The January 1839 edition of Tait’s opened with an essay called ‘Lake Reminiscences, from 1807–1830, By the English Opium-Eater, No 1 – William Wordsworth’. Building on the success of his portrait of Coleridge, De Quincey now promised to provide his readers with ‘sketches of the daily life and habits’ of the whole Wordsworth circle. What followed would cross-pollinate biography with gossip, literary criticism and local history, but it was as autobiography that De Quincey saw his ‘Lake Reminiscences’, which he later grouped together in his collected work under the title Autobiographic Sketches with Recollections of the Lakes. A black comedy about a Messiah who rejects his disciple, the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ might be seen as a parodic inversion of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
It was now that De Quincey, the avenger, described the deep, deep magnet of William Wordsworth, his longing to meet the poet, his delay of four and a half years, his first sighting of Dove Cottage, the day on which he saw his hero descending down the garden path and the night that followed, ‘the first of my personal intercourse with Wordsworth’, which was also ‘the first in which I saw him face to face’. ‘In 1807 it was,’ De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’ began, ‘at the beginning of Winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth.’
Autobiographic Sketches had borrowed The Prelude’s narrative frame, but in ‘Lake Reminiscences’ De Quincey used his first-hand knowledge of the poem to prove his intimacy with the poet. Despite Wordsworth’s current ‘slovenly’ appearance, wrote De Quincey, he had ‘assumed the beau’ at Cambridge, donning silk stockings and powdering his hair, and the first time he got ‘bouzy’ was when he visited the Christ College rooms which had once been occupied by Milton. Wordsworth’s own college rooms, De Quincey revealed, had been above the kitchen, where from ‘noon to dewy eve, resounded the shrill voice of scolding from the female ministers of the head cook’. These Boswellian details, presented as the fruits of private conversations, were gleaned from ‘Residence at Cambridge’, Book Third of the unpublished Prelude.
De Quincey’s moment of glory was yet to come. ‘And here I may mention,’ he revealed to the readers of Tait’s, ‘I hope without any breach of confidence, that, in a great philosophic poem of Wordsworth’s, which is still in M.S., and will remain in M.S. until after his death, there is, at the opening of one of the books, a dream, which reaches the very ne plus ultra of sublimity.’ He was referring to the dream of the Arab in Book Fifth. In De Quincey’s account of these lines the poet, reading Don Quixote by the sea, falls asleep and dreams that coming towards him across the sands is an Arab on a dromedary. In his hands are two books. One is Euclid’s Elements and the other ‘is a book and yet not a book, seeming, in fact, a shell as well as a book, sometimes neither, and yet both at once’. Applying the shell to his ear, the dreamer hears a prophecy that the world will be destroyed by flood. The Arab is on a ‘divine mission’ to bury the books and thus save ‘two great interests of poetry and mathematics from sharing in the watery ruin’. Thus he continues on his way, ‘with the fleet of waters of the drowning world in chase of him’.
De Quincey’s readers will have found in his various writings versions of Wordsworth’s dream before. The Malay who appeared at Dove Cottage was another Arab dream, while in the London Magazine De Quincey had recalled Walking Stewart advising him to bury his most precious books ‘seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth’. De Quincey doubted that his betrayal of Wordsworth’s trust, which today would land him in court, could ‘in any way affect Mr Wordsworth’s interests’, but few things could be more irritating to the poet than to discover that the contents of his yet unpublished masterpiece had been stolen from him and spilled out in a piece of popular journalism.
The first of the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ ended with a cliffhanger: ‘I acknowledge myself,’ De Quincey revealed, ‘to have been long alienated from Wordsworth. Sometimes even I feel a rising emotion of hostility – nay, something, I fear, too nearly akin to vindictive hatred.’ His great ‘fountain of love’ for the poet and ‘all his household’ had dried up, and he found himself ‘standing aloof, gloomily granting (because I cannot refuse) my intellectual homage’. On whose side did the fault lie? On Wordsworth’s, ‘in doing too little’, or on De Quincey’s ‘in expecting too much’? Both were to blame, De Quincey suspected. He then announced that for the next instalment he would ‘trace, in brief outline, the chief incidents in the life of William Wordsworth’: few biographies have begun in such a manner.
