Guilty Thing (44 page)

Now that opium has reverted to the realm of myth, we read De Quincey differently. We see him as one of us, a voice anticipating our own age of recreational drug use, but this is not how he was read in 1821. While De Quincey pronounced himself ‘the only member' of ‘the true church on the subject of opium' the congregation, as he knew very well, was bursting through the doors of the cathedral. The ‘Confessions' alludes to some of the more illustrious consumers – ‘the late dean of – ; Lord – ; Mr –, the philosopher' – but the whole country was marinated in opium, which was taken for anything from upset stomachs to sore heads. Hannah More's great friend, the saintly Wilberforce, was an addict; middle-class women collapsed on their sofas in its haze; even dogs and children were dosed up with it. The miraculous effects of opium were no more mysterious to De Quincey's contemporaries than the miraculous effects of aspirin are to us today; everyone who had ever taken opium to sedate a sore tooth knew what De Quincey was describing. Those few who remained unaware of the drug's effect on dreams now gave it a try. Southey had his first taste of opium ‘for the sake of experiencing
the sensation which had made De Quincey a slave to it
'. Branwell Brontë did the same. Dorothy, in her later years, also became addicted (her dosage was 35–40 drops a day), while Wordsworth remained remarkable in living eighty years without letting opium pass his lips. ‘Many persons,' wrote the author of
Advice to Opium-Eaters
, ‘greatly injured themselves by taking Opium experimentally, which trial they had been enticed to make by the fascinating description of the exquisite pleasure attendant on the taking of that drug, given in a recent publication on the subject.' De Quincey, however, scoffed at the suggestion that he was the nation's drug-pusher: ‘Teach opium-eating!' he exclaimed. ‘
Did I teach wine-drinking?
Did I reveal the mystery of sleeping? Did I inaugurate the infirmity of laughter?'

Subscribers to the
London Magazine
would have enjoyed the exaggerated romance of De Quincey's first trip, the outrageous irony of posing as the only floating Londoner, the comically soaring prose – ‘eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath, and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood' – and the chutzpah involved in recasting a household habit as a personal and unique transgression. The genius of his
Confessions
, as the cultural historian Mike Jay puts it, is that ‘
De Quincey was not so much breaking a taboo
as deliberately creating one by recasting a familiar practice as transgressive and culturally threatening. It was a Byronic double game: baiting the moralists and middlebrow public opinion while delighting the elite with the invention of a new vice.'

It was a complicated ruse, but nothing De Quincey wrote was ever straightforward. A fearless ironist, his mischief worked in curious ways, and playfulness, venom, ambition, revenge and self-perception were built into every brick of his
Confessions
.

So too was his response to Wordsworth
, whose voice can be heard throughout. De Quincey took Coleridge's subject matter and clothed it in Wordsworthian garb. Like
The Prelude
, De Quincey's
Confessions
was a work the author had ‘hesitated' about ‘allowing' to ‘come before the public eye, until after my death (
when, for many reasons, the whole will be published
)'. And as in Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey', De Quincey was concerned with the maturing self. To explore the newly discovered mansion of his mind he returns to the streets of London rather than the ‘hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows' of the Wye Valley, and the ‘sense sublime' located by Wordsworth in ‘setting suns and the round ocean and the living air' is found by De Quincey in the bottle he buys on Oxford Street. His impersonation of ‘Tintern Abbey' can be heard in the very rhythm of his sentences. Addressing himself to his wife, ‘beloved M., dear companion of my later years', De Quincey reveals at the end of Part I that ‘these troubles are past', and brings us into the present moment:

Meantime, I am
again
in London
: and
again
[my stress] I pace the terraces of Oxford-street by night, and oftentimes, when I am oppressed by anxieties that demand all my philosophy and the comfort of thy presence to support, and yet remember that I am separated by three hundred miles and the length of three dreary months, – I look up the streets that run northwards from Oxford-street, upon moonlight nights, and recollect my youthful ejaculation of anguish: – and remember that thou art sitting alone in that same valley, and mistress of that very house to which my heart turned in its blindness nineteen years ago. . .

‘The length of three dreary months' echoes ‘Tintern Abbey's' ‘the length of five long winters'. The incantation of ‘again. . . again' repeats Wordsworth's:

and again I hear

These waters . . .

. . . Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs . . .

. . . Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows . . .

By Wordsworth's side, we discover at the end of the poem, is his ‘dear, dear Sister' and the sudden appearance of De Quincey's Margaret, sitting by Dorothy's former hearth, plays a similarly healing role.

But the Opium-Eater assumed, in a way that Wordsworth did not, his reader's intimacy: ‘And how do I find my health after all this opium-eating? In short, how do I do?
Why, pretty well, I thank you, reader
.' Opium is not a voluble or a social drug and his visionary descents took him into soundless worlds, but De Quincey talks to us in the way people talk after dinner, several bottles down, when the table is cleared and the night is young. He confides more than he confesses, and is generous in his confidences; he anticipates our responses, fears our boredom, and likes our company. At least, this is how he appeared in his writing.

