On 15 February 1855, De Quincey added a sentence to the end of a cheerful letter to Florence: ‘On Tuesday last I saw the death announced of Miss Wordsworth at the age of eighty-four.’ This is all he writes on the subject; De Quincey had bid farewell to his impassioned Dorothy many years before.
In Lothian Street, the Opium-Eater had become as celebrated a magus as Coleridge on Highgate Hill. Disciples came from afar to witness his dreamlike voice and antiquated manners. One such figure recalled how, during a night walk, De Quincey ‘suddenly, casting a startled look behind, exclaimed, “My adversaries are in full chase of me; good-night”’. On another occasion, having been dragged out to dinner, De Quincey returned to his lodgings worse for wear and found himself locked out. He knocked and knocked, but failed to rouse the household. Climbing over a wall, he slept in a ditch. One night, concerned about his daughters, he dreamed that ‘a door opened: it was a door on the further side of a spacious chamber’. He ‘waited expectingly, not knowing what to expect. At length a voice said audibly and most distinctly, but not loudly – Florence and Emily, with the tone of one announcing an arrival. Soon after, but not immediately, entered Florence, but to my great astonishment, no Emily. . . A shadow fell upon me, and a feeling of sadness – which increased continually as no Emily entered at the door.’
Florence believed that her father’s luxurious love of excitement eventually became burdensome to him, and that he settled down in his later years ‘much like other people’. This was only relatively true. In 1856 another William was added to De Quincey’s roll call: a man called William Palmer was convicted of poisoning a man called John Cook. ‘Never for one moment have I doubted Palmer’s guilt,’ De Quincey announced in a long letter to Emily about the case, adding that ‘I would habitually say to such criminals. . . For your own peace of mind, I counsel you to confess.’ Preparing volume five of Selections: Grave and Gay, De Quincey was revising his own Confessions, which he allowed to grow to three times their natural size. Now, for the first time, he recorded his memories of the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s, of the ‘huge charging block of waters’ in the River Dee, and of the nameless woman who returned to the post office the bank draft for Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy. ‘I long for the rest of De Quincey,’ wrote Crabb Robinson, ‘and yet I neither love nor respect the man: I admire only the writer.’
In 1857 he became absorbed in the case of Madeline Smith, a pretty young lady from Glasgow on trial for poisoning her lover. ‘To me,’ De Quincey concluded, ‘it seems that from the very first Miss Smith has been cruelly treated.’ So Paget had been right about modern murder methods: poison was the prevailing style. This same year De Quincey visited Margaret in Ireland, crossing the sea for the second time in his life. The journey from Dublin to Lisheen was taken by train, where he ‘crept along at the tail of 666 wagons’. He now had a granddaughter – his ‘little Tipperary thing’ – the thought of whom gave him great pleasure. Florence had also become a mother, and was living in India where her husband, Colonel Baird-Smith, was involved in quelling a mutiny. ‘I have no heart now for any one thought but what concerns poor insulated Florence and her baby,’ De Quincey told Emily. Always terrified by the idea of India, every night he had the same dream: ‘a vision of children, most of them infants but not all, the first rank being girls of five or six years old, who were standing in the air outside, but so as to touch the window, and I heard, or perhaps fancied I heard, always the same dreadful word, Delhi’. He would wake to find himself standing ‘at the window, which is sixteen feet from the bed’. His nervous system had not suffered like this, De Quincey confessed, since ‘the summer of 1812’.
After 1858 he barely left the house. Working on the edge of a groaning table, with mountains of newspapers climbing the walls and the floor beneath him swamped, De Quincey completed the fourteenth volume of Selections: Grave and Gay. He was now receiving royalties from both the American and the British editions of his work: at last, his writing was making money.
Towards midnight on 7 December 1859, De Quincey began to lose consciousness. ‘Twice only was the heavy breathing interrupted by words,’ recorded Emily. ‘My dear, dear mother,’ he murmured; ‘Then I was greatly mistaken.’ Mrs Quincey had been right, after all, to insist that her wayward son remain at Manchester grammar. In the last few days, he had also remembered his father, ‘for a juster, kinder man never breathed’. This was one of the very few occasions that Emily had heard mention of her grandfather. Then, as the ‘waves of death rolled faster and faster over him’, Emily watched De Quincey rise from the ‘abyss’ and throw up his arms as if to greet a long lost friend: ‘Sister! Sister! Sister!’ he cried. Elizabeth had, as he knew she would, come to illuminate his final hour.
In another presentiment, recorded long before in his Confessions, De Quincey had declared that the ‘last cloudy delirium of approaching death’ would return him to Grasmere, where he would be reinstalled ‘in some chamber of that same humble cottage’. In bed, her father looked, thought Emily, ‘like a boy of fourteen’.
Thomas De Quincey, the last of the Romantics, died aged seventy-four on the forenoon of 8 December, exactly forty-eight years to the day after the wreckage of the Marr household at 29 Ratcliffe Highway. He was buried next to Margaret in the kirkyard of St Cuthbert’s, beneath the castle rock, and two bowshots from the statue of John Wilson in Princes Street Gardens.