De Quincey was not, like Hazlitt, a great hater. In his essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, Hazlitt argued that ‘Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.’ But had De Quincey felt hatred alone towards Wordsworth he could never have described his colossal ego with such clarity, nor could he have explored so well the impact of colliding with such a thing. His subject in the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ is not vindictive hatred but disappointed love. In one passage he described:
The case of a man who, for many years, has connected himself closely with the domestic griefs and joys of another, over and above his primary service of giving to him the strength and the encouragement of a profound literary sympathy, at a time of universal scowling from the world; suppose this man to fall into a situation in which, from want of natural connections and from his state of insulation in life, it might be most important to his feelings that some support should be lent to him by a family having a known place and acceptance, and what may be called a root in the country, by means of connections, descent, and long settlement. To look for this, might be a most humble demand on the part of one who had testified his devotion in the way supposed. To miss it might – but enough. I murmur not; complaint is weak at all times; and the hour is passed irrevocably, and by many a year, in which an act of friendship so natural, and costing so little, (in both senses so priceless,) could have been availing.
Wordsworth has never been granted the same biographical immediacy as Coleridge, and without De Quincey he would have remained for us a distant figure in a black coat. The comic details in the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ allow him that vital extra dimension: Wordsworth, De Quincey revealed, had not been an amiable child, and nor did he make a performance of gallantry around women: ‘a lover. . . in any passionate sense of the word, Wordsworth could not have been’. There are memorable portraits of him slicing through the uncut pages of De Quincey’s new copy of Burke with a buttery knife, beating down the rent of Allan Bank when the chimneys smoked, and growing prosperous on the back of benefactors, patrons, legacies and bequests. Any need for money, De Quincey noted, was met by a convenient death; when Wordsworth’s family began to increase, a wealthy uncle, feeling ‘how very indelicate it would look for him to stay any longer’, promptly departed this world. Those standing in Wordsworth’s way politely ‘moved off’, for fear of being bumped off. Wordsworth’s business sense was immaculate: ‘Whilst foolish people supposed him a mere honeyed sentimentalist, speaking only in zephyrs and bucolics, he was in fact a somewhat hard pursuer of what he thought fair advantages.’ Hazlitt’s sketch of the poet in The Spirit of the Age described, without De Quincey’s personal animosity, the same chill arrogance (‘He admits of nothing below, scarcely of anything above, himself’), the same dismissal of other writers (‘He condemns all French writers. . . in the lump’), and the same disengagement with the world beyond nature (‘If a greater number of sources of pleasure had been open to him, he would have communicated pleasure to the world more frequently’). Hazlitt was indifferent to Wordsworth’s indifference towards him; his mastery lay in evaluating the poet’s character as though it were lines of verse. De Quincey’s own mastery lies in the vulnerability of his anecdotes, the friction between biographer and subject, the focus on himself as the receiving consciousness. For all his Greek, he was a born journalist. ‘The truth and life of these Lake Sketches,’ gasped Mary Russell Mitford when she put down her copy of Tait’s, ‘is wonderful.’
We are also indebted to De Quin
cey for the best portrait of Dorothy that we have. ‘A happier life, by far, was hers in youth,’ he rightly said, comparing the woman whose dawn had ‘fleeted away like some golden age’ to ‘the Ruth of her brother’s creation’. The man to whom Ruth had ‘dedicated her days’ had abandoned her, and De Quincey implies that Wordsworth did the same. ‘Miss Wordsworth suffered not much less than Coleridge,’ De Quincey boldly declared.
