In November De Quincey was put to the horn once more, this time for non-payment of his daughters’ music lessons. That month he took advantage of sanctuary and placed himself in accommodation with Mr Brotherton, landlord of one of the hovels in the precincts of Holyrood Abbey. It was the second time in his life that De Quincey had made his home in a monastery.
To live without money, said Hazlitt in ‘On the Want of Money’, ‘is to live out of the world’. Holyrood was a world outside the world; it had its own government, its own court, its own prison, its own economy, its own streets and shops and small-town life; it even had its own wild terrain – Holyrood Park contained one half of Duddingston Loch and all of Arthur’s Seat, a dormant volcano with a panoramic view of the city. Having paid the bailie (or governor) two guineas, the inmates – known as the ‘Abbey lairds’ – could roam within a radius of six miles, and from midnight on Saturday until midnight on Sunday they were free to leave the precinct without fear of arrest, frequently returning in full flight from their creditors as the clock struck twelve. Architecturally, Holyrood resembled the Priory but in other ways the life of an Abbey laird was like that of an Oxford undergraduate, not least because the university operated a similar curfew. In a rare sighting of him inside the abbey, William Bell Scott described De Quincey as resembling ‘the ghost of one whose body had not received the clod of earth to entitle it to rest in peace’. Meanwhile, De Quincey’s ‘growing son’ – most likely William – was ‘getting well into his teens like an uncared-for dog’.
Caroline Cottage was on the edge of the abbey boundary, but to avoid harassment De Quincey did not return during his first few weeks in Brotherton’s lodgings. We find him back home in the spring of 1834, but after being horned once more he returned to Holyrood. Sanctuary did not come free: De Quincey needed to find twelve guineas a month to cover the rents for Brotherton and for Caroline Cottage, and both fell into (or rather, began in) arrears. He was now unable to buy either ink or opium and could not leave Holyrood ‘without very urgent danger’ as ‘emissaries are on the watch in all directions’. In April 1834 he was put to the horn again – for an unpaid book bill – and sued by a servant for her wages. In June he was sued by the grocer, and he exchanged Brotherton’s lodgings for ‘miserable’ rooms with Miss Miller, where his vast family, to save on rent, joined him. To write in peace, De Quincey rented another set of rooms within the abbey from a Miss Craig. On two occasions in 1834 he was sued in Holyrood’s own court for non-payment of rent to Miss Miller and Miss Craig, and he only narrowly avoided the shame of being imprisoned within the sanctuary itself.
On the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, William Tait, the radical son of a builder, launched a journal to rival Blackwood’s. The purpose of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine was to provide a voice for the new electorate: while Blackwood’s was for the educated elite, Tait’s was for the common man. Despite his aversion to Jacobins, De Quincey – nothing if not Janus-faced – approached Tait, and it was Tait who encouraged his new author to write about himself. Blackwood, who continued to commission De Quincey, turned a blind eye to the Opium-Eater’s duplicity.
His first essay for Tait’s, which appeared in December 1833, was an anonymous sketch of ‘Mrs Hannah More’, who had died, aged eighty-eight, in August that year. ‘I knew Mrs Hannah More tolerably well,’ De Quincey began, ‘perhaps as well as it was possible that any man should know her who had not won her confidence by enrolling himself amongst her admirers.’ The low temperature of his praise was maintained throughout. ‘Mrs H. More,’ said De Quincey, was an egotist surrounded by fawning acolytes; himself impatient of such characters, he ‘never paid her a compliment’. Nor did he express any interest in her works, and he ‘appeared’, in her presence, not ‘to know that she was an author’. As a friend and neighbour of ‘a lady’ with ‘whose family’ De Quincey ‘maintained a very intimate acquaintance’, Hannah More had been introduced to him in Wrington in 1809; nothing was said about this ‘lady’ being the author’s mother (one of the fawning acolytes) or about De Quincey’s having first met Mrs H. More in Bath in 1798. Nor was there any reference to her as the person who had introduced De Quincey to Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’. On the contrary, listed amongst Hannah More’s crimes was her boast that she had ‘foresworn’ poetry along with ‘pink ribbons’, as though poetry were a childish indulgence rather than ‘the science of human passion in all its fluxes and refluxes’.
