Guilty Thing (4 page)

He also had a lifelong love of majestic churches. In his dreams he returned to the aisles and galleries of this ancient building, to the swelling anthems of the funeral, ‘the
burst of
the Hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling movement of the choral passion, the agitation of my own trembling sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the wrath of the organ', followed by ‘the priest in his white surplice waiting with a book by the side of an open grave', and the sacristan waiting with his shovel.

Doctors Percival and White, both notable figures in the rich cultural, scientific and intellectual life of the town, were friends of De Quincey's father. Percival was co-president of the renowned Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society; White was vice-president, and Quincey senior was a founding member. The ‘Lit & Phil' was composed of prominent Mancunian industrialists, engineers, doctors and intellectuals who would gather to discuss matters of natural philosophy, law, literature, education and advances in chemistry and science.

Dr P, as De Quincey referred to Thomas Percival, was ‘
a man, of elegant tastes
and philosophic habits' who exchanged ideas with Voltaire. He was instinctively distrusted by De Quincey's practical and evangelical mother, who associated philosophers with infidels, and her dislike was fuelled by Percival's habit of reading aloud extracts from his erudite correspondence. She was bored by the society of Northern philosophers, but Thomas was captivated by Dr P, who had written a collection of improving fables for children called
A Father's Instructions
, a copy of which he had given to Thomas and Elizabeth. De Quincey had never before met the author of a book he admired.

His life imitated art in the fullest sense, and De Quincey's need to read was, as he put it, ‘absolutely endless and inexorable as the grave'. He read voraciously, ravenously, for seventy years, creating layer upon layer of fictitious memory. In
The Prelude
, which De Quincey first read in manuscript form, Wordsworth celebrated ‘all books which lay/ Their sure foundation in the heart of man', and the foundations of De Quincey's most significant moments can be found in novels, poems, plays, travelogues and works of philosophy. His reading provided a guide through the maelstrom of consciousness; it gave a shape to shapeless events, and a meaning to those things – such as death – that he found terrifying in their random cruelty. Because he used the inside of a book to make sense of the outside world his experiences might be seen as only half-true, but the relationship between fact and fiction was, for De Quincey, complicated. Again and again we find, in the books he loved, accounts of the events which formed him. For example in
Titan
, written by his second favourite novelist, the German Romantic Jean Paul Richter, is a description of the death of a girl which is identical in atmosphere to De Quincey's description of the death of his sister Elizabeth.
Titan
's heroine, Liana, dies by an open window through which ‘the golden sun gushed through the clouds', and ‘suddenly the folding doors of an inspired concert-hall flew open, and outswelling harmonies floated by'. For De Quincey, reading was less an escape from reality than a perilous journey to the truth, as potentially devastating as opium itself. Before he discovered drugs, it was through books that De Quincey sought to find a route back to his original self, to the person he was before Elizabeth's death.

Accordingly, he was possessed by the power of writers and the first writer to lodge himself in De Quincey's psyche was Thomas Percival. The impression made on him by
A Father's Instructions
‘was
deep and memorable
: my sister wept over it and wept over the remembrance of it, and later carried its sweet aroma off with her to heaven'. Percival's tales, set in a contemporary Manchester which contained elements of ancient Greece, were principally about animals, the force of maternal affection, the importance of filial gratitude, and the racial superiority of Europeans. In one story, a country boy knowing nothing of life beyond his family home goes to Manchester to see an exhibition of wild beasts and is mesmerised by a Blakean tiger of sublime ‘symmetry'; another is set on a heavenly June day when the ‘
clouds were dispersed
, the sun shone with unusual brightness' and ‘verdure of the meadows. . . regaled every sense'. Once absorbed into his imagination where they marinated for decades, these tales stalked De Quincey's own writings.

In addition to being the family doctor, Charles White was an enthusiastic craniologist who passed on to De Quincey – whose own skull, in contrast to his tiny body, was enormous – his belief that the shape and size of the head was an indication of intellect. Elizabeth's head, White pronounced, was ‘
the finest
. . . in its development of any he had ever seen' and her brain ‘the “most beautiful”', which confirmed – or formed – De Quincey's view of her as a superior being. ‘For its superb developments,' De Quincey proudly recorded, his sister's skull ‘was the astonishment of science'. Lord over life and death, Charles White was fascinating to De Quincey, who compared him to ‘some mighty caliph, or lamp-bearing Aladdin'. Of all his childhood books,
Arabian Nights
was De Quincey's touchstone; his Manchester was less like ancient Greece than an Arab city. White had turned a room of his own house into a museum of medical curiosities consisting of body parts which he used to illustrate his lectures, and when De Quincey came here as a child it was he who was Aladdin, entering the magic cave.

