I knew that I was onto a good thing with this book before the page numbers were even out of roman numerals. Describing the wealth of new material that has come to light in the three decades or so since the last biography of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison men- tions the areas in which it has enriched our understanding:
. . . his enduring sorrow over the loss of his sister Elizabeth, his masochistic desire for humiliation; his association with prostitutes; his pursuit of, and subsequent alienation from, Wordsworth and Coleridge; his struggle with drugs and alcohol . . . his horrendous battles with debt; his imprisonment in Edinburgh gaols . . .
This was a lively life, and this is a lively Life. Even as a child, when De Quincey was forced to play rather than read, he preferred to play with gunpowder. He was getting drunk by the age of seven. At the age of eight, his biographer reports, he got pocket money for the first time; ‘almost simultaneously, he now had debt’.
He obsessively spent money he didn’t have on books, and his bibliomania was the first great manifestation of his propensity to addiction — a hunger to consume that was ‘absolutely endless and inexorable as the grave’.
It led to debt, and debt led to more debt. As Morrison argues, debt and addiction were parallel drives: in both cases, the cure plunges the afflicted further into the disease. ‘He seems to have been both so inured to desperation that he could not see beyond it,’ writes Morrison, ‘and so in need of it that he did not want to.’
It is as the author of the first junkie memoir that De Quincey is mainly now remembered. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a sensation at the time, though Edgar Allan Poe (America’s De Quincey, if ever there was one) claimed that it had been ‘composed by my pet baboon, Juniper, over a rummer of Hollands and water’.
He kept strange hours and sailed between highs and lows. ‘Quince was often tipsy . . . . He doses himself with opium and drinks like a fish,’ reported one contemporary. Another found him in a ‘sort of grey watchman’s coat, evidently made for a man four times his size, and bought probably at a pawnbroker’s shop’; when their argument about transcendental philosophy got heated, the coat fell open to reveal that he had ‘nothing else on of any description whatsoever’.
‘There maun be somethin’ raaly wrang wi’ my lodger,’ was the down-to-earth judgment of his Edinburgh landlady. ‘He doesna eat as muckle in a week as my wee oo [grandson] eats in a day.’
Morrison suggests that De Quincey — whose drug of choice was laudanum — was cross-addicted to opium and alcohol. Opium withdrawal is an unpleasant but not a life-threatening process; De Quincey’s description of the protracted horrors he suffered suggests psychopharmacological complications (or, of course, exaggeration).
In his deception and self-deception, his architectural hallucinations, his killing dreams, his love for and horror of the drug, De Quincey presents (and self-presents) as an exemplary study of addiction.
But De Quincey was also a literary critic, a political polemicist, an author of Gothic fiction, a biographer and translator and scholar of German philosophy. He wrote a scandalously gossipy memoir of Wordsworth (though he was an astute critic of the verse), and was the first man to out Coleridge as a plagiarist. And he was the author of On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts, an immaculately ironised play on ethics and aesthetics that inspired the dandies and flaneurs who were to come.
De Quincey manages to bridge the oddly wide-seeming gap between the Romantics and the Victorians. His world is Wordsworth’s, but it is also Browning’s. Amazingly, there’s a daguerreotype of him, taken in 1850: a shrewd-looking old ruffian with cropped hair, a disarrayed tie, and a mistrustful sideways look.
Contemporary accounts testify to his shortness of stature, his good looks, flutingly musical voice, and immaculate manners; Thackeray commended a note of De Quincey’s for ‘the extreme neatness of its style, and penmanship, and antique courtesy of its tone’. But the antique courtesy did not extend to his editors or his creditors, all of whom were accustomed to be fobbed off, lied to, wheedled with, or vanished from at little or no notice. His middle years are the story of a highly productive fugitive. Yet his teenage years were those of a pilgrim. He hero-worshipped Coleridge and Wordsworth — counterpoints, for the young Thomas, to an absent father and a mother of grim and unbending religiosity.
He lent Coleridge money and practically stalked Wordsworth, wangling his acquaintance and even contriving to rent Dove Cottage when the great man no longer lived there. Both relationships soured, though. De Quincey’s ego grew, and Wordsworth’s remained the same size.
Financial necessity, meanwhile, meant that the establishment of a new basis for philosophy (his stated ambition) took a back seat to hack journalism. De Quincey may have spent as much as £150 a year on dope, God alone knows how much on books, tended to rent at least two or three houses at any given time (Dove Cottage spent several years as his book depository) and fathered eight children.
He rattled between Blackwood’s, Tait’s, the London Magazine, the Westmoreland Gazette and others, trimming his sails to the editorial wind, feuding and falling back in with their editors as chance and necessity dictated.
Left to himself, De Quincey’s political positions were pretty robust. In foreign policy, he never met an imperial adventure he didn’t like: he thought the best remedy for the Indian Mutiny was the mass execution of savages, and he was all for the Opium Wars. At home, he thought the Chartists common Jacobins, opposed the Catholic Emancipation Bill, and was firmly in favour of the Peterloo massacre. He may have taken drugs, in other words, but he was hard to mistake for a hippie.
It’s not his politics that matter, though. It’s his writing — and it’s a testament to it that those periodicals actively competed for the services of a man who must have been the contributor from hell.
‘What a poet that man is!’, wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning after reading De Quincey’s Suspiria. ‘How he vivifies words, & deepens them, & gives them profound significance.’ She’s right. De Quincey was a marvellous prose stylist: sinuous, vivid to the point of hallucination, his sentences glittering with unexpected trouvailles.
As a teenage runaway, he records that at the moment of leaving: ‘I lingered . . . as under some sense of dim perplexity, or even of relenting love for the very captivity itself which I was making so violent an effort to abjure.’ Isn’t ‘relenting love’ good? Camping in a field of cows, he lay awake in fear that one ‘should break into my preserve, and poach her heavy foot into my face’. Isn’t that last clause great? In the grip of late-stage addiction, he describes ‘infinite incoherence, ropes of sand, gloomy incapacity of vital pervasion by some one plastic principle, that is the hideous incubus on my mind always.’ Again: ‘ropes of sand’?
Describing the death of his beloved older sister when he was six years old — which he cast as the defining catastrophe of his life — he wrote: ‘Mere anarchy and confusion of mind fell upon me.’ Morrison doesn’t mention it, but that phrase ‘mere anarchy’ is familiar to us now in another context. Is it possible that Yeats stole it?
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