Guilty Thing (42 page)

more than once
, under anxiety at the recollection of some error uncorrected or some thought left open to misconstruction (which being sent off by Friday morning's post would be sure to face him in print the following day) he has fervently wished that some Eastern magician would, a few hours before publication, loosen the ‘Gazette' Office from that rock on which we trust it is built – raise it into the air with all its live and dead stock – and would transport it for one week, – not – (as angry people are apt to say) into the Red Sea, but some comfortable place on its shore, Arabia Felix for instance.

It was not a literary style that Westmorland cottagers would be used to, but in a few years' time De Quincey's flights of fancy would make him famous.

Deadlines created anxiety, but they also enabled him to write. Without the limits they imposed De Quincey's essays would possibly never stop, and certainly never start. Deadlines allowed him to ‘express himself rapidly', to create a ‘
more burning logic
, a perfect life of cohesion, which is liable to be lost or frozen in the slow progress of careful composition'. The transitory nature of journalism both excited and alarmed him. ‘
A newspaper is not like a book
in its duration,' De Quincey explained in one of his distinctive editorials. ‘Books are immortal; for some of them last for ten or even fifteen years: but newspapers must content themselves with an existence almost literally ephemeral.' His letter of resignation, written after eighteen months at the
Westmorland Gazette,
was accepted and following De Quincey's departure, John Kilner was appointed editor.

By 1820 the cottage felt weighed down by books and babies – Mary was expecting her third child, Horatio, who would be known as Horace – and De Quincey took a six-month lease on a larger house, Fox Ghyll, one mile north of Ambleside. ‘
Mr De Quincey's Books
have literally turned their master & his whole family out of doors,' mocked Sara Hutchinson. His move set the pattern for the rest of his life: De Quincey accumulated paper in its various forms until the space became, as his daughters put it, ‘snowed-up' and there was no longer room in which to sit, stand or open the door, at which point he started again somewhere else. He did not relinquish the lease on Dove Cottage; instead the house became a cupboard.

When Wordsworth visited Fox Ghyll he described the downstairs rooms as so dark that they resembled ‘a well or dungeon'. This is the only image we have of the interior of De Quincey's new home. As for the exterior, during the family's residence there, Dorothy said, the windows were ‘
always blinded
, or with but one eye to peep out of'. The house was isolated, the only neighbours being an old woman and her daughter, and because De Quincey had pawned his wife's watch, they had no means of telling the time. Sara Hutchinson predicted that De Quincey would stay here for the duration, ‘unless unsettled by an earth-quake or a
second accumulation of books
'. He stayed until 1825, returning to Dove Cottage only when he needed to retrieve something. But while De Quincey no longer inhabited the cottage, the cottage still inhabited him. It was ‘endeared' to his ‘heart so unspeakably beyond all other houses' that, years after leaving, he revealed that ‘I rarely dream through four nights running that I do not find myself (and others besides) in some one of those rooms, and, most probably, the last cloudy delirium of approaching death will re-install me in
some chamber of that same humble cottage
.'

In December, at the invitation of John Wilson, De Quincey travelled to Edinburgh to meet William Blackwood, proprietor and clandestine editor of
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
. ‘
Maga
', as it was known by its contributors (from Blackwood's way of calling it, in his Scottish accent, the ‘
Mahga
zine') had been founded to rival the
Edinburgh Magazine
and Wilson was one of its stars. Also in the constellation were Hogg, Lockhart, and a lethal young Irishman called William Maginn.

Sir Walter Scott called
Blackwood's
the ‘mother of mischief'; Mary Russell Mitford called it ‘a very libellous, naughty, wicked, scandalous, story-telling, entertaining work'; and more recently the critic Karl Miller described it as a journal of
squabash
,
bam
and
balaam
. ‘Squabash' meant putting people down or cutting them up. A ‘bam' was a trick or a leg-pull. And ‘balaam' meant ‘rejected or unsolicited material (slush in the common parlance)'. One of the earliest editions, in 1817, opened with a hatchet job by Wilson on Coleridge's
Biographia Literaria
before presenting something called ‘The Chaldee Manuscript'. Written in the language of the Book of Daniel, and posing as a found document of the sort rescued by Chatterton from St Mary Redcliffe, the Chaldee Manuscript was a piece of nonsense cooked up by Wilson, Lockhart and Hogg in which Blackwood, ‘the man whose name was of ebony' and Constable, proprietor of the
Edinburgh
and ‘the man which is crafty', wrestle for mastery. Its appearance offended everyone – Church, Whigs, Tories, ladies – and Blackwood was forced to publish an apology. Sales of
Maga
duly soared to 10,000.