He was able to reveal a good deal about the Wordsworths, but there was a good deal De Quincey did not know. He was unaware of Wordsworth’s French mistress, Annette Vallon, and his illegitimate daughter, Caroline; he knew nothing of Coleridge’s love for Sara Hutchinson; he believed – wrongly – that Dorothy had spent much of her childhood with the royal family in Windsor Castle. He depicted himself as both inside and outside the magic circle: at one point he called himself Wordsworth’s ‘sole visiting friend’ in the tight community of the vale, and at another he described the surfacing of a memory which brought with it a ‘pang of wrath’: walking with Wordsworth and Southey, the subject of Charles Lloyd, then seriously ill, had arisen. Wordsworth said something which De Quincey did not hear; when asked to repeat his comment, Wordsworth replied that ‘in fact, what he had said was a matter of some delicacy, and not quite proper to be communicated except to near friends of the family. This to me! – O ye gods – to me. . .’
It is easy to imagine De Quincey alone in his Lake adventures, but he is accompanied throughout by a huge yellow-haired man who shares his every experience and mirrors his every attitude. Whether they were travelling together, sharing a room, or sharing a bed, De Quincey and Professor Wilson would fall into ‘a confidential interchange of opinions upon a family in which we had both so common and so profound an interest’. ‘Let me render justice to Professor Wilson as well as myself,’ De Quincey writes after describing Wordsworth’s ingratitude: ‘not for a moment, not by a solitary movement of reluctance or demur, did either of us hang back in giving the public acclamation which we, by so many years, had anticipated. . .’ ‘I shall acknowledge then on my own part,’ De Quincey says elsewhere, ‘and I feel that I might even make the same acknowledgement on the part of Professor Wilson,’ that while they both treated Wordsworth ‘with a blind loyalty of homage’ which had ‘something of the spirit of martyrdom’, to ‘neither’ has he repaid such ‘friendship and kindness’. Of the poet’s marriage, ‘to us who. . . were Wordsworth’s friends, or at least intimate acquaintances – viz., to Professor Wilson and myself – the most interesting circumstance. . . the one which perplexed us exceedingly, was the very possibility that it should ever have been brought to bear’. Of Dorothy: ‘All of us loved her, by which us I mean especially Professor Wilson and myself. . .’ It is with a tribute to the poet’s sister that the essays on Wordsworth end: ‘Farewell, impassioned Dorothy! I have not seen you for many a day – shall never see you again, perhaps; but shall attend your steps with tender thoughts, so long as I hear of you living: so will Professor Wilson.’
Wordsworth would claim not to have read De Quincey’s recollections of him in Tait’s, which ran between January and August 1839, and he was probably telling the truth. His response to their appearance was to state that De Quincey had forced himself upon the family from the start: ‘My acquaintance with him,’ said Wordsworth, flicking away an afternoon fly, ‘was the result of a letter of his own volunteered to me.’
On a Sunday evening in the late summer of 1839, De Quincey called at the home of one of his creditors, a solicitor called McIndoe who lived at 113 Princes Street. Two of De Quincey’s sons had lodged here from February to May that year, and he still owed the McIndoes rent. While Mrs McIndoe repaired their guest’s torn coat, the men talked. By twelve o’clock the coat was not yet mended; it was too late to ‘leap the boundary’ of sanctuary and so De Quincey was given a bed for the night in a chamber next to the dining room.
The following month he was still there. Mrs McIndoe now sued him for the unpaid rent and De Quincey bolted back to Holyrood, where Miss Miller was also in pursuit of payments. Ricocheting between irate landladies, De Quincey returned to Princes Street with his hoards of books, letters and manuscripts – including ‘about 8 separate works’ by Giordano Bruno, bought back in 1809, and ‘one or two’ other books, ‘equally rare’ – where he stayed for the next three years. During this time he developed a horror of the McIndoes, whom he regarded as his jailers. The McIndoes felt equally trapped by De Quincey. Were he to have sold his editions of Bruno, De Quincey would have been a free man, but he would not part with them for ‘a thousand guineas’.