Beneath the mockery of Hannah More lay depths of nostalgia. De Quincey’s prose is propelled by his pleasure in returning to the subject of his youth, his pride in having rubbed shoulders with fame. The full texture of his tone only becomes apparent when we remember the conditions under which he was writing: this was a man in freefall recalling the days when he had nothing to lose.
In ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth had moved back and forth between the quiet present and the turbulent past. In Holyrood Abbey, De Quincey did the opposite. Liberated from Maga’s macho pugilism, from now until the end of his life De Quincey’s subject was a lost paradise.
In February 1834 he began a series of twenty-five essays which would run in Tait’s over the next seven years. Initially called ‘Sketches of Men and Manners from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater’, they were eventually known as Autobiographic Sketches. De Quincey’s childhood was a fairy tale: ‘I was born in a situation the most favourable to happiness of any, perhaps, which can exist; of parents neither too high nor too low; not very rich, which is too likely to be a snare; not poor, which is oftentimes greater.’ His father was a merchant with a copious library and his mother was well born; his boyhood days were passed in large houses with an abundance of servants, and the family income was £6,000 a year. De Quincey recalled his disruptive elder brother; how Greenhay had been sold at a loss; how his guardians had ‘grossly mismanaged’ his fortune; how his mother had moved to Bath; how, on the ‘most heavenly day in May’, he ‘beheld and first entered’ the ‘mighty wilderness’ of London; and how he had travelled across a turbulent Ireland.
De Quincey’s most striking feature as an autobiographer was his romanticisation of first times. Here he was in tune with the age he was recalling. Coleridge’s mariner had been ‘the first that burst into that silent sea’; Keats had described ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; and Hazlitt had recorded in his 1823 essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, how, as a youth, he had walked ten miles in the mud to hear, for the first time, Coleridge preach. The Autobiographic Sketches contain a catalogue of first times – ‘It was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly in the summer season, and certainly in the years 1807, that I first saw [Coleridge]’; ‘It was in the year 1801, whilst yet at school, that I made my first literary acquaintance’; ‘It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of 1803, that I first entered Oxford. . .’; ‘It was on a November night, about ten o’clock, that I first found myself installed in a house of my own – this cottage, so memorable from its past tenant to all men’; ‘It was at Mr Wordsworth’s house that I first became acquainted with (then Mr) Wilson, of Elleray’. De Quincey described the first time he experienced loss as a child, his first coach journey as a boy, the first time he read Lyrical Ballads and, for the first time, he mentioned the death from hydrocephalus of his sister. It was at that point, he revealed, that he had become a ‘nympholept’.
He would write several versions of his autobiography, each one more impassioned than the last. Here, in the pages of Tait’s, there are no wheels announcing the arrival of his dying father, and no zeniths, vaults, or Sarsar winds accompanying the death of Elizabeth, an event then seen as less important than the loss of the family income.
All of De Quincey’s writing grew out of Wordsworth but it was The Prelude that provided the seed for his Autobiographic Sketches. De Quincey’s theme, like that of Wordsworth, was the history of ‘what passed within me’. Wordsworth’s revolutionary France became De Quincey’s revolutionary Ireland, the ‘blank confusion’ of Wordsworth’s L
ondon defined De Quincey’s chaotic city; De Quincey’s essays on Oxford rework Wordsworth’s ‘Residence at Cambridge’. ‘Writing where I have no books,’ De Quincey confessed, ‘I make all my references to forty years’ course of reading, by memory’. A relic of English Romanticism imprisoned in Victorian Scotland, De Quincey’s memories were in full flow when, in July 1834, he heard that Coleridge, his role model in failure, had died.
