Guilty Thing (31 page)

Throughout the spring, Dorothy and Mary, desperate to get the pamphlet out of their lives, smoothed the path, calming Wordsworth in his irritation with De Quincey, thanking De Quincey for his hard work – ‘you have indeed been a Treasure to us. . . having spared my Brother so
much anxiety and care
' – and reassuring him, again and again, that they were all, especially young Johnny, looking forward to his return. Sara Hutchinson, in a postscript to a particularly mortifying letter from Wordsworth, wished that De Quincey could see ‘your orchard just now, for it is the most beautiful spot upon earth'. Dorothy was upset that the laurels in his orchard had been ‘cruelly mauled' by a gardener, and now looked like ‘
dismembered creatures
'. Mary, writing to thank him for his labours, added that ‘the workmen are now very busy about your cottage'. ‘Your cottage is painted,' wrote Dorothy in June, ‘and I hope will be ready by the end of the next week or the beginning of the week after.' Even Wordsworth grudgingly added, at the end of a long complaining missive, that ‘your house is in great forwardness and very neat'.

Amongst the correspondence currently heaving its way between London and Grasmere was a letter from De Quincey to Johnny, who wanted to be a printer. It is written with such care and charm that we can see in an instant why Dorothy felt such affection for her new friend. Wordsworth venerated childhood but was a distant and severe father; De Quincey had a clear affinity with children; he entered immediately into Johnny's world and allowed him access to his own. His letter contains a Piranesian picture of De Quincey's visits to the printer whose tardiness was causing him so much trouble:

When I get to the house
where this man lives, I go first into a very dark passage, then I come to a stair-case which goes round and round and keeps getting darker and darker till at last it is so very dark that they are obliged to have a candle burning there all day long, even in the very middle of the day. When I am at the top of this stair-case, then I push against a door which opens and then shuts again of its own self – as soon as I have gone in – without my touching it I got through this door; and then I get into a large room full of men all printing; then I go into another room still bigger where there are more men printing; and in one corner of this room, a little wooden house is built with one window to it and one door – the least little place you ever saw; there is only room for about 2 men to sit down in it.

There is nothing patronising in his description of the building: De Quincey gives the stairs, doors and rooms exactly as he experienced them himself, and his ‘sweet letter', said Dorothy, brought ‘perfect
joy in the house
'. In other letters to Johnny he enclosed pictures he had drawn for the child's bedroom wall, and promised to teach him how to swim, fly a kite, walk on stilts and sail a boat. It was the adult world De Quincey found hard to engage with. He confessed in a letter to Wordsworth that he felt ‘guilty of a crime' in not replying to Dorothy for ‘so long a time'.

The Cintra pamphlet was finally ready for the printers in early May, at which point Wordsworth, in a sudden panic that he was to be thrown into Newgate prison, wanted it read for libel. Another week was wasted with De Quincey underlining any passage he felt was vulnerable, and the press eventually ran on 15 May. In a ‘paroxysm of joy', De Quincey dispatched the first four finished copies to Grasmere. Wordsworth, who had now lost interest in the venture, responded with neither pleasure nor gratitude, but a list of errata: there were misquotations, incorrect words, the punctuation might have been improved, and one potentially libellous passage about Lord Wellesley which Wordsworth had ordered De Quincey to cancel was still there. As far as Wordsworth was concerned, De Quincey had failed in his task. Cornered and pointed at, De Quincey was indignant: ‘About the supposed libel. . . I am anxious to be acquitted on this point – on which I am not
at all in fault
.' Quick to side with Wordsworth was a gleeful Coleridge: De Quincey's collaboration with the poet had ended, as his own had done in
Lyrical Ballads
, by his work being unacknowledged and his voice silenced.

Coleridge, who understood De Quincey all too well, expressed to Daniel Stuart, editor of the
Courier
, his ‘vexation and surprise that Wordsworth should have entrusted anything to him beyond the mere correction of the Proofs'. He had, said Coleridge, ‘
both respect
and affection for Mr De Quincey, but saw too much of his turn of mind, anxious yet dilatory, confused from over-accuracy, & at once systematic and labyrinthine, not fully to understand how great a plague he might easily be to a London Printer, his natural Tediousness made yet greater by his zeal & fear of not discharging his Trust, & superadded to Wordsworth's own Sybill's Leaves blown about by the changeful winds of an anxious Author's Second-thoughts.'

De Quincey's natural tediousness would increase with time. Forty years later his editor would describe how, when asked by a printer to confirm whether his use of the word ‘caligraphy' should have one ‘l' or two, De Quincey sent a note explaining that ‘
according to all analogy
I should have expected the word to be written with a single “l”, the adjective κ α λ σ ς being so uniformly spelt with a single λ; and resting upon this consideration I had in one of the proofs, and in one single instance, altered the whole to
caligraphy.
But, feeling some doubt, I consulted three or four different lexicons, all of which doubled the λ. And I have since met the word written
callig
. in a most carefully edited MS of Porson.' De Quincey never gave a printer a correction without including a lengthy explanation, which explanation, he then further explained in a spidery marginal script, should not be included in the printed text.

He remained in London after the pamphlet appeared, paralysed by the future. There had been a suggestion that he accompany Wordsworth and John Wilson on a trip around Ireland, which he let slide. Wilson then proposed that he and De Quincey visit Spain in September: this also never happened. His continuing silence was making Dorothy anxious: ‘
Sometimes we fancy
that you are on the point of setting off to Grasmere, and therefore have delayed writing, and at times I, being of a fearful temper, fancy that you are ill. . . We have been so long used to receive your letters regularly that we take very ill to this long privation of that pleasure.'

