1
Books
In memory of all books which lay
Their sure foundations in the heart of man
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Fifth
The first chapter of Thomas De Quincey’s life, according to the account he gave in his Autobiographic Sketches, came ‘suddenly’ to a ‘violent termination’ at noon on a midsummer’s day in 1792. It is typical of De Quincey’s sense of time that he marked his beginning by an event he described as an ending. The date was 3 June and he was six years old; his nine-year-old sister Elizabeth had died the day before, after drinking tea ‘in the house of a labouring man’ and walking back through a meadow ‘reeking with exhalations’. In De Quincey’s mind the tea and reeking exhalations resulted in hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, which explained what he saw as the swelling of her forehead. Hydrocephalus was thought to stimulate the intellect, but De Quincey would always believe that it was the other way around, that Elizabeth’s ‘intellectual grandeur’ brought on the hydrocephalus. His elder sister, he understood, died from excessive intelligence, a condition from which he also suffered.
De Quincey’s childhood home was a country mansion with a porticoed front door and three tall chimneys. It was built by Mr Quincey – the ‘De’ was not prefixed to the family name until 1797 – according to Mrs Quincey’s design, and was of a grandeur, De Quincey later noted, more suited to the fortune his father ‘was rapidly approaching than the one he actually possessed’. His mother was a ‘lady architect’, and Greenhay, as the house was called, was her coup d’essai. The De Quincey children grew up around stonemasons, carpenters, painters, plasterers and bell-hangers; while other women of her class busied themselves with gentler pursuits, Elizabeth Quincey demolished walls and improved views, expanded floors and widened windows. Thomas De Quincey was raised in a world of interiors.
Greenhay was the shell in which he nurtured his mind. He would never forget the layout of the house: there were two staircases; a grand flight at the front for the family, and a narrow set at the back for their servants. On the day in question, young Thomas waited until the maids were taking their lunch in the kitchen before creeping up the back stairs and down the corridor to the bedroom in which the body of his sister now lay. The room was locked but the key was in place; he turned it and entered, closing ‘the door so softly that, although it opened upon a hall which ascended through all the storeys, no echo ran along the silent walls’. Elizabeth’s bed, which had been moved from its usual position, now faced an open window through which ‘the sun of midsummer at mid-day was showering down in torrents of splendour’ onto her ‘frozen eyelids’. While Thomas stood gazing at the stiffening body, ‘a solemn wind began to blow – the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries.’ He fell into a reverie in which ‘a vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me…’
Hearing ‘a foot on the stairs’ the pulses of life began to beat again; Thomas kissed, for the last time, his sister’s marble lips and, lest he be discovered, ‘slunk, like a guilty thing, with stealthy steps from the room’. It was now that he lost his innocence: in Elizabeth’s bedroom De Quincey learned that ‘all men come into this world alone; all leave it alone’ – a hard lesson for a boy whose heart was ‘deeper than the Danube’. From this day forward he lived inside his sense of loss; there was ‘nothing on the stage but a solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief – a mighty darkness and a sorrow without a voice’. Many times since, De Quincey recalled, ‘on a summer day, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked on the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian but saintly swell: it is in this world the one audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life I have happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances, viz, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day.’
* * *
Few autobiographers have given us a more remarkable, or convoluted, childhood scene – part memory, part midsummer daydream, part opium reverie – or one that propels us more swiftly into the furnishings of their imagination. It is an example of what De Quincey called his ‘impassioned prose’, which takes flight mid-sentence, and what Baudelaire called De Quincey’s ‘naturally spiral’ way of thinking, his escalating up and down and circling around a line of associated ideas. What De Quincey describes is terror recollected in tranquillity; he always invested in the things that he feared, such as endless time and boundless space.
His vision occurred on the outskirts of Manchester, a prosaic setting for Aeolian intonations and Sarsar winds of death, but no more so than the ‘tree filled with angels … bespangling every bough like stars’ seen by the ten-year-old William Blake on Peckham Rye. The Manchester in which De Quincey was born was on the cusp of the industrial revolution; not yet the great Cottonopolis it would become in his lifetime, he knew it as a ‘gloomy’ town framed by ‘mud below’ and ‘smoke above’, whose only virtue lay in the philosophical interests of its inhabitants. Two such figures, Thomas Percival and Charles White – Manchester’s most respected physicians – attended De Quincey’s sick sister and then returned, the day after her death, to perform the post-mortem. This operation added a new dimension to De Quincey’s trauma. The men, with their cases of equipment, entered his sister’s room where they sawed through her skull and inspected the liquid deposits around the brain. Elizabeth’s angelic head had been violently attacked; the room in which De Quincey had glimpsed the vaults of heaven was now a chamber of horrors. Was he on one side of the door listening, while on the other side the doctors coolly performed their task? He would recall the paradisical period of childhood as the time in which we trod ‘without fear every chamber in [our] father’s house’, when ‘no door was closed’.
An hour after Percival and White had departed, he returned to the bedroom but found it locked and the key removed. De Quincey was ‘shut out forever’. This is his version of a paraclausithyron, meaning, from the Greek, ‘lament by a shut door’; the motif, employed in Greek and Augustan love elegies, was parodied in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Pyramus and Thisbe communicate through a crack in the wall.