Parody, personality and headlong jollity summed up the
Blackwood's
manifesto, while imitation, masquerade and double-bluff lay at the heart of the
Blackwood's
personality. The contributors imitated both one another and themselves. John Wilson adopted the persona of Christopher North,
Blackwood's
elderly editor, and behind this mask, so Wilson's biographer puts it, he could ‘
abuse Wordsworth anonymously
in an article, and, in a later number of the magazine, attack with scorn the author of his own article, and write a stern letter against himself for libelling so great a poet – then, in the following number, round off this Protean transaction with another vigorous onslaught on the Lake Poets'.

Blackwood's
squabash and bam came to the boil in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae', a literary symposium which ran from 1822 until 1835 in which, as Hogg complained, the personality of each was ‘
eemetawtored
'. An in-joke composed of further in-jokes, the effect of the ‘Noctes' was to invite the reader to look through a window at a party to which they were not invited. Together with Christopher North, the sketches featured Morgan Odoherty, modelled on Maginn (whose pseudonym was otherwise Sir Morgan O'Doherty, Bart), the Shepherd, based on Hogg, and Timothy Tickler, the pseudonym of Wilson's Tory uncle, Robert Sym (Tickler being the name of William Blackwood's dog). Walk-on parts included Lord Byron, various characters from John Galt's novels, and a German called ‘Kempferhausen', modelled on R. P. Gillies. The companions would meet at Ambrose's Tavern – a real place – to consume vast quantities of food and drink and debate the issues of the day. Their discussions usually ended up being about
Blackwood's
itself. It was the very sublime of fun, and nothing so brilliant has ever been repeated in the British press.

Not only did De Quincey need the money, but he was perfectly placed to become a Blackwoodsman, as the cohort were known, and had been edging towards this manner of journalism in his editorship of the
Gazette
. There was one subject on which he was currently an expert, and he suggested that he write a piece for
Blackwood's
on opium. Blackwood welcomed the idea and looked forward to the finished product. The article never appeared; all Blackwood received from De Quincey were high-handed letters in which he described himself as ‘
the atlas of the magazine
' and as ‘hard at work, being determined to save the Magazine from the fate which its stupidity merits'. ‘I
do
“keep my word”,' De Quincey stormed in a further letter to his long-suffering editor, ‘– not “once” merely, but always – when I am aware that it is pledged'. Bewildered by De Quincey's self-importance, Blackwood replied that as far as the magazine was concerned, ‘it will be quite unnecessary for you to give yourself further trouble'.

While De Quincey was busy not writing for
Blackwood's
, another drama was brewing. In January 1820 an English journal called the
London Magazine
had launched, with the aim of countering the power of the Scottish publications. It was here that Hazlitt's
Table Talk
and Lamb's
Essays of Elia
first appeared. The editor, a Scot called John Scott, was soon at loggerheads with the pseudonymous Blackwoodsmen for attacking all his friends, including Keats and Leigh Hunt, and for using, as he put it, ‘the
most licentious personal abuse
' to ‘lure. . . one class of readers, and the veriest hypocritical whine, on matters of religion and politics' as ‘bait for another'.
Blackwood's
, said Scott, made a ‘common joke of common honesty'. Such claims, Wilson told De Quincey, had only one response: Scott ‘
must be a dead man
'. Ready to challenge him were Lockhart and Wilson himself, ‘so Scott had no chance'. While
Blackwood's
feigned deep hurt, Scott would not retreat and De Quincey, whose ‘abhorrence' of Scott was ‘deep – serious – and morally grounded', stoked the fire by goading Wilson to ‘Lampoon him in songs – in prose – by night and day – in prosperous and adverse fortune. Make him date his ruin from Nov 1st 1820 – Lash him into lunacy.' De Quincey's cheerleading had only just begun: ‘
I am burning for vengeance
. I do so loathe the vile whining canting hypocrisy of the fellow, that I could myself contribute any price of labour to his signal humiliation.' In February 1821, Scott challenged Lockhart – who he believed to be the editor, Christopher North – to a duel. In the masquerade that was
Blackwood's
, Lockhart was represented by his friend, Jonathan Christie, who shot Scott through the abdomen. Nine days later, aged thirty-six, Scott was indeed a dead man. And Lockhart, Maginn proudly proclaimed, was ‘wet with the blood of the Cockneys'.