Guilty Thing (38 page)

On 11 May, in the midst of their negotiations, there was another murder and this time at the heart of government: the prime minister Spencer Perceval was shot dead in the foyer of the House of Commons. It was as though the king himself had been slain, and in his own castle. His assassin, a Liverpool merchant-broker called John Bellingham, acted with striking coolness and deliberation. Having taken himself to Parliament after visiting an exhibition of paintings (his father had been an artist), Bellingham shot Perceval with a single bullet to the chest and then sat on a bench to wait for his arrest. For once, De Quincey was on the scene: John Williams might be lying beneath the crossroads with a stake through his heart, but murder still stalked abroad. Bellingham was a handsome and articulate man whose story was utterly dismal. He had been imprisoned for four years in Russia, where he had travelled for business, and had subsequently been refused government compensation. ‘
Recollect, Gentlemen
,' he told the court in his trial, ‘what was my situation. Recollect that my family was ruined and myself destroyed, merely because it was Mr Perceval's pleasure that justice should not be granted. . . I demand only my right, and not a favour; I demand what is the birthright and privilege of every Englishman.' Coleridge, immediately drawn in, offered to report on the murder for the
Morning Chronicle
and the next day he visited a London pub to take down the local reaction. He found here no pity for Perceval, leader of an unrepresentative government, and total sympathy for his avenger: Bellington was a popular hero.

So while Parliament mourned the death of the prime minister, the rest of the country celebrated the execution of a tyrant and anticipated further such deaths. ‘
These were the very words
,' Coleridge reported from the tavern: ‘“This is but the beginning” – “More of these damned Scoundrels must go the same way & then the poor people may live.”' What Coleridge heard was the revolutionary fervour of 1790s France. ‘
The country is no doubt in a most alarming situation
,' Wordsworth wrote home to an anxious Dorothy, ‘and if much firmness be not displayed by the Government, confusion & havoc & murder will break out and spread terribly.'

The next household wreck, however, was to be his own.

The tension between De Quincey and Dorothy was broken exactly a month later when, on 11 June, he received a letter. ‘My dear Friend,' Dorothy ominously began: ‘
I am grieved to the heart
as I write to you – but you must hear the sad tidings – Our sweet little Catherine was seized with convulsions on Wednesday night. . . the fits continued till ¼ after 5 in the morning, when she breathed her last.' Later that day, Wordsworth appeared on his doorstep in the company of Crabb Robinson, who noted that De Quincey ‘burst into tears' on seeing them and ‘seemed to be
more affected than the father
'.

The fact that Dorothy had written immediately to De Quincey while Wordsworth went out of his way to pay him a visit shows that they were concerned about how he would take the news, but De Quincey's grief – described by an appalled Crabb Robinson as ‘
puling and womanly weakness
' – was beyond anything they could have expected. ‘
Nobody
,' De Quincey replied to Dorothy,

can judge from [Catherine's] manner to me before others what love she shewed to me when we were playing or talking together alone. On the night when she slept with me in the winter, we lay awake all the middle of the night – and talked oh how tenderly together: When we fell asleep, she was lying in my arms; once or twice I awoke from the pressure of her dear body; but I could not find [it] in my heart to disturb her. Many times on that night – when she was murmuring out tender sounds of endearment, she would lock her little arms with such passionateness round my neck – as if she had known that it was to be the last night we were ever to pass together. Ah pretty pretty love, would God I might have seen thy face and kissed thy dear lips again!

Mary Dawson, De Quincey added, had a burden on her conscience for the way in which she sometimes spoke to Catherine.

One of the meanings of the Latin word
plagiarius
, from which ‘plagiarism' derives, is the theft or seduction of another man's child. In this sense, De Quincey plagiarised Catherine Wordsworth. For as long as he could remember he had nurtured thoughts of kissing a dead girl as he parted from her for the final time, and his eroticisation of Catherine is intensified by the fantasy, expressed in his letter to Dorothy, that she knows this night together will be their ‘last'. De Quincey later described himself as having had a presentiment, on leaving for London, that Catherine's life would end, which was confirmed when a dog howled three times outside his door. He went on to tell Dorothy that he was fixated by the image of the ‘
idle gazers
' who will have crowded into her room to look ‘at our darling's face' as she lay lifeless on the bed prior to her burial, while ‘her father, her mother, and I should have been allowed to see her face no more'. Her aunt is not included in this line-up of intimates, but then Dorothy, as De Quincey knew, had never shown much fondness for Catherine's face.

Crabb Robinson, who saw De Quincey over the next few days, thought he was hamming up his pain and in De Quincey's next letter to Dorothy, he laboured over his expressions of sorrow, producing three drafts before he was satisfied: ‘
Oh that I could have died for her
or with her! Willingly dear friend I would have done this.'

