Amongst the nation’s ‘first-class assassins’ was Sarah Malcolm, who dispatched an entire household. ‘Sprightly and diligent, good-looking and fond of admiration’, she would, Tickler mused, have made an admirable wife for ‘Gentleman Williams’, who had been ‘pleasant with his chit-chat’ and fond of children, patting ‘their curled heads with the hand that cut an infant’s throat in the cradle’. Everyone who met Williams ‘delighted’ in ‘the suavity of his smile. But in his white great coat – with his maul – or his ripping-chisel – or his small ivory-handled pen-knife, at dead of night, stealing upon a doomed family, with long silent strides, while at the first glare of his eyes the victims shrieked aloud “We are all murdered!” Williams was then a different being indeed, and in all his glory.’
In July 1824, De Quincey returned to London, determined to meet his deadlines and clear his debts. On arrival he purchased the inaugural copy of a journal called the John Bull which contained an anonymous article in which ‘the Opium-Eater’ was lampooned as the ‘Humbug of the Age’. De Quincey was ‘a sort of hanger-on’ of the ‘Lake School’, a man so desperate for celebrity that he was prepared to present his own infirmities ‘for wonder or applause’. Referring to him as ‘Quincy’, the author charged his subject with being ‘a humbug even to his name: he has no right whatever to the Norman De. His father was an honest shopkeeper, who lived and died Quincy, and his son might just as well designate himself Mr Quin Daisy as Mr De Quincy.’ As for De Quincey’s person: ‘conceive an animal about five feet high, propped on two trapsticks, which have the size but not the delicate proportions of rolling pins, with a comical sort of indescribable body and a head of the most portentous magnitude, which puts one in mind of those queer big-headed caricatures which you see occasionally from whimsical pencils. As for the face, its utter grotesqueness and inanity is totally beyond the reach of the pen to describe. . .’
De Quincey was presented as a second-rate show-off, a fake and a groupie. But most wounding were the references to Margaret, who was described as having been his ‘serving maid long before he married her’. ‘Quincy’ was challenged to present the public with ‘an extract from his parish register, dating the birth of his eldest son, and also his marriage’. The author of the article was the Blackwoodsman William Maginn, and the source of his information was clearly John Wilson, the man from whom De Quincey had anticipated a ‘great & unexpiable injury’. The following month the libel was reprinted by the Westmorland Gazette’s rival paper, the Kendal Chronicle, thus ensuring that Margaret De Quincey, currently suffering from depression, was also informed. Thus Blackwood’s avenged itself on the Opium-Eater.
‘Do you live in Fox Ghyll?’ Elizabeth Quincey asked her son in January 1825. ‘How many children have you?’ Her own children were almost all lost to her, Henry having died aged twenty-six in 1819, the year before Mary died in childbirth and Richard disappeared at sea. Only Jane was still living at Westhay, where De Quincey now never came.
His mother might well have asked where he was living: still in London, De Quincey was sleeping – so his new friend Charles Knight, the former editor of a journal called Knight’s Quarterly to which De Quincey had contributed, observed – under hayricks in Hampstead, ‘in retired doorways or upon bulkheads, after the fashion of poor Savage the poet’. One evening De Quincey met John Clare, a poet who ‘studied for himself in the fields, and in the woods, and by the side of brooks’. Clare noted the Opium-Eater’s ‘little artless simple seeming body’ stealing ‘gently among the company’ at parties, hat in hand and ‘a smile turning timidly’, looking ‘something of a child over grown in a blue coat and black neckerchief’. His dress, Clare said, was ‘singular’.
During these particularly rudderless London days De Quincey wrote an essay on a murder case which he described as ‘amongst the most remarkable events of our times’. In 1816 the battered corpse of William Coenen, from Enfield, was found in the River Rhine, and in 1822 a German spirits merchant called Peter Anthony Fonk was charged with his death. In a documentary account of the background to the case, De Quincey questioned Fonk’s guilt. The English, German and French, he reflected, operate different systems of justice, but ‘it is possible that no system whatsoever would have sufficed to illuminate the guilty darkness of this transaction’. The essay, a sober piece of investigative journalism, was submitted but never published: Taylor and Hessey had left the London, and the new editor now dispensed with De Quincey’s services.
