It was while he was imprisoned by the McIndoes that De Quincey returned to the subject of household murder. His ‘Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, composed as a letter from XYZ to Christopher North, appeared in Blackwood’s in November 1839, at the same time as Tait’s was running De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’. For those subscribing to both journals, the murder story and the Wordsworth story could be read alongside one another.
‘A good many years ago,’ XYZ began, ‘you may remember that I came forward in the character of a dilettante in murder.’ Few readers will have remembered De Quincey’s first murder essay, written twelve years before. Fewer still will have remembered the Ratcliffe Highway murders to which he once again referred. XYZ reveals that he has a ‘horribly ambitious’ nephew who fancies himself ‘a man of cultivated taste in most branches of murder’; the boy’s ideas on the subject, says his uncle, are all ‘stolen from me’. Not all murders, XYZ goes on to explain, are in ‘good taste’; like statues, paintings and ‘epic poems’, they each ‘have their little differences and shades of merit’. A career as a murderer is a downward path, ‘for if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination’.
One of the connoisseurs, known from his misanthropical disposition as ‘Toad-in-the-hole’, despairs of modern murder: ‘Even dogs are not what they were, sir – not what they should be. I remember in my grandfather’s time that some dogs had an idea of murder. . . but now. . .’ Holding the French Revolution responsible for the degeneration in his art, Toad-in-the-hole retires from society in 1811. It is widely assumed he has hanged himself, but one morning in 1812 he is seen cleanly shaved and gaily attired, ‘brushing with hasty steps the dews away to meet the postman’. The cause of his jollity is ‘the great exterminating chef-d’oeuvre of Williams at Mr Marr’s, No 29 Ratcliffe Highway’. What took place twelve nights later, at Mr Williamson’s, was by ‘some people pronounced even superior’, but Toad-in-the-hole demurs. ‘One, perhaps, might suggest the Iliad – the other the Odyssey: what do you get by such comparisons?’ In celebration of Williams’s achievement, a splendid dinner is given by the society to which all the connoisseurs are invited. Toasts are drunk to ‘the sublime epoch of Burkism and Harism’, to ‘Thugs and Thuggism’, to the Syrian assassins, and the Jewish Sicarii.
Jaded and depressed, De Quincey was recycling earlier work: returning to the paper turned down by Blackwood in 1828, he re-hashed his joke about murder being the tip of the moral iceberg. In the rejected paper, Williams had been described by a Frenchman as a ‘plagiarist’; here it is the nephew of XYZ who steals his uncle’s ideas.
But if ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ had been an imitation of a Blackwood’s essay, De Quincey’s ‘Second Paper on Murder’ was an imitation of the first. The ‘Second Paper’ was no more than nostalgia: his friendship with John Wilson was exhausted and Christopher North, to whom XYZ’s letter was addressed, belonged to a bygone age. Like Toad-in-the-hole, De Quincey was looking back to his golden years and in publishing the piece, Blackwood’s was doing the same. The jubilation of the connoisseurs following the Thurtell case, described in ‘On Murder’, is repeated in the ‘Second Paper’ as jubilation at the Williams murders. The difference between the two published papers is plain: in ‘On Murder’ the murderer is a poet; in the ‘Second Paper’, the murderer is a plagiarist. No longer a portrait of Wordsworth, the murderer looked more like De Quincey himself, in his motiveless malignity.
Throughout 1840 De Quincey continued to write his ‘Lake Reminiscences’. Having told the story of his first acquaintance with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, he now wrote four essays on the ‘Society of the Lakes’, which appeared in Tait’s between January and August. Here the vale described by Wordsworth as a maternal embrace was unveiled as an assemblage of ‘afflicted households’. Along with De Quincey’s account of Charles Lloyd’s ‘utter overthrow of happiness’ are a litany of other grim Lakeland tales, including the story of a man named Watson who murdered his mother ‘by her own fireside’; a Miss Smith who was saved from falling down a ravine by a figure in white who she assumed to be her sister but discovered was a ghost; and the dream described to De Quincey by a local woman in which ‘a pale and bloodless’ footman ‘appeared to be stealing up a private staircase, with some murderous instruments in his hands, towards a bedroom door’. He told the tale of the Maid of Buttermere, seduced and abandoned by a fraud posing as ‘The Hon. Augustus Hope’, and explained that the mountainous landscape inspired some ‘remarkable suicides’, including that of a ‘studious and meditative young boy, who found no pleasure but in books, and the search after knowledge’. The history which made the greatest impact on De Quincey was that of Sally Green’s parents, who fell down a ravine on Easedale during a storm, leaving in the snow ‘the sad hieroglyphics of their last agonies’. Six children were still living at home; and Sally, their twelve-year-old daughter, was taken on by the Wordsworths – fatally, so De Quincey believed – as a servant.
