Guilty Thing (16 page)

He stopped in Bangor, whose cathedral cemetery was said to be the most beautiful in the country. To De Quincey it resembled a ‘well-kept shrubbery'. Wherever he went, he felt eyes upon him: ‘Was I not liable to the suspicion of pedestrianism?' he asked, knowing that a walking man was generally considered a vagrant. He took a small room in a house; here his paranoia reached its peak when his landlady idly reported the response of her former employer, the Bishop of Bangor, to the news that a young man was currently lodging with her. ‘
You must recollect, Betty
,' the bishop had warned, ‘that Bangor is in the High Road to the Head' – ‘the Head' being Holyhead – ‘so that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from their debts into England, and of English swindlers, running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route.' ‘Oh my lord,' Betty had blithely replied, ‘I really don't think that this young gentleman is a swindler.' She did not
think
he was a swindler? De Quincey erupted. ‘For the future I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it,' and he rose from the table, packed his bag, and took his leave.

While his landlady's apparent lack of certainty regarding his honesty sounded to De Quincey like suspicion, what sounded to her like pride was the anger he had been unable express to his mother, who had not doubted for a moment that her son was a swindler. It was also a rush of fear: De Quincey had returned the banknote, but the whispers were still pursuing him.

It was at this point that De Quincey, so aware of the domestic space he occupied, rid himself of it altogether. It was the tyranny of houses rather than of school from which he was now escaping, and he needed wilderness in which to disappear. Next stop was Caernarfon, ‘
two and a half hours
smart walking', during which his head was filled with hatred, not for his mother or for his landlady, but for the bishop who had offended his honour. No longer trusting the hospitality of lodgings, he booked into solitary inns for single nights and absorbed himself in ‘the eternal motion of winds and rivers'. He felt like ‘the Wandering Jew liberated from. . . persecution', and could not imagine a ‘happier life' than ‘this vagrancy'. But vagrancy did not come cheap. De Quincey's guinea a week was barely sufficient; it was costing half a guinea a day to keep himself warm and fed. Money management was always beyond him and the Welsh experiment anticipated a lifetime of running away from debts, exactly as the bishop had warned. His only option, if De Quincey was to eat more than berries picked from the hedgerows, was to sleep amongst the ferns and furze of the hillside. He constructed a makeshift tent which covered him like an umbrella, but it was difficult to pitch and offered no protection against the weather. Added to which, if he slept exposed to the stars he worried that a cow might tread on his face.

The October nights drew in. De Quincey befriended other gentlemen walkers, one of whom introduced him to German literature, which became a lifelong passion. He found himself a guest in a household of kind-hearted siblings whose parents were away; here he stayed for three happy days as a Cyrano de Bergerac, writing love letters on behalf of the sisters. When the adults were due to return, De Quincey swiftly departed. Once considered the most charming of guests, he was now bundled out of back doors. Winter was coming; it would soon be too cold to sleep outside, and besides, he was growing weary of Wales. His tour was over, but rather than return to the rule of the Priory he decided to ‘slip' his ‘anchor' and ‘launch' himself ‘upon the boundless ocean of London'. It was as if ‘some overmastering fiend, some instinct of migration' were driving him ‘
to fly where no man pursued
'.

De Quincey's biographers have wondered at the impetuousness of this decision. Why, when he had finished his tour of north Wales, did he not return to Chester as agreed? And why go to London, when it was fresh air and the open road that he was craving? One answer is to be found in the pages of
London Labour and the London Poor
where, fifty years later, Henry Mayhew divided the world into wanderers and settlers: De Quincey's tribe was the former. Another answer is that he needed to run away for a second time in order to do it properly. De Quincey's rebellion had so far been a tame affair, added to which his suffering had not been sufficient. ‘There is,' he believed, ‘a mysterious sensibility connected with
real suffering
,' and it was this that he needed to experience. His voyage would be incomplete until he had known what it was to live
in extremis
, and London was the city that killed its inhabitants. Added to which, in London he had felt invisible. He was seventeen, the same age as his brother and Chatterton when they had both arrived in the city; he was following in their footsteps while also preparing himself to meet Wordsworth. De Quincey needed to prove his Romantic credentials, and to study the religion of solitude before worshipping at Wordsworth's altar.