During Elizabeth’s funeral, the small boy ‘sank back’ into his ‘own solitary darkness’ and heard nothing except ‘some fugitive strains from the sublime chapter of St Paul’: ‘But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept.’ He watched his sister’s coffin, with its record of her name, age and date of death, ‘dropped into darkness as messages addressed to worms’. Then came the work of the sacristan, with his shovel of earth and stones, and ‘immediately the dread rattle ascend[ed] from the lid’. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ‘and the grave, the coffin, the face are sealed up for ever and ever’. De Quincey’s solitude and grief aligned with religious intimations, and throughout July and August he sought out sequestered nooks in the house and grounds where he could absorb the ‘awful stillness’ of ‘summer noons’ with their windless ‘desert air’. Gazing into the skies for a sign of Elizabeth’s face he took to ‘shaping images in the distance out of slight elements’. On Sundays, the family attended a church ‘on the old and natural model of England, having aisles, galleries, organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions majestic’. Here, unwatched, he wept in silence at the passage on children and the sick and when the organ ‘threw its vast columns of sound over the voices of the choir’ he raised his ‘streaming eyes to the upper windows of the galleries’. Through the storied glass, when the sun was shining, he saw clouds shaped as beds in ‘chambers of the air’ on which children lay ‘tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for death’. De Quincey was always drawn to what he called cloud architecture, and later claimed Wordsworth as the poet of the sky’s grand pageants.
He also had a lifelong love of majestic churches. In his dreams he returned to the aisles and galleries of this ancient building, to the swelling anthems of the funeral, ‘the burst of the Hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling movement of the choral passion, the agitation of my own trembling sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the wrath of the organ’, followed by ‘the priest in his white surplice waiting with a book by the side of an open grave’, and the sacristan waiting with his shovel.
* * *
Doctors Percival and White, both notable figures in the rich cultural, scientific and intellectual life of the town, were friends of De Quincey’s father. Percival was co-president of the renowned Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society; White was vice-president, and Quincey senior was a founding member. The ‘Lit & Phil’ was composed of prominent Mancunian industrialists, engineers, doctors and intellectuals who would gather to discuss matters of natural philosophy, law, literature, education and advances in chemistry and science.
Dr P, as De Quincey referred to Thomas Percival, was ‘a man, of elegant tastes and philosophic habits’ who exchanged ideas with Voltaire. He was instinctively distrusted by De Quincey’s practical and evangelical mother, who associated philosophers with infidels, and her dislike was fuelled by Percival’s habit of reading aloud extracts from his erudite correspondence. She was bored by the society of Northern philosophers, but Thomas was captivated by Dr P, who had written a collection of improving fables for children called A Father’s Instructions, a copy of which he had given to Thomas and Elizabeth. De Quincey had never before met the author of a book he admired.
De Quincey’s life imitated art in the fullest sense, and his need to read was, as he put it, ‘absolutely endless and inexorable as the grave’. He read voraciously, ravenously, for seventy years, creating layer upon layer of fictitious memory. In The Prelude, which De Quincey first read in manuscript form, Wordsworth celebrated ‘all books which lay / Their sure foundation in the heart of man’, and the foundations of De Quincey’s most significant moments can be found in novels, poems, plays, travelogues and works of philosophy. His reading provided a guide through the maelstrom of consciousness; it gave a shape to shapeless events, and a meaning to those things – such as death – that he found terrifying in their random cruelty. Because he used the inside of a book to make sense of the outside world his experiences might be seen as only half-true, but the relationship between fact and fiction was, for De Quincey, complicated. Again and again we find, in the books he loved, accounts of the events which formed him. For example in Titan, written by his second favourite novelist, the German Romantic Jean Paul Richter, is a description of the death of a girl which is identical in atmosphere to De Quincey’s description of the death of his sister Elizabeth. Titan’s heroine, Liana, dies by an open window through which ‘the golden sun gushed through the clouds’, and ‘suddenly the folding doors of an inspired concert-hall flew open, and outswelling harmonies floated by’. For De Quincey, reading was less an escape from reality than a perilous journey to the truth, as potentially devastating as opium itself. Before he discovered drugs, it was through books that De Quincey sought to find a route back to his original self, to the person he was before Elizabeth’s death.
Accordingly, he was possessed by the power of writers and the first writer to lodge himself in De Quincey’s psyche was Thomas Percival. The impression made on him by A Father’s Instructions ‘was deep and memorable: my sister wept over it and wept over the remembrance of it, and later carried its sweet aroma off with her to heaven’. Percival’s tales, set in a contemporary Manchester which contained elements of ancient Greece, were principally about animals, the force of maternal affection, the importance of filial gratitude, and the racial superiority of Europeans. In one story, a country boy knowing nothing of life beyond his family home goes to Manchester to see an exhibition of wild beasts and is mesmerised by a Blakean tiger of sublime ‘symmetry’; another is set on a heavenly June day when the ‘clouds were dispersed, the sun shone with unusual brightness’ and ‘verdure of the meadows … regaled every sense’. Once absorbed into his imagination where they marinated for decades, these tales stalked De Quincey’s own writings.