*In several languages, ‘guilt’ and ‘debt’ are the same word.
The Tables Turned
‘May I quote Thomas De Quincey? In the pages of his essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” I first learned of the Ratcliffe Highway deaths, and ever since that time his work has been a source of perpetual delight and astonishment to me.’
Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
‘I wonder,’ said Jorge Luis Borges, ‘if I could have existed without De Quincey?’ Many people could not have existed without De Quincey. The last of the Romantics, in all other things he came first. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater spawned two genres: the recovery memoir, and what Terence McKenna has called the ‘pharmo-picaresque’ literary tradition. In 1822 the Confessions were translated into Russian, and in 1828 Alfred de Musset produced the first French ‘translation’, which he furnished with a further 5,000 words, including a section in which De Quincey rediscovers Ann of Oxford Street bejewelled in a ballroom, hanging on the arm of a baron. Musset’s version of the Confessions inspired the nightmarish programme music of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830), in which the despairing hero tries to poison himself with opium, only to suffer visions in which he believes he has murdered his beloved, been condemned to death, and witnesses his own execution and funeral, marked by a witches’ sabbath, and equally Balzac’s novella Massimilla Doni in 1837. Twenty years later Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater appeared in America: ‘And now, with time, space expanded also. The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.’ One hundred and thirty years on, in William Burroughs’s The Place of Dead Roads, Kim Carson ‘opens the door to go out of the druggist’s shop’ just as ‘some one comes in with a puff of fog and cold air. Boy about eighteen, angular English face. . . rather like the young De Quincey.’
Reading De Quincey, wrote Baudelaire, affected ‘my whole emotional and aesthetic orientation’ and he described, in his 1860 translation of Confessions in Les Paradis artificiels, the solipsism of the Opium-Eater as ‘an appalling marriage of man to himself’. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), the opium-addicted Ezra Jennings (a partial portrait of Collins himself) recommends the London passages of the ‘far-famed’ Confessions as an account of how a man can ‘occupy himself actively, and. . . move about from place to place under the influence of opium’. In his opium stupors, Jennings has hellish dreams. In one, ‘I was whirling through empty space with the phantoms of the dead, friends and enemies together. In another, the one beloved face which I shall never see again, rose at
my bedside, hideously phosphorescent in the black darkness, and glared and grinned at me.’ For Jean Cocteau in Diary of an Addict – based on his opium withdrawal in 1928 – ‘Opium is the woman of destiny, pagodas, lanterns.’
While the Confessions have ensured De Quincey’s cult status, his essays on murder anticipated our construction of, and obsession with, Jack the Ripper. Alfred Hitchcock, who modelled his own dandy killers on John Williams, described ‘On Murder’ as a ‘delightful essay’. Murder, Hitchcock counselled, was not the province of the ‘underworld thug’: it ‘should be treated delicately’, and ‘brought into the home where it rightly belongs’. Both Dickens and Dostoevsky – who went into exile with the Confessions in his pocket – used the motif of knocking as a way of entering their murderer’s minds. ‘Suddenly,’ Dostoevsky wrote of Raskolnikov, outside the money-lender’s flat in Crime and Punishment, ‘he heard the careful placing of a hand on the handle of the lock and the rustle of clothing close to the door and listening, just as he was doing outside it, holding her breath and probably with her ear to the door’. After murdering Tigg Montague in Martin Chuzzlewit, Jonas springs from the wood ‘as if it were a hell’. But it is no longer the wood that Jonas fears; his fear has diverted ‘to the dark room he had left shut up at home. He had a greater horror, infinitely greater, of that room than of the wood. . . His hideous secret was shut up in the room, and all its terrors were there; to his thinking it was not in the wood at all.’ Stopping at an inn for a glass of beer, he hears ‘a knocking within’. He imagines a similar knocking on the door ‘of that infernal room at home’, a knocking ‘which would lead to rumour, rumour to detection, detection to death. At that instant, as if by some design and order of circumstances, the knocking had come. It still continued; like a warning echo of the dread reality he had conjured up. As he could not sit and hear it, he paid for his beer and walked on again.’ In D. H. Lawrence’s short story, ‘The Prussian Officer’ (1916), the orderly, having murdered his captain after giving him a tankard of beer, hides out in the woods. Sequestered in some deep recess, he hears a knocking – ‘A great pang of fear went through his heart. Somebody was knocking.’ It is a bird tapping a branch, the ‘tap tap tap’ a sign that the pulses of life were beginning to beat again.