His anguish was such that residents of the vale assumed De Quincey must be Catherine's father. ‘
The grounds for this fiction
,' he explained, ‘were the plainness of the child's appearance,' Wordsworth's ‘indifference' to and ‘want of fondness' for ‘the little thing', and De Quincey's own ‘grief for its death'. He was evidently on the verge of a breakdown. Wordsworth was not indifferent to Catherine's death, which in part destroyed him. ‘Surprised by Joy', written for his daughter, describes a sudden moment of delight which he instinctively turned to share with her, before remembering that she was ‘long buried in the silent tomb':

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind –

But how could I forget thee? – Through what power,

Even for the least division of an hour,

Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

To my most grievous loss? – That thought's return

Was the worse pang that sorrow ever bore,

Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;

That neither present time nor years unborn

Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Wordsworth's grief for Catherine was pure. De Quincey's was entangled in guilt – about reading the newspapers when she wanted to play, about being in London when she died, about having destroyed the moss hut and culled the orchard and thus damaged relations between the two houses. Added to which, De Quincey and Catherine had entered the Wordsworths' world at the same time, and in this sense they were twinned: her departure coincided with his own. As long as the children still loved him, De Quincey had a link to the family; good relations were unlikely to be resumed now that Catherine had gone.

But there was another dimension to the story as well: the death of Wordsworth's daughter reactivated De Quincey's grief for Elizabeth. Catherine had died in midsummer, twenty years – almost to the day – after De Quincey's sister. Catherine had vanished in ‘
early dawn
, just as the first gleams of morning began to appear above Seat Sandal and Fairfield', and she thereafter ‘assumed a connection . . . with the summer sun, by timing her immersion into the cloud of death with the rising and setting of that fountain of life'. Her death triggered memories of other tragic maids, like Ann of Oxford Street and the nameless child with whom De Quincey had curled up in the freezing house on Greek Street. Wherever in the country he ran, De Quincey was pursued by the same scenes. Not only had he been unable to save Jane, Elizabeth and Catherine from the deadly hands of ungrateful servants, but he had, as far as the Wordsworths were concerned, become an ungrateful servant himself.

Catherine also recalled Wordsworth's Lucy. Both girls were three when they died – ‘Three years she grew in sun and flower', Wordsworth wrote of Lucy – and the narrator of this ‘Lucy' poem had, like De Quincey, insisted on being the girl's sole tutor:

This Child I to myself will take;

She shall be mine, and I will make

A lady of my own.

The dead Lucy was a ‘Maid whom there were none to praise/ And very few to love', and the death of Catherine, De Quincey later wrote, was ‘
obscure and little heard of
. . . amongst all the rest of the world'.

Catherine's death allowed De Quincey to reclaim his Wordsworthian credentials. His relationship with Wordsworth had begun with the wise child in the churchyard in ‘We are Seven', and this is where it ended. Aged fourteen, De Quincey had seen himself in Wordsworth's maid who played by her brother's gravestone and now, aged twenty-six, he went one stage further, ‘stretching' himself ‘every night,
for more than two months running
' upon the earth where Catherine lay. In
Suspiria de Profundis
, the sequel to
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, De Quincey explained his ‘passion for the grave': he did not see a ‘grave as a grave' but ‘as the portal through which . . . some heavenly countenance', a ‘mother or sister', might be pulled back again.

In daylight hours he had visions of Catherine walking through fields of foxgloves carrying a basket on her head (recalling one of
The Prelude
's spots of time, the ‘girl who wore a pitcher on her head'), and by the autumn De Quincey began to feel that his ‘
life could not be borne
'. He left Grasmere and travelled to Liverpool, Birmingham, Bath and Bristol in search of medical help.

It was in Bristol that he recovered. As suddenly as it came, his grief left his body in the form of a ‘
peculiar sensation
' from the ‘knee downwards', making it hard for him to move. It was as though he had drunk from ‘Lethe or a river of oblivion'. All memories of Catherine now ‘vanished from my mind. . . she might have been dead for a thousand years, so entirely abolished was that last lingering image of her face or figure'. Her grave now became a memorial not to her brief life but to ‘the dire internal physical convulsion' by which De Quincey had been ‘shaken and wrenched' at the news of her death. It was Catherine, of course, who had experienced the dire internal physical convulsions, but Catherine was now as abstracted to De Quincey as John Williams himself. De Quincey had no idea what, apart from raw carrots, had caused the child's strange fit of passion, but he gave to his own condition a name: ‘
nympholepsy
'.

The word, first used in the late eighteenth century, is from the Greek,
nympholeptos
, meaning possessed by nymphs. It refers, in De Quincey's usage, to the ‘frenzy' of longing suffered by those in pagan times who caught a glimpse of a nymph or goddess in the forest. The ‘nympholept' himself is then ‘doomed to die', its being impossible to live after seeing such beings. In the wake of Nabokov's ‘nymphets' we now associate nympholepsy with paedophilia, and while De Quincey sexualised (dead) girls, he used the term to describe a longing for any unobtainable object. A boy in the vale killed himself, he wrote, after ‘languish[ing] with a sort of
despairing nympholepsy
after intellectual pleasures'; De Quincey's own early relationship with Wordsworth was a ‘nympholepsy
which had seized upon me
', and then attached itself, by proxy, to ‘the very lakes and mountains, amongst which the scenery of this most original poetry had chiefly grown up and moved'. He also experienced the ‘
sublime attractions of the grave
' as a form of ‘nympholepsy', and saw in the ‘Lucy' poems Wordsworth's particular expression of the malady.