In addition to being the family doctor, Charles White was an enthusiastic craniologist who passed on to De Quincey – whose own skull, in contrast to his tiny body, was enormous – his belief that the shape and size of the head was an indication of intellect. Elizabeth’s head, White pronounced, was ‘the finest … in its development of any he had ever seen’ and her brain ‘the “most beautiful”’, which confirmed – or formed – De Quincey’s view of her as a superior being. ‘For its superb developments,’ De Quincey proudly recorded, his sister’s skull ‘was the astonishment of science’. Lord over life and death, Charles White was fascinating to De Quincey, who compared him to ‘some mighty caliph, or lamp-bearing Aladdin’. Of all his childhood books, Arabian Nights was De Quincey’s touchstone; his Manchester was less like ancient Greece than an Arab city. White had turned a room of his own house into a museum of medical curiosities consisting of body parts which he used to illustrate his lectures, and when De Quincey came here as a child it was he who was Aladdin, entering the magic cave.
‘Memories are killing’, said Samuel Beckett, and De Quincey, for whom there was no such thing as forgetting, believed himself cursed by memory; his mind was a palimpsest on which ‘every chaos’ was ‘stamped’ and ‘arrayed in endless files incapable of obliteration’. Jorge Luis Borges based his story ‘Funes the Memorious’ on De Quincey’s ghastly condition. Following a fall on his head, Funes can remember everything he ever saw and everything that ever happened to him. He remembers the shape and movement of every cloud, and the crevice and moulding of every house. Aged nineteen, Funes’s face is ‘more ancient than Egypt’.
De Quincey saw, standing in a clock case in Charles White’s museum, the embalmed and mummified body of a woman called Hannah Beswick, alongside which hung the skeleton of the highwayman, Thomas Higgins. There is a peculiar horror to the sight of a dead body standing upright, and De Quincey would later find his appalled reaction to this sight caught in the fifth book of Wordsworth’s Prelude, which is entitled ‘Books’. The poet recalls how, roaming the margins of Lake Esthwaite as a child, he saw a boat of men ‘with grappling-irons and long poles’ sounding the water. ‘At length’ from the depths ‘bolt upright rose’ a dead man. His face was ‘ghastly’, a ‘spectre shape’ of ‘terror’. Wordsworth claims to have felt ‘no vulgar fear’ because his ‘inner eye’ had ‘seen such sights before among the shining streams of fairyland’, but he is at his least convincing when he talks about fairyland. The tension with which he controls the scene suggests that in his terror Wordsworth became himself as rigid as the corpse.
De Quincey always remembered the stories attached to bolt-upright bodies. Hannah Beswick, born in 1688, developed a fear of being buried alive after her brother, pronounced dead, had opened his eyes when his coffin lid was being nailed down. The doctor who attended the unfortunate man – who then lived on for many years – was Charles White, and Hannah Beswick paid White £25,000 to ensure that, once her own body appeared to have expired, he keep it above ground and check it daily for signs of life. White was true to his word, and after her death, aged seventy, Hannah Beswick’s unburied corpse became known as the Manchester Mummy. Fascinated by the resurrection (he knew by heart ‘the great chapter of St Paul’, which was read at his sister’s funeral), De Quincey was doubtless also fascinated by the idea of Elizabeth herself being still alive on the other side of the bedroom door, while Percival and White cut open her head and then bandaged it up like a mummy.
‘Highwayman’ Higgins, as he was known around Manchester, had been in life a night-rider of gallantry and elegance. He was also, according to De Quincey, a ‘noonday murderer’ who was believed to have slaughtered a wealthy widow and her servant in their Bristol home. His guilt was never proved but in a typical flight of fancy De Quincey later imagined, in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, Highwayman Higgins pulling woollen stockings over the hoofs of his horses to muffle their clatter when he returned from his two-day journey from Bristol to Manchester, his pockets filled with the dead woman’s gold. Higgins was hanged, but, Thomas learned, his body was cut down prematurely and when it arrived at the surgeon’s table to be dissected, he too had not yet quite expired. A medical student was required to finish the job by plunging a knife into the still-beating heart.
Locked doors, open windows, footsteps on the stairs and guilty figures slipping away; midsummer days, Arabian Nights, echoing churches, damaged skulls and writers wielding knives: the death of Elizabeth stood at the centre of a vast web of associations for De Quincey. The summer of 1792 was the fair seed-time of his childhood, and he described his character as taking root in this strange soil.
* * *
Beyond the walls of the house, the country was responding to events in France. Three years earlier, the fall of the Bastille had been welcomed as the overthrow of absolutism and slavery. ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the World! & how much the best!’ cried Charles James Fox, leader of the opposition. ‘With freedom, order and good government,’ cautioned William Pitt, leader of the government, ‘France would stand forward as one of the most brilliant Powers in Europe; she would enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate.’ But order quickly broke down. In 1791 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had fled Versailles and were placed under guard in a Paris prison. The French National Assembly was dissolved and a legislative assembly established. Three months before the death of little Elizabeth Quincey, France had declared war on Austria and Prussia and it was now widely feared that Britain would be drawn into the hostilities. France was declared a republic, and Louis XVI was put on trial. English newspapers were filled with French horror stories from across the Channel – mob rule, mountains of carcasses, massacres in the Tuileries, massacres in the prisons. In late January 1793 the king was executed: regicide was open season. The Revolution had become the Terror. Dehumanised in France, the British turned Louis into a hero facing death with fortitude: his last night on earth was reconstructed by the British press as a tender domestic moment in which the noble king instructed his fainting wife and weeping children in the will of God. The following October, Marie Antoinette was also guillotined: in the French royal family, De Quincey found his first example of a household wreck. On 1 February 1793, France declared war on England.