It was late November 1802 when he crossed back into England, but the days seemed to him like ‘
the last brief
resurrection of summer'. The departing season was ‘awful' in its ‘universal silence' and ‘death-like stillness', the light over the woods and fields resembling ‘lambent and fitful gleams from an expiring lamp'. Some kind lawyers De Quincey had met on the road gave him twelve guineas to keep him going, now that he would no longer be drawing on his mother's purse, and the final night of his walking tour was spent in the Lion Inn at Shrewsbury. Here he waited in an empty ballroom for the arrival of the Holyhead mail that would take him to Birmingham. Outside, the wind was rising and the ‘
whole atmosphere
had become one vast laboratory of hostile movements'. Midnight came and the household retired; De Quincey, listening for the wheels of the carriage, was left alone to reflect. He was facing a ‘precipice'; the next stage of his adventure filled him with ‘terror', ‘horror'. Three ‘gorgeous chandeliers' illuminated the musicians' galleries, and he thought of the Whispering Gallery, ‘for once again I was preparing to utter an irrevocable word'. The ‘unusual dimensions' of the walls and ceiling mirrored those of the city lying in wait; he noticed, as a ‘terrific feature' of the room's altitude, an ‘echoing hollowness' and imagined the ‘flying feet' that had crossed the floor when the air was ringing with music and the room filled with dancers. Beyond the windows the night was as dark ‘as the inside of a wolf's throat'.

At two in the morning the carriage rolled up to the old inn door and De Quincey took his seat. On the road to London eighteen months earlier he had imagined the traffic being sucked in by the city, but he now described London as hurtling towards him, like a hysterical River Dee or a mad dog with a foaming mouth. With ‘every step' of the twenty-eight-hour journey the metropolis was ‘coming nearer, and beckoning. . . for purposes as dim, for issues as incalculable, as the path of cannon-shots fired at random and in darkness'.

The idea was to borrow against the patrimony he was due to receive when he reached twenty-one. Therefore, the first thing De Quincey did when he was deposited in Lombard Street in the City of London was to take himself to a money lender he had heard about called Mr Dell, and arrange a loan of £200. Unaware of the complexity involved in such a transaction, he expected to see his riches immediately and was dismayed to find himself referred to an attorney. The attorney lived at 38 Greek Street, one of the five roads leading off from Soho Square, immediately south of Oxford Street. The significance of the names cannot have been lost on De Quincey, a scholar of Greek who longed to go to Oxford. Added to which, he had spent much of his childhood on another Oxford Street – in battle with the boys from the Manchester cotton factory.

The exterior of 38 Greek Street had an ‘
unhappy countenance
of gloom and unsocial fretfulness'. De Quincey knocked. A face peered suspiciously through a narrow window by the side of the front door, which then opened slowly. The attorney, a hulk of a man, led the boy through a house of ‘desolation' and ‘deep silence'. In a room at the back which he used as an office, he enquired into his young client's circumstances. De Quincey, who never knew if the attorney's name was Brown or Brunell but referred to him as Brunell, now learned that it would take a dreary fortnight for the loan to be finalised. Dispirited, he found himself ‘barely decent' lodgings at half a guinea a week in which to wait. He does not say where these lodgings were but they are unlikely to have been far from Soho. From now on his London life was organised around daily visits to Greek Street; paperwork was done, letters were paid for, promises were made; nothing appeared. Meanwhile the money De Quincey handed over in order to ‘process' his non-existent loan drained his purse.

