A Blackwood’s article, explained Edgar Allan Poe in ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’, should be written in the ‘tone laconic, or curt’. It ‘can’t be too brief. Can’t be too snappish. Always a full stop. And never a paragraph.’ Or else it should be written in the ‘tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional’ where the ‘words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning’. On the other hand, ‘the tone metaphysical is also a good one. If you know any big words this is your chance for them.’ De Quincey, who could do any of these tones, had sent Blackwood his account of the murder of William Coenen by Peter Anthony Fonk. Neither snappish, whirling or metaphysical, the article did not appear and from now on, De Quincey employed for Blackwood’s the tone ironic. ‘Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart,’ he wrote in a review of Robert Gillie’s German Stories, ‘but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea urn.’
John Wilson also had an essay spiked by Blackwood’s. During the summer of 1823, he prepared a piece called ‘Murderers’, whose subject matter remains unknown. ‘I am not very sure,’ Blackwood responded, ‘if these horrid details are the kind of reading that the general readers of “Maga” would like to have.’ Blackwood’s were currently running a more elevated series called ‘Lectures on the Fine Arts’. De Quincey, still living under Wilson’s roof, now interwove murder with the fine arts to produce his mock lecture ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, which appeared in Blackwood’s in February 1827. The lecture is framed by a letter ‘To the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine’ from ‘XYZ’ (one of De Quincey’s noms de plume) informing him of a ‘Society of Connoisseurs in Murder’ in which murders are evaluated like works of art. As evidence of this unholy assemblage, XYZ enclosed for publication the purloined script of ‘The Williams Lecture on Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. The author of the paper is the chair of the society, a position previously held by John Thurtell.
‘Something more,’ the lecturer insists, denouncing the talents of Thurtell (whose ‘principal performance, as an artist, has been much overrated’), ‘goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensible to attempts of this nature.’ The master of the art was, of course, John Williams, who raised murder to ‘a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr Wordsworth observes, has in a manner “created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed”’. The reference is from Wordsworth’s 1815 ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’: ‘Every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.’
Coleridge also got his dues: the pleasure of a good murder, the lecturer suggests, is akin to the pleasure we get from other catastrophes. Years before, he remembered, during an evening spent around the tea urn with Coleridge in Berners Street, their talk was interrupted by cries of ‘Fire! Fire!’ and the party rushed into Oxford Street to find a piano factory in flames. ‘As it promised to be a conflagration of merit,’ the lecturer regretted being unable to stay until the blaze reached its crisis. He later enquired of Coleridge ‘how that very promising exhibition had terminated. “Oh, sir,” said he, “it turned out so ill, that we damned it unanimously.”’ Coleridge, ‘too fat to be a person of active virtue’ but nonetheless a ‘worthy Christian’, had left his tea and talk, it transpired, for nothing.
After guiding the reader through ‘the great gallery of murder’ from ‘Cain to Mr Thurtell’, the lecturer considered the question of murdered philosophers. ‘It is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has been either murdered, or, at the least, been very near it.’ The excursus on the connections between philosophy and murder was chiefly, he confessed, a means ‘of showing my own learning’. While Descartes was ‘all but murdered’, Spinoza died in suspicious circumstances – ‘how was it possible that he should die a natural death at forty-four?’ – while Hobbes, ‘on what principle I could never understand, was not murdered’. Malebranche was murdered by Bishop Berkeley, Leibniz died from the fear of being murdered, and Kant had a narrow escape on a journey, the murderer preferring to kill ‘a little child, whom he saw playing on the road, to the old transcendentalist’. The fate of the present incumbent of Edinburgh University’s chair of moral philosophy was not discussed.