* * *
Thomas De Quincey was the fourth of eight children. The eldest, William, was probably born in 1782; Elizabeth was born in 1783 and died, as we know, aged nine; Mary was born in 1784, a year before Thomas himself, who was born on 15 August 1785 and was therefore a Leo. (Lions would play a rich part in his imaginative life, and one of De Quincey’s earliest dreams was of lying down before one.) Jane, who arrived in 1786, died aged three; Richard, known as ‘Pink’, appeared in 1789, to be followed by a second girl called Jane, and finally, in 1793, a boy eight years younger than Thomas, called Henry. The death of the first Jane, two years before Elizabeth, was ‘scarcely intelligible’ to Thomas – ‘summer and winter came again … Why not little Jane?’ – and in his Autobiographic Sketches he described her as his older and not his younger sister; De Quincey evidently believed himself to be his mother’s fifth and not her fourth child. More disturbing to Thomas, then aged four, than the mystery of his position in the family, or of Jane’s current whereabouts, was the rumour that went around the house that she had been treated cruelly by the servant who was nursing her. The effect on him of this suggestion was ‘terrific … the feeling which fell upon me was a shuddering horror, as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife’.
For Thomas, birthdays, anniversaries and the dates of deaths would always be of great significance. His future editor, David Masson, who was introduced to him in the 1840s, remembered De Quincey’s animated response to hearing that it was the birthday of another of the guests in the room: ‘“O,” he exclaimed, “that is the anniversary of the battle of So-and-So”; and he seemed ready to catch as many birthdays as might be thrown him on the spot, and almanac them all round in a similar manner from his memory.’ Also born on 15 August, sixteen years before Thomas himself, was Napoleon Bonaparte. Sharing a birthday can be both a bonding and a threatening experience, implying that we are in some ways twinned with that other person, destined to progress along parallel lines. Sharing his birthday with a man simultaneously regarded as a murderer, a genius, a usurper and a hero could only increase De Quincey’s sense of destiny, and Bonaparte’s presence as a nemesis would shadow his life.
* * *
‘What is to be thought of sudden death?’ De Quincey asked in his most famous essay, ‘The English Mail-Coach’. Suddenness fascinated him: ‘Wonderful it is to see the effect of sudden misery, sudden grief, or sudden fear … in sharpening the intellectual perceptions,’ he wrote, and sudden death was a subject about which he had thought a great deal. The French king and queen had died suddenly, and at the hands of the lower classes. Did Thomas think that Jane had been killed by her violent nurse? He certainly associated Elizabeth’s death with the visit, also in the care of a servant, to the house of the servant’s father; and another of his earliest memories involved saving ‘fugitive’ spiders from the angry broom of a bloodthirsty housemaid, who stopped his campaign of salvation by telling him ‘of the many murders that the spider had committed and next (which was worse) would commit if reprieved’. Servants would always play an important role in his internal dramas, but however De Quincey understood Jane’s death, his grief had remained hidden like stars in the daylight until he found himself standing by Elizabeth’s bedside.
His parents, also called Thomas and Elizabeth, had married in 1780 in Queen Square, London, at the heart of Bloomsbury. His mother’s people, the Pensons, were a cut above his father’s: she came from a military family and both her brothers served with the East India Company in Bengal. Elizabeth Penson was a snob; the ‘De’ in ‘De Quincey’ was an affectation she added as a widow in order to keep up appearances; her husband would have disapproved of such a flourish. De Quincey’s father, known as Thomas Quincey, was another upright figure – a friend described him as being ‘the most upright man I ever met with in my life’. Quincey started his working life as a draper in London’s Cheapside before moving in 1780 to the burgeoning industrial centre of Manchester where, on a steep, half-timbered road called Market-Street Lane (under where the Arndale shopping centre now stands), he opened a shop selling ‘printed Linens, Musslins, Furnitures, and other Cottons’. It was in a room above the shop that Thomas came into this world. He was keen to pin down for his readers the precise ‘tier in the social scaffolding’ occupied by his family: the Quinceys belonged to the urban middle-classes. By the time Thomas was born, his father had made the decision to exchange retail for importing Irish linen and West Indian cotton, and he was therefore a merchant and no longer a draper. While his children may have grown up in ‘circumstances of luxury’, with servants and underservants who were maintained, because his father was a moral man, in even more ‘luxury’, the family were not, De Quincey stressed, ‘emphatically rich’. They might have become so had Thomas Quincey not been, unusually for a trader in the West Indies, a ‘conscientious protester’ against slavery, and had he not died aged forty from tuberculosis.
Soon after De Quincey’s birth the family moved from Market-Street Lane to a larger house on the outskirts of the city. It was called The Farm, and described by De Quincey in Wordsworthian terms as ‘a pretty rustic dwelling’. It was then fashionable for the homes of the elite to include a greenhouse, later known as an orangery or conservatory, and Mr Quincey’s ‘daily pleasure’ lay in his books, his garden and his greenhouse. A sickly child, Thomas was lovingly nursed; he was always drawn to the nurturing qualities of women and, a lifelong hypochondriac, he never tired of describing, in baroque detail, the malfunctions of his body. Of the memories which date back to this time, the most powerful was his father’s illumination of the house in 1789, when King George III recovered from his first attack of madness.