‘Memories are killing', said Samuel Beckett, and De Quincey, for whom there was no such thing as forgetting, believed himself cursed by memory; his mind was a palimpsest on which ‘every chaos' was ‘stamped' and ‘arrayed in endless files incapable of obliteration'. Jorge Luis Borges based his story ‘Funes the Memorious' on De Quincey's ghastly condition. Following a fall on his head, Funes can remember everything he ever saw and everything that ever happened to him. He remembers the shape and movement of every cloud, and the crevice and moulding of every house. Aged nineteen, Funes's face is ‘more ancient than Egypt'.

De Quincey saw, standing in a clock case in Charles White's museum, the embalmed and mummified body of a woman called Hannah Beswick, alongside which hung the skeleton of the highwayman, Thomas Higgins. There is a peculiar horror to the sight of a dead body standing upright, and De Quincey would later find his appalled reaction to this sight caught in the fifth book of Wordsworth's
Prelude
, which is entitled ‘Books'. The poet recalls how, roaming the margins of Lake Esthwaite as a child, he saw a boat of men ‘with grappling-irons and long poles' sounding the water. ‘At length' from the depths ‘bolt upright rose' a dead man. His face was ‘ghastly', a ‘spectre shape' of ‘terror'. Wordsworth claims to have felt ‘no vulgar fear' because his ‘inner eye' had ‘seen such sights before among the shining streams of fairyland', but he is at his least convincing when he talks about fairyland. The tension with which he controls the scene suggests that in his terror Wordsworth became himself as rigid as the corpse.

De Quincey always remembered the stories attached to bolt-upright bodies. Hannah Beswick, born in 1688, developed a fear of being buried alive after her brother, pronounced dead, had opened his eyes when his coffin lid was being nailed down. The doctor who attended the unfortunate man – who then lived on for many years – was Charles White, and Hannah Beswick paid White £25,000 to ensure that, once her own body appeared to have expired, he keep it above ground and check it daily for signs of life. White was true to his word, and after her death, aged seventy, Hannah Beswick's unburied corpse became known as the Manchester Mummy. Fascinated by the resurrection (he knew by heart ‘the great chapter of St Paul', which was read at his sister's funeral), De Quincey was doubtless also fascinated by the idea of Elizabeth herself being still alive on the other side of the bedroom door, while Percival and White cut open her head and then bandaged it up like a mummy.

‘Highwayman' Higgins, as he was known around Manchester, had been in life a night-rider of gallantry and elegance. He was also, according to De Quincey, a ‘noonday murderer' who was believed to have slaughtered a wealthy widow and her servant in their Bristol home. His guilt was never proved but in a typical flight of fancy De Quincey later imagined, in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts', Highwayman Higgins pulling woollen stockings over the hoofs of his horses to muffle their clatter when he returned from his two-day journey from Bristol to Manchester, his pockets filled with the dead woman's gold. Higgins was hanged, but, Thomas learned, his body was cut down prematurely and when it arrived at the surgeon's table to be dissected, he too had not yet quite expired. A medical student was required to finish the job by plunging a knife into the still-beating heart.

Locked doors, open windows, footsteps on the stairs and guilty figures slipping away; midsummer days, Arabian Nights, echoing churches, damaged skulls and writers wielding knives: the death of Elizabeth stood at the centre of a vast web of associations for De Quincey. The summer of 1792 was the fair seed-time of his childhood, and he described his character as taking root in this strange soil.

Beyond the walls of the house, the country was responding to events in France. Three years earlier, the fall of the Bastille had been welcomed as the overthrow of absolutism and slavery. ‘
How much the greatest event
it is that ever happened in the World! & how much the best!' cried Charles James Fox, leader of the opposition. ‘
With freedom, order and good government
,' cautioned William Pitt, leader of the government, ‘France would stand forward as one of the most brilliant Powers in Europe; she would enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate.' But order quickly broke down. In 1791 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had fled Versailles and were placed under guard in a Paris prison. The French National Assembly was dissolved and a legislative assembly established. Three months before the death of little Elizabeth Quincey, France had declared war on Austria and Prussia and it was now widely feared that Britain would be drawn into the hostilities. France was declared a republic, and Louis XVI was put on trial. English newspapers were filled with French horror stories from across the Channel – mob rule, mountains of carcasses, massacres in the Tuileries, massacres in the prisons. In late January 1793 the king was executed: regicide was open season. The Revolution had become the Terror. Dehumanised in France,
the British turned Louis into a hero
facing death with fortitude: his last night on earth was reconstructed by the British press as a tender domestic moment in which the noble king instructed his fainting wife and weeping children in the will of God. The following October, Marie Antoinette was also guillotined: in the French royal family, De Quincey found his first example of a household wreck. On 1 February 1793, France declared war on England.