The ‘Lake Reminiscences’ end with the death of Catherine Wordsworth, whose ‘nature and manners’ contained a ‘witchery’, which made De Quincey ‘blindly, doatingly, in a servile degree, devoted’. The child, he revealed to his readership, ‘in a manner lived with me at my solitary cottage; as often as I could entice her from home, walked with me, slept with me, and was my sole companion’.
De Quincey’s account of his estrangement from Wordsworth appeared not in the ‘Lake Reminiscences’ but as diversion in an essay for Tait’s on ‘Walking Stewart’, which appeared later that year. By attaching himself so unthinkingly to his idol, De Quincey explained, he had ‘committed a great oversight. Men of extraordinary genius and force of mind are far better as objects for distant admiration than as daily companions.’ There were traits of Wordsworth’s character which were ‘painful and mortifying’. A man was entitled to his pride, but ‘something there was, in the occasional expression of this pride, which was difficult to bear’. Wordsworth would allow no one’s opinion but his own; on occasions when others spoke ‘he did not even appear to listen’.
De Quincey was floundering. Refusing to recognise the role played by opium, he pinned the breakdown in relations on the business with Mary Dawson, his ‘selfish housekeeper’ who in 1812 had denied Dorothy access to the cottage during one of De Quincey’s trips to London. How could the Wordsworths have believed these orders came from De Quincey himself? And ‘why . . . upon discovering such forgeries and misrepresentations’ did they not ‘openly and loudly denounce them for what they were?’ Having been falsely accused by the Wordsworths, De Quincey’s innocence was never acknowledged. But then again, he conceded, ‘after the first year or so’ his friendship with Wordsworth had hardly developed anyway. Wordsworth had ‘no cells in his heart for strong individual attachment’, as ‘poor Coleridge’ also realised, whose rupture with his former collaborator was now described by De Quincey in detail and at length. Other reasons were proffered for the waning of his ‘blind and unquestioning veneration’: Wordsworth did not like Mrs Radcliffe’s novels or Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein’, he had not even read Walter Scott. De Quincey might, he concluded, have left Grasmere altogether were it not for Margaret Simpson.
This is the last he says, in any of his writings, about his adult life. De Quincey, whose experiences were always pre-scripted, had no script for what happened next. Having described his London adventures in his Confessions, his childhood and youth in his Autobiographic Sketches, and his early acquaintance with Wordsworth and Coleridge in his ‘Lake Reminiscences’, his tale now comes to a sudden end. It is as if, having reached the top of the stairs, he found himself looking down a void and from this point on he referred to himself in terms only of his dreams and reveries. The reason he says nothing more about the external world is because, from 1813, De Quincey no longer lived there:
from now on he inhabited a word-packed world within himself and drowned in rivers of oblivion.
Edinburgh was killing him. In late February 1841, as the sky was beginning to crimson, he packed into a single trunk as many of his papers as would fit, hired a porter to help him with the load, and slipped like a fugitive out of the McIndoes’ house. A free man at last, De Quincey launched himself into the dawn of a new day.
*Referring to this passage of Mary Wilson Gordon’s Memoir of John Wilson, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcroft, ‘I wish I could make you as long a call as De Quincey made North.’
John Williams: connoisseur, dandy, aesthete and scourge of God.
14
Postscript
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous form of things –
We murder to dissect.
Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’
De Quincey went fifty miles west to Glasgow. Here, in what its citizens called the second city of the British Empire, he hid in the home of John Pringle Nichol, professor of astronomy at the university. ‘Address under cover, if you please,’ De Quincey instructed Robert Blackwood. A month later he moved into the house of Edward Law Lushington, the university’s professor of Greek. Lushington – who went on to become one of De Quincey’s late, great, friends – had been a Cambridge contemporary of Tennyson and was now engaged to marry the poet’s sister, Cecilia.
But two days after arriving at Lushington’s, De Quincey was back in Edinburgh, arrested – under the name of ‘T. E. Manners Ellis’ – at the instigation of Frances Wilson, the landlady of 42 Lothian Street, the house in which he had been so well looked after. How many other names did De Quincey hide behind? We can assume that there were many. In April he was in Glasgow once more, this time in lodgings on the high street, and from here he took a ‘mean room’ in the house of a college officer called Thomas Youille at 79 Renfield Street, an austere avenue in the city centre. A kindly man, Youille was soon turned by his tenant into a second McIndoe. ‘It is often shocking,’ De Quincey observed of Youille and his wife, ‘to witness the struggle between their good nature on the one side and on the other their failing power with their growing vexation.’ During his two years at Renfield Street, De Quincey was ill with purpura, a condition in which blood haemorrhages into the skin. His legs turned scarlet and purple and he was unable to lift either arm; he existed, as one of his visitors noted, in a ‘half torpid condition under opium’.
Meanwhile Mrs McIndoe had discovered his whereabouts, and De Quincey temporarily found movement enough in his limbs to flee. Undeterred, she tracked him ‘from lodging to lodging, and took advantage of the hours when she knew I was not at home, to procure admission to my rooms’. He was being pursued by this irate woman, De Quincey shamelessly explained to Professor Nichol, as the result of a ‘violent but hopeless attachment. . . which [he] could not reciprocate’.
In November 1841 he scrawled on a scrap of envelope: ‘I am in the situation of a man holding on by his hands to the burning deck of a ship. . . This is the End.’ In May 1843, Youille gave him an ultimatum: either pay the rent or go. Leaving his papers as promise of payment, De Quincey closed the door on another lodging.
The previous August his children had been ejected from Holyrood. Taking a lease on an eight-room cottage called Mavis Bush near Lasswade, seven miles outside of Edinburgh, they now took control of their lives. Here the sisters lived in what their father described as ‘the most absolute harmony I have ever witnessed’. Using his annuity to pay off debts, Margaret Thomasina raised Florence, Emily and Paul Frederick, while Francis began an apprenticeship in Manchester and Horace, an ensign with the 26th Regiment (a position costing De Quincey a mighty £700), sailed to China to fight with the British in the Opium Wars. They described Mavis Bush as ‘paradise’, but their lives were not without stress. Writing in 1858, Charles MacFarlane remembered how De Quincey’s abandoned children went ‘begging about the village for food, and looking both sickly and hungry. . . The minister and his wife supplied their immediate wants, and then we raised a small fund for them in Edinburgh, where their father has had his hand in nearly every man’s pocket.’ Doubtless, concluded MacFarlane – who had ‘lost all patience’ with the man – De Quincey will spin ‘eternal sentences about the strength, depth, and unimaginable vivacity of his paternal affections’. But from now on, De Quincey treated his daughters as idealised mothers, while he embraced old age as a second childhood.
For years Margaret Thomasina was plagued by creditors who, hearing that the family were no longer in sanctuary, beat a path to the door of Mavis Bush cottage, and as a result of these ‘persecutors’ though still in her twenties she suffered two haemorrhages. De Quincey feared his daughter would die, as he put it, from ‘the misery of her situation. She is entirely guiltless of wrong; and I, unless I can do something effectual and sudden, shall feel myself in part the cause.’ Margaret lived on, but at the end of 1842 he heard that Horace had died of sickness in Hong Kong. De Quincey’s own opium wars now began.