Since 1816 Coleridge had been living in the Highgate home of his doctor, James Gillman. Here his opium intake was monitored, he was pampered by Mrs Gillman, and he was whisked off by the family on seaside breaks. His friends had initially complained at his withdrawal from the world, but Coleridge needed a sanctuary. He would never be entirely free of opium, but under the Gillmans’ loving care he reduced his intake and, piece by piece, let go of the past. For the last chapter of his life he experienced stability, and his thinking took on renewed energy. In 1819 his reputation was sealed by a review in Blackwood’s. ‘The reading public of England,’ wrote Lockhart, ‘. . . have not understood Mr Coleridge’s poems as they should have done.’ Coleridge was ‘the prince of superstitious Poets. . . he stands absolutely alone among the poets of the most poetical age’.
Visiting Coleridge in 1824, Carlyle had found ‘a fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange, brown, timid, yet earnest looking eyes, a high-tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair’. From Highgate Hill, Carlyle later wrote, this figure looked ‘down on London and its smoke-tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there’. Seeming twenty years older than he was, Coleridge had become a legend of a bygone age. Admirers made their pilgrimage to Highgate, just as De Quincey had made his own pilgrimage to Bridgwater. ‘To the raising spirits of the young generation,’ said Carlyle, Coleridge ‘had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma.’
When Lamb, his oldest friend, heard of the death of Coleridge, ‘it was without grief. It seemed to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world – that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve.’ Did De Quincey grieve, or did he grieve that he could not grieve? He later claimed that he and Coleridge had not been friends, ‘not in any sense, nor at any time’, but this was untrue. Only two years before his death, Coleridge had described De Quincey to Blackwood as his ‘old friend’. A fragile early friendship had developed into a relationship which was more strange and less easy to define. As Richard Holmes puts it, De Quincey saw in Coleridge something ‘dangerous and elemental, a demonic elder brother or doppelgänger’.
During his Shakespeare lectures at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, Coleridge had described how, at sunset or sunrise on the highest of Germany’s Harz Mountains, climbers could see a giant spectre surrounded by a glowing halo. The ‘apparition of the Brocken’, as the spectre is called, is a vast projection, caused by light and cloud, of the climber’s own shadow: his terrifying vision is of himself. The experience, Coleridge concluded, is akin to being in the audience of a Shakespeare play: here too, ‘every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so. . . you only know it to be yourself by similarity of action’. He had also described his own effect on De Quincey: when De Quincey looked at Coleridge, he knew it to be himself by similarity of action.
De Quincey’s most immediate reaction on hearing of Coleridge’s death must surely have been that the poet owed him money. He, who had once helped Coleridge without waiting to be asked, was now reduced to begging. While De Quincey was on the run from creditors, Coleridge’s shirts had been laundered, his dinners cooked, and his health fussed over by devoted friends in a handsome house overlooking Hampstead Heath. However bad things became for Coleridge, there had always been a mattress for him to fall upon. He had enjoyed the patronage of the Wedgwoods, the hospitality of the Morgans, the devotion of the Gillmans. As Coleridge span around Germany and Malta and the British Isles, his wife and children were warm and comfortable at Greta Hall, being tended to by Southey. De Quincey, equally erudite, equally articulate, equally troubled, had never been supported by anyone, and his own wife and children had been snubbed by his friends.
The month after Coleridge’s death, De Quincey’s eldest son, William – the ‘uncared-for dog’ – was taken ill. First he lost his hearing and then he lost his sight; his eyes protruded and were covered by a ‘film of darkness’. The feverish boy had terrible dreams where, De Quincey believed, ‘the recollection of some family distresses seemed to prey upon his mind’. He died on 25 November 1834. De Quincey believed that William had hydrocephalus, but the surgeons who opened his skull were unable to diagnose the cause of death. He had only just turned eighteen, dying at the same age as the uncle he was named after. A scholar of Greek and a lover of books, William was the child who most resembled his father. ‘Upon him,’ De Quincey said, ‘I had exhausted all that care and hourly companionship could do to the culture of an intellect.’ He considered publishing his son’s commentary on Suetonius but his ‘heart retreated under the hopelessness’ of the scheme. All said and done, William’s accomplishments were no greater than those of young men ‘of every generation for the last two centuries’, who have had ‘their names murmured over’ before sinking ‘into everlasting silence and forgetfulness’.