When Thomas was six the Quinceys moved to ‘Greenhay’, whose substantial greenhouse formed ‘the principal room’ for family life. By then he had seen so little of his father that he doubted whether he ‘would have been able to challenge me as a relative; nor I him, had we happened to meet on the public roads’. Mr Quincey’s work, together with the weakness of his lungs, meant that his days were increasingly spent in warmer climes: ‘he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra, next in Madeira, then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in St Kitts’, wrote De Quincey, who would never travel further than Ireland. Thomas Quincey senior’s membership of the Literary and Scientific Society, which he joined in the year that he moved to Manchester, suggests that he was held in high esteem by men of learning. He kept a small collection of Italian Renaissance paintings and a growing library; his favourite authors were Cowper and Dr Johnson. His reverence for them was such, De Quincey said, that had these great men visited Greenhay, his father ‘might have been tempted to express his homage through the Pagan fashion of raising altars and burning incense’. Thomas would share his father’s veneration for writers. Two aspects of the household library later struck him as significant: the first was that his father’s books were all in English, and the second was that he had nothing from the ‘Black Letter’, or Gothic script, period, which spanned the twelfth to the seventeenth century. It was a book collection, De Quincey concluded, for the purposes of ‘instant amusement’ as opposed to prolonged study.
Aged twenty-three, Quincey senior had written a book of his own, a topographical study called A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England, Performed in the Summer of 1772, which had previously been published in five parts in the Gentleman’s Magazine. It was by reading his father’s accounts of the state of draining, mining, farming and manufacturing in the Midlands that De Quincey later came to know something of the man, and his own first book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which similarly began its life as magazine instalments, would also describe a short English tour.
De Quincey’s chief memory of his father was of learning, aged seven, that he was coming home from the West Indies to die. The invalid was expected on a summer evening of ‘unusual solemnity’ and the children and servants had assembled on the front lawn to greet his carriage. The experience was recorded by De Quincey as a ‘chorus of restless images’: sunset came and night fell; still they stood listening for the sound of the wheels which, because the house was isolated and the roads empty, would be heard from a distance. As midnight approached, the silent party walked up the lane where, out of the gloomy stillness, horses’ heads slowly appeared; the carriage was moving at such a hearse-like pace that the wheels made no sound at all. Inside, against a ‘mass of white pillows’ lay ‘the dying patient’. Were it not for ‘the midsummer night’s dream which glorified his return’, De Quincey would not have remembered his father at all.
Mr Quincey’s life exhaled in July 1793, a year and one month after the death of little Elizabeth and six months after the beheading of the French king. From now on De Quincey would always associate the sting of death with ‘the endless days of summer’. Summer deaths, he suggested, were more affecting than winter deaths because the heavens were more distant, ‘more infinite’, and the clouds seemed grander and ‘more towering’.
Mrs Quincey inherited the house – which her husband advised her not to sell until prices had risen – plus half the income that would come from the sale of his businesses, a share in the New Linen Hall in Chester, and a share in a ship called the Isabella Brigantine of Drogheda. The total income at her disposal was £1,600 a year. It was a fair sum; not Mr Darcy’s ten thousand but enough to ensure the family’s comfort. When the boys reached twenty-one they would receive a patrimony of their own, and until then their moral and financial welfare was left in the care of four unbending guardians: a clergyman, a magistrate, a merchant and a banker, named, respectively, Samuel Hall, James Entwhistle, Thomas Belcher and Henry Gee.
Like a stage direction, his father’s exit was followed by the arrival back from school of De Quincey’s ‘horrid pugilistic’ eleven-year-old brother, William, whom he also barely knew. William is given more space by far in the Autobiographic Sketches than the adored Elizabeth, who features only as a corpse. All we know of Elizabeth in life is that she read books, drank tea and fell ill, while William – a rider of ‘whirlwinds’ and director of ‘storms’ – is endowed with many dimensions in page after page of vividly recalled, rolling anecdote. The role played by his older brother was of profound significance to Thomas, who always ‘had a sort of feeling, or omen of anticipation, that possibly there was some being in the world who was fated to do him … a great and irreparable injury’. The identity of this being would shift with the years, but in the nursery it was William. Not yet at school, Thomas had no knowledge of children other than his own siblings, and William was the only boy he knew who had seen the world beyond Greenhay. An excessively energetic child, family lore put William Quincey down as a disrupter of the peace and Mrs Quincey sent him away at the first opportunity. School only nurtured his love of conflict, and by the time William returned home he ‘would have fastened a quarrel upon his own shadow for presuming to run before him’.
William despised Thomas, and Thomas had ‘a perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing.’ This pertinent observation goes to the heart of De Quincey’s nature. He also had a craze for being afraid, which was fed by William on a nightly basis. Between the ages of seven and twelve, De Quincey was dominated by his brother. He pictured himself, under William’s tyrannical rule, as an ‘Irish hodman’ running up and down a ‘vast Jacob’s ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league’, trying to reach the ‘top of any Babel’ his assailant might ‘choose to build’. Whether he was seeking the face of his dead sister or keeping up with the demands of his living brother, De Quincey saw himself as a figure on a perpetual staircase.
