Meantime, I am again in London: and again [my stress] I pace the terraces of Oxford-street by night, and oftentimes, when I am oppressed by anxieties that demand all my philosophy and the comfort of thy presence to support, and yet remember that I am separated by three hundred miles and the length of three dreary months, – I look up the streets that run northwards from Oxford-street, upon moonlight nights, and recollect my youthful ejaculation of anguish: – and remember that thou art sitting alone in that same valley, and mistress of that very house to which my heart turned in its blindness nineteen years ago. . .
‘The length of three dreary months’ echoes ‘Tintern Abbey’s’ ‘the length of five long winters’. The incantation of ‘again. . . again’ repeats Wordsworth’s:
and again I hear
These waters . . .
. . . Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs . . .
. . . Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows . . .
By Wordsworth’s side, we discover at the end of the poem, is his ‘dear, dear Sister’ and the sudden appearance of De Quincey’s Margaret, sitting by Dorothy’s former hearth, plays a similarly healing role.
But the Opium-Eater assumed, in a way that Wordsworth did not, his reader’s intimacy: ‘And how do I find my health after all this opium-eating? In short, how do I do? Why, pretty well, I thank you, reader.’ Opium is not a voluble or a social drug and his visionary descents took him into soundless worlds, but De Quincey talks to us in the way people talk after dinner, several bottles down, when the table is cleared and the night is young. He confides more than he confesses, and is generous in his confidences; he anticipates our responses, fears our boredom, and likes our company. At least, this is how he appeared in his writing.
It is possible to see the Opium-Eater in his first flush of fame because his new friend Richard Woodhouse kept a record of their conversations. John Taylor and James Hessey, who bought the London after the death of John Scott, hosted regular dinners, in the style of the ‘Noctes’, to which their contributors were invited and De Quincey, an object of great fascination, was a frequent guest. Here he appeared ‘sallow-looking’ and ‘very much an invalid’, being often too ill to add to the table talk. He would, however, sit up afterwards with Woodhouse smoking ‘segars’. ‘I was astonished at the depth and reality, if I may so call it, of his knowledge,’ Woodhouse said of the man for whom reality had become a distant memory. He was also astonished by De Quincey’s capacity to gossip, stir and sow the seeds of discontent. Speaking in what Carlyle would describe as his ‘slow sad and soft voice’, De Quincey insisted that Wordsworth and Dorothy were in fact not having sexual relations, that it was simply Wordsworth’s habit to kiss his sister whenever he saw her. Always attuned to the voices of others, De Quincey described how when Wordsworth read his own poetry his face assumed a ‘conventicle appearance, and his voice a methodistical drawl that is quite distressing. Southey mouths it out like a wolf howling. Coleridge lengthens the vowels and reads so monotonously, slowly, and abstractedly, that you can scarce make out what he says.’ As for the fatal affair with Blackwood’s, Wilson was ‘the principal person concerned’, the man who should have come forward to Scott and revealed his identity. But De Quincey also described to Woodhouse the effect of first reading ‘We Are Seven’: ‘How deep must a man have gone below the thoughts of the generality,’ he mused, ‘before he could have written such a ballad.’
It was at one of the dinners hosted by Taylor and Hessey that De Quincey found himself in the company of a man who turned out to be ‘a murderer, and a murderer of a freezing class; cool, calculating, wholesale in his operations’. This was the young artist and critic, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who contributed to the London Magazine under the noms de plume Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot and Cornelius van Vinkbooms. Sixteen years later Wainewright was accused of poisoning his uncle, mother-in-law and sister-in-law, the latter because she had ‘very thick ankles’. Wainewright was, said De Quincey, a snake who slithered ‘over the sleeping surfaces of confiding household life’. De Quincey was too unwell to partake in the conversation, but ‘if I had known this man for the murderer that even then he was. . . what sudden growth of. . . interest, would have changed the face of that party!’ Wainewright’s case struck De Quincey as remarkable for two reasons: ‘for the appalling revelation which it makes of power spread through the hands of people not liable to suspicion’, and for the contrast ‘between the murderer’s appearance and the terrific purposes with which he was always dallying’. He and Wainewright wrote for the same journal – ‘this formed a shadowy link between us; and, ill as I was, I looked more attentively at him than at anybody else’.
