Guilty Thing (32 page)

De Quincey eventually left London in July, and made his way not to Grasmere but to the wooded vale of Wrington, twelve miles from Bristol, where his mother had spent £12,500 (the equivalent of £700,000) on a house called Westhay, for which she was planning radical improvements. His sisters, who had been amused by De Quincey's request for a floorplan, were equally amused by his comments on the floorplans they sent to him: ‘
We could not help laughing
when we observed the truth of your remark as to all the rooms at Westhay being 12ft by something, for we have never remarked the circumstance before.' He arrived to find the usual chaos of builders and carpenters, and he described the scene to Dorothy as though it were one of his dreams:

when I first came here
we had below stairs only one room habitable, besides the kitchen. . . and in every other part of the house and even after the bedrooms were finished, it was impossible to make use of them in the daytime; for there being no front stairs yet erected – and there being no road to the backstairs but through the hall which the workmen used as a workshop, there was no getting upstairs without displacing all their benches, etc, which was a complete ceremony and process; and, being up one was a complete prisoner – which did not suit me at all: – since then we have migrated successively into a parlour of the neighbouring farmhouse; – into a greenhouse with no floor; – into a room with a floor but no ceiling; – into a closet 6 feet by 6; – and finally, after having been hunted round the house by painters and paperers, we have resolved into our original sitting-room. . .

While De Quincey was in a greenhouse with no floor, and a room with a floor but no ceiling, Dorothy was ‘musing' in the moss hut behind Dove Cottage. Always concerned about the maltreatment of trees – ‘
malice
has done the work
', she wrote to De Quincey of the felling of ancient trees under Nab Scar – she was dreaming of the continued life of her garden. ‘Pleasant indeed it is,' she mused in her reply, ‘to think of that little orchard which for one seven years at least will be a secure covert for the Birds, and undisturbed by the woodman's axe. There is no other spot which we may have prized year after year that we can ever look upon without apprehension that next year, next month, or even tomorrow it may be deformed or ravaged.' Dorothy's suggestion was that De Quincey was to be custodian of her memories rather than tenant of the cottage. The house was still in every sense hers, and the orchard remained her ‘
perfect paradise
'.

While her son was rearranging his life around the Wordsworths, Elizabeth Quincey was rearranging hers around Hannah More, whose own home, Barley Wood, was now less than a mile away. More's fame had reached the next level with
Coelebs in Search of a Wife,
which was the topic of all fashionable conversation. De Quincey, who had been unable to get beyond page forty, saw her regularly throughout the summer and described his visits in satirical letters to Dorothy. Hannah and her sisters, who were for Napoleon and against Wordsworth, sparred with De Quincey on all subjects. He ‘tormented them to the utmost of my power' or so he said, and gave ‘extreme pain to all the
refined
part of the community here'. But De Quincey remained a favourite of the More household, who thought he had the makings of a bishop; one of the sisters referred to him afterwards as ‘that sweet young man', which suggests that they had been charmed rather than pained by their guest.

A month ago, wrote Dorothy to De Quincey on 1 August 1809, you had ‘talked of being at Grasmere
in three weeks
'. ‘
When are we to see you?
' a despairing Mary asked him on 12 September. ‘All has been in readiness for you, and everyone of us wishing to see you for a long long time.' But Richard had arrived at Westhay on 8 September to be reunited with his siblings. The sailor was brimful of stories, some of which De Quincey relayed in a letter to Johnny:

He has been in cold Countries
where there is no daylight for many many weeks. He has been amongst great Forests where there were only Lions and Bears and Wolves. And up Rivers and Lakes where nobody lived. And amongst many nations of Black men and men that are the colour of copper. He has also been past the country where Giants live: they are called Patagonians. He has been in Battles and seen great Towns burning: And sometimes the men that he fought against caught him and put him in prison. Once he was in that Island where Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday lived: I dare say your Mother or your Aunt has told you about them.

It was
another six weeks before he caught the mail to the north and opened the door to the cottage. ‘It was,' De Quincey recalled, ‘on a November night, about ten o'clock, that I first found myself installed in a house of my own – this cottage, so memorable from its past tenant to all men, so memorable to myself from all which has since passed in connexion with it.' Wordsworth had lived here during ‘perhaps, the happiest period of his life – the early years of his marriage, and of his first acquaintance with parental affections'. De Quincey would do the same, but ‘in that very house', he confessed, ‘the second birth of my sufferings began'.

Wordsworth, ‘The Deserted Cottage', frontispiece illustration by Birket Foster

‘. . . Margaret

Went struggling on through those calamitous years

With cheerful hope . . .'

9

Residence in Dove Cottage and the Revolution

I could not always lightly pass

Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,

Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old,

That garden of great intellects, undisturbed.

