Guilty Thing (14 page)

Elizabeth Quincey was still hunting for land on which to build her house, and so the school holidays in the summer of 1801 were spent in a rented cottage in Everton, now part of Liverpool but then a smart village on the hill above the great port. Gentrified for wealthy tradesmen, Everton looked onto the Welsh mountains and the Irish Sea. ‘When you approach the cottage, you may reach the chimneys with your hat,' Elizabeth warned her son. Sending directions, she described herself as his ‘steering chart'.

You will leave Manchester on Saturday morning in the canal-boat, first of all informing yourselves whether there is a boat sailing upon a Saturday morning, of which I have great doubts; almost a certainty, indeed, that Saturday morning is the only one in the week it does not go. You will be landed about a mile from Warrington London Bridge, where you will meet coaches, into one of which you will get and go to Warrington to dinner; and
you must
secure your places in the Long Coach to Liverpool, which (with all the Manchester coaches) comes to the Angel Inn, Dale Street. Should my suspicion about the boat be right, you must come directly from Manchester in the Long Coach in the morning of Saturday; — lose no time as soon as you can on Thursday to know all this, and let your place be arranged.

It was a bossy letter which no doubt irritated him, but Mrs Quincey had once again placed her son in surprisingly congenial surroundings. ‘You need bring no books,' she wrote, ‘for Mr. Clarke, our neighbour, will lend you any Greek or Latin author. Of Italian, French, and English books he seems to have store also; and in the town there is really a noble library, to which Mr. Cragg will introduce you.' The address was 9 Middle Lane, and Mr Clarke, who was part of a literary coterie, lived in the large house across the street. Every day he and De Quincey would read Aeschylus together, and Clarke introduced the boy to his friends: William Shepherd, author of a life of the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini; William Roscoe, who had written a popular biography of Lorenzo de' Medici; and James Currie, whose recent edition of Robert Burns included a study of the poet's life. The men were ‘
fraternisers
with French Republicanism' at a time when, as De Quincey later put it, ‘such politics were absolutely disreputable'. They were also versifiers of the kind Wordsworth despised; their poems displayed, to De Quincey's mind, ‘the most timid and blind servility to the narrowest of conventional usages, conventional ways of viewing things, conventional forms of expression'. He quarrelled with them over literary matters, disagreeing in particular over Burns, who De Quincey was currently reading in Currie's own edition. These disreputable radicals, he felt, ‘taxed Burns with ingratitude' towards his aristocratic patrons, while De Quincey, who presented himself as having been the most radical of them all, was alone in upholding the poetic spirit of independence.

It was as biographers rather than poets that the group impressed De Quincey, who had already absorbed Boswell's
Life of Johnson
and Johnson's
Lives of the Poets
, which included his
Life of Savage
. His web of connections grew wider; he learned that Roscoe was friends with the artist, Fuseli, and with the scientist, Joseph Priestley. He could bring to the table a few trophies of his own: his mother's intimacy with Hannah More and his proximity to Edmund Burke; More was intensely disliked by the group, and Roscoe had written a pamphlet against Burke. But De Quincey's most important discovery by far during this first Everton summer was that Mr Clarke, Mr Roscoe and Dr Currie were all intimate with
Lyrical Ballads
, and knew the name of the invisible ‘friend' who had furnished the volumes with five of his own poems. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, well known in Bristol for his radical lectures and for editing
The Watchman
, a journal of the type to make Mrs Quincey quake.

There was more: Roscoe had been aware of Coleridge since his
Poems on Various Subjects
appeared in 1796, when he recognised the poet's ‘
genius
' to be ‘of the highest class'. He had even invited Coleridge, after the failure of
The Watchman
, to recommence his political career in Liverpool, as ‘
Bristol is not
a place likely to reward his merits'. Coleridge and De Quincey were tracing the same path across the country; leaving Bristol, Coleridge was now living in the Cumbrian town of Keswick in order to be near the ‘giant Wordsworth'. En route to his new home the previous summer, Coleridge had stayed in Liverpool for a week and seen ‘a great deal of Dr Currie and Roscoe'. Currie he described as ‘a genuine philosopher', and Roscoe as ‘a republican with all the feelings of prudence and all
the manners of good sense
'. He had liked them enough to recommend their good company to Southey.

In De Quincey's later accounts of Roscoe and Currie he erased his discovery that
Lyrical Ballads
had more than one admirer. ‘
To me
,' he imperiously wrote, ‘who in that year, 1801, already knew of a grand renovation of poetic power – of a new birth of poetry, interesting not so much to England as to the human mind – it was secretly amusing to contrast the little artificial uses of their petty traditional knack with the natural forms of a divine art.' He was ‘“indebted”' as he put it – in inverted commas – to Roscoe for the information about Coleridge, but ‘discharged that debt ill, for I quarrelled with my informant for what I considered his profane way of dealing with a subject so
hallowed to my own thoughts
'. Roscoe's profanity was to suggest that Coleridge should concentrate on his political journalism at the expense of his poetry. From now on De Quincey ‘
searched east and west
, north and south, for all known works or fragments of the same authors'.