To De Quincey’s horror, John Wilson appeared in London that October, where he offered his services as a writer for the London. Hessey suspected that it was a Blackwood’s plot. De Quincey, expecting to become a ‘dead man’ once Wilson revealed whose side he had been on in the magazine wars, agreed. To protect himself, he blackened his friend’s name. Wilson, De Quincey said, had the ‘happy knack’ of ‘catching & making use of the thoughts of other people’, with ‘no opinions of his own on any subject’, no ‘originality’, ‘no principles’ and ‘no judgment’. It was Wilson who penned ‘the most objectionable’ of the Blackwood’s articles. ‘His character is represented to be a compound of cruelty and meanness. He will domineer over those authors who have as yet no reputation in the world, he will grudge them their fair degree of credit, he will abuse them, & strive to keep them back, & even to crush them. But to those who are established in reputation. . . he will be abject & cringing.’ And at the same time as slandering him, De Quincey plotted with Wilson his return to Blackwood’s. Crabb Robinson, that perfect recorder of the De Quinceyan temperature, called on him and found him ‘querulous’, ‘in ill health’, ‘very strongly impressed with his own excellence, and prone to despise others’.
By December 1821, De Quincey could no longer endure the separation from his family and he returned to Fox Ghyll in time for the New Year celebrations. He had been away for seven months, and was now the self-appointed ‘Pope of Opium’.
In 1822 he did, in a manner of speaking, return to Blackwood’s when he made his debut as the Opium-Eater in the community of the ‘Noctes’. ‘Pray, is it true, my dear Laudanum,’ asks the doddery Christopher North, ‘that your “Confessions” have caused about fifty unintentional suicides?’ ‘I should think not,’ replies the Opium-Eater. ‘I have read of six only; and they rested on no solid foundation.’ ‘And now,’ continues North, ‘that you have fed and flourished fourteen years on opium, will you be persuaded to try a course of arsenic?’ The Shepherd then describes his own response to the Opium-Eater’s ‘desperate interesting confession’:
It’s perfectly dreadfu’, yon pouring in upon you o’ oriental imagery. But nae wunner. Sax thousand draps o’ lowdnam! It’s as muckle, I fancy, as a bottle o’whusky. I tried that experiment mysel, after reading the wee wud wicked wark, wi’ five hunner draps, and I couped ower, and continued in ae snore frae Monday night till Friday morning. But I had naething to confess.
The Shepherd had ‘naething at least that wad gang into words’, his opium experience being just ‘clouds, clouds, clouds hovering round and round’. He is told by North that he should write a book about the clouds anyway. Moving the conversation forwards, the Shepherd asks ‘But how’s Wudsworth?’ ‘I have not seen him since half-past two o’clock on the 17th September,’ replies the Opium-Eater.
It is doubtful that he was amused by his ‘Noctes’ persona. Teased by Lamb about his Confessions, De Quincey had reacted badly. There were, he grandly explained, ‘certain places & events and circumstances, which had been mixed up or connected with parts of my life which have been very unfortunate, and these, from constant meditation & reflection upon them, have obtained with me a sort of sacredness’. Should they be referred to ‘by others in any tone of levity or witticism’ it seemed
to him ‘a sort of desecration & harrowing, analogous to the profanation of a temple’.
