Guilty Thing (63 page)

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.”'

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.'