The Affliction of Childhood
Introduction to the World of Strife
Infant Literature
The Female Infidel
I am Introduced to the Warfare of a Public School
I enter the World
The Nation of London
Dublin
First Rebellion
French Invasion of Ireland, and Second Rebellion
Travelling
My Brother
Premature Manhood
He was now alone of all his kind. In 1853 his daughter Margaret married and moved to Ireland, and in April 1854 John Wilson died. In the months before his friend’s death De Quincey had considered enquiring after his health but was prevented from doing so by his real reason for writing, which was to retrieve, from one of Wilson’s associates, a trunkful of books. ‘My unfortunate chattels,’ De Quincey explained to John Findlay, ‘instead of being rescued from destruction, are plunged into a deeper and more hopeless oblivion than ever. This, you see, is what I want to know from Wilson, not, of course, where the books are placed, but the name of the gentleman to whom he introduced me.’ Soon after Wilson’s funeral, De Quincey remarked at a dinner party that the professor had surrounded himself with parasites ‘who ministered to his vanity’, and that ‘the sickly, false sentiment of his works’ had been mocked by the Wordsworths. He then entertained the company with a ‘droll’ impersonation of Wilson’s style of lecturing.
The wind was in his sails; it was time to move on. ‘I often’, De Quincey told Findlay, ‘feel an almost irresistible inclination to rush away and bury myself among books in the heart of some great city like London or Paris.’ Taking only his coat, he left Mavis Bush, walked the seven miles to Edinburgh and returned to the rooms at 42 Lothian Street where, sixteen years earlier, he had written ‘The Household Wreck’. Removing from the cupboard the set of clothes he had then left behind, his landlady, Frances Wilson, unlocked the door to his lair. He was, he told Hogg, planning his own version of Arabian Nights, which in a sense was true. Mixing his opium with water, De Quincey began work on the fourth volume of Selections: Grave and Gay. Blending into one continuous essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ and ‘Second Paper on Murder as One of the Fine Arts’, he now added a ‘Postscript’ which proved to be the finest murder essay of them all.
It was required of him, De Quincey’s ‘Postscript’ began, to provide ‘some account of Williams, the dreadful London murderer of the last generation’ who, ‘in one hour. . . exterminated all but two entire households’. The artist’s performances were remarkable not only for their aesthetic value, but also for their continuing ‘mystery’: ‘Had the murderer an accomplice?’
For his final piece of theatre, De Quincey’s design, grouping, light and shade were all perfectly arranged. The Ratcliffe Highway was ‘a public thoroughfare in a most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London’. There were as many turbans to be seen here as hats; ‘every third man might be set down as a foreigner. Lascars, Chinese, Moors, Negroes, were met at every step.’ The serpentine figure who ‘forced his way through the crowded streets’ on the night of 7 December 1811, his tools buttoned up in his oversized coat, stood five foot seven inches tall, and judging from De Quincey’s plaster cast of his face, his features were ‘mean’. John Williams had been at sea during the war, when the navy was composed of ‘murderers and ruffians’ and all types of men on the run; those who knew him noted his ‘polished hatred of brutality’ and the ‘exquisite suavity’ of his manners. A woman who had seen him at the Thames Police Office told De Quincey that the hair of Williams ‘was the most extraordinary and vivid colour, viz, bright yellow’. Ruminating on this information, De Quincey wondered if, having been in India, Williams had disguised its natural colour by dying it with paint used to decorate high-caste horses of the Punjab. This same woman also revealed that Williams had a ghastly pallor, as though ‘green sap’ rather than blood circulated in his veins.
Like Titian and Rubens, who practised their art in wigs and diamond buckled shoes, De Quincey imagined Williams setting out ‘for a grand compound massacre’ in full dress. ‘It is really wonderful,’ he mused, picturing the silken murderer clad in black stockings and pumps, gliding like a hellkite through the turbaned crowds, ‘to pursue the successive steps of this monster, and to notice the absolute certainty with which the silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and movements of the bloody drama, not less surely and fully than if we had been ourselves hidden in Marr’s shop.’