It was through the ‘Noctes’ that Blackwood’s poached the Opium-Eater from the London Magazine and turned him into their own creation. De Quincey’s ‘personality’ was further embedded in the culture of Maga with the appearance of the parodic ‘Confessions of an English Glutton’. Like the Opium-Eater, the English Glutton finds that in ‘profess[ing] himself a slave to gluttony – the commonest failing of all!’ he is alone of his kind. The way to ensure immortality, he learns, is to ‘pour’ his ‘fatal story’ into the ‘confiding and capacious bosom of the public’ as ‘the Wine-drinker, the Opium-Eater, the Hypochondriac, and the Hypercritic’ have all done (the Wine-drinker referred to Charles Lamb’s 1813 essay – republished by the London in 1822 – ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’). A glutton since ‘August 1764’ when he was ‘precisely two years and two months old’, he is now an eater of everything (except opium). A plate of pork, he confesses, ‘smoking in his rich brown symmetry of form and hue’, plunges him into ‘media res. Never shall I forget the flavour of that first morsel – it was sublime!’ Thus De Quincey’s rainy Sunday afternoon becomes a steaming Sunday roast. Discarding both knife and fork, the Glutton thrust the beast ‘wholesale’ into his mouth ‘until at last my head began to swim – my eyes seemed starting from their sockets. . . a fullness of brain seemed bursting through my skull – my veins seemed swelled into gigantic magnitude – I lost all reason and remembrance, and fell, in that state, fairly under the table.’ These horrors, however, are now behind him. ‘Forty-two years have passed since that memorable day – forty thousand recollections of that infernal pig have flashed across my brain.’ As for his ‘dreaming hours’, the Glutton suffered ‘quotidian repetitions of visions, each more hideous than the former. I dreamt, and dreamt, and dreamt – of what? Of pig – pig – pig – nothing but pig.’ He saw ham in the landscape and ham in the clouds. Pursued by Hogg (the pun was intended), he ‘tumbled headlong down thousands of thousands of fathoms, till I was at length landed in a pig-stye, at the very bottom of all bottomless pits’.
The parodies of the Opium-Eater were tributes rather than attacks: Blackwood’s revenge came later, and when it was least expected.
Gill’s Hill Cottage, where the corpse of William Weare was hidden in a pond.
‘The murder is a good one, and truly gratifying to every man of correct taste. Yet it might have been better.’
12
Imagination, Impaired and Restored
Like one, that on a lonely road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Coleridge, ‘The Ancient Mariner’
Debt swallowed debt, like one deep calling to another. Home in Grasmere in 1822, De Quincey’s time was spent beating back the butcher, the grocer, the wine merchant, the haberdasher, the butterman, the dressmaker, the landlord, all demanding payment. He would dread the sound of knocking, and the suspense in the house when knocking was expected. His current income was around £250 a year, composed of £100 from Elizabeth Quincey – now suffering the indignation of being known as the Opium-Eater’s mother – £100 from his Uncle Penson, and the rest made up from his writing. It was equivalent to the income of a country parson. Frugality was essential, but De Quincey understood only excess; during his worst excesses he spent £150 a year on laudanum. Excess was in the blood; his mother’s extravagant property speculations and repeated home improvements had drained her own coffers, leaving her reliant on the generosity of her brother.
At the core of De Quincey’s personality were his addictions. Opium was one and debt was another; his relationship to both was a manifestation of the same fear. Without the insulation they offered, he was faced with the ordinary tide of human affairs. Opium and debt allowed De Quincey to live a second life, apart and with himself alone. They removed him from the crowd and had him trapped: just as opium cured the effects of opium, the solution to debt was to borrow. A credit-based economy is a catastrophe for an addict, but the logic of debt made sense to De Quincey. ‘You know there is such a thing,’ he once explained, ‘as buying a thing and yet not paying for it.’ De Quincey was at home in the realm of indebtedness, intellectual or financial. Despite his fascination with political economy – a subject he chewed over for the London Magazine in thousands of indigestible words – money would always remain for him an abstract idea. When little Paul Dombey asks his father, in Dickens’s novel, what money is, Mr Dombey replies: ‘Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence,’ as he jingles them in his pocket. Money was never so solid for De Quincey; any coins in his pocket disintegrated like a rope of sand. Money frightened him: lethal, insidious, invisible, it circled around his person, pursuing him in its absence like footsteps on the road. When it came his way he quickly passed it on to friends, ridding himself of the evidence. De Quincey’s primary expenditure, apart from opium, was on books: book-buying was another addiction. He bought hungrily, greedily, avidly, regardless of cost and then, because he had nowhere to store his booty, he paid rent for rooms he could not afford. He was well trained in the business of bolting when reality began to bite.