Leaving Thomas and his siblings in Everton, Mrs Quincey set out that August to find them all a home. But instead of buying the land on which to build a new house, she was offered an excellent price (£500) for an old house in the cathedral city of Chester, on the border with north Wales, where she had been left shares in her husband's linen company. The Priory, as it was called, was a curious building in a more curious setting. Picturesque rather than sublime, De Quincey described it as ‘a beautiful place', ‘a gem', and he must have been struck by his mother's unconscious Wordsworthian affinities: she had bought a ruined cottage in the grounds of a Tintern Abbey. Enclosed within high and rugged exterior walls, the Priory had once been attached to the medieval church of St John; following the dissolution of the monasteries, the religious foundation had fallen into decay and its remains were left scattered about like the stones of Carthage. In De Quincey's terminology, the Priory had ‘dwindled by successive abridgements from a royal quarto into
a pretty duodecimo
'. When Elizabeth Quincey discovered the house, it was hidden amongst ivy-covered relics and arches. To the left of the front door was a desiccated statue of the Madonna and Child, and to the right a chubby saint at prayer. She bought it with a view to making alterations; Mrs Quincey's new home, Thomas explained, was to be a building she ‘in part planned, and built, but chiefly repaired out of [the]
ancient gothic monastery
'.

Once again, De Quincey's interest was ignited by the former occupant: 200 years earlier, what was left of the Priory had been lived in by antiquarian and bibliomane Sir Robert Cotton. De Quincey was a book collector, and Cotton's library, still considered the most important collection of manuscripts ever assembled by a private individual, contained the Lindisfarne Gospels, two of the contemporary exemplifications of Magna Carta and the only surviving manuscript of ‘Beowulf'. Here was a Black Letter heritage which exceeded even Chatterton's dreams. Cotton had been friends with the Jacobean poet, dramatist and critic, Ben Jonson, who was considered the equal of Shakespeare, and was said to have come here as a guest. A pattern had been established whereby De Quincey took over the homes of the country's literary giants.

There were ten rooms in the Priory, and Mrs Quincey, at the cost of £1,000, added ten more of her own (which subsequently fell down). Those from ‘
Sir Robert's day
' were, for De Quincey, the treasures. Cotton had lived like a ‘literary bachelor'; the monastic kitchen had a ‘noble groined ceiling of stone' which ‘indicated, by its disproportionate scale, the magnitude of the establishment to which once it had ministered'. On the upper storey were Sir Robert's private quarters – his former bedroom, a ‘pretty old hall' with a ‘mosaic painted window' in the door, and an ‘elegant dining room'. Thomas also loved the ‘miniature pleasure ground' whose ruined archways were ‘so small that Drury Lane could easily have found room for them on its stage'. The Gothicisms were never-ending: in the church itself was a mysterious oak coffin, said to belong to a monk who murdered one of his brethren and was subsequently refused a Christian burial. Framed inside a white Corinthian niche, a full-length skeleton stood behind a shroud.

When he returned to school in the autumn, De Quincey continued to plague his mother with bids for freedom, and she replied with letters of fire and brimstone. ‘
Every human being
is brought upon this stage for the greater purposes of glorifying God. . . and if any one temper of mind may singly be put to denote the whole anti-Christian character, it is self-glory.' Her message was clear: ‘I know what your ideas are. . . and I plainly perceive that you have exalted one, and that the most dangerous faculty of mind, the imagination, over all the rest. . . you are now carried away, wholly blinded by the bewildering light of your fancy.' The school, Thomas claimed, had ‘murdered' his ‘health', his liver in particular, and he suggested he might study alone at the Priory. Elizabeth replied that ‘a year spent at home in desultory reading, without an object, is an evil of such incalculable extent that I shall never consent to it'. The books he was currently consuming, she noted, were the work of ‘infidels and Jacobins'. He argued that he was more idle at school than he would ever be at home; she, in despair, offered him £100 if he completed the year. Thomas, like her eldest son William, was slipping out of her control: ‘Must you govern me or must I govern you?' Mrs Quincey asked.

In March 1802 a peace was agreed between England and France. Under the Treaty of Amiens, as it was called, the English recognised the French Republic. It was once more possible to cross the Channel, and as troops were coming home those civilians, together with art lovers and Grand Tourists, who had been trapped on British shores for the past nine years, poured into Paris. No longer a tyrannical monster, Napoleon had become the restorer of order. It was like, said Thomas Robinson, the brother of Henry Crabb, the ‘
transformation in a pantomime
, where a devil is suddenly converted to an angel'.

Spring slipped into summer and then, ‘like an
army with banners
', midsummer had arrived. It was the most dangerous time of year for De Quincey and on 2 July he decided his own future: he would run away from school and place himself outside the realm of established values. On his last evening as a schoolboy, the sky was high and the sun shimmered ‘light and broad and gaudy'. He went through the rituals of terminating the day. Now that he knew he would never see his headmaster again, the old man did not seem such a villain; ‘
he had been uniformly
kind to me, and had allowed me such indulgences as lay in his power'. During the final hours in his study, De Quincey fell into ‘
a sort of trance
, a frost as of some death-like revelation'. He remembered his midsummer visit two years before to the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's, and its terrible effect: ‘a word once uttered is irrevocable'. On this, the most significant night of his life, ‘a voice, too late for warning, seemed audibly to say, “Once leave this house, and a Rubicon is placed between thee and all possibility of return. . . Even now thy conscience speaks against it in sullen whispers; but at the other end of thy long life-gallery that same conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders.”' His reverie was broken by ‘a sudden step upon the stairs'. Darkness fell, and after a brief sleep De Quincey rose at half past three in the morning. ‘
I dressed myself
, took my hat and gloves, and lingered a little in the room. For nearly a year and a-half this room had been my “pensive citadel”. . . I shed tears as I looked around on the chair, hearth, writing-table, and other familiar objects, knowing too certainly that I looked upon them for the last time.'