It is possible to see the Opium-Eater in his first flush of fame because his new friend Richard Woodhouse kept a record of their conversations. John Taylor and James Hessey, who bought the
London
after the death of John Scott, hosted regular dinners, in the style of the ‘Noctes', to which their contributors were invited and De Quincey, an object of great fascination, was a frequent guest. Here he appeared ‘sallow-looking' and ‘very much an invalid', being often too ill to add to the table talk. He would, however, sit up afterwards with Woodhouse smoking ‘segars'. ‘
I was astonished at the depth and
reality
, if I may so call it, of his knowledge,' Woodhouse said of the man for whom reality had become a distant memory. He was also astonished by De Quincey's capacity to gossip, stir and sow the seeds of discontent. Speaking in what Carlyle would describe as his ‘slow sad and soft voice', De Quincey insisted that Wordsworth and Dorothy were in fact not having sexual relations, that it was simply Wordsworth's habit to kiss his sister whenever he saw her. Always attuned to the voices of others, De Quincey described how when Wordsworth read his own poetry his face assumed a ‘
conventicle appearance
, and his voice a methodistical drawl that is quite distressing. Southey mouths it out like a wolf howling. Coleridge lengthens the vowels and reads so monotonously, slowly, and abstractedly, that you can scarce make out what he says.' As for the fatal affair with
Blackwood's
, Wilson was ‘the principal person concerned', the man who should have come forward to Scott and revealed his identity. But De Quincey also described to Woodhouse the effect of first reading ‘We Are Seven': ‘How deep must a man have gone below the thoughts of the generality,' he mused, ‘
before he could have written such a ballad
.'

It was at one of the dinners hosted by Taylor and Hessey that De Quincey found himself in the company of a man who turned out to be ‘a murderer, and a murderer of a freezing class; cool, calculating, wholesale in his operations'. This was the young artist and critic, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who contributed to the
London Magazine
under the
noms de plume
Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot and Cornelius van Vinkbooms. Sixteen years later Wainewright was accused of poisoning his uncle, mother-in-law and sister-in-law, the latter because she had ‘very thick ankles'. Wainewright was, said De Quincey, a snake who
slithered ‘over the sleeping surfaces
of confiding household life'. De Quincey was too unwell to partake in the conversation, but ‘if I had known this man for the murderer that even then he was. . . what sudden growth of. . . interest, would have changed the face of that party!' Wainewright's case struck De Quincey as remarkable for two reasons: ‘for the appalling revelation which it makes of power spread through the hands of people not liable to suspicion', and for the contrast ‘between the murderer's appearance and the terrific purposes with which he was always dallying'. He and Wainewright wrote for the same journal – ‘this formed a shadowy link between us; and, ill as I was, I looked more attentively at him than at anybody else'.

To De Quincey's horror, John Wilson appeared in London that October, where he offered his services as a writer for the
London
. Hessey suspected that it was a
Blackwood's
plot. De Quincey, expecting to become a ‘
dead man
' once Wilson revealed whose side he had been on in the magazine wars, agreed. To protect himself, he blackened his friend's name. Wilson, De Quincey said, had the ‘happy knack' of ‘catching & making use of the thoughts of other people', with ‘no opinions of his own on any subject', no ‘originality', ‘no principles' and ‘no judgment'. It was Wilson who penned ‘the most objectionable' of the
Blackwood's
articles. ‘His character is represented to be a compound of cruelty and meanness. He will domineer over those authors who have as yet no reputation in the world, he will grudge them their fair degree of credit, he will abuse them, & strive to keep them back, & even to crush them. But to those who are established in reputation. . . he will be abject & cringing.' And at the same time as slandering him, De Quincey plotted with Wilson his return to
Blackwood's
. Crabb Robinson, that perfect recorder of the De Quinceyan temperature, called on him and found him ‘querulous', ‘in ill health', ‘very strongly impressed with his own excellence, and prone to despise others'.

By December 1821, De Quincey could no longer endure the separation from his family and he returned to Fox Ghyll in time for the New Year celebrations. He had been away for seven months, and was now the self-appointed ‘Pope of Opium'.

In 1822 he did, in a manner of speaking, return to
Blackwood's
when he made his debut as the Opium-Eater in the community of the ‘Noctes'. ‘
Pray, is it true, my dear Laudanum
,' asks the doddery Christopher North, ‘that your “Confessions” have caused about fifty unintentional suicides?' ‘I should think not,' replies the Opium-Eater. ‘I have read of six only; and they rested on no solid foundation.' ‘And now,' continues North, ‘that you have fed and flourished fourteen years on opium, will you be persuaded to try a course of arsenic?' The Shepherd then describes his own response to the Opium-Eater's ‘desperate interesting confession':