Thus the lecturer arrived at the Augustan age of murder, spanning the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This included the cases of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, Sir Theophilus Boughton, and Mrs Ruscombe of Bristol, murdered in her College Green bedroom by Highwayman Higgins, the man whose skeleton De Quincey knew so well. While the merits of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, ‘the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that were ever committed’, are deserving of a lecture in themselves, ‘or even an entire course of lectures’, the lecturer remained unimpressed by the Radlett murders: ‘as to Mr Thurtell’s case, I know not what to say’. Along with the rest of the populace, he had been ‘carried away’ with ‘enthusiasm’ about the dispatch of William Weare, a murder which occasioned ‘the fullest meeting of amateurs that I have ever known since the days of Williams’. Out of their beds crawled the connoisseurs, ‘on every side you saw people shaking their heads, congratulating each other, and forming dinner-parties for the evening’. But the truth, as one of their more respected members complained, is that there ‘was not an original idea in the whole piece’. Thurtell’s style was ‘as hard as Albrecht Dürer, and as coarse as Fuseli’. The murder of Weare was ‘mere plagiarism’.
Riding one day in Munich, the lecturer continued, he ran into a distinguished amateur of the society who had left British shores in order to ‘practise a little professionally’. His debut, this amateur informed him, had recently taken place at Mannheim where his lodgings faced those of an overweight baker whose ‘vast surface of throat’ he fancied. One evening, after the baker had shut up shop, the amateur ‘bolted in after him’, ‘locked the door’ and, addressing him with ‘great suavity, acquainted him with the nature of my errand’. Drawing out his tools, the murderer was ‘proceeding to operate’ when the baker, throwing himself into a boxing attitude, proudly announced that he ‘would not be murdered’. Their fight began. ‘For the first thirteen rounds, the baker positively had the advantage’; by round nineteenth, he ‘came up piping’. By the twenty-seventh round, the baker had become ‘a log on the floor’ and the murderer was able, at last, to complete his task. The brave Baker of Mannheim, De Quincey’s finest fictional creation, fixed himself in his author’s imagination.
The lecture concluded with three rules to ensure an aesthetically satisfying murder. Firstly, the victim must be a good man, for ‘how can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?’ Secondly, he must be a private figure because public figures, such as the Pope, are seen as ‘abstract ideas’ rather than flesh and blood. Thirdly, he must be young enough to not yet be dyspeptic. While ‘severe good taste’ would demand that the victim leaves behind a family of dependants, ‘I would not insist too keenly on this condition.’
‘On Murder’ was a rich brew. Edward Herbert’s – ‘Tims’ – account of Thurtell as a ‘great actor’ was a main ingredient, but De Quincey added to the pot a sprinkling of Coleridge’s lectures on the fine arts, Burke’s theory of the sublime, and the current craze for brotherhoods and clubs. The boxing match between the amateur and the Mannheim baker was a parody of Hazlitt’s 1822 essay, ‘The Fight’, and in the Society of Connoisseurs of Murder we see a version of the Blackwoodsmen in Ambrose’s Tavern. The murderer’s pleasure in his task recalls that described by Wilson in his Blackwood’s story, ‘Extracts from Gosschen’s Diary’, and De Quincey’s tone throughout is in tune with the ‘Noctes’ celebration of the ‘genius’ apparent in the current variety of murder methods. He was also parody
ing his own persona: the man who hailed opium as the hero of his tale now proclaimed the murderer to be an artist. Ticking all the boxes, De Quincey had demonstrated How to Write a Blackwood Article.
But there was more to the conception of this essay than parody and imitation. There was design, grouping, light and shade: De Quincey had opened the door to a room in his own mind. The artist as murderer was a seed first sown by Richard Savage and confirmed by Thomas Wainewright, but the target here was Wordsworth. Suggesting that the Ratcliffe Highway murderer had created the taste by which he was enjoyed, De Quincey inoculated John Williams onto William Wordsworth: the murderer was a poet, the poet was a murderer.