Instead, De Quincey threw himself into work: ‘I believe that in the course of any one month since that unhappy day I have put forth more effort in the way of thought, of research, and of composition, than in any five months together selected from my previous life. Thus at least (if no other good end has been attained) I have been able to instruct my surviving children in the knowledge that grief may be supported.’ One month before the death of William De Quincey, William Blackwood had also died, and the following year the death of James Hogg would bring to an end the golden age of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’.
De Quincey’s essays on Coleridge, which ran from September 1834 until January 1835, might have diverted from the theme of his Autobiographic Sketches but instead they continue the story, describing how the Opium-Eater went from being a maker to a destroyer of icons. It was here that De Quincey described his evening with Thomas Poole in 1807, where Coleridge was unmasked as a man who presented the ideas of others as his own. Having revealed Poole’s doubts about the originality of Coleridge’s table talk, De Quincey provided his readers with a lengthy list of further ‘borrowings’ from German philosophers that he alone had been able to detect in Coleridge’s works. He was right about Coleridge’s thefts – scholars still grapple with the reasons why an intellect as magnificent as his should lean so extensively on the thoughts of others – but to unmask him in this way was an act of violence on De Quincey’s part, born of utter despair. Having desecrated the church, however, he continued to worship: ‘I will assert finally, that, after having read for thirty years in the same track as Coleridge, – that track in which few of any age will ever follow us, such as German metaphysicians, Latin schoolmen, thaumaturgic Platonists, religious Mystics, – and having thus discovered a large variety of trivial thefts, I do, nevertheless, most heartily believe him to have been as original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man ever as existed; as Archimedes in ancient days, or as Shakespeare in modern.’
Moving from scholarly competitiveness to backstairs gossip, De Quincey suggested that Coleridge had always preferred the company of Dorothy Wordsworth to that of his own wife, Sarah. Dorothy, De Quincey conceded, had ‘no personal charms’ but ‘still, it is a bitter trial to a young married woman to sustain any sort of competition with a female of her own age, for any part of her husband’s regard, or any share of his company’. De Quincey himself, meanwhile, owed ‘no particular civility’ to Mrs Coleridge, who had once ‘insulted. . . a female relative of my own’, a woman vastly her ‘superior’ in ‘courtesy and kindness’. The relative was Margaret.
De Quincey rolled relentlessly forward: ‘I am the last person in the world to press harshly or uncandidly against Coleridge, but I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations – for his constitution was strong and excellent – but as a source of luxurious sensations.’ Self-indulgence rather than physical suffering was therefore the cause of Coleridge’s addiction. As for his lectures on the fine arts, his black-lipped performance at the Royal Academy ‘was a poor reflection of jewels once scattered on the highway by himself’.
De Quincey told the truth about Coleridge and in doing so gave us an angel riven by demons, a figure in whom fatal weakness combined with preternatural power. Excepting Hazlitt, no one understood Coleridge’s thought so well as De Quincey, who navigated without difficulty through the mists of the mariner’s mind. In 1825 Hazlitt had published a collection of twenty-five portraits called The Spirit of the Age. Nothing was said, in his sketch of Coleridge, about Hazlitt’s own friendship with the poet, which had turned sour over politics. Instead he gave a brilliant account of his subject’s intellectual development which reached a devastating conclusion: ‘What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in The Courier.’ De Quincey, another mighty heap of hope reduced to hackery and the pursuit of oblivion, trumped Hazlitt by creating a likeness of such vibrancy that other portraits appear pallid by comparison. Coleridge had died a ‘ruin’, De Quincey concluded, but he was nonetheless irreplaceable: ‘Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss. . . Like the sea it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving bell will bring up again.’ De Quincey’s Coleridge is touching, troubled, haunted; he is a man you want to meet and who, for a moment, you feel that you have met.
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