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book Third

His sufferings began almost immediately. Until a permanent housekeeper could be found, Dorothy had arranged for thirteen-year-old Sally Green, whose parents had perished in the snow on Easedale, to come in and cook De Quincey's breakfasts, but he dismissed the ‘
little orphan maiden
' and returned to Allan Bank.

What could have gone so wrong with Sally Green that De Quincey, who had kept his distance from Wordsworth for the past six months, now placed himself once again under the poet's roof? Dorothy, however, was delighted to have him back. ‘Mr De Quincey,' she said in a letter to a friend, ‘has been above a month with us, and is like
one of our own Family
.' While he perched at Allan Bank, a procession of wagons and carts, all advancing in measured movements, delivered his cargo of books to the lawn of Dove Cottage. ‘
I can tell you
that he has already received 9 or 10 chests,' wrote Dorothy of the volumes dumped like loads of coals, ‘and that 19 more are on the road.' The bulk of the books would need to remain in their chests, she realised, ‘on account of the smallness of the house'.

Despite his fascination with the death of Sally's parents – ‘in so brief a period as one fortnight', De Quincey enthused in ‘Lake Reminiscences', the Green family ‘came to be utterly broken up'– he thought the girl ‘
lazy, luxurious and sensual
'. Sally was also being employed as a nurse for little Catherine Wordsworth, and as far as De Quincey was concerned more of her time was spent thinking about boys than protecting her ‘
youthful charge
'. He had always entertained powerful fantasies around servants: his first sister, De Quincey believed, had been killed by a servant, while Elizabeth had died after being taken to visit a servant's father.

His dislike of Sally Green was not the only problem. De Quincey was uncomfortable in the cottage for a number of reasons. Jane had said that her brother would be unable to manage on his own for more than two months, and we know from his time in Everton that De Quincey threw himself on people – almost anyone – in order to break his solitude. Possibly the house, emptied now of children, felt eerie; quite possibly he saw himself as an intruder and needed reassurance from the Wordsworths that he was welcome; almost certainly he was overwhelmed by the responsibility he had been handed. When his family lived in North Parade it had not been at the personal invitation of Edmund Burke, and nor had Burke been concerned with whether his former home was being treated by its new occupants with sufficient respect. In many ways, it was De Quincey who was now the housekeeper at Dove Cottage, and he was made aware of his lowly position.

Added to which, he had a quite different perspective on the place to the one shared by the Wordsworths. For William and Dorothy, Dove Cottage epitomised the picturesque, but to De Quincey it was, like all houses, sublime. Compare their descriptions of the hill on which the cottage was built: Wordsworth's ‘little domestic slip of mountain' was De Quincey's ‘vast and seemingly never ending series of ascents'. The Wordsworths saw the exterior walls as ‘embossed' with flowers, and De Quincey saw them as ‘
smothered
'. For the Wordsworths the cottage was a hidden nest; for De Quincey there was nowhere from which it could not be seen. He had gazed towards it from Oxford Street in 1803, he had looked down on it from the gorge of Hammerscar in 1805, its ‘glare' wheeled into view around bends in the road, and gleamed like a lighthouse amongst the rocks and stones and trees.

During the autumn De Quincey helped John Wilson to write an essay for
The Friend
called ‘The Letter to Mathetes', in which a student explores his need for a Wordsworthian moral guide. It was De Quincey who came up with the signature ‘Mathetes', meaning follower of Christ. By Christmas, Dorothy had found a replacement for Sally Green and De Quincey was reinstalled in his home. His new housekeeper, Mary Dawson, had originally worked for the Wordsworths and then moved on to Brathay where she cooked for Charles Lloyd and his family. She was, Dorothy enthused, a ‘proud and happy Woman' who ‘will suit the place exactly, and the place exalts her to the very
tip-top of exaltation
'. De Quincey enthusiastically suggested that the Wordsworth household – including Coleridge and the enormous John Wilson – return to the cottage for Christmas dinner, but the number proved too many for the parlour and the feast was moved to Elleray. Wilson, an ebullient entertainer who, the previous summer, had hosted a week-long fishing party for thirty-two men at Wast Water, would not have flinched at the last-minute change of plan. De Quincey opened up the cottage instead for the new year, when he put on a firework display for the children of the vale. ‘Mr de Quincey's House was like a fair,' wrote the ever-watchful Sara Hutchinson.

The year 1810 was a good one for De Quincey and a bad one for Coleridge. De Quincey settled into cottage life and found his pace. He taught Latin to Johnny, read everything he could find about circumnavigating the globe, and played with the toddler, Catherine, who possessed, according to her Aunt Dorothy, ‘
not the least atom of beauty
', but for De Quincey was the ‘
impersonation of the dawn
'. In April, while being tended to by Sally Green, Catherine ate raw carrots and began to vomit. This, De Quincey felt, was ‘criminal negligence' on Sally's part. A fit of convulsions followed which left the child's left hand and leg partly paralysed.