With no income, De Quincey wrote some pieces for a paper called the New Times but the work fizzled out. ‘To fence with illness with the one hand,’ he complained to Wilson in February 1825, ‘and with the other to maintain the war with the wretched business of hack author, with all its horrible degradations, – is more than I am able to bear.’ He had nowhere to hide; he yearned to ‘slink into some dark corner’ and ‘show my face to the world no more’. His abject state amused his fellow writers: referring to the booksellers, Payne and Foss, Lamb – famous for his puns – suggested the Opium-Eater ‘should have chosen as his publishers, Pain and Fuss’.
Charles Knight came to the rescue and gave De Quincey a room in his house on Pall Mall. Here he stayed, in great embarrassment, during the summer of 1825 while waiting for his mother to direct him some money. Knight described his ragged guest as ‘constantly beset by idle fears and vain imaginings’ and ‘helpless’ in relation to ‘every position of responsibility’. Not wanting to inconvenience the servants, De Quincey prefaced the smallest request with an apology of baroque elaboration.
Meanwhile, his wife and children, ‘starving on the scanty produce of his scribble’ as Carlyle put it, were forced out of Fox Ghyll when the house was sold to a friend of the Wordsworths. They took refuge at The Nab, from where Margaret sent her husband heart-rending letters. Still he did not return to Grasmere. Instead he resorted to begging Dorothy – of all people – to pay Mrs De Quincey a visit lest her ‘grief’ should grow to the point where she became ill. ‘Oh Miss Wordsworth,’ he wrote on 16 July, ‘I sympathised with you – how deeply and fervently – in your trial 13 years ago: – now, when I am prostrate for a moment – and the hand of a friend would enable me to rise before I am crushed, do not refuse me this service.’ The death of Catherine Wordsworth in the summer of 1812 was increasingly on his mind, but it was she and William, as Dorothy must have recollected, who had then deeply and fervently sympathised with De Quincey.
Mrs Quincey, once again making alterations to her house, managed to find a spare £300 to send to her exasperating son. It was three times the amount he was expecting, but still he failed to return to his family or to clear his debts. Bidding Knight farewell, De Quincey headed south rather than north, finding himself lodgings on the Surrey side of the Thames. He was hiding his face; he had slunk into a dark corner. ‘Wife and children’, he said, were ‘a man’s chief blessings’ but ‘also create for him the deadliest of anxieties’. He was, De Quincey later confessed, perpetually haunted by the desire to fly from himself and the double life, which had long been a necessity, was the reward of both opium and debt. Whether his disappearance from the world was mental or physical, De Quincey needed a home from which to escape, just as a man needs a wife to whom he can be faithless. As in the winter of 1802/03, he now dallied around the London streets doing very little. He had no work, and nor would he work in London again; his relationship with the metropolis had come to an end.
When Margaret De Quincey next saw her husband, in October 1825, he had turned forty. ‘The poor little man is returned,’ wrote Wordsworth’s daughter, Dora. Her salty aunt, Sara Hutchinson, was typically sceptical about their neighbour’s condition. ‘He tells Miss W,’ Sara wrote, ‘that he had entirely left off opium before he came hither, but has been obliged to have recourse to it again: “as he has no Shoes to walk in & without exercise he is obliged to take it”. I suppose it is easier to send to the Druggists than to the Shoe Maker.’ De Quincey was immediately arrested for the sum of £90, after which he
cleared floor space in Dove Cottage and, after an absence of six years, returned with his sprawling family to the hallowed site. His five young children – Margaret had given birth to a fourth son, called Paul Frederick – now lived inside what was effectively a warehouse; De Quincey’s books were used as stools, tables, stepping-stones and building bricks, the covers stained with spillages, the pages scribbled on and torn. Writing was impossible, but he had no commissions anyway. Without an income or the possibility of an income, De Quincey’s mood in the summer of 1826 was one of ‘heart-withering depression’, and his health was ‘pretty uniformly = o’.