His laudanum intake now swerved between 160 and 300 drops a day. Battling with ‘infantine feebleness’ and ‘a torpor of the will’, he reduced it to 130 drops; for a month it ‘plunged’ to 80 drops, and then to 60. For ninety hours in the summer of 1822, De Quincey took no laudanum at all. The results were sleeplessness, restlessness, excessive sweating, ‘unspeakable, unutterable misery of mind’ and ‘the wretchedness of a lunatic’. A benefit was that, momentarily, his powers returned: ‘I have a greater influx of thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign of opium,’ he wrote. Those thoughts ‘which had been frozen up’ now ‘thawed’ and streamed in on him. But he soon resorted to his usual levels of ingestion, and the drug once again ‘aggravated the misery which for the moment it relieved’. And so the wheel turned. What he wrote under the influence afterwards filled him with self-loathing. Opium-writing became, he explained to Mary Russell Mitford, ‘overspread with a dark frenzy of horror’, as though ‘wrapt’ in a ‘sheet of consuming fire – the very paper is poisoned to my eyes. I cannot endure to look at it, and I sweep it away into the vast piles of unfinished letters or inchoate essays.’
In November 1822 Margaret gave birth to their fourth child, a son called Francis. On 9 December he returned to London with the aim of clearing his debts. ‘Why am I now in London?’ he raged to Hessey and Taylor from his rooms opposite their Fleet Street offices, ‘Are you aware – 1. Of the enormous sacrifice I am making in personal happiness by staying at a distance of 300 miles from my own family? 2. . . of the price in money at which I am doing this? 3. Have you ever asked – whose interests this residence in London was meant to serve?’ It was a confused rage, directed mainly at himself. Without his editors on his doorstep, nothing would get written, and if nothing was written there would be no payment. De Quincey was also aware – as were all the London contributors – that Blackwood’s, to whose editor he had been similarly obnoxious, was the superior publication.
His rooms were described by a visitor as a ‘German Ocean of Literature’, with volumes ‘flooding all the floor, the table and the chairs, – billows of books tossing, tumbling, surging open’. This ocean found its way into De Quincey’s writing. In his ‘Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected’, which appeared in the London between January and July 1823, he described his oceanic feeling for books. In his youth, he ‘never entered a great library, suppose of 100,000 volumes, but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind’ that there were not years in a lifetime in which to read everything. Books were reduced to nothing but counting: De Quincey could ‘extract the honey’ from one-twentieth of this hive; ‘subt
racting’ works of reference, such as dictionaries, there ‘would still remain a total of not less than twelve hundred thousand books over and above what the presses of Europe are still disemboguing into the ocean of literature’. A Portuguese monk, he continued, had shown how, ‘with respect to one single work, viz: The History of Thusanus’, that to ‘barely. . . read over the words (allowing no time for reflection) would require three years labour, at the rate of (I think) three hours a-day’. Reading at the rate of 400 pages a day – ‘all skipping being barred’ – meant that the most a man could hope to accomplish in thirty years was 10,000 volumes. A sixty-year lifespan allowed him to ‘travel through’ only 20,000, ‘a number not, perhaps, above five per cent of what the mere current literature of Europe would accumulate in that period of years’. His ‘gluttonism’ for books, De Quincey explained, turned what should be a pleasure into a ‘torment’; the excess of it all tipped him into ‘madness’. Meanwhile, his landlord was after the rent and so he absconded to a local inn and hid for a while beneath an alias.
Guilty Thing Page 29