While he described himself as ‘persecuted’ by McIndoe’s ‘hostile attitude’ and his ‘violent attempts’ at ‘ejection’, McIndoe hung on De Quincey’s promises of payment. So bitter were relations in the Princes Street household that at various points the two parties communicated only by letter, and in the third person. ‘Mr McIndoe. . . requests that Mr De Quincey shall remove tonight for he is resolved that no further communication shall take place between them on this subject and that before 10 o’clock, so as to prevent any unnecessary steps being taken,’ wrote McIndoe, pushing the missive beneath De Quincey’s door. McIndoe’s object, De Quincey explained in desperation to Blackwood’s son, Robert, who was now editing Maga, was to ‘possess himself of my papers, and hold those as a means of extracting money ad libitum’. It was stalemate. ‘If I am to go away at this moment,’ argued De Quincey, ‘I should draw upon myself a sort of legal persecution which at present would be ruinous. I wish to stay a month longer.’ And if McIndoe put him to the horn, De Quincey would simply bounce back into and out of sanctuary. De Quincey saw himself not as a betrayer of trust but as a victim of extortion: McIndoe received whatever money his tenant earned, often directly from Blackwood himself, but he always demanded more. ‘I spend months after months in literary labour,’ De Quincey told Blackwood in despair:
I endure the extremity of personal privations; some of which it would be humiliating to describe; (but by way of illustration I may mention – that having in a moment of pinching difficulty for my children about 10 months since pawned every article of my dress which could produce a shilling. I have since that time had no stockings, no shoes, no neck-handkerchief, coat, waist-coat, or hat. I have sat constantly barefoot; and being constitutionally or from the use of opium unusually sensible of cold, I should really have been unable to sit up and write but for a counterpane which I wrap round my shoulders).
Blackwood, ‘pained beyond measure’ by this letter, sent De Quincey £4.
The McIndoes, on their own downward slope, were also pawning their belongings: ‘I suppose that a more absolute wreck of decent prosperity never can have been exemplified,’ De Quincey grandly observed of the couple. ‘If I give him nothing, he will immediately take occasion to write me a violent letter full of abuse. He will insist on my leaving his house. No matter what rights I may afterwards establish in law, he will obtain his immediate object of retaining my Papers – now a vast body, far above portability.’ Back in Holyrood, Miss Miller – ‘for vindictive purposes’ – held out the same threat.
Tracing the growth of one of his debts as it is recorded in Miss Miller’s passbook, which contains records of De Quincey’s accounts between 3 May 1836 and 14 August 1840, Horace Eaton, the best of his biographers on the business of money, allows us to watch a seed sprout into Jack’s beanstalk:
Beginning with the small sum of £2 3s., small considering that De Quincey had apparently been living under her roof for two years, the amounts owed varied from month to month. It was increased by charges for milk and vegetables, by small loans, by the use of Miss Miller’s credit with grocers when De Quincey’s credit was nil. It reached £33 in April 1837, in spite of occasional payments; falling to £12 in May, rising through 1838 and 1839, until when the rooms were finally surrendered, it reached the not inconsiderable sum of £175 4s. 2d. This debt troubled De Quincey until his death and was finally settled by his executor.
To get
a sense of the scale of De Quincey’s difficulties, we must imagine acre upon acre of similar saplings.
‘Caught and chained’ by his papers, De Quincey dared not leave his room. The scene is reminiscent of his childhood in Greenhay, when he had been placed under arrest by his brother William (‘Who could put you under arrest?’ he had then imagined his guardian saying; ‘A child like you?’) A relative of the McIndoes, visiting their house as a girl, remembered with awe the closed door behind which the mysterious tenant sat writing. ‘The last body who went into that room,’ the servants teased, ‘was put up the lum [chimney] and never came out.’ De Quincey’s door creaked open only to receive his meals which, because his teeth were mostly gone, consisted of tea, coffee, sops of bread and tender slivers of mutton. Fascinated, the girl once managed to peep inside the room and see the famous ocean of paper. Meanwhile, Mrs McIndoe, whom De Quincey suspected of ‘tampering with locks, listening, eaves dropping’, shook any letters that arrived for him in case they contained money. One of these was from Branwell Brontë: affected by Confessions and himself now an opium-eater, Brontë sent De Quincey a poem and some translations of his own. The previous year Branwell had made the pilgrimage to Grasmere where he knocked on the door of Hartley Coleridge, the present incumbent of The Nab. Too preoccupied to take much notice of his young acolyte, De Quincey did not reply.
Guilty Thing Page 36