William, he said, was a ‘tiger’. He was everything that Thomas was not: William was masculine while Thomas was, as he put it, ‘effeminate’; William was wilful, athletic, bossy, noisy and boisterous while Thomas was fragile and introverted. Unlike Thomas, William ‘detested all books excepting only such as he happened to write himself’, one such work being ‘How to raise a Ghost; and when you’ve got him down, how to keep him down’. There was seemingly nothing that William could not do and he ruled over the nursery like a sorcerer. Literally so: William practised necromancy, ‘legerdemain’ – or sleight of hand – and ‘thaumatology’, the study of miracles. As well as magic and illusion, he fascinated his siblings with lectures on natural philosophy and displays of pyrotechnics; to demonstrate the laws of physics he strapped cats into parachutes and dropped them from great heights. He boasted that he could walk on the ceiling like a fly and blamed his failure to do so on the friction from the plaster of Paris; if the ceiling were coated with ice, he insisted, it would be different. He then constructed an apparatus for getting himself launched like a humming-top in the hope that he could ‘spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis – perhaps he might even dream upon it’. These performances only ended after one of his sisters orchestrated a mutiny, at which point William devoted himself to the writing and production of a bloody tragedy in which his siblings were all massacred in the first act.
His next project was to form an army with Thomas as a foot soldier, and to wage a two-year-long war with the boys who worked in the cotton factory which lay between Greenhay and the city of Manchester. De Quincey had a country childhood but one in which the city, a place of speed, mayhem and blank anarchy, loomed large as an alternative, more dangerous, life form. Twice a day, on either side of a road called Oxford Street (a name with great significance in De Quincey’s narrative), the opposing sides hailed stones at one another. It was a re-enactment of events in France, with Oxford Street as the cordon sanitaire dividing the gentrified De Quincey brothers from the sans-culottes who were ‘slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally neglected, and always covered in flakes of cotton’. William and Thomas, dressed by their mother in hessian boots and trousers – the latter garment being ‘at that time unheard of except amongst sailors’ – were mocked as ‘bucks’, which Thomas thought preferable to being labelled either cowards, thieves or murderers. But William considered the term an insult. On one occasion when he was taken prisoner of war, De Quincey, not a natural warrior, fell into the hands of a group of factory girls by whom he was petted; he was subsequently placed ‘under arrest’ by his brother for not performing his regimental duties. On these occasions his bedroom became a prison. During one period of incarceration he pictured a visit from one of his guardians:
Guardian. – What is this I hear, child? What are you fretting about?
I. – Because I’m under arrest.
Guard. – Arrest! Nonsense! Who could put you under arrest? A child like you? Who was it?
Peace did not return to De Quincey’s life until William, who had shown evidence of a talent for drawing, was sent to London to be apprenticed – in return for a fee of 1,000 guineas – to one of Europe’s most successful artists, Philippe de Loutherbourg, who had been shown some of the boy’s sketches. It was an ideal pairing of master and pupil: Loutherbourg, who was also an illusionist, occultist, engineer, scientist and faith-healer, specialised in creating stage effects for London theatres and had designed scenery and lighting for David Garrick. He was also an artist at the forefront of the apocalyptic sublime, and his invention of the ‘Eidophusikon’, a mechanical theatre, six foot by eight, was one of the sights of London. A precursor of the cinema, the Eidophusikon’s most famous production, in 1782, was a Gothic movie scene from Paradise Lost showing a bronze city apparently composed of incombustible flames, entitled Satan arraying his troops on the banks of the Fiery Lake, and the rising of the Palace of Pandemonium. Coloured lights, sound effects, three-dimensional models and clockwork automata produced a spatialising of sin terrifying to the audience who came to look at the fallen angel and the hell that was within him.
Before breakfast on the day that William left Greenhay, a ‘most splendid’ day in a ‘splendid June’, the children were once again gathered on the front lawn of the house. Running alongside the garden was a brook with a bridge and a gate; De Quincey, constrained, as ever, by his brother’s exuberance, stood alone by the running water while his siblings spun around their leader on the grass. The sound of their play was broken suddenly by the roar of a mob in the direction of Oxford Street, and a large dog ‘suddenly wheeled into view’. Barred from the garden by the closed gate and the brook, the dog – foam oozing from his mouth, his eyes ‘glazed, and as if in a dreamy state’ – stopped in his tracks and looked directly at De Quincey, whose sympathy went out to the persecuted dreamer. The mob, wielding pitchforks, then appeared in view and the pariah took off; the pursuit continued for a further twenty-four miles, ending only when the ‘deranged’ creature was eventually run over by a cart. The threshold moments in De Quincey’s life were often accompanied by an image of disaster hurtling in his direction; separation from William and narrowly avoiding being mauled to death by a rabid dog blended into a seamless story: ‘freedom won and death escaped, almost in the same hour’.
Without William to stand in his way, Thomas’s own greatness would now shine. Another chapter had closed on another midsummer day. It was now the start of what he called ‘a new book’.
* * *
De Quincey’s mother provided the first enigma for the boy whose world was composed of signs and symbols. Described by her son as a handsome but ‘freezing’ figure who ‘delighted not in infancy, nor infancy in her’, Elizabeth Quincey was a stickler for order and hierarchy. From a military family, she addressed her servants only through the intermediary of the housekeeper, and her presence was compared by a housemaid to that of a ghost. Distant, unyielding and holy as a nun, every day for six years Mrs Quincey had her children ‘roll out’ of their nursery ‘as mail-coaches go down daily to London’, in order that she might inspect their appearance, from back posture to skin pallor. ‘Were the lamps of our equipage clean and bright? Were the linch-pins secured?’ Before pronouncing them ‘to be in proper trim’ she performed ‘two ceremonies that to us were mysterious and allegorical’: she sprinkled the hair and faces of each with lavender water and milk of roses, and bestowed on their foreheads a single kiss. For the rest of his life De Quincey pondered the significance of these rituals.
There are many indications, however, of Elizabeth Quincey’s softer side, not least the pet name of ‘Pink’ given to her son Richard as a tribute to his prettiness. She also had a weakness for fashion and her children were paraded in the latest styles. De Quincey did not share his mother’s concern with appearances but he inherited other characteristics and interests, including her restlessness and enthusiasm for houses. She also implanted in him, in a tale about nearly drowning as a child, an image that would return in his opium dreams. As his mother came near to death, ‘a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act – every design of her past life lived again – arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence … her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.’
Mrs Quincey’s primary legacy to her children was a sense of guilt: ‘Trial by jury, English laws of evidence, all were forgotten; and we were found guilty on the bare affidavit of the angry accuser.’ De Quincey grew up believing himself to be a great criminal; not only must he be responsible in some way for the catalogue of ills which had befallen his family, he was also to blame for his precocity and for any praise his intelligence might receive. ‘Usually mothers defend their own cubs right or wrong,’ he remembered. ‘Not so my mother.’ Should a visitor or a tutor compliment one of her progeny, Mrs Quincey, rather than flushing with maternal pride, would protest ‘so solemnly … that we children held it a point of filial duty to believe ourselves the very scamps and refuse of the universe.’
Soon after his sister Elizabeth’s death, Thomas began to receive pocket money. It was a generous amount, too large, he thought, for a boy his age, and he spent it in the local bookshop. He could never have enough books. ‘Had the Vatican, the Bodleian, and the Bibliothèque du Roi all been emptied into one collection for my private gratification, little progress would have been made in this particular craving.’ A regular customer, he soon found himself owing the bookseller, evidently touched by the earnestness of the child, three guineas. The debt unleashed in Thomas a great panic; ‘deep anxiety now began to oppress me as to the course in which this mysterious (and indeed guilty) current of debt would finally flow. For the present it was frozen up; but I had some reason for thinking that Christmas thawed all debts whatsoever, and set them in motion towards innumerable pockets. Now my debt would be thawed with all the rest; and in what direction would it flow? There was no river that would carry it off to sea…’ He dragged his anxiety behind him like a ball and chain.
At the same time as he feared drowning in bottomless debt, Thomas ordered from the bookseller a multi-volume history of ocean navigation. This inspired a new fear: given ‘what a huge thing the sea was’ and the number of men and ships ‘eternally running up and down it’, the parts of such a work would surely themselves reach ‘infinity’. In a fresh panic about the size of his purchase, he took himself with pounding heart to the bookshop to ask ‘how many volumes did he think it would extend to?’ The answer he was given would determine for the seven-year-old boy ‘whether for the next two years I was to have an hour of peace’. But instead of speaking to the kindly bookseller he knew, De Quincey was served by an unknown assistant who mocked his anxiety. ‘How many volumes? Oh! Really I can’t say. Maybe a matter of 15,000, be the same more or less.’ ‘More?’ Thomas said in horror, imagining ‘supplements to supplements’ in a series which ‘might positively never end’. In addition to the three guineas he already owed, the payments for this never-ending series would themselves never end – they would ‘stretch to the crack of doom’. De Quincey had a vision of being trapped in a lifetime of rapidly accelerating debt and eventually hanging from the end of a rope, like Highwayman Higgins.
As the fantasy took hold he imagined a knock ‘at the front door’ of Greenhay, and a wagoner with ‘a bland voice’ on the step announcing a delivery for him. ‘Looking out, I should perceive a procession of carts and wagons, all advancing in measured movements; each in turn would present its rear, deliver its cargo of volumes, by shooting them, like a load of coals, on the lawn, and wheel off to the rear, by way of clearing the road for its successors … Men would not know of my guilt merely, they would see it.’ To his horror, De Quincey realised that he was reliving – ‘literally … in myself’ – one of the tales he and Elizabeth had read together in Arabian Nights. In the story, a young man with a bundle of ropes – one of which Thomas doubtless imagined noosed about his neck – finds himself in the house of a wicked magician who has imprisoned a beautiful girl. The man pledges his love to the maiden and when he hears the magician returning he slips away, leaving the ropes behind. The next morning the magician knocks at his own front door, enquiring for the figure to whom the ropes belong. Whenever De Quincey and his sister reached this point in the story, Thomas would play the part of the guilty lover nervously approaching the door and say, in a quivering voice, ‘Oh Mr Magician, those ropes cannot be mine! They are far too good; and one wouldn’t like, you know, to rob some other poor young man. If you please, Mr Magician, I never had money enough to buy so beautiful a set of ropes.’