De Quincey had swallowed his pride when he begged Dorothy to call on his wife; he now swallowed it again and asked Wilson, the man he had believed was out to kill him, if there was anything with which he ‘might assist Mr Blackwood at this moment?’ Wilson was encouraging and so in September 1826, De Quincey exchanged the University of the Lakes for the Athens of the North, taking a room in the Wilsons’ freshly built house at 6 Gloucester Place, a few moments walk from the Royal Circus.
‘What a wonderful city Edinburgh is!’ exclaimed Coleridge to Southey when he came here in 1803. ‘What alteration of Height and Depth! – a city looked at in the polish’d back of a Brobdignag Spoon held lengthways – so enormously stretched-up are the Houses!’ Built on volcanic rock, Edinburgh is crested by a castle and bordered by cone-shaped mountains and a ship-filled sea. Two cities in one, the Old Town was a warren of winding streets and squalid hovels and the New Town, where Wilson lived, was a place of cool elegance and neo-classical order. The subterranean vaults and chambers of the Old Town housed the underworld, while the New Town was home to the city’s philosophers, lawyers and businessmen. During his years here on the run, De Quincey would inhabit both realms.
He had arrived in the land of Macbeth, but Scotland’s ancient fascination with ghosts and witchcraft had been tempered by the Edinburgh professors, David Hume, Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart, under whose tutelage the city turned into a hub of rational thought. In 1820, Wilson added his name to the pillars of the Scottish Enlightenment when he was appointed, to general surprise, chair of moral philosophy at the university, a post previously occupied by Dugald Stewart. As the panel had been looking to appoint a Tory, Wilson’s position turned out to be more political than philosophical. Professor Wilson was required to give 120 lectures a year on a subject about which he knew nothing and on which De Quincey, who had long planned to write a magnum opus which would synthesize all the philosophies, knew everything. To compensate for their lack of content, Wilson delivered his lectures in thunderous rhetoric, stressing words such as ‘this’ and ‘of’, and running his finger down his nose at the end of each paragraph. De Quincey’s impersonation of the act was thought very good. ‘The man is a fool,’ observed one of his students, ‘and if he was na sic a big fool, he would be laughed at.’
The two men had long been interdependent: while De Quincey drew on Wilson for cash, Wilson drew on De Quincey for credibility. Did De Quincey have any books about ‘Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, &c or their system,’ asked Wilson? Could he ‘write me some long letters about either, or their philosophy?’ What, in De Quincey’s opinion, might ‘constitute moral obligation? – and what ought to be my own doctrine on the subject?’ Could De Quincey phrase the answer to these questions as though he were writing ‘chapters’ in his ‘own work’ so as not to provoke suspicion, and ‘contrive to give [his] letters a less mysterious outward appearance?’ De Quincey made a point hereafter of never praising his friend’s intellect.
Together with Lockhart, Wilson established a drawing-room annual called Janus, to be published on 1 January 1826. Only one copy of ‘the double-faced old gentleman’, as Wilson called it, appeared but it was an appropriate title. A fake philosopher by day and the fictitious Christopher North by night, Wilson, like Chatterton, employed a shadow self. Added to which, Edinburgh was the city of doubles: forty years earlier a local locksmith called Deacon Brodie had doubled up as a moonlight burglar, using wax impressions of his customers’ keys to rob their homes. Robert Louis Stevenson – an admirer of De Quincey – based Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on Brodie’s two selves, but only after James Hogg had provided the blueprint in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. De Quincey never mentioned Hogg’s novel, which appeared in 1824, but it was of profound interest to him. Hogg’s title was a reference to the Opium-Eater’s own Confessions, and themes from the novel would find their way into De Quincey’s later writing.
