Guilty Thing (47 page)

Thurtell's posthumous confession,
A Warning from the Tomb, or J. Thurtell's Caution to the Youth of Great Britain
, was sold on the streets as a tale about the dangers of gambling; his skeleton was stored in the Royal College of Surgeons; his likeness was exhibited in Madame Tussaud's; his name turned up in novels by George Eliot, William Thackeray and Robert Louis Stevenson. Dickens was haunted by Thurtell (the murder of Montague by Jonas Chuzzlewit bears a striking resemblance to the murder of Weare), and a hundred years later the repetition of ‘Thurtell was a murdered man' was used in schools for handwriting practice.

De Quincey had written to James Hessey in November, remarking that ‘
the murder is a good one, as you observe
, and truly gratifying to every man of correct taste: yet it might have been better, if [Thurtell] would have thrown in a few improvements that I could have suggested – I speak
aesthetically
 – as the Germans say, of course: morally, it is a damnable concern. You must allow me to look at these things in 2 lights. Perhaps it is yet too recent to be looked at by the aesthetic critic.' Hessey clearly agreed. Edward Herbert, who covered the Thurtell story for the
London Magazine,
was not an aesthetic critic. His exhaustive report appeared in the issue for February 1824, following De Quincey's translation of ‘Analects of Jean Paul Richter'. ‘I fear you will have become heartily wearied of the names of Thurtell, Probert and Hunt,' Herbert began before noting how, apart from the solitary natures of the location and the victim, everything else associated with the crime – the ‘actors, the witnesses, the murderers, the merry party at the cottage. . . the gigs, the pistols, even the very knives, were in clusters!' The irrelevance of the observation inevitably found its way into the ‘Noctes' where the party in Ambrose's Tavern enjoyed a discussion of ‘Tims', as Herbert was named (Tobias Tims the barber is a recurring figure in the ‘Noctes') over a tripe supper.

‘Tims on Thurtell!!'
mocked Timothy Tickler. ‘What a most ludicrous thing it would have been had Thurtell assassinated Tims!. . . What small, mean, contemptible Cockney shrieks would he have emitted! 'Pon my honour, had Jack
bona fide
Thurtellised Tims, it would have. . . thrown such an air of absurdity over murder.' ‘That's ae way indeed,' replied the surly Shepherd, ‘o' making murder ridiculous. . . What kind o' a Magazine can that o' Taylor and Hessey be, to take sic writers as Tims? I hope they don't run in clusters.'

The clusters non sequitur was the cause of great mirth, and the response to Edward Herbert's praise of Thurtell's courtroom speech was unanimous: ‘Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!' ‘I dinna ken the time,' concluded the Shepherd, ‘I hae laucht so muckle.'

In a story written in 1838 called ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article', Edgar Allan Poe has the editor propose to a would-be contributor, Signora Psyche Zenobia, that she kill herself in order to describe ‘
the sensations
'. William Blackwood refers Miss Zenobia to an article called ‘The Dead Alive', which contains a record, ‘full of tastes, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition', of a man who was buried while still breathing: ‘You would have sworn,' he says admiringly, ‘that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin.' Alternatively, Blackwood suggests that she use as a model ‘The Man in the Bell', the record of the writer's ‘sensations' as he was driven slowly mad by the tolling of the church bell under which he was sleeping.

The Thurtell case allowed
Blackwood's
to indulge its love of the macabre. ‘
We are certainly a blood-thirsty people
,' noted Tickler, ‘and the scaffold has been mounted, in this country, by first-rate criminals.' Some of the more recent ‘malefactors', Christopher North agreed, included butlers ‘quite unaccountably' cutting the throat of their masters (a reference to the Duke of Cumberland case), magistrates throwing their wives over bridges and into coal pits, ‘blue-eyed young maidens' poisoning their families ‘with a mess of pottage' (in 1815, servant girl Eliza Fenning was hanged for putting arsenic in her employers' dumplings), and any ‘decent well-dressed person' you might meet on an evening stroll, who ‘after knocking out your brains with a bludgeon, pursues his journey'. Tickler noted the ‘beautiful variety of disposition and genius' which saved the ‘simple act of slaughter' from accusations of sameness. You might be killed by a knife, dagger, pistol, club, mallet, hatchet, or apothecary's phial; you might find yourself huddled out of a garret window, impaled on spikes, put in a hot oven, ‘gagged with a floor-brush till your mouth yawns like a barn-door', boiled in lime in your back court, cut up like bacon, and pickled, salted and barrelled. You might escape from ‘the murderer of the Marrs', Christopher North added, ‘through a common sewer'. The wonder of it all was ‘that in a country where murder has thus been carried to such a pitch of cultivation, its 14 million inhabitants would have been set agape and aghast by such a pitiful knave as Jack Thurtell killing and bagging one single miserable sharper'.