Returning to Midlothian, he based himself at Mavis Bush where, for the third time in his life, he fell prostrate before his dark idol. Descending to a daily dose of 5,000 drops of laudanum, he could sink no further. ‘Through that ruin, and by help of that ruin,’ he afterwards wrote in a series of extraordinary letters to Lushington, ‘I looked into and read the latter states of Coleridge. His chaos I comprehended by the darkness of my own, and both were the work of laudanum. It is as if ivory carvings and elaborate fretwork and fair enamelling should be found with worms and ashes amongst coffins.’ It is a memorable image of the destruction of a delicate and finely cast mind. He was increasingly preoccupied by Coleridge; the poet had often ‘spoken to me of the dying away from him of all hope. . . Then I partly understood him, now perfectly.’ De Quincey imagined escaping from a ‘maelstrom roaring for him in the distance’; in his dreams he saw through ‘vast avenues of gloom those towering gates of ingress which hitherto had always seemed to stand open, now at last barred against my retreat, and hung with funeral crape’. The Dark Interpreter returned to his side, a ‘symbolic mirror’ reflecting the dreamer back to himself.
Reducing his daily drops, he fell ‘from purgatory into the shades of a deeper abyss’, but still he persisted. By November 1844 he was describing to Lushington ‘the tremendous arrears of wrath still volleying and whirling round me from the retreating opium. Its flight is Parthian; flying it pursues.’ On Christmas Day he recorded in his diary how, at ‘about 7 p.m.,’ it ‘first solemnly revealed itself to me that I am and have long been under a curse. . . Oh dreadful! By degrees infinitely worse than leprosy.’ His revelation echoes the belated discovery ten years earlier, on giving up the lease of Dove Cottage, that he had been ‘under a possession’. Admitting that opium was ‘at the root of all this unimaginable hell’, he took the first steps towards recovery.
‘Conquer it I must by exercise unheard of,’ he told himself, ‘or it will conquer me.’ Addicts often use exercise as an aid to recovery, but De Quincey’s feet gave way beneath him. Unable to walk as far as Edinburgh, he instead staggered round and round the garden, measuring his circuits; after ninety days he had completed, he estimated, one thousand miles. It has been convincingly suggested that De Quincey suffered from a neurological condition known as restless legs syndrome, characterised by a creeping sensation in the feet and calves and an urgent need for the legs to ‘yawn’, particularly at night. Today it is treated with gentle exercise, lifestyle changes and the drugs used for Parkinson’s disease; De Quincey suppressed the symptoms with opium.
After eight months of steady reduction he discovered, he told Lushington, ‘in the twinkling of an eye, such a rectification of the compass as I had not known for years’. Two days later he relapsed, ‘but that no way alarmed me – I drew hope from the omen’. He returned to the image of the whirlpool; no longer ‘carried violently by a headlong current’, he was ‘riding as if at anchor, once m
ore dull and untroubled, as in days of infancy’. ‘Silently, surely,’ De Quincey ‘descended the ladder’. He had in his hand the ‘true key’ to recovery, and ‘even though a blast of wind has blown the door to again, no jot of spirits was gone away from me. I shall rise as one risen from the dead.’
In late 1844, De Quincey, now aged fifty-nine, jotted down preparatory notes for ‘A New Paper on Murder as a Fine Art’. His murder essays always take us to the seabed of his psyche, and he now proposed that our most glorious murderers – like John Williams ‘who murdered the baby’ – should be commemorated as public statues. This thought flowed into another, aimed at Wilson: ‘Note the power of murderers as fine-art professors to make a new start, to turn the corner, to retreat upon the road they have come.’ De Quincey’s concern in this paper was less with murder or plagiarism than poverty and the camouflage of the crowd. Obscurity, he continued, ‘throws a power about a man, clothes him with attributes of ubiquity. . . The privilege of safe criminality, not liable to exposure, is limited to classes crowded together like leaves in Vallombrosa’ – the image is from Milton – ‘for them to run away into some mighty city, Manchester or Glasgow, is to commence life anew.’ Concealment was an art he had learned in 1802, as a grubby Romantic on the streets of London. In a riff about authorship as a criminal activity, he now imagined two writers – doubtless himself and Wilson – who were so prolific that ‘at fifty they had forgotten much of their own literary villainies, and at sixty they commenced with murderous ferocity a series of answers to arguments which it was proved upon them afterwards that they themselves had emitted at thirty’. The lives of these ‘self-replying authors’ had come full circle: it was as though, he said, they had found themselves in ‘the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s’, where secrets committed to the walls were ‘retaliated . . . in echoing thunders’.
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