Confessions of a Justified Sinner is narrated twice: first by an unnamed ‘editor’ and then by the sinner himself. The story begins in 1687 with the marriage of a wealthy bride to the Laird of Dalcastle. Their union is unhappy, and they soon live in separate parts of the house where Lady Dalcastle spends her time in consultation with her spiritual adviser, a Calvinist zealot called the Reverend Robert Wringhim, while the laird enjoys the company of his bonny mistress. Lady Dalcastle’s first child, George, lives with the laird and her second child, understood to be the son of the clergyman whose name he is given, lives with his mother. George grows into a popular young man while young Wringhim becomes a joyless bigot. The brothers meet for the first time at a tennis match in Edinburgh, where George proclaims Wringhim the spawn of ‘the crazy minister’ from Glasgow. From that moment, George is stalked by Wringhim. There is nowhere that Wringhim does not appear: in the mist on Arthur’s Seat, George sees a giant apparition of his brother, a ‘halo of glory’ around his head; turning around he finds Wringhim behind him. George is then murdered and a witness claims that Wringhim, together with a companion resembling one of George’s friends, did the deed. Here the editor’s narrative ends and Wringhim’s confession begins: we enter the hellish mind of the murderer.
He killed his brother, Wringhim reveals, under the malevolent influence of a shape-shifting stranger called Gil-Martin, who convinces him that as one of the elect his salvation is assured. Wringhim is himself being stalked by Gil-Martin, who at times becomes his mirror image. ‘I am wedded to you so closely,’ says Gil-Martin, ‘that I feel as if we were the same person. . . I am drawn to you as by magnetism, and wherever you are, there must my presence be with you.’ Other murders take place – including that of his pious mother – of which Wringhim has no memory. He suffers blackouts and loses all sense of time; it becomes unclear whether the events being described are internal or external. Unable to shake off the shadow of Gil-Martin, Wringhim flees: ‘O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly to the farthest corners of the earth, to hide from those against whom I have no power to stand.’ Having penned his confession, he hangs himself.
In the final pages of the book we return to 1823 where the ‘editor’, reading August’s edition of Blackwood’s, comes across a letter from Hogg about a suicide’s grave: ‘So often had I been hoaxed by the ingenious fancies displayed in that Magazine, that when this relation met my eye, I did not believe it.’ The letter bore, however, ‘the stamp of authenticity in every line’. It was indeed authentic, in the sense that it was really published in Blackwood’s, in August 1823. Titled ‘A Scots Mummy’ and addressed to ‘Sir Christy North’, Hogg’s letter described the digging up of an ancient grave by two shepherd boys. The resurrected corpse, buried in 1712, had been miraculously preserved, with dimpled cheeks and ‘fine yellow hair about nine inches long’. The editor, contacting Lockhart, requests a meeting with the elusive Ettrick Shepherd. He and Lockhart then open Wringhim’s grave where they find on his body the sodden manuscript of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Busy with matters of law and literature, Lockhart passes the pages over to the editor, who then presents them to the world.
Throughout the winter of 1826/27, De Quincey lived at 6 Gloucester Place in much the same way that Coleridge had lived in Allan Bank in 1808. Eating specially prepared meals in his room, he drank laudanum all night and slept all day; coming downstairs in the morning, Wilson would pass his guest, candle in hand, retirin
g to bed. ‘Hang you!’ he erupted on one occasion. ‘Can’t you take your whisky toddy like a Christian man, and leave your damned opium slops to infidel Turks, Persians and Chinamen?’ Wilson’s children became used to the dishevelled figure comatose before the fire, his head resting on a book, and the cook became used to De Quincey’s daily bulletins detailing his gastric state. She must be sure, De Quincey instructed her in reverential tones, to slice his mutton ‘in a diagonal rather than a longitudinal form’. ‘A’ this claver aboot a bit mutton nae bigger than a prin!’ she declared, shaking her head.
Meanwhile, it was Dorothy who once more took care of Margaret and the children. ‘Mrs De Quincey seemed on the whole in good spirits,’ she reported to De Quincey, ‘but with something of sadness in her manner, she told me you were not likely very soon to be at home.’ Why did he not move his family to Edinburgh, Dorothy quite reasonably asked, where ‘lodgings are cheap’ and ‘provisions and coals not dear’? This is where the remaining correspondence between De Quincey and Dorothy Wordsworth comes to an end.
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