Guilty Thing (39 page)

Any chances of Dorothy once again becoming De Quincey's daily companion were now destroyed by the actions of a servant. Mary Dawson had proved a worse housekeeper than Sally Green. She was a ‘
foolish, selfish and ignorant
old maid', who gave herself ‘unlimited power in all which regarded the pecuniary arrangements of my house'. De Quincey had a longstanding arrangement with Dorothy that during his periods of absence the Wordsworths were free to use the cottage. Despite its having become a tender subject for both parties, the offer still stood. But when De Quincey was away in London, probably during the spring of 1812, Dorothy was turned from the door by Mary Dawson on the grounds that her ‘master' had left instructions to let no one in. ‘
Any real friend of mine
,' De Quincey stormed when he heard what had happened, would have seen through Mary Dawson – who enjoyed having the cottage to herself – but the Wordsworths were all too ready to believe they had been turned away from ‘their own' house. They had already lost control of the orchard; this was considered the next step in De Quincey's takeover bid. Accused of bolting the door against them, De Quincey – who prided himself on his generosity – was too wounded to defend his own honour. Besides, who would believe that he had been wronged? The word of Mary Dawson, a longstanding retainer and, most importantly, a native of the vale, would hold more weight than anything an ‘intruder' had to say. So De Quincey ‘
sate down half-contentedly
under accusations which, in every solemnity of truth, applied less justly to myself than to any one person I knew amongst the whole circle of my acquaintance. The result was that ever after I hated the name of the woman at whose hands I had sustained this wrong.'

The year 1812 was a terrible one for the Wordsworths who, six months after the death of Catherine, lost their son Thomas to measles. ‘
Pray come to us as soon as you can
,' Wordsworth wrote to De Quincey on the night of the boy's death, ending his summons: ‘Most tenderly and loving, with heavy sorrow for you, my dear friend.'

The Corsican Crocodile dissolving the Council of Frogs.

‘I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles.'

11

The Recluse

. . . a mighty city – boldly say

A wilderness of building, sinking far

And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth,

Far sinking into splendour – without end!

Wordsworth,
The Excursion

In 1813 De Quincey went to sleep in Dove Cottage, and while he slept ‘
a theatre seemed suddenly opened
and lighted up' in his brain ‘which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour'. In his dreams the house ‘swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity', the walls expanded and the floors dissolved, the dark wainscoting unfolded like a Japanese flower in water and the stone flags crumbled into desert sands: ‘I seemed every night to descend,' he wrote, ‘not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths.' Like Milton's Satan, he was ‘hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie', to a ‘bottomless perdition'.

Time, too, unfurled itself; he seemed sometimes ‘to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay; sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed'. Childhood episodes, long forgotten and the length of eternity, paraded themselves before him, and the featureless figures of his London walks returned ‘upon the rocking waters of the ocean. . . the sea seemed paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries'. He became the heaving ocean; he found himself in China, a country in which he had often thought he would ‘go mad'. In scenes of ‘unimaginable horror' he was oppressed by ‘birds, beasts, reptiles' and every tropical tree and plant.

I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid in wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

Adopted by cartoonists to symbolise Napoleon, the ‘cursed crocodile' was the creature that terrified De Quincey the most. In his dreams he escaped from the reptile's great green jaws to find himself trapped in Chinese houses whose furnishings ‘soon became instinct with life'. He lay under ‘the weight of incubus and nightmare', cursing ‘the spells which chain[ed] him down from motion'. Powerless as a child, he was imprisoned by sleep.

To have asked De Quincey whether he had taken opium on ‘any particular day' was the equivalent of asking ‘
whether his lungs
had performed respiration'. His daily consumption of laudanum rose to 8,000 drops; a considerable amount but still only half of what Coleridge was taking. ‘
He can do nothing
,' Dorothy noted of De Quincey. ‘He is eaten up with the spirit of procrastination; but if once in two or three years he actually does make an effort, he is so slow a labourer that no one who knows him would wish to appoint him to it.' Johnny, to whom De Quincey was once again teaching Latin, he now saw ‘for a
nominal hour
every day. . . This said nominal hour is generally included in the space of twenty minutes; either the scholar learns with such uncommon rapidity that more time is unnecessary, or the Master tires.'

This was a momentous year for De Quincey's Lakeland neighbours. John Wilson, now married, lost his fortune and left Elleray for his home town of Edinburgh. Despite being on his uppers, De Quincey gave Wilson £200 (‘Will £200 be enough?' he asked). Mary Dawson announced that she was pregnant – the fruits of her time in the cottage while the master was away – which left De Quincey without a servant, and Wordsworth was offered the lucrative position of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, which allowed the family to move into a handsome pile called Rydal Mount, on the road to Ambleside. After thirteen years, the Wordsworths were no longer residents of Grasmere. ‘
I was the last person
who left the house yesterday evening,' Dorothy wrote to Jane Marshall of their final night in the hamlet. ‘It seemed as quiet as the grave; and the very church-yard where our darlings lie, when I gave a last look upon it seemed to cheer my thoughts. There I could think of life and immortality – the house only reminded me of desolation, gloom, emptiness, and cheerless silence.'

