Guilty Thing (5 page)

Thomas De Quincey was the fourth of eight children. The eldest, William, was probably born in 1782; Elizabeth was born in 1783 and died, as we know, aged nine; Mary was born in 1784, a year before Thomas himself, who was born on 15 August 1785 and was therefore a Leo. (Lions would play a rich part in his imaginative life, and one of De Quincey's earliest dreams was of lying down before one.) Jane, who arrived in 1786, died aged three; Richard, known as ‘Pink', appeared in 1789, to be followed by a second girl called Jane, and finally, in 1793, a boy eight years younger than Thomas, called Henry. The death of the first Jane, two years before Elizabeth, was ‘scarcely intelligible' to Thomas – ‘
summer and winter came again
. . . Why not little Jane?' – and in his
Autobiographic Sketches
he described her as his older and not his younger sister; De Quincey evidently believed himself to be his mother's fifth and not her fourth child. More disturbing to Thomas, then aged four, than the mystery of his position in the family, or of Jane's current whereabouts, was the rumour that went around the house that she had been treated cruelly by the servant who was nursing her. The effect on him of this suggestion was ‘
terrific
. . . the feeling which fell upon me was a shuddering horror, as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife'.

For Thomas, birthdays, anniversaries and the dates of deaths would always be of great significance. His future editor, David Masson, who was introduced to him in the 1840s, remembered De Quincey's animated response to hearing that it was the birthday of another of the guests in the room: ‘“O,” he exclaimed, “that is the
anniversary of the battle of So-and-So
”; and he seemed ready to catch as many birthdays as might be thrown him on the spot, and almanac them all round in a similar manner from his memory.' Also born on 15 August, sixteen years before Thomas himself, was Napoleon Bonaparte. Sharing a birthday can be both a bonding and a threatening experience, implying that we are in some ways twinned with that other person, destined to progress along parallel lines. Sharing his birthday with a man simultaneously regarded as a murderer, a genius, a usurper and a hero could only increase De Quincey's sense of destiny, and Bonaparte's presence as a nemesis would shadow his life.

‘
What is to be thought of sudden death?
' De Quincey asked in his most famous essay, ‘The English Mail-Coach'. Suddenness fascinated him: ‘
Wonderful it is
to see the effect of sudden misery, sudden grief, or sudden fear. . . in sharpening the intellectual perceptions,' he
wrote, and sudden death was a subject about which he had thought a great deal. The French king and queen had died suddenly, and at the hands of the lower classes. Did Thomas think that Jane had been killed by her violent nurse? He certainly associated Elizabeth's death with the visit, also in the care of a servant, to the house of the servant's father; and another of his earliest memories involved saving
‘fugitive' spiders
from the angry broom of a bloodthirsty housemaid, who stopped his campaign of salvation by telling him ‘of the many murders that the spider had committed and next (which was worse)
would
commit if reprieved'. Servants would always play an important role in his internal dramas, but however De Quincey understood Jane's death, his grief had remained hidden like stars in the daylight until he found himself standing by Elizabeth's bedside.

His parents, also called Thomas and Elizabeth, had married in 1780 in Queen Square, London, at the heart of Bloomsbury. His mother's people, the Pensons, were a cut above his father's: she came from a military family and both her brothers served with the East India Company in Bengal. Elizabeth Penson was a snob; the ‘De' in ‘De Quincey' was an affectation she added as a widow in order to keep up appearances; her husband would have disapproved of such a flourish. De Quincey's father, known as Thomas Quincey, was another upright figure – a friend described him as being ‘
the most upright man
I ever met with in my life'. Quincey started his working life as a draper in London's Cheapside before moving in 1780 to the burgeoning industrial centre of Manchester where, on a steep, half-timbered road called Market-Street Lane (under where the Arndale shopping centre now stands), he opened a shop selling ‘printed Linens, Musslins, Furnitures, and other Cottons'. It was in a room above the shop that Thomas came into this world. He was keen to pin down for his readers the precise ‘tier in the social scaffolding' occupied by his family: the Quinceys belonged to the urban middle-classes. By the time Thomas was born, his father had made the decision to exchange retail for importing Irish linen and West Indian cotton, and he was therefore a merchant and no longer a draper. While his children may have grown up in ‘
circumstances of luxury
', with servants and underservants who were maintained, because his father was a moral man, in even more ‘luxury', the family were not, De Quincey stressed, ‘emphatically
rich
'. They might have become so had Thomas Quincey not been, unusually for a trader in the West Indies, a ‘conscientious protester' against slavery, and had he not died aged forty from tuberculosis.

Soon after De Quincey's birth the family moved from Market-Street Lane to a larger house on the outskirts of the city. It was called The Farm, and described by De Quincey in Wordsworthian terms as ‘a pretty rustic dwelling'. It was then fashionable for the homes of the elite to include a greenhouse, later known as an orangery or conservatory, and Mr Quincey's ‘daily pleasure' lay in his books, his garden and his greenhouse. A sickly child, Thomas was lovingly nursed; he was always drawn to the nurturing qualities of women and, a lifelong hypochondriac, he never tired of describing, in baroque detail, the malfunctions of his body. Of the memories which date back to this time, the most powerful was his father's illumination of the house in 1789, when King George III recovered from his first attack of madness.