But Elizabeth was now dead, and De Quincey saw himself saying those same lines, in that same voice, to the wagoner who would soon be depositing on the front lawn the wagonloads of books.
Books and infinity were bound together for De Quincey, who ‘fell’, he said, ‘into a downright midsummer madness’ at the thought of there being ‘one hundred thousand books’ that he would never be able to read, or pictures that he would never see, or pieces of music that he would never hear. ‘Every man and woman,’ he told himself, ‘was a most interesting book, if one knew how to read them. Here opened upon me a new world of misery; for, if books and works of art existed by millions, men existed by hundreds of millions … Nay, my madness took yet a higher flight…’
According to legend it is impossible to read Arabian Nights to the end. As vengeance against his faithless first wife, the king swears to take a new bride every few days and have her slaughtered: Scheherazade, his latest queen, diverts her husband’s bloodlust with a ceaseless flow of tales. Arabian Nights is composed of stories within other stories which themselves contain further stories, all of which, with their attendant magicians, necromancers, illusionists, caliphs, genies and princes, blend into one endless and ever-echoing palimpsest. Reading them through the filter of De Quincey’s young mind there is clearly a resemblance between the fictional Baghdad of spires, alleyways and subterranean worlds and his later descriptions of East London. Arabian Nights, we also note, is a book without an author, which would have induced in the child endless wonder.
Jorge Luis Borges suggests that the Romantic movement began at the moment Arabian Nights was first read in France, in the translation by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717. It was through Arabian Nights that Coleridge had became ‘habituated to the vast’, and De Quincey’s own preoccupation with the sublime may well have seeded itself with these nursery tales which he knew only in an annotated edition. His love for Gothic novels – the popular fiction of the day – was certainly born at this point. He would have preferred the French title, Les Mille et Une Nuits, because, as Borges puts it, ‘To say “a thousand nights” is to say infinite nights, countless nights, endless nights. To say “a thousand and one nights” is to add to infinity. The title contains the suggestion of an infinite book.’
The story of Aladdin particularly fascinated De Quincey. ‘The sublimity which it evoked was mysterious and unfathomable … made restless by the blind sense which I had of its grandeur, I could not for a moment succeed in finding out why it should be grand.’ Here was an example, De Quincey said, of the power of ‘involutes’, a word he took from conchology (an involute shell is intricately spiral or whorled) but whose meaning is similar to the ‘spots of time’ described in Book Eleventh of The Prelude. Wordsworth’s spots of time are particular experiences (a drowned man rising bolt upright from the bottom of the lake) or scenes of imaginative convergence (a rock, a naked pool, a beacon, a woman with a basket on her head, a single sheep, a blasted tree) that penetrate the memory and allow us ‘to mount, / When high, more high, and lift […] us up when fallen.’ De Quincey described as involutes those times, like the day he had crept into Elizabeth’s bedroom, where ‘the materials of future thought or feeling’ are ‘carried imperceptibly into the mind as vegetable seeds are carried variously combined through the atmosphere’. The experience is imbued with a complex of heightened imaginative responses forming ‘compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’. De Quincey’s autobiographical writing is saturated with such moments.
It was the beginning of ‘Aladdin’ which took on for him the power of an involute. This is how he remembered it:
At the opening of the tale a magician living in the central depths of Africa is introduced to us as one made aware by his secret art of an enchanted lamp … The lamp is imprisoned in subterraneous chambers, and from these it can be released only by the hands of an innocent child. But this is not enough: the child must have a special horoscope written in the stars, or else a peculiar destiny written in his constitution, entitling him to take possession of the lamp. Where shall such a child be found?… The magician knows: he applies his ear to the earth; he listens to the innumerable sounds of footsteps that at the moment of his experiment are tormenting the surface of the globe; and amongst them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin.
So the magician ‘fastens his murderous intention upon one insulated tread’, and in the ‘flying footsteps’ of the small boy he reads an ‘alphabet’ of ‘secret hieroglyphics’. The world, young Thomas understood as he trembled before these pages, was composed of correspondences – ‘so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys’.
But this image is nowhere to be found in ‘Aladdin’. In the version of Arabian Nights read in the De Quincey household the magician is guided by the stars to the boy who is capable of exhuming the lamp; he does not put his ear to the ground to catch his ‘flying footsteps’. Like so many of the formative memories layered in De Quincey’s personal mythology, the origins of the footsteps are vaporous. The image may have come from a childhood dream, or from listening out for the sound of his father’s carriage on the distant road; or perhaps it was the other way round and the ‘memory’ of his dying father’s return home was the result of his ‘memory’ of the opening scene of ‘Aladdin’. Like many of the experiences he described as involutes, this one was not actual at all.
* * *
In the summer of 1797, after William departed for London, Elizabeth Quincey put Greenhay on the market and moved the family 170 miles south-west, to the watering-hole of Bath in Somerset. Now that the trading connection with Manchester was over, there was no reason to continue in the manufacturing North. On a stormy night in August, the house she had built for £6,000 was sold to the only bidder for £2,500. De Quincey had entered the world of rapidly disappearing money. Had his mother waited a few years, he later believed, she would have received six times that sum, but Elizabeth Quincey, like many a widow, wanted to start a new chapter herself.
Copyright © 2016 by Frances Wilson