Between now and 1830, De Quincey shuttled to and fro between Edinburgh and Grasmere. In November 1827 his exhausted wife gave birth to her sixth child, a daughter called Florence, and the two eldest children, William, aged eleven and Margaret Thomasina, nine, moved to Edinburgh to be educated by their father. That same month, in Tanner’s Close in the city’s Old Town, an army pensioner died in the home of an Irishman called William Hare. With the help of his friend, William Burke, Hare removed the fresh corpse from the coffin (replacing it with wood) and sold it for seven shillings to a professor of anatomy called Robert Knox, who used the body for dissection. When Hare’s lodger fell ill a few days later, he and Burke helped him on his way by holding his nose and covering his mouth. Because there were no incriminating marks, the victim appeared to have died of natural causes and Burke and Hare again sold his carcass to Knox. They had stumbled upon a foolproof murder method: those people deemed worthless in their lifetime were of value after death. Burke and Hare similarly dispatched fifteen further Edinburgh citizens, inviting the victims into their homes, giving them enough alcohol to pass out, and then smothering them. The stream of bodies was delivered in tea chests to an apparently unsuspecting Knox. The ruse was not apprehended until November 1827, at which point Knox was presumed innocent, Hare turned King’s evidence and went to Ireland, and Burke was condemned to death.
It was Wilson who wrote about Burke and Hare for Maga, inserting them into the ‘Noctes’ in March 1829. Having visited Hare in his cell, Christopher North apparently found him ‘Impenitent as a snake – remorseless as a tiger’. Was he, asked the Shepherd, ‘a strang Deevil Incarnate?’
Naebody believes in ghosts in touns, but every body believes in ghosts in the kintra. Let either Hare or Knox sleep a’ night in a lanely wood, wi’ the wund roaring in the tap branches o’ the pines, and cheepin’ in the side anes, and by skreich o’ day he will be seen flying’ wi’ his hair on end, and his een jumpin’ out o’ their sockets, doon into the nearest toon, pursued, as he thinks, by saxteen ghaists a’ in a row. . . demandin’ back their ain atomies.
The Shepherd later confuses an ornate monologue on Edmund Burke’s theory of fear with the fear generated by Burke, Hare and Knox.
De Quincey meanwhile, riding high on the success of ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, wrote a follow-up. Again composed as a letter to William Blackwood, ‘XYZ’ describes himself as having been in Germany at the time that his lecture appeared in ‘your far-famed journal’ (in his haste, De Quincey had forgotten that in his original article XYZ was not the lecturer but the correspondent who sends Blackwood the transcript of the Williams Lecture). He invites Blackwood and Christopher North to join one of the banquets held by the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder: ‘Pray do not be alarmed by any superannuated old assassins who you may see lounging about our ante-chambers, for they are as good as muzzled.’ It is the job of his servant, XYZ continues, to provide for his weekend’s reading ‘the best murders that can be had in the public journals of the empire’. Should the newspapers fail him, copies of the Newgate Calendar and God’s Revenge against Murder will do. And in the event of this servant wanting to do ‘a little in the murderous line’ himself, his master explains that from murder ‘you will soon come to highway robbery, and from highway robbery it is but a short step to petty larceny. And when once you are got to that, there comes in sad progression Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and late hours; until the awful climax terminates in neglect of dress, non-punctuality, and general waspishness.’
Defending himself from accusations of nationalism by praising only English murder, XYZ singles out the case of William Coenen and Peter Fonk – ‘the most eminent German murder that has been produced for the last 50 years’ – and the murder in Paris in 1720 of Jean Baptiste Savary. Savary, an ‘unmarried man of dissipated life’, was slaughtered in his home by a man ‘of polished manners and elegant appearance’, who had been admitted as a guest. His valet was then killed in the wine cellar, and his cook dispatched in the kitchen. The bludgeoned bodies were discovered ‘pretty much in the same way as in the case of the Marrs: a person called in the evening, and knocked long and loud for above a quarter of an hour’. The motive was apparently revenge, but the murderer, ‘an amateur of the finest genius’, was believed to have been of such high rank that the affair was simply hushed up. As far as the French were concerned, ‘the great Williams’ owed everything to this Parisian murder: he was no more than a ‘filthy plagiarist’. The essay was rejected by Blackwood who evidently felt that the joke had run its course.
