Guilty Thing (50 page)

The Shepherd later confuses an ornate monologue on Edmund Burke's theory of fear with the fear generated by Burke, Hare and Knox.

De Quincey meanwhile, riding high on the success of ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts', wrote a follow-up. Again composed as a letter to William Blackwood, ‘XYZ' describes himself as having been in Germany at the time that his lecture appeared in ‘your far-famed journal' (in his haste, De Quincey had forgotten that in his original article XYZ was not the lecturer but the correspondent who sends Blackwood the transcript of the Williams Lecture). He invites Blackwood and Christopher North to join one of the banquets held by the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder: ‘
Pray do not be alarmed
by any superannuated old assassins who you may see lounging about our ante-chambers, for they are as good as muzzled.' It is the job of his servant, XYZ continues, to provide for his weekend's reading ‘the best murders that can be had in the public journals of the empire'. Should the newspapers fail him, copies of the
Newgate Calendar
and
God's Revenge against Murder
will do. And in the event of this servant wanting to do ‘a little in the murderous line' himself, his master explains that from murder ‘you will soon come to highway robbery, and from highway robbery it is but a short step to petty larceny. And when once you are got to
that
, there comes in sad progression Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and late hours; until the awful climax terminates in neglect of dress, non-punctuality, and general waspishness.'

Defending himself from accusations of nationalism by praising only English murder, XYZ singles out the case of William Coenen and Peter Fonk – ‘the most eminent German murder that has been produced for the last 50 years' – and the murder in Paris in 1720 of Jean Baptiste Savary. Savary, an ‘unmarried man of dissipated life', was slaughtered in his home by a man ‘of polished manners and elegant appearance', who had been admitted as a guest. His valet was then killed in the wine cellar, and his cook dispatched in the kitchen. The bludgeoned bodies were discovered ‘pretty much in the same way as in the case of the Marrs: a person called in the evening, and knocked long and loud for above a quarter of an hour'. The motive was apparently revenge, but the murderer, ‘an amateur of the finest genius', was believed to have been of such high rank that the affair was simply hushed up.
As far as the French were concerned, ‘the great Williams' owed everything to this Parisian murder: he was no more than a ‘filthy plagiarist'. The essay was rejected by Blackwood who evidently felt that the joke had run its course.

Leaving Gloucester Place, De Quincey moved with his children into lodgings on Pitt Street, on the coast of the Firth of Forth, where he injected his energies (to the tune of around eighty-five articles) into a Tory newspaper called the
Edinburgh Evening Post
, edited by a trio of hard-line Presbyterian ministers. The family then moved to Porteus's Lodgings, 19 Duncan Street, in the Newington area of the city, where Wilson described finding De Quincey one day dressed in an army coat four times too large for him, and with nothing on beneath. ‘You may see I am not dressed,' said De Quincey. ‘I did see it,' replied Wilson.

An unlikely friendship blossomed with the newly married Thomas Carlyle, whose German translations De Quincey had bludgeoned in a review for the
London Magazine
. He ‘
grew pale as ashes
at my entrance', Carlyle reported of their first encounter, ‘but we recovered him again'. De Quincey was ‘essentially a gentle and genial little soul', ‘washable away', whose present existence was as a ‘kind of “hostage” to his creditors'. The two of them should form, Carlyle suggested, a ‘Bog School' to counter the ‘Lake School'. ‘What wouldn't one give to have him in a Box,' exclaimed Jane Carlyle, ‘and take him out to talk!' When she questioned De Quincey's eldest son about his education, William explained that ‘his father wished him to learn [Greek] through the medium of Latin and he was not entered in Latin yet because his father wished to teach him from a grammar of his own which he had not yet begun to write'.

Placing Horace and Francis in school at Rydal, Margaret De Quincey, who had never before left her native mountains, now made the journey to Edinburgh with her two youngest children. Here, in the granite city, she became so unhappy that her life was thought to be in danger.

De Quincey's next piece for
Blackwood's
, an essay on ‘Rhetoric', was praised by Wordsworth who, despite noting that it contained ‘
some things from my Conversation
', reported to Crabb Robinson that it proved that ‘whatever [De Quincey] writes is worth reading'. The London
Athenaeum
considered it good enough to qualify De Quincey for the chair of logic at London University. The position, which De Quincey would have liked, was never offered, and in his ‘Sketch of Professor Wilson', written for the
Edinburgh Literary Gazette
in 1829, he made plain his opinion of his friend's philosophical credentials.

The ‘Sketch of Professor Wilson' is a summation of De Quincey's style as a biographer. Giving himself the central role, he focused on the opening scene in which he and Wilson were introduced by Wordsworth in the study used by Coleridge: one great literary partnership brought forth another. His description of Wilson's strapping physique was prefaced by a lengthy digression on his own dislike of physical descriptions; on one occasion De Quincey had been shocked to hear Coleridge describe a certain philosopher as ‘chicken-breasted'. Wilson's long strides and arched instep eventually received their due praise, along with his masterly management of a runaway bull. As for his features, Wilson's complexion ‘was
too florid
', his yellow hair was ‘of a hue quite unsuited to that complexion; eyes not good, having no apparent depth, but seeming mere surfaces'. His house at Elleray was a ‘silent commentary' on his ‘state of mind': ‘At first sight there was an air of adventurousness, or even of extravagance about the plan and situation of the building.' Of Wilson's academic credentials, the university presumably imagined ‘that they filled the chair with some peculiar brilliance'.

