Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  Another man he could not forgive was William Maginn, who had slandered him in the John Bull as the first humbug of the age. De Quincey’s appearance had been savagely mocked, his wife’s virtue had been grossly insulted, his family’s honour had been scandalously impugned, the nobility of the ancient De Quincey name had been challenged, De Quincey’s son William had been humiliated; but what the Opium-Eater chose to publicly defend in Suspiria was the reality of the house in which he had lived during the winter of 1802. Maginn had doubted that a building such as this existed on Oxford Street, and De Quincey would not be seen as having lied about, or embellished, the wretchedness of his past suffering. The empty house had actually been, he revealed, on Greek Street. He was now at liberty to give the address because the attorney whose home it was had since died, and would therefore not recognise the description and be provoked into producing some counter Confessions of his own.

  Amongst De Quincey’s notes for future Suspiria was an account of a man called Symonds who, in revenge for a woman’s scorn, ‘committed several murders in a sudden epilepsy of planet-struck fury’. Symonds later confessed to the prison chaplain that ‘as he rushed on in his hellish career, he perceived a dark figure on his right, keeping pace with himself’. He had been attended in his crimes, De Quincey noted, by the Dark Interpreter himself.

  De Quincey would have a base in Mavis Bush cottage for the rest of his life, but for the most part he preferred not to be there. His habit of camouflaging himself in city crowds while his family resided in the country was ingrained, and he continued to rent rooms – the exact number is uncertain – in Edinburgh and Glasgow, which he loaded with treasure before moving on. In Mavis Bush itself, a tin bath being stored in his study was filled to the brim with papers which, under his strictest orders, were not to be moved. De Quincey was pursued, said James Hogg’s son (also called James Hogg), ‘by Chinese-like reverence for written or printed paper. Newspapers and magazines, which reached him from all parts of the world, he preserved with religious care.’ He was also astonishingly careless. Two tea chests of papers were left for storage in a booksellers in Glasgow, the name and address of whom De Quincey promptly forgot, and candle fires turned many of his papers to ash (it was habitual for his daughters to point out to De Quincey, as he worked, that his hair was alight).

  The chaos of his filing system was recalled by a Glasgow friend, Colin Rae Brown. In 1847 De Quincey, then residing in the city with a certain Mrs Tosh, had to leave when her daughter was struck suddenly with fever. What was he to do? Where on earth could he go? De Quincey was in a whirl. And then, ‘“Ah,” he answered, putting his hand to his forehead, “that reminds me that I have been paying the rent of apartments in Renfield Street for a number of years. Many valuable books and papers are or should be still there.” As he thus spoke,’ wrote Rae Brown, ‘I stared, almost agape, in downright amazement.’ So back De Quincey went to his mean little room at the Youilles’.

  In appearance he resembled a cartoon of poverty. He wore stockings without shoes or shoes without stockings, his ancient jacket was a size too large, his neck-tie looked like a piece of straw. During his daily walks De Quincey was mistaken for a tramp, and he became known in the two cities for what David Masson, his future biographer and editor, remembers as ‘the absolute uncertainty of his whereabouts’. Scuttling through the night streets, invisible as a mole, the Opium-Eater made the occasional public appearance. In one account of his arrival at a dinner party, a commotion was heard in the hall ‘as if some dog or other stray animal had forced his way in. . . What can it be? Some street boy of some sort?’ Enter De Quincey, dressed in whatever he could get his hands on – a ‘boy’s duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, fragments of a particoloured belcher handkerchief. . . list shoes, covered with snow. . . and the trousers! – someone suggests that they are mere linen garments blackened with writing-ink’.

  His conversation remained mysterious in tone and remarkable in range, the drawback being that De Quincey rose to his best when it was ‘rapidly becoming tomorrow’. ‘The first difficulty,’ one of his admirers recalled, ‘was to induce him to visit you. The second was to reconcile him to leaving.’ As the guests departed for their beds, De Quincey stayed on at the table, sometimes for weeks at a time.