For the remainder of each day, he walked. He may have returned to St Paul's, he may have taken himself to Westminster Abbey, which he had longed to see; he may have visited the house in Holborn where Chatterton took his own life, or followed the Thames down to Wapping to see the Hawksmoor church on the Ratcliffe Highway. De Quincey left no record of his movements, but he was young and restless and filled with curiosity. He may well have followed the river to Hammersmith Terrace to find the house in which William had died four years earlier, during his own brief stay in London. Loutherbourg still lived there with his wife, Lucy, once reputed to be the most beautiful woman in England: would De Quincey have gazed through the windows at the man who had killed his brother while he was in his care? The Loutherbourgs, former occultists, had turned their home into a famous public healing clinic; a contemporary described how the poor came here in their thousands to be healed by ‘heavenly and divine influx coming from the
Radix God
'. When, in 1789, Loutherbourg was lampooned in
The Times
as ‘Dr Lutherburgo Humbuggo' he renounced his role as public prophet and limited his healing powers to his inner circle. What did Loutherbourg do while his apprentice lay sweating with typhoid in one of his beds? William's letters home from his days in London have not survived, but he would have enjoyed telling his family about the shadow world of Philippe De Loutherbourg, illusionist, mystic and apocalyptic artist.

His twelve guineas soon ran out and by Christmas De Quincey could no longer afford his lodgings. He could have offered his services as ‘a
corrector of Greek proofs
', but it never occurred to him to find work. In any case, to get a job he would need a recommendation and he knew no one in London except Brunell. Faced with sleeping on the streets, he now turned to the attorney to ask if he might bed down in a corner of his empty house. Brunell, who had money problems of his own and slept in a different quarter of London every night in order to avoid the bailiffs, assented and thus began De Quincey's experience of starving in Soho, recorded in loving detail in the opening section of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
His suffering now reached its zenith: ‘
extremities such as these
. . . cannot be contemplated. . . without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness of the human heart'. De Quincey, who says nothing about the various other places in London where he would lay down his head, turns the house in which he squatted into the centre of his experience.

Number 38 was a standard four-storey Georgian terrace but to De Quincey it was a ‘London mansion', with ‘as large a choice of rooms, or even of apartments' as he could ‘possibly desire'. Except for the ‘Bluebeard room', as De Quincey called it, which Brunell used as his office and kept locked at all times, the house ‘from the attics to the cellars' was ‘at our service'. It was not quite empty; also living there was a ‘plain' and ‘hunger-bitten' girl who was glad to have the older boy's protection. The two small bodies slept where they fell, huddling together for warmth, bundles of law reports serving as pillows. They lived like children from a storybook, in a land where loving adults had simply dissolved. In the attics they found an old sofa cover and a piece of rug which they added to their nest. All night De Quincey listened to the rats scuttle up and down the bare stairs.

Who was this nameless child? ‘She did not herself know,' De Quincey said, though he suspected she was Brunell's daughter. Dickens lifted her from the
Confessions
and reinstated her as the marchioness in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, but for De Quincey she was, like all the angels who appear and just as suddenly disappear in his writing, an incarnation of Elizabeth. Meanwhile, his own identity was evaporating. Dell now wanted proof that the ragged boy calling himself Thomas De Quincey was the same Thomas Quincey junior named as second son in the will of Thomas Quincey senior. ‘It was strange to me to find my own self. . . suspected of counterfeiting my own self,' De Quincey recalled, as if he hadn't already, as Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy, been pursued by the post office for a similar impersonation. His identity was hard to prove since he had made himself a missing person; not wanting to be discovered by his mother or guardians, De Quincey could not ask for their verification. Should his location be discovered he would be returned, with the full weight of the law, to Manchester Grammar – ‘a humiliation worse to me than death, and which would, indeed, have terminated in death'. He was, however, able to produce letters from Lord Altamont which satisfied Dell that his client had connections, and De Quincey continued his wait at Greek Street. Here he saw in the new year of 1803, looking forward to the day when he could again afford to eat.