‘
I wish you would praise me
as a lecturer in Moral Philosophy,' Wilson complained to De Quincey when he read the first instalment. ‘That would do me good; and say that I am thoroughly logical and argumentative – for it is true, not a rhetorician, as fools aver.'

In February 1829, De Quincey returned to Grasmere. He had agreed to share the mortgage of The Nab with Margaret's father, John Simpson, who owed £900. De Quincey wanted to do something to make his wife happy, but it was a complex arrangement which left him paying interest on a mortgage of £1,400. His attitude to house ownership was relaxed: ‘
Paying only the annual interest
,' De Quincey wrote blithely to Charles Knight, who had expressed surprise at his friend's improved fortunes, ‘is what
I
do, can do, and will do.' Margaret reassured the lawyer guaranteeing the loan that: ‘from
the love that we all bear the place
there need be no doubt that we will all of us make any sacrifice rather than engender its loss'.

The eight De Quinceys squeezed into the farmhouse with the nine Simpsons, and Margaret gave birth to her seventh child, a boy called Julius. Taking with him a handful of his progeny, De Quincey decamped to Dove Cottage. He claimed during this time to have written a 400-page novel called
The New Canterbury Tales
, but such a thing was never published and nor has a manuscript been found. In May 1830, after a year of ‘milk, milk, milk – cream, cream, cream', De Quincey left his family behind and returned to Edinburgh for good.

At Rydal Mount, Dorothy had collapsed with intestinal pains and it seemed unlikely that she would survive. ‘Were she to depart,' said Wordsworth, ‘the phasis of my moon will be robbed of light to a degree that I have not courage to think of.' A version of her lived on, but she was no longer the exquisite Dorothy who De Quincey had known. She lost her mind, and for the next thirty years remained a prisoner inside her attic bedroom.

What role did Wordsworth now play for De Quincey? Both men had found fame: Wordsworth's was slow to arrive and De Quincey's had roared in against the tide like the hysterical River Dee. But while De Quincey had once been rich and Wordsworth poor, the Wordsworths now lived like country gentry and the De Quinceys starved. For want of any other occupation, little Johnny – these days stiffly addressed by De Quincey as Mr John Wordsworth – had become vicar of a parish in Leicestershire. Neither Johnny nor Willy were academically inclined, but Willy, according to his tutor, Hartley Coleridge, was ‘a bore'. Dora, Wordsworth's favourite child, replaced Dorothy as amanuensis and virgin sacrifice, and finding themselves unemployed, Dorothy and Sara referred to their home as ‘Idle Mount'.

Two letters to Wordsworth survive from this period, in both of which De Quincey apologises for having not received him when he called. In the first, sent from Fox Ghyll in 1823, he blames his ‘strange' behaviour on the ‘load of labour', and in the second, sent from The Nab in 1829, he blames a fever contracted on the mail-coach from Edinburgh. In both cases Wordsworth was evidently left standing outside while De Quincey cowered in a back room. The litanies of excuses recall those he employed in 1806, when he was dabbling in laudanum and postponing his first encounter with his hero. ‘Mr de Quincey, I am sorry to say admits no one on account of illness,' Wordsworth now explained, unaware that he had been dropped as a friend. ‘This grieves me much, as he is a delightful Companion and for weightier reasons, he has a large family of young Children with but a slender provision for them.' ‘
Father called on Mr de Quincey
the other evening but was not admitted,' wrote the more sensitive Dora, adding that De Quincey had promised to return the call, but his ‘tomorrow' has ‘not yet arrived'.

So Wordsworth's role for De Quincey had not changed. An object of terror to begin with, an object of terror he remained. The only difference was that after twenty years, Wordsworth was left knocking on the door.

Holyrood Abbey, where De Quincey lived like ‘the ghost of one whose body had not received the clod of earth to entitle it to rest in peace'.

13

Same Subject (continued)

                           . . . attired

In splendid clothes, with hose of silk, and hair

Glittering like rimy trees, when frost is keen.

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book Third

Apart from his friends and relatives and the relatives of his friends,
De Quincey owed money to fifty-one tradespeople
, including the tin-plate maker, the dance-master, the cobbler, the grocer, the poulterer, the cow-feeder, the brazier, the schoolmaster, the coalman, the confectioner, the glazier, and several booksellers and landlords. For debtors, Edinburgh was the best of towns and the worst of towns. The best because, by ancient Scottish law, Holyrood Abbey offered sanctuary to the pursued, and the worst because, also by ancient Scottish law, the debtor was first ‘put to the horn' – a public humiliation whereby, with three blasts of a horn, he was denounced in the market place as a rebel to the king. If he could not then satisfy his creditors, he faced imprisonment – or sanctuary. For De Quincey, who was put to the horn on nine occasions, Holyrood Abbey became a home.