  Elizabeth Quincey died in January 1846. ‘She was above ninety-seven,’ calculated her son. He had last seen his mother fourteen years before, although they had been in regular contact about money. Under the terms of her will, Thomas continued to receive his annual allowance. The rest of the estate was left to Jane, her other surviving child.

  In America, where the British magazines were regarded as setting the highest possible standard, the Opium-Eater was considered a master. ‘No Englishman cares a pin for De Quincey,’ despaired Nathaniel Hawthorne. ‘We are ten times as good readers and critics as they.’ It was De Quincey whom Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting Edinburgh in February 1848, most wanted to meet, expecting him to be ‘some figure like the organ of York Minster’. During their conversation, De Quincey revealed to Emerson that he had copied Wordsworth’s poem on the growth of his own mind into five notebooks. He also said that it had been the poet’s habit to ‘appropriate what another said so entirely as to be angry if the originator claimed any part of it’.

  Later that year De Quincey penned what would be his final letter to Wordsworth, now Poet Laureate. His purpose was to introduce his former mentor to a certain ‘Mr Neocles Jaspis Mousabines’, an accomplished young Greek scholar who ‘honours your name and services to this generation’ and has been ‘powerfully and unaffectedly impressed by the study of your works’. Would Wordsworth have any time in his schedule to ‘converse’ with this latest acolyte? Wordsworth’s reply has not survived, but eighteen months later, on 23 April – the day on which Shakespeare was both born and died – the poet breathed his last. His widow now took from the drawer her husband’s autobiographical poem, which she named The Prelude, and sent it to the publisher. It was an ‘inappropriate’ title, thought De Quincey; ‘he designed it as the opening to a great poem, but as the great poem was never finished, the “Prelude” stands as an opening to nothing’.

  In 1849 ‘The English Mail-coach’ was published in Blackwood’s. It would be De Quincey’s last contribution to Maga, and the essay stands as the crowning example of the effect of opium addiction on the imagination. Divided into four parts, ‘The Glory of Motion’, ‘Going Down with Victory’, ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’ and ‘Dream Fugue’, De Quincey returned to his love of velocity, in the days before trains, when the mail-coach, like ‘some mighty orchestra’ obedient ‘to a supreme baton’, distributed around the land the news of Napoleon. As ever, the prose is driven by nostalgia – ‘Even thunder and lightning, it pains me to say, are not the thunder and lightning which I remember at the time of Waterloo’ – and De Quincey’s subject is less the historical past than the life of his dreams, tyrannised even today by the ‘terror and terrific beauty’ of the mail-coach.

  In one of his most potent and brilliant diversions, De Quincey now described the way in which dreams contain, in compound images, ‘the horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures’. In dreams, he suggests, images are injected into one another – the dragon, for example, ‘is the snake inoculated upon the scorpion’. The term was apt for a man who inoculated himself with opium, but ‘most frightful’ of all these ‘dream horrors’ is that in which the dreamer finds himself inoculated with ‘some horrid alien nature’. What if this ‘were his own nature repeated’? What if ‘not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced into what he once thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself?’ In his fantasy of escalating antibodies, De Quincey was back inside the Piranesian dreamscape, endlessly climbing the stairs of his own Carceri.

  He then, in ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’, recalls how coming home many years ago after a visit to his mother, he had warmed himself with ‘a small quantity of laudanum’ and sat, as
he liked to do, in the ‘drawing room’ of the mail-coach next to the driver. This monster of a man had only one eye and, in his hallucinogenic state, De Quincey watched the lid flicker and shut as the charioteer fell into a deep sleep. Meanwhile the horses thundered on into the dawn, led by the ‘great saucer eyes of the mail’. The woods and fields on either side were cloaked in silvery mist, and despite the comatose state of his companion, De Quincey felt as safe as a child in his older sister’s arms. Suddenly he heard wheels ahead. ‘A whisper it was – a whisper from, perhaps, four miles off – secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevitable.’ What could he do to ‘check the storm-flight’ of the ‘maniacal horses?’ The slumbering Cyclops had the reins held tightly in his grip, and De Quincey was unable to loosen them. They were coursing down an avenue as straight as a ‘cathedral aisle’, at the end of which appeared a small gig, a tug in the line of a great cutter. On the bench sat a pair of cooing lovers, their heads bent towards one another. ‘Between them and eternity’ lay ‘but a minute and a half’. De Quincey cried out in alarm and the couple took in the hurricane tearing towards them on the wrong side of the road. ‘Fast are the flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our horses’; rising, the young man pulled hard on the reins but too late – the charging block on which De Quincey sat whirled, with the force of twenty Atlantics, past the tiny cart, clipping the back wheel: ‘the blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically’. Rising ‘in horror’, De Quincey turned around to observe the wreckage: the carriage was trembling, the horse was standing still, the driver was ‘like a rock. . . But the lady –’