In ‘The Decay of Murder’, published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, Leslie Stephen impersonated De Quincey’s style to complain that the current spate of ‘intelligent’ detective fiction was like ‘a drug in the market’. For Oscar Wilde, there was ‘no essential incongruity between crime and culture’, and in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’, his essay on Thomas Griffin Wainewright, Wilde included among his subject’s artistic attributes his skills as ‘a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age’. The heroine of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler counsels Eilert Lovborg to commit suicide with artistic grace: ‘Do it beautifully’. In ‘Decline of the English Murder’, George Orwell complained that ‘you never seem to get a good murder nowadays’, and Jean-Paul Sartre included in Saint Genet a chapter called ‘On Fine Art Considered as Murder’. ‘The criminal kills,’ Sartre observed; ‘he is a poem; the poet writes the crime.’ In Nabokov’s Despair, Hermann Karlovich, who kills his doppelgänger (who in fact looks nothing like him), explains to the reader that ‘An artist feels no remorse, even when his work is not understood, not accepted.’ Truman Capote, in his ‘non-fiction novel’, In Cold Blood, describes how Perry Smith, who murdered the Clutter family in their home in Holcomb, Kansas, admitted that he had always wanted to make something artistic. ‘And now, what has happened?’ Smith says to Capote: ‘An incredible situation where I kill four people and you’re going to produce a work of art.’
Humbert Humbert’s observation in Lolita, that you can ‘count on a murderer for a fancy prose style’, is the perfect De Quinceyan epigram, and Virginia Woolf found in De Quincey’s fancy prose style a model for her own. The ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse – in which Woolf experiments with the expansion and contraction of time in the rooms of the now empty house – was composed alongside her essay on ‘Impassioned Prose’.
De Quincey’s dreams are hailed by Borges as ‘the best in literature’, and we return to his opium descent in Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole. In Wonderland, Alice drinks from a mysterious bottle similar to those found in apothecary shops, and talks to a caterpillar on a mushroom smoking a hookah. For J. G. Ballard, De Quincey was an inventor of dystopias; Crash might be seen as the twentieth-century equivalent of ‘The English Mail-Coach’.
For Baudelaire, De Quincey was the first flâneur; for Guy Debord, his mapping of the mind onto the movements of the city made him the original psychogeographer; for Iain Sinclair psychogeography began with De Quincey’s image of the north-west passage in Confessions.
As editor of The Westmorland Gazette, De Quincey anticipated our finest tabloid traditions, while an example of De Quinceyan memoirs might be Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Paul Theroux’s frank account of the breakdown of his relationship with V. S. Naipaul and Iris as I Knew Her, A. N. Wilson’s recollections of Iris Murdoch. De Quincey’s portrait, in the ‘Lake Reminiscences’, of Dorothy and William Wordsworth as impassioned, fervent and feral inspired Emily Brontë’s creation of Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights: the Brontës were avid readers of the Edinburgh magazines. His ‘Lake Reminiscences’ were also the blueprint for Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic Eminent Victorians, the biography that punctured our reverence for the past. ‘The first duty of the biographer,’ said Strachey, is ‘a becoming brevity. . . The second. . . is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them.’ It was from De Quincey that Lytton Strachey learned the fine art of character assassination.
‘For years,’ said Borges of Thomas De Quincey, ‘I thought that the almost infinite world of literature was in one man.’ But one almost infinite man, it seems, runs through a world of literature. We are all De Quinceyan now.
Notes
Abbreviations
Coburn – Kathleen Coburn (ed.), The Letters of Sara Hutchinson, 1800–1835, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954
‘Confessions’ – De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, in Barry Milligan (ed.), Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003
Diary – ‘Diary, 1803’ in Barry Symonds (ed.), Writings, 1799–1820: The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 1, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000
Eaton – Horace A. Eaton, Thomas De Quincey: A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936
Griggs – E. L. Griggs (ed.), Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–57
H. A. Page – H. A. Page, Thomas De Quincey, His Life and Writings, with unpublished correspondence, 2 vols, London: John Hogg and Co., 1877
Hogg – James Hogg, De Quincey and His Friends, Personal Recollections, Souvenirs and Anecdotes of Thomas De Quincey, His Friends and Associates, London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1895
Japp – Alexander H. Japp (ed.), De Quincey Memorials, Being Letters and Other Records Here First Published, 2 vols, London: Heinemann, 1891
Jordan – John E. Jordan (ed.), De Quincey to Wordsworth: The Biography of a Friendship, London: Cambridge University Press, 1962
Lindop – Grevel Lindop, The Opium Eater, London: J. M. Dent, 1981
‘Mail-Coach’ – De Quincey, ‘The English Mail-Coach’, in Milligan (ed.), Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Masson – David Masson (ed.), The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 13 vols, London: A & C Black, 1897
Middle Years – Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, The Middle Years, part 1, 1806–1811; part 2, 1812–1820, revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967
Morrison – Robert Morrison, The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 2009
‘New Paper’ – De Quincey, ‘A New Paper on Murder as a Fine Art’, in Robert Morrison (ed.), On Murder, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2006
‘On Knocking’ – De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in Morrison (ed.), On Murder
‘On Murder’ – De Quincey, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, in Morrison (ed.), On Murder
‘Postscript’ – De Quincey, ‘Postscript [to On Murder as One of the Fine Arts]’, in Morrison (ed.), On Murder
Recollections – David Wright (ed.), Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970
‘Second Paper’ – ‘Second Paper [on Murder as One of the Fine Arts]’, in Morrison (ed.), On Murder
‘Suspiria’ – ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, in Milligan (ed.), Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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