Watching the detective slither his way into the mind of the murderer is now a staple form of popular entertainment. But when De Quincey entered the interior of Williams, a man of ‘snakey insinuation’, he was going where only Milton had gone before when, in Paradise Lost Book IX, Satan penetrates the head of the sleeping serpent through his mouth.
The victim towards whose house Williams was aimed was an ‘old and very intimate friend’. At least, Marr had ‘originally had been a friend; but subsequently, on good cause arising, he had become an enemy. Or more probably, as others said, the feelings had long since languished which gave life to either relation of friendship or of enmity.’ The two men had sailed to Calcutta together and quarrelled over the girl who eventually married Marr. This, at least, is what the public wanted to believe, De Quincey suggested; they preferred to think of Williams as a spurned lover rather than a hound from hell. Timothy Marr, a ‘stout, fresh-faced young man of twenty-seven’, had invested ‘about £180’ in refurbishing his small drapery at 29 Ratcliffe Highway. The unpaid bills were accumulating and he was alarmed by the prospect of debts; as he closed the shop that night he looked forward to resting his head on the breast of his wife, who was in the basement nursing the baby.
Leaving the house shortly before midnight to buy oysters for her master’s supper, Margaret Jewell – who De Quincey renamed Mary – saw a figure in the shadows. The elderly watchman saw him too, peeping into the shop window. The servant girl had left and Marr was alone: Williams ‘bolted’ inside ‘and by a dexterous movement of his left hand. . . turned the key’. ‘Let us leave the murderer alone with his victims,’ De Quincey now instructed, tip-toeing away. ‘For fifty minutes let him work his pleasure. The front-door, as we know, is fastened against all help. Help there is none. Let us, therefore, in vision, attach ourselves to Mary; and, when all is over, let us come back with her, again raise the curtain, and read the dreadful record of all that has passed in her absence.’
It had turned midnight, and was now the morning of Sunday 8 December. Mary made her way down the coffin-narrow passageways, ‘in an area of London where ferocious tumults were continually turning her out of what seemed to be the direct course’. The shops had shut, she was losing her bearings, and her mission had failed. Nothing remained ‘but to retrace her steps’. A watchman with a lantern guided her back to the door of 29 Ratcliffe Highway. ‘In many cities,’ De Quincey paused to explain, ‘bells are the main instruments for communication between the street and the interior of houses: but in London knockers prevail. At Marr’s there was both a knocker and a bell. Mary rang, and at the same time very gently knocked.’ She listened for the thud of footsteps coming up from the kitchen. Silence. One person in the household might possibly have fallen asleep during her absence, but surely not everyone – ? Had the child been taken ill? An ‘icy horror’ crept over her as she remembered ‘the stranger in the loose dark coat, whom she had seen stealing along under the shadowy lamp-light, and too certainly watching her master’s motions’. The silence deepened; Mary’s heart was pounding. Then came a sound which filled her with ‘killing fear’.
What was it? On the stairs, not the stairs that led down to the kitchen, but the stairs that led upwards to the single story of bedchambers above, was heard a creaking. . . Next was heard most distinctly a footfall: one, two, three, four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly descended. Then the dreadful footsteps were heard advancing along the little narrow passage t
o the door. The very breathing can be heard of that dreadful being, who has silenced all breathing except his own in the house. There is but a door between him and Mary. What is he doing on the other side of the door?. . . How hard the fellow breathes! He, the solitary murderer, is on one side of the door; Mary is on the other side. . . The unknown murderer and she both have their lips upon the door, listening, breathing hard; but luckily they are on different sides. . .
There was not a doubt in De Quincey’s mind about the murderer’s purpose. ‘Quietly opening the door,’ he would ask, in a whispering ‘counterfeit’ of Marr’s voice, why Mary had been out for so long. Thus inveigling the girl into ‘the asylum of general darkness’, Williams would have ‘perfected and rounded the desolation of the house’.
Behind the counter, Marr’s body ‘told its own tale’. He had been bludgeoned on the back of the head while reaching for a pair of unbleached cotton socks. Then, ‘by way of locking up all into eternal silence’, his throat had been cut. Hearing groans, Mrs Marr and James Gowan, the apprentice boy, made for the front rather than the back door, where the heavy swing of the murder’s mallet stopped them in their tracks.