  But the lady! Oh heavens! Will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutching at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing! Figure to yourself, reader, the elements of the case. . . From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night, – from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight, – from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love, – suddenly as from the woods and fields, – suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation, – suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.

  The ‘rapture of panic’ and fantasia of guilt, which returned ‘a thousand times’ in his future dreams, is described in Suspiria’s final section, ‘Dream Fugue’, where De Quincey sees the terrified girl at the prow of a boat in the ‘desert spaces of the sea’, a frigate flying towards her while he, helpless, looks on. ‘The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to catch her.’ There she stands, ‘sinking, rising, fluttering, fainting’ through storms, ‘through the darkness of quicksands, through fugues and the persecution of fugues’.

  The unknown woman joined the gallery of girls whose deaths he had been unable to prevent.

  In the autumn of 1849 he appeared at the offices of Hogg’s Instructor, the journal founded by James Hogg the younger. From one pocket of his cape – a garment three sizes too large – De Quincey produced a roll of manuscript and from the other a small brush; uncurling the sheets he carefully brushed each one, placing them individually in the editor’s hands, ‘with a grave upward glance to see how [he] was getting on’. Thus he proposed himself as a new contributor, and from 1851 everything De Quincey wrote, including essays on the guilt of Anne Boleyn, the etymology of the Westmorland dialect, the opium trade in China, and a further autobiographical series called ‘A Sketch from Childhood’, would be published by Hogg. De Quincey’s ‘Sketch’, the most magnificent version of his memories so far, now centred on the death of Elizabeth and opened with the following sentence: ‘About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my life came to a violent termination.’

  Hogg, an amiable and patient man, left a loving memoir of De Quincey in which he recalls the ‘gifted, ingenuous and noble’ author, aged seventy, ascending ‘like a squirrel’ a ravine on the Esk, and suffering ‘unheard-of-misery’ when invited out to dinner. On one occasion Hogg ran into Wilson who asked: ‘Well, how is friend De Quincey?’ He was, regretted Hogg, on his way to see him, rather complaining. ‘Ah!’ said the Professor, ‘I hope it is only caused by one of those small matters about which he is so frequently worrying himself, such as the loss of a manuscript or some other trifle. . . Say to him when you call that I would be pleased if he would come and dine with me to-morrow at the usual hour. You know the difficulty of dragging him out to dinner. Say that we are to have no strangers, and that I will see to a dish of hare-soup a la De Quincey being on the table.’

  It is unlikely that De Quincey took up the invitation. It was with Hogg that he now discussed the smaller matters of the day, from the thrill of boxing matches to ‘a murder surrounded by mysteries’. When it came to the latter, Hogg noted, De Quincey was always able to ‘track out the missing links in the chain of evidence’.

  No sooner had De Quincey abandoned Tait for Hogg than Tait’s ran a paper by the pathologist John Paget on ‘The Philosophy of Murder’. The world is changing, argued Paget, and so too are murder methods. ‘Crowbars, masks and dark lanterns are outré and behind the times. The highway-gentleman of the last century, dressed and curled. . . he too is passed away with the times he illustrated, and his place is filled by men of business – by march-of-intellect operators in chloroform and new and improved strangulators.’ In order to execute the ‘cool, nicely considered, artistic crime’ the modern murderer employs arsenic or strychnine: ‘Poisoning,’ concluded Paget, ‘(the word crawls from the pen like a snake) is the prevailing style’; it is ‘the kind of murder that even a lady might do with clean hands – that even Macbeth might have found some comfort in. “Out! Out, damned spot!”’