The following year, 1814,
The Excursion
was published. In the first part a figure known as ‘The Wanderer' tells the story of Margaret, a Lakeland girl deserted by her husband when he runs away to join the army. Impoverished and depressed, her cottage crumbling around her, Margaret waits for him to return. ‘My spirit clings/ To that poor Woman,' says the Wanderer:

                  – so familiarly

Do I perceive her manner, and her look,

And presence; and so deeply do I feel

Her goodness, that, not seldom, in my walks

A momentary trance comes over me. . .

Two miles from Grasmere, on the edge of Rydal Water, there stood, and still stands, an ancient farmhouse called The Nab. Low and white with mullioned windows, the building, in possession of the same family for generations, was the home of a farmer called John Simpson, whose seventeen-year-old daughter was another Margaret. A courtship began between this strapping young woman and the battered incumbent of Dove Cottage, who serenaded her, so a watchful Dorothy informed Mrs Clarkson, ‘at the
up-rouzing of the Bats and the Owls
'. Wilson, visiting from Edinburgh, reported that he had ‘
walked to De Quincey's
, which I reached at half-past one o'clock in the morning: he was at The Nab, and when he returned about three o'clock, found me asleep in his bed'. She will have been nine when De Quincey first arrived in the vale, but he did not encounter Margaret Simpson until now, at which point he described himself as falling in love with her simplicity (she thought
The Vicar of Wakefield
was a history book). But as we know from his Everton journals, De Quincey was plagued by his sex drive.

In August 1814, his youngest brother, Henry, arrived in Grasmere but found no one at home. After two days of knocking, Henry reported, he ‘
gave up the ghost
, for I perceived that at least nothing more than your ghost made its appearance'. There were a few telling glimpses of De Quincey that year. Crabb Robinson saw him in London at the house of Charles Lamb, where he talked ‘about Wordsworth with the zeal and intelligence of a well-instructed pupil'. His style was a ‘mixture of
pedantry and high-flown sentimentality
', his conversation did not ‘flow readily', and he was ‘too much of a disciple and admirer to have anything of his own'. ‘Pedantry and high-flown sentimentality': Crabb Robinson's observation recalls that of Coleridge, who described De Quincey's working style as ‘anxious yet dilatory'. His distance from Wordsworth had not improved his confidence; De Quincey was as unsure now as he had been eleven years earlier about what ‘character' to present to the world. But in Edinburgh, where he visited John Wilson that same year (‘
Quince has gone off to Edinburgh
at last with Mr Wilson,' reported Sara Hutchinson), his talk was remembered differently. Here, in the company of James Gibson Lockhart, Regency beau and fledgling biographer of Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Ettrick shepherd and poet, Sir William Hamilton, philosopher, and the Germanist R. P. Gillies, De Quincey was more at his ease. His voice, remembered Gillies, was ‘
extraordinary, as if it came from dreamland
', and his talk leapt ‘at will from the beeves to butterflies, and thence to the soul's immortality, to Plato, and Kant, and Schelling, and Fichte, and Milton's early years and Shakespeare's Sonnets, to Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Homer and Aeschylus, to St Thomas of Aquin, St Basil and St Chrysostom'. He would ‘recount profound mysteries from his own experiences – visions that had come over him in his loneliest walks among the mountains, and passages within his own personal knowledge, illustrating, if not proving, the doctrines of dreams, of warnings, of second sight and mesmerism. And whatever the subject might be, every one of his sentences (or one of his chapters, I might say) was woven into the most perfect logical texture, and uttered in a tone of sustained melody.'

Later that year, Wilson, Hogg and De Quincey formed an awkward party at Rydal Mount. On a night of spectacular beauty, when a belt of stars stretched across the sky, Hogg raised his glass. ‘
Hout, me'em
!' he said, ‘it is neither mair nor less than joost a triumphal arch in honour of the meeting of the poets.' Wordsworth, taking De Quincey's arm and ‘leading the little opium-chewer aside' muttered in his ear, ‘Poets? Poets? – What does the fellow mean? Where are they?' De Quincey, pleased to display his intimacy with Wordsworth, mischievously reported the insult to Hogg. Two years later, Hogg avenged himself with a send-up of ‘The Recluse' called ‘The Stranger', which appeared in an anonymous collection of parodies called
The Poetic Mirror
. A traveller arrives at a tarn where his horse ‘breaks propriety' with a snort ‘like blustering canon':