for the exterior, during the family’s residence there, Dorothy said, the windows were ‘always blinded, or with but one eye to peep out of’. The house was isolated, the only neighbours being an old woman and her daughter, and because De Quincey had pawned his wife’s watch, they had no means of telling the time. Sara Hutchinson predicted that De Quincey would stay here for the duration, ‘unless unsettled by an earth-quake or a second accumulation of books’. He stayed until 1825, returning to Dove Cottage only when he needed to retrieve something. But while De Quincey no longer inhabited the cottage, the cottage still inhabited him. It was ‘endeared’ to his ‘heart so unspeakably beyond all other houses’ that, years after leaving, he revealed that ‘I rarely dream through four nights running that I do not find myself (and others besides) in some one of those rooms, and, most probably, the last cloudy delirium of approaching death will re-install me in some chamber of that same humble cottage.’
In December, at the invitation of John Wilson, De Quincey travelled to Edinburgh to meet William Blackwood, proprietor and clandestine editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. ‘Maga’, as it was known by its contributors (from Blackwood’s way of calling it, in his Scottish accent, the ‘Mahgazine’) had been founded to rival the Edinburgh Magazine and Wilson was one of its stars. Also in the constellation were Hogg, Lockhart, and a lethal young Irishman called William Maginn.
Sir Walter Scott called Blackwood’s the ‘mother of mischief’; Mary Russell Mitford called it ‘a very libellous, naughty, wicked, scandalous, story-telling, entertaining work’; and more recently the critic Karl Miller described it as a journal of squabash, bam and balaam. ‘Squabash’ meant putting people down or cutting them up. A ‘bam’ was a trick or a leg-pull. And ‘balaam’ meant ‘rejected or unsolicited material (slush in the common parlance)’. One of the earliest editions, in 1817, opened with a hatchet job by Wilson on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria before presenting something called ‘The Chaldee Manuscript’. Written in the langu
age of the Book of Daniel, and posing as a found document of the sort rescued by Chatterton from St Mary Redcliffe, the Chaldee Manuscript was a piece of nonsense cooked up by Wilson, Lockhart and Hogg in which Blackwood, ‘the man whose name was of ebony’ and Constable, proprietor of the Edinburgh and ‘the man which is crafty’, wrestle for mastery. Its appearance offended everyone – Church, Whigs, Tories, ladies – and Blackwood was forced to publish an apology. Sales of Maga duly soared to 10,000.
Parody, personality and headlong jollity summed up the Blackwood’s manifesto, while imitation, masquerade and double-bluff lay at the heart of the Blackwood’s personality. The contributors imitated both one another and themselves. John Wilson adopted the persona of Christopher North, Blackwood’s elderly editor, and behind this mask, so Wilson’s biographer puts it, he could ‘abuse Wordsworth anonymously in an article, and, in a later number of the magazine, attack with scorn the author of his own article, and write a stern letter against himself for libelling so great a poet – then, in the following number, round off this Protean transaction with another vigorous onslaught on the Lake Poets’.
Blackwood’s squabash and bam came to the boil in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, a literary symposium which ran from 1822 until 1835 in which, as Hogg complained, the personality of each was ‘eemetawtored’. An in-joke composed of further in-jokes, the effect of the ‘Noctes’ was to invite the reader to look through a window at a party to which they were not invited. Together with Christopher North, the sketches featured Morgan Odoherty, modelled on Maginn (whose pseudonym was otherwise Sir Morgan O’Doherty, Bart), the Shepherd, based on Hogg, and Timothy Tickler, the pseudonym of Wilson’s Tory uncle, Robert Sym (Tickler being the name of William Blackwood’s dog). Walk-on parts included Lord Byron, various characters from John Galt’s novels, and a German called ‘Kempferhausen’, modelled on R. P. Gillies. The companions would meet at Ambrose’s Tavern – a real place – to consume vast quantities of food and drink and debate the issues of the day. Their discussions usually ended up being about Blackwood’s itself. It was the very sublime of fun, and nothing so brilliant has ever been repeated in the British press.
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