  De Quincey’s oeuvre was now, in the words of George Gilfillan, ‘scattered in prodigal profusion through the thousand and one volumes of our periodical literature’. In America, a Boston firm of publishers called Ticknor and Fields took on the challenge of compiling a twenty-two-volume edition of his collected works, something De Quincey believed to be ‘absolutely, insuperably, and for ever impossible’. This they achieved by going through thirty years’ worth of journals and cutting out the essays signed XYZ, the Opium-Eater and Thomas De Quincey. Without Ticknor and Fields, ‘hardly the sixth part of my literary undertakings, hurried or deliberate, sound, rotting, or rotten, would ever have reached posterity’. But there was unease as well in De Quincey’s response to the project. ‘It is astonishing,’ he mused, ‘how much more Boston knows of my literary acts and purposes than I do myself.’ With this advantage over him, the Opium-Eater feared that ‘if on any dark December morning, say forty or fifty years ago, I might have committed a forgery (as the best of men will do occasionally) Boston could array against me all the documentary evidence of my peccadillo before I should have time to abscond’.

  De Quincey was now persuaded by Hogg to begin the Sisyphean task of putting together an English edition of his works, more extensive than its American sibling. All of his papers needed to be located; some had been burned by candles, others he vaguely remembered depositing in various lodgings. Miraculously, some of the dispersed manuscripts made their way back to him: when De Quincey was sheltering from a thunderstorm in the Royal Exchange Hotel, a waiter tapped him on the arm and politely handed over a bundle that had been left there for storage several months before. Former landladies, who received payment for their trouble, appeared at Hogg’s offices with cartloads of packages; one of them – probably Mrs McIndoe – exploited the system by returning what turned out to be several parcels of straw.

  In letters to Hogg, De Quincey documented the pandemonium into which he was now hurled: he was ‘utterly in the dark’ as to the whereabouts of the paper entitled ‘Coleridge and Opium-Eating’ – was it
‘chez moi? Or chez la presse? (I speak French, simply as being the briefest way of conveying my doubt).’ Should the lost paper be chez moi, it would take him ‘half a day’ to find; ‘as it is manifestly not on my table, I should proceed to postulate that it must have been transposed to the floor’. There was nothing De Quincey disliked more than the business of having to ‘stoop’. Referring to another mislaid essay, he despaired that despite ‘working through most parts of the night, I have not yet come to the missing copy. . . I am going on with the search yet, being walled in by superfluous furniture, in so narrow an area (not larger than a post-chaise as regards the free space), I work with difficulty, and the stooping kills me. I greatly fear that the entire day will be spent in the search.’ As for the papers themselves, George Gilfillan chanced to see one of De Quincey’s manuscripts and described the words as ‘piled over each other’s heads, two, three, and four deep – erasure after erasure’. As Wilson said of De Quincey’s style: ‘the best word always comes up’.

  The exercise allowed De Quincey not only to locate, collate and order his writing but to rebuild it as well. Essays written under pressure were returned to at leisure. Writing to deadline, he said, forced a man into ‘saying the thing that is not’. Hammering away on these hurried pieces, he now added rooms, floors and staircases, higher attics and deeper cellars in an ever-increasing number of notes, afterthoughts, second thoughts, reflections and diversions. He chose as his title Selections: Grave and Gay: ‘Selections’ reflected the incomplete nature of the project, and ‘Grave and Gay’ comes from Book VI of The Prelude (‘Strange rendezvous my mind was at that time,/ A parti-coloured show of grave and gay’). Here was the parti-coloured mansion of De Quincey’s own mind, revealed for all to see. Volume one, which appeared in May 1853, opened with Autobiographic Sketches. These might be described as a palimpsest of his essays for Tait’s, sections of Suspiria de Profundis, and his recent ‘Sketch from Childhood’ for Hogg’s Instructor. Writing once again over the earlier versions of his youth, De Quincey cut some passages, extended others, and divided the whole into thirteen sections, echoing the thirteen books of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude. The titles he chose, after Wordsworth’s own titles, were as follows: