Guilty Thing (13 page)

De Quincey's time was spent ‘
Reading, Hunting
, Riding, Shooting, bathing and Sea excursions', or so he told his mother. ‘We generally ride sixteen or seventeen miles a day, by which means we get to see almost everything worth seeing in this most romantic country.' From the park he looked onto the ‘cloud-capt' Croagh Patrick, Ireland's holy mountain, which he and Westport conquered. ‘It is about two miles to the top,' Thomas reported home, ‘from which may be seen a great part of Connaught. When I was at the summit, I thought of Shakespeare looking “abroad from some high cliff, and enjoying the elemental war”.'

When he returned to England in late September, De Quincey considered himself a man of the world. He had been to London, crossed the sea, climbed a mountain, marched along in the progress of history, and had his first taste of romantic love. He had stretched into his liberty; the development of his ‘whole mind was rushing in like a cataract, forcing channels for itself'. Describing, in
The Prelude
, his experience of France, Wordsworth put it thus: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!' So had it been for De Quincey in Ireland.

De Quincey and Westport parted at Holyhead, never to meet again. Their lives followed parallel lines, however, as both became satellites of Romantic poets; Westport, after inheriting the title of Lord Sligo, becoming the raffish companion of Lord Byron.

De Quincey took the coach to Birmingham where a letter from his mother, waiting at the post office, ordered him to Laxton Hall, the Northamptonshire home of her friend, Lady Carbery. He liked Lady Carbery a good deal and the next seven weeks were spent in vigorous theological debate with his hostess. Once again, De Quincey's learning was respected and he was treated as an adult. The only shadow to pass over his happiness was the question of what would happen next. His letters from Ireland had returned again and again to the vexed question of his education. Winkfield, Thomas repeated, was filled with blockheads and had nothing to offer a boy of his ambition; Eton, mooted as a possibility, was clearly too violent – he had already suffered one severe blow to the head. If he had to continue at school at all, he begged that it be Bath Grammar. Bewildered by her son's rebelliousness, Elizabeth De Quincey chose, as parents do, to rein him in. She decided that he should return to neither Winkfield nor Bath, but to the city of his birth. He was to be enrolled as a boarder at Manchester Grammar with the aim of starting at Oxford University when he was nineteen years old. Pupils who had been at the school for three years were eligible to receive, from Brasenose College, an annual allowance of £50. This, added to De Quincey's personal income of £150 a year, would make up the requirement needed to support an undergraduate. The plan was sensible, but De Quincey was uninterested in the limits of his own economy and frustrated by the thought of yet another upheaval. He was to continue, he realised, in a state of protracted boredom until well into adulthood, a prospect which left him with a ‘sickening oppression'.

Having been pushed forwards on a straight gravel road, De Quincey now found himself diverted down beds of torrents and systems of ruts. He compared his fate to that of ‘
some victim
of evil destiny' in the Middle Ages, an ‘inheritor of a false fleeting prosperity' who was then ‘detected as a leper'. ‘Misgivingly I went forwards,' he said of the way ahead, ‘feeling forever that, through clouds of thick darkness, I was continually nearing a danger, or was myself perhaps wilfully provoking a trial, before which my constitutional despondency would cause me to lie down without a struggle.' On 9 November he was transferred ‘from the glittering halls of the English nobility' to the ‘cheerless. . . and rude benches of an antique school-room'.

His life was in fact moving backwards. His mother, dissatisfied with Bath, determined to build a new house and took herself on a tour of the country, assessing each town and village in terms of the quality of medical advice, the availability of aristocratic society, the pleasantness of the scenery, and the proximity to an evangelical clergyman. She also reverted to the plainer name of ‘Quincey'. Her son, returning to Manchester, decided to retain the pseudonymous particle ‘De'.

Four years after leaving it behind him, Thomas was back in Cottonopolis, city of dust and lucre, and the noisiest place in England. From now on he could not ‘
stir out of doors
' without being ‘nosed by a factory, a cotton-bag, cotton dealer, or something else allied to that most detestable commerce' – the commerce which had been the trade of his father. Manchester, he told his mother, dissipated ‘the whole train of romantic visions I had conjured up'. De Quincey would never reinvent his hometown as Chatterton had reinvented Bristol, but it was here that his identification with the marvellous boy began in earnest.

Friedrich Engels, in the early 1840s, described the area which housed Manchester Grammar as ‘an almost undisguised working men's quarter, for even the shops and beer houses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a
trifling degree of cleanliness
'. De Quincey's new home, on a cramped and hectic street which also served as the apple market, was ‘a cave of despair' (the line is from Edmund Spenser). Arriving at nine o'clock on a rainy Sunday night, he was conducted to the headmaster's study through a ‘
series of unfurnished
little rooms, having small windows but no doors'. The interior was as bald and blank as a poorhouse; the walls, which might have been embellished by friezes or medallions illustrating ‘the most memorable glorifications of literature', were ‘a dreary expanse' of whitewash. De Quincey boarded with the headmaster, Charles Lawson, a kindly, jaded figure with a tottering gait and diamond buckles on his shoes, who had taught at the school for half a century. His wig, from the back, looked like a cauliflower.