‘I was myself at the time nearly three hundred miles from London,’ De Quincey recalled, but even here ‘the panic was indescribable’. Southey himself had been struck by the degree of terror felt across the nation, while Coleridge, delivering his Shakespeare lectures in London, noted there the ‘many thousands of households, composed exclusively of women and children’, and later drew De Quincey’s attention to the many other households ‘who necessarily confide their safety, in the long evenings, to the discretion of a young servant girl’. Should she find herself ‘beguiled by the pretence of a message from her mother, sister, or sweetheart, into opening the door, there, in one second of time’, goes the wreckage of the house. It was the murder twelve nights later of the Williamson household which revealed the ‘absurdity of ascribing to [Williams] any ruralising tendencies’. A killer of this calibre would not ‘abandon for a moment. . . the great metropolitan castra stativa of gigantic crime, seated for ever on the Thames’.
John Williamson, publican of the King’s Head tavern on New Gravel Lane, around the corner from Ratcliffe Highway, had served his last customer when, at twenty-five minutes to midnight ‘the house-door was suddenly shut and locked’ by ‘a crash, proclaiming some hand of hideous violence’. It is through the eyes of John Turner, the ‘poor, petrified journeyman’ who had retired for the night, that De Quincey now describes the events. Driven by the fascination of ‘killing fear’, Turner rose from his bed, opened the door and, ‘quite unconscious of what he was doing, in blind, passive, self-surrender to panic, absolutely descended both flights of stairs’. Four steps from the bottom, he could see directly into the blood-soaked parlour where, swathed in a coat of the finest quality, Williams was pacing about in creaking shoes, deciding which of the keys from Mrs Williamson’s pocket would lead him to the hidden treasure. Had the murderer been less occupied, he would have heard the breathing of the journeyman who now leapt back up the stairs, passing as he did so the door of the Williamsons’ sleeping granddaughter. ‘Every minute,’ John Turner felt, ‘brings ruin nearer to her.’ His ‘first thought’ had been to take the girl ‘out of bed in his arms’ but what if she were to wake and cry out? She would endanger the lives of them both. The only way to save the child was by first saving himself. John Turner then pushed his bed against the door and began to rip the bedding into shreds. Downstairs, Williams filled his pockets with coins and his sack with plate. ‘Murderer is working in the parlour; journeyman is working hard in the bedroom. . . Like chorus and semi-chorus, strophe and antistrophe, they work each against the other. Pull journeyman, pull murderer.’
The murderer was certain to find another throat on the upper storeys, but to loiter would hazard his night’s work. He had to leave in haste, shave off his yellow hair, blacken his eyebrows and return to sea. But blood beckoned; rather than slip out of the house he began his ascent. Still knotting his sheets together, the journeyman heard the approaching tread. ‘As the Alpine avalanches, when suspended above the traveller’s head. . . come down through the stirring of the air by a simple whisper, precisely on such a tenure of a whisper was now suspended the murderous malice of the man below.’
For De Quincey, writing involved the projection of the writer’s ‘own inner mind’. Words, he wrote in an essay on ‘Style’, needed to ‘pass through a prism, and radiate into distinct elements, what previously had been even to himself but dim and confused ideas’. Virginia Woolf, in her essay on ‘Impassioned Prose’, put it more succinctly: De Quincey’s enemy was ‘the hard fact’. Despite his knowledge of the background and character of John Williams, garnered from the newspapers and Fairburn’s ‘Accounts’, De Quincey had no interest in the hard facts of the case. What he understood was that a man calling himself John Williamson had murdered a man called John Williamson; it recalled the time he was pursued by the shadow of Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy, or the time when Mrs Quincey believed that her son, returned from his own sea adventures, was not Richard De Quincey at all but an imposter calling himself Richard De Quincey.
In The Maul and the Pear Tree, their skilful re-examination of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, P. D. James and T. A. Critchley cast doubt on the guilt of John Williams and suggest that William – ‘Long Billy’ – Ablass, who had orchestrated the mutiny on the Roxburgh Castle, and Cornelius Hart, the carpenter for Marr’s new shop front, were the killers. The murders, argue James and Critchley, were linked to the mutiny, ‘and we think that the circumstances of that mutiny, could they now be traced, would bear out our own hypothesis’. De Quincey, for whom there was little difference between being guilty and seeming so, did not countenance the thought of Williams as having a collaborator. He had read about the tall man and the shorter man seen hurrying from the King’s Head on the night of the Williamson murders; he knew that two or even three men had been seen loitering on the Ratcliffe Highway when Marr’s household was slaughtered, but De Quincey’s object was to prove that Williams was an actor, a connoisseur, a dandy, an aesthete, a scourge of God who walked in darkness, a tiger, a man of snaky insinuation, and a domestic Attila. The murderer was, like Wordsworth’s vision of the poet, a solitary artist, lonely as a cloud.
In the ‘Postscript’, facts stored in De Quincey’s inner mind for forty-two years radiated and took on the grandeur of a dream. The wreckage of his own two households – the first when he was a child at Greenhay, the second when he was an adult in Edinburgh – unfurled before him. The draper’s shop above which he was born returned as 29 Ratcliffe Highway; the former tavern, The Dove and Olive Branch, which had been first Wordsworth’s and then De Quincey’s home returned as the King’s Head. His sister’s body behind the locked door re-formed itself as the massacred families; his precious Margaret ‘inoculated’ upon Mary Dawson – whose name he had hated since she barred the door to Dorothy Wordsworth – to become Mary Jewell, the sole survivor of the household wreck. Coleridge, whose genius lay ‘scattered like jewels on the highway’, reappeared as the murdered man; De Quincey’s lost brothers, William and Richard, his mentor, Wordsworth, his collaborator, John Wilson, and his nemesis, Napoleon Bonaparte – with whom he shared a birthday – inoculated upon one another to form the faceless figure of the suave, yellow-haired sailor-poet skulking through a city which might have been Bath, or Bristol, or Baghdad, or Manchester, or Liverpool, or Edinburgh, or Paris, or Pandemonium, or even one of Piranesi’s prisons; his object being to kill the former friend who lived on a street with almost the same name as De Quincey’s favourite novelist and which sounded like St Mary Redcliffe, the Gothic church in which Chatterton had unlocked the door to the room at the top of the stairs and invented an alter ego called Thomas Rowley.
And in his dream fugue, Kitty Stillwell – whose age De Quincey remembered as nine rather than fourteen – is at the forefront of the journeyman’s mind. A hard fact to swallow was that,
in his desperation to escape from the house, John Turner had forgotten all about her.
In a letter to Florence, De Quincey described this latest volume of his works as containing ‘one novelty, viz, an account of the murders perpetrated by Williams in 1812, which may a little interest you’. He had consistently misremembered the year of the Ratcliffe Highway slaughters, which was 1811. The difference between the two dates was crucial: in the spring of 1811 De Quincey had reached the peak of his intimacy with Wordsworth, who had lent him a copy of The Prelude. In the winter of 1811 he had taken an axe to the moss hut in the orchard, and relations between the two households had chilled; by the summer of 1812 he was sleeping on Catherine Wordsworth’s grave. The Ratcliffe Highway murders marked the point where De Quincey’s life broke in half: the figure of John Williams gazing through windows at household hieroglyphics and patting the head of the baby whose throat he was about to cut, represented De Quincey’s last guilty scene.
In the twenty-seven years since ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, De Quincey had approached the murders from the positions of Shakespearean critic, satirist, reporter, Gothic novelist and self-plagiarist. In ‘Postscript’ he told the story of John Williams from the position of biographer, and the figure he described was as freely invented as Chatterton’s Rowley. He had also imagined the murders from the perspectives of all the key players, and whenever De Quincey was depressed, John Findlay would cheer him up with a game called ‘What would the Baker say?’ In ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, was an account of the Mannheim baker who defended himself with his fists against his killer. Findlay and De Quincey, as Findlay put it, had ‘established a queer sort of freemasonry’ about this baker, who they saw as ‘quite free from shilly-shally – always decided in his views, and with a certain ready activity in expressing them’. The effect of Findlay’s question on De Quincey’s spirits ‘was perfectly magical. The drooping head was raised, the pallid face slowly wreathed into a half-aroused smile, which seemed to convey: “Well, that is a good idea. We have not yet considered what can be said and what can be done from that point of view.”’
Guilty Thing Page 40