Amongst the nation's ‘first-class assassins' was Sarah Malcolm, who dispatched an entire household. ‘Sprightly and diligent, good-looking and fond of admiration', she would, Tickler mused, have made an admirable wife for ‘Gentleman Williams', who had been ‘pleasant with his chit-chat' and fond of children, patting ‘their curled heads with the hand that cut an infant's throat in the cradle'. Everyone who met Williams ‘delighted' in ‘the suavity of his smile. But in his white great coat – with his maul – or his ripping-chisel – or his small ivory-handled pen-knife, at dead of night, stealing upon a doomed family, with long silent strides, while at the first glare of his eyes the victims shrieked aloud “We are all murdered!” Williams was then a different being indeed, and in all his glory.'

In July 1824, De Quincey returned to London, determined to meet his deadlines and clear his debts. On arrival he purchased the inaugural copy of a journal called the
John Bull
which contained an anonymous article in which ‘the Opium-Eater' was lampooned as the ‘
Humbug of the Age
'. De Quincey was ‘a sort of hanger-on' of the ‘Lake School', a man so desperate for celebrity that he was prepared to present his own infirmities ‘for wonder or applause'. Referring to him as ‘Quincy', the author charged his subject with being ‘a humbug even to his name: he has no right whatever to the Norman De. His father was an honest shopkeeper, who lived and died Quincy, and his son might just as well designate himself Mr Quin Daisy as Mr De Quincy.' As for De Quincey's person: ‘conceive an animal about five feet high, propped on two trapsticks, which have the size but not the delicate proportions of rolling pins, with a comical sort of indescribable body and a head of the most portentous magnitude, which puts one in mind of those queer big-headed caricatures which you see occasionally from whimsical pencils. As for the face, its utter grotesqueness and inanity is totally beyond the reach of the pen to describe. . .'

De Quincey was presented as a second-rate show-off, a fake and a groupie. But most wounding were the references to Margaret, who was described as having been his ‘serving maid long before he married her'. ‘Quincy' was challenged to present the public with ‘an extract from his parish register, dating the birth of his eldest son, and also his marriage'. The author of the article was the Blackwoodsman William Maginn, and the source of his information was clearly John Wilson, the man from whom De Quincey had anticipated a ‘great & unexpiable injury'. The following month the libel was reprinted by the
Westmorland Gazette
's rival paper, the
Kendal Chronicle
, thus ensuring that Margaret De Quincey, currently suffering from depression, was also informed. Thus
Blackwood's
avenged itself on the Opium-Eater.

‘Do you live in Fox Ghyll?' Elizabeth Quincey asked her son in January 1825. ‘How many children have you?' Her own children were almost all lost to her, Henry having died aged twenty-six in 1819, the year before Mary died in childbirth and Richard disappeared at sea. Only Jane was still living at Westhay, where De Quincey now never came.

His mother might well have asked where he was living: still in London, De Quincey was sleeping – so his new friend Charles Knight, the former editor of a journal called
Knight's Quarterly
to which De Quincey had contributed, observed – under hayricks in Hampstead, ‘in retired doorways or upon bulkheads,
after the fashion of poor Savage the poet
'. One evening De Quincey met John Clare, a poet who ‘
studied for himself in the fields
, and in the woods, and by the side of brooks'. Clare noted the Opium-Eater's ‘little artless simple seeming body' stealing ‘gently among the company' at parties, hat in hand and ‘a smile turning timidly', looking ‘something of a child over grown in a blue coat and black neckerchief'. His dress, Clare said, was ‘singular'.

During these particularly rudderless London days De Quincey wrote an essay on a murder case which he described as ‘
amongst the most remarkable
events of our times'. In 1816 the battered corpse of William Coenen, from Enfield, was found in the River Rhine, and in 1822 a German spirits merchant called Peter Anthony Fonk was charged with his death. In a documentary account of the background to the case, De Quincey questioned Fonk's guilt. The English, German and French, he reflected, operate different systems of justice, but ‘it is possible that no system whatsoever would have sufficed to illuminate the guilty darkness of this transaction'. The essay, a sober piece of investigative journalism, was submitted but never published: Taylor and Hessey had left the
London
, and the new editor now dispensed with De Quincey's services.

With no income, De Quincey wrote some pieces for a paper called the
New Times
but the work fizzled out. ‘
To fence with illness
with the one hand,' he complained to Wilson in February 1825, ‘and with the other to maintain the war with the wretched business of hack author, with all its horrible degradations, – is more than I am able to bear.' He had nowhere to hide; he yearned to ‘slink into some dark corner' and ‘show my face to the world no more'. His abject state amused his fellow writers: referring to the booksellers, Payne and Foss, Lamb – famous for his puns – suggested the Opium-Eater ‘should have chosen as his publishers,
Pain
and
Fuss
'.

Charles Knight came to the rescue and gave De Quincey a room in his house on Pall Mall. Here he stayed, in great embarrassment, during the summer of 1825 while waiting for his mother to direct him some money. Knight described his ragged guest as ‘
constantly beset by idle fears
and vain imaginings' and ‘helpless' in relation to ‘every position of responsibility'. Not wanting to inconvenience the servants, De Quincey prefaced the smallest request with an apology of baroque elaboration.