Once again De Quincey was on the run from Wordsworth, but he was also nervous about his developing relationship with Dorothy. Added to which, the thought of ‘his' cottage – its windows newly curtained, walls freshly painted, and deal bookcases standing empty – filled him with terror. His sister Jane wrote on 17 May to remind him that he had promised some time ago to be with them in ten days. ‘
I observe you always say
ten days, a distance which as regularly recedes so that it is constantly at the same standing.' The only news they had of Thomas came ‘from your favoured friend, Miss Wordsworth. . . When shall we hear anything more of this beautiful cottage? I can't approve of the sitting-room being upstairs.' Jane's letters to her brother were always teasing. ‘I should like to know,' she said of his future in Grasmere, ‘how you will pass your time – whether you mean to bury yourself in total seclusion, or only in an elegant retirement, embellished with every unsophisticated pleasure. I can tell you that you will never endure it alone for two months.' The only news she had from home was that Hannah More had published a novel called
Coelebs in Search of a Wife
, ‘which we have read; – very good advice to masters and misses, but quite out of your way'.

De Quincey's time in London was currently spent bingeing on opium and books, both great stoppers of clocks. The thought of boxing up his new volumes – he had accumulated 300 more in the last few months – made him torpid. Coleridge described how any duty, once opium had been taken, would ‘
in
exact proportion
' to its ‘
importance
and urgency. . . be neglected', and similarly how ‘in exact proportion, as I
loved
any person or persons more than others, & would have sacrificed my life to them', they would be ‘barbarously mistreated by [my] silence, absence, or breach of promise'. De Quincey claimed that he was, at this point, still ‘a dilettante eater of opium' but the evidence suggests he was more than this, and that opium was becoming preferable to reality. His inertia led to guilt, guilt led to opium, opium led to inertia, inertia led to guilt: he later described how the ‘oppression of inexpiable guilt' lay upon him with ‘the weight of
twenty Atlantics
'.

On Saturday nights he would douse himself and make his way across the city, walking far beyond his known boundaries, ‘for an opium-eater is too happy to observe
the motion of time
'. He found himself in ‘knotty problems of alleys' with ‘enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of coachmen'. These he imagined to be
terrae incognitae
, of which he was the ‘first discoverer'. He paid ‘a heavy price in distant years' for his metropolitan excursions, ‘when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep'. Now, when he slept, he saw Piranesian cities and palaces, and ‘silvery expanses of water', from seas and oceans to ‘translucent lakes, shining like mirrors'.

In his sentient hours, De Quincey visited another peripatetic: Walking Stewart. This was the same bushy-haired traveller he had observed in Bath, and who, in his diary, he had compounded with the ancient mariner to form an impression of Coleridge. Stewart, a figure in the semi-mythical mould of Sir John Mandeville, had apparently walked through India, Persia and Turkey, across the deserts of Abyssinia and Arabia, through northern Africa, into every European country as far east as Russia, as well as over to the new United States and into the upper reaches of Canada. Whether his peregrinations were real or metaphorical it is hard to know – sometime he referred to them as journeys of the mind. In his essay, ‘Walking Stewart', De Quincey repeated some advice the old man had given him about the preservation of books: ‘
he recommended
to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work, properly secured from the damp, &c, at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who, in their turn, were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation'.

Burying books was a gratifying thought for a man like De Quincey, who imagined himself being buried beneath them. Some years later, parting from Walking Stewart at Somerset House on the Strand before making his way through Soho to Tottenham Court Road, De Quincey recalled that he ‘stopped nowhere, and walked fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham Court Rd I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible), but overtook, Walking Stewart'. There must, De Quincey said, ‘have been
three Walking Stewarts
in London', as he overtook him again and then again. Walking Stewart was as multiple as the figure of the artist in the Piranesi print.

Duplication was in the air. In the spring of 1809, De Quincey's brother Richard reappeared after six years at sea. Having run away aged fourteen, Richard had joined the navy, been captured first by pirates and then by the Danes, and was now coming home as part of a prisoner exchange. Making his way down Greek Street one evening, Thomas ran into a family friend called John Kelsall who had come to London to legally confirm Richard De Quincey's identity, but found himself barred from doing so when the young man declared himself not well enough for visitors. Richard's reluctance to see visitors threw Mrs Quincey into a panic: this was a sign, she believed, that the released prisoner was not her son at all but a ‘pretender' assuming his position in order to claim his inheritance. The ‘real' Richard would have come straight home to his loving mother rather than secrete himself in London; this filial ingratitude was most unnatural. The ‘real' Richard, she surmised, had ‘probably lost his life' in a mutiny and this other person was a sailor ‘assuming his name and character'. The bundle of letters she had believed to be from Richard were, Mrs Quincey now concluded, ‘
forgeries
'. It is a bewildering story which reveals something of the mindset of the family, and puts into a different perspective De Quincey's own anxieties about counterfeit and multiple identities. Was his fear of identity fraud inherited from his mother, who had given the family a false name?

De Quincey alone understood that Richard was who he said he was, and that he needed to adjust to shore life before reintroducing himself to the mother from whom he had run away. ‘It is a great satisfaction to me that my Feelings and actions are intelligible to you,' Richard wrote to Thomas, adding that ‘There seems to be something very whimsical in Mr K[elsall's] ideas of
my non-identity
.'