Lawson's house was built in the Roman style around a quadrangle which allowed, De Quincey imagined, the old man to fantasise that he was still at Oxford and that everything afterwards ‘had been a dream'. De Quincey's room, ‘a quiet study lifted by two storeys above the vapours of the earth', could be found ‘up dilapidated staircases' and down ‘old
worm-eaten passages
'. Sequestered in his Chattertonian attic, he read and worked through the nights, paper scattering around him, waiting for his sentence to be over. By now he was fluent in Greek, and writing Greek verse in lyric metre.

Manchester had its distractions and De Quincey returned to the museum of Charles White; the mummy in the clock case was no longer on view, but the handsome highwayman's skeleton was still there to greet him. Lady Carbery moved to the city and her company gave De Quincey some respite. Then, in January 1801, to jolt him back into consciousness, a new edition of
Lyrical Ballads
appeared. This time it was in two volumes, and the title page contained the name of an author: ‘W. Wordsworth'. Volume one contained the same selection as the 1798 edition, with the inclusion of ‘Love' and the omission of ‘The Convict'. ‘The Ancient Mariner' had been placed ominously at the end, just before ‘Tintern Abbey', a new arrangement that broke the conversational balance. The mariner's altered position gave his voyage a different meaning; no longer heralding the journey that lay in wait for the reader, he seemed more like a dotty relation ranting in a back room at a family reunion.

Lyrical Ballads
opened instead with ‘Expostulation and Reply' which, like ‘We Are Seven', dramatises an exchange between a visionary and a logician. A man called William, sitting dreamily on a stone by Lake Esthwaite, is goaded by his friend Matthew to do something more useful instead:

‘Why William, on that old grey stone,

Thus for the length of half a day,

Why, William, sit you thus alone,

And dream your time away?'

William replies that,

‘The eye it cannot chuse but see,

We cannot bid the ear be still;

Our bodies feel, where'er they be,

Against, or with our will.'

Wordsworth, De Quincey wrote, ‘sees the same objects' as other men, ‘but he sees them engraved in lines far stronger and more determinate'. His visual authority lay not in the novelty of what he saw, but in his ability to awaken ‘into illuminated consciousness ancient lineaments of truth long
slumbering in the mind
'.

‘Expostulation and Reply' was followed by ‘The Tables Turned', in which the dreamy William now explains to the studious Matthew that self-knowledge comes from nature and not books:

Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,

Or surely you'll grow double:

Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks,

Why all this toil and trouble?

We learn more about ourselves, explains William, from a ‘vernal wood' than from the words of dead philosophers. Not only does scholarship detract from the truth but it destroys the life of things:

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous form of things –

We murder to dissect.

For the next thirty years, De Quincey later wrote, besides himself only one man in fifty ‘knew what was meant by “that poet who had cautioned his friend against growing double”. To all others it was
a profound secret
.'

In the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads
, De Quincey discovered the enigmatic ‘Lucy' poems, in which Wordsworth returns again and again to the sudden death of a young girl, and ‘Ruth', the poem of abandonment to which De Quincey would himself return throughout his relationship with Wordsworth. Ruth was ‘not seven years old' when, ‘left half desolate' by her father, she began ‘wandering over hill and dale'. When she ‘grew to woman's height' she was courted by an American soldier who promised her a life in the New World, but he deserted his bride. Mad with grief, Ruth was ‘in a prison housed' and lived the rest of her days ‘under the greenwood tree'. De Quincey was also struck by a poem called ‘Nutting', in which Wordsworth recalled how, as a boy, he had savagely destroyed a scene of virgin beauty:

           Then up I rose

And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash

And merciless ravage; and the shady nook

Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,

Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up

Their quiet being. . .

The brief ‘Advertisement' accompanying the first edition of
Lyrical Ballads
had been replaced by a hefty forty-page ‘Preface' in which Wordsworth expounded the theory on which his poetry was based. ‘
All good poetry
' was ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', a poet was a man of ‘more than usual organic sensibility', the taste for ‘frantic novels' and ‘sickly and stupid German tragedies' was driving the works of great writers, like Shakespeare and Milton, ‘into neglect'.

De Quincey, identifying himself as one of the readers shamed by Wordsworth, found here ‘
the most finished
and masterly specimen of reasoning which has in any age or nation been called forth by any one of the fine arts'. He also discovered that the poet had a collaborator: a ‘friend', whose opinions on the subject coincided entirely with Wordsworth's own, and who had written ‘The Ancient Mariner', ‘The Foster-Mother's Tale', ‘The Nightingale', ‘The Dungeon' and ‘Love'. But nothing was said about why this friend's name did not appear on the title page of the present edition.