Leaving Gloucester Place, De Quincey moved with his children into lodgings on Pitt Street, on the coast of the Firth of Forth, where he injected his energies (to the tune of around eighty-five articles) into a Tory newspaper called the Edinburgh Evening Post, edited by a trio of hard-line Presbyterian ministers. The family then moved to Porteus’s Lodgings, 19 Duncan Street, in the Newington area of the city, where Wilson described finding De Quincey one day dressed in an army coat four times too large for him, and with nothing on beneath. ‘You may see I am not dressed,’ said De Quincey. ‘I did see it,’ replied Wilson.
An unlikely friendship blossomed with the newly married Thomas Carlyle, whose German translations De Quincey had bludgeoned in a review for the London Magazine. He ‘grew pale as ashes at my entrance’, Carlyle reported of their first encounter, ‘but we recovered him again’. De Quincey was ‘essentially a gentle and genial little soul’, ‘washable away’, whose present existence was as a ‘kind of “hostage” to his creditors’. The two of them should form, Carlyle suggested, a ‘Bog School’ to counter the ‘Lake School’. ‘What wouldn’t one give to have him in a Box,’ exclaimed Jane Carlyle, ‘and take him out to talk!’ When she questioned De Quincey’s eldest son about his education, William explained that ‘his father wished him to learn [Greek] through the medium of Latin and he was not entered in Latin yet because his father wished to teach him from a grammar of his own which he had not yet begun to write’.
Placing Horace and Francis in school at Rydal, Margaret De Quincey, who had never before left her native mountains, now made the journey to Edinburgh with her two youngest children. Here, in the granite city, she became so unhappy that her life was thought to be in danger.
De Quincey’s next piece for Blackwood’s, an essay on ‘Rhetoric’, was praised by Wordsworth who, despite noting that it contained ‘some things from my Conversation’, reported to Crabb Robinson that it proved that ‘whatever [De Quincey] writes is worth reading’. The London Athenaeum considered it good enough to qualify De Quincey for the chair of logic at London University. The position, which De Quincey would have liked, was never offered, and in his ‘Sketch of Professor Wilson’, written for the Edinburgh Literary Gazette in 1829, he made plain his opinion of his friend’s philosophical credentials.
The ‘Sketch of Professor Wilson’ is a summation of De Quincey’s style as a biographer. Giving himself the central role, he focused on the opening scene in which he and Wilson were introduced by Wordsworth in the study used by Coleridge: one great literary partnership brought forth another. His description of Wilson’s strapping physique was prefaced by a lengthy digression on his own dislike of physical descriptions; on one occasion De Quincey had been shocked to hear Coleridge describe a certain philosopher as ‘ch
icken-breasted’. Wilson’s long strides and arched instep eventually received their due praise, along with his masterly management of a runaway bull. As for his features, Wilson’s complexion ‘was too florid’, his yellow hair was ‘of a hue quite unsuited to that complexion; eyes not good, having no apparent depth, but seeming mere surfaces’. His house at Elleray was a ‘silent commentary’ on his ‘state of mind’: ‘At first sight there was an air of adventurousness, or even of extravagance about the plan and situation of the building.’ Of Wilson’s academic credentials, the university presumably imagined ‘that they filled the chair with some peculiar brilliance’.
‘I wish you would praise me as a lecturer in Moral Philosophy,’ Wilson complained to De Quincey when he read the first instalment. ‘That would do me good; and say that I am thoroughly logical and argumentative – for it is true, not a rhetorician, as fools aver.’
In February 1829, De Quincey returned to Grasmere. He had agreed to share the mortgage of The Nab with Margaret’s father, John Simpson, who owed £900. De Quincey wanted to do something to make his wife happy, but it was a complex arrangement which left him paying interest on a mortgage of £1,400. His attitude to house ownership was relaxed: ‘Paying only the annual interest,’ De Quincey wrote blithely to Charles Knight, who had expressed surprise at his friend’s improved fortunes, ‘is what I do, can do, and will do.’ Margaret reassured the lawyer guaranteeing the loan that: ‘from the love that we all bear the place there need be no doubt that we will all of us make any sacrifice rather than engender its loss’.
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