When Thomas was six the Quinceys moved to ‘Greenhay', whose substantial greenhouse formed ‘
the
principal room
' for family life. By then he had seen so little of his father that he doubted whether he ‘
would have been able to
challenge me as a relative; nor I
him
, had we happened to meet on the public roads'. Mr Quincey's work, together with the weakness of his lungs, meant that his days were increasingly spent in warmer climes: ‘he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra, next in Madeira, then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in St Kitts', wrote De Quincey, who would never travel further than Ireland. Thomas Quincey senior's membership of the Literary and Scientific Society, which he joined in the year that he moved to Manchester, suggests that he was held in high esteem by men of learning. He kept a small collection of Italian Renaissance paintings and a growing library; his favourite authors were Cowper and Dr Johnson. His reverence for them was such, De Quincey said, that had these great men visited Greenhay, his father ‘might have been tempted to express his homage through the Pagan fashion of
raising altars and burning incense
'. Thomas would share his father's veneration for writers. Two aspects of the household library later struck him as significant: the first was that his father's books were all in English, and the second was that he had nothing from the ‘Black Letter', or Gothic script, period, which spanned the twelfth to the seventeenth century. It was a book collection, De Quincey concluded, for the purposes of ‘
instant amusement
' as opposed to prolonged study.

Aged twenty-three, Quincey senior had written a book of his own, a topographical study called
A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England, Performed in the Summer of 1772
, which had previously been published in five parts in the
Gentleman's Magazine
. It was by reading his father's accounts of the state of draining, mining, farming and manufacturing in the Midlands that De Quincey later came to know something of the man, and his own first book,
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, which similarly began its life as magazine instalments, would also describe a short English tour.

De Quincey's chief memory of his father was of learning, aged seven, that he was coming home from the West Indies to die. The invalid was expected on a summer evening of ‘
unusual solemnity
' and the children and servants had assembled on the front lawn to greet his carriage. The experience was recorded by De Quincey as a ‘chorus of restless images': sunset came and night fell; still they stood listening for the sound of the wheels which, because the house was isolated and the roads empty, would be heard from a distance. As midnight approached, the silent party walked up the lane where, out of the gloomy stillness, horses' heads slowly appeared; the carriage was moving at such a hearse-like pace that the wheels made no sound at all. Inside, against a ‘mass of white pillows' lay ‘the dying patient'. Were it not for ‘the
midsummer night's dream
which glorified his return', De Quincey would not have remembered his father at all.

Mr Quincey's life exhaled in July 1793, a year and one month after the death of little Elizabeth and six months after the beheading of the French king. From now on De Quincey would always associate the sting of death with ‘
the endless days of summer
'. Summer deaths, he suggested, were more affecting than winter deaths because the heavens were more distant, ‘more infinite', and the clouds seemed grander and ‘more towering'.

Mrs Quincey inherited the house – which her husband advised her not to sell until prices had risen – plus half the income that would come from the sale of his businesses, a share in the New Linen Hall in Chester, and a share in a ship called the
Isabella Brigantine of Drogheda
. The total income at her disposal was £1,600 a year. It was a fair sum; not Mr Darcy's ten thousand but enough to ensure the family's comfort. When the boys reached twenty-one they would receive a patrimony of their own, and until then their moral and financial welfare was left in the care of four unbending guardians: a clergyman, a magistrate, a merchant and a banker, named, respectively, Samuel Hall, James Entwhistle, Thomas Belcher and Henry Gee.

Like a stage direction, his father's exit was followed by the arrival back from school of De Quincey's ‘horrid pugilistic' eleven-year-old brother, William, whom he also barely knew. William is given more space by far in the
Autobiographic Sketches
than the adored Elizabeth, who features only as a corpse. All we know of Elizabeth in life is that she read books, drank tea and fell ill, while William – a rider of ‘whirlwinds' and director of ‘storms' – is endowed with many dimensions in page after page of vividly recalled, rolling anecdote. The role played by his older brother was of profound significance to Thomas, who always ‘had a sort of feeling, or
omen of anticipation
, that possibly there was some being in the world who was fated to do him. . . a great and irreparable injury'. The identity of this being would shift with the years, but in the nursery it was William. Not yet at school, Thomas had no knowledge of children other than his own siblings, and William was the only boy he knew who had seen the world beyond Greenhay. An excessively energetic child, family lore put William Quincey down as a disrupter of the peace and Mrs Quincey sent him away at the first opportunity. School only nurtured his love of conflict, and by the time William returned home he ‘would have fastened a quarrel upon his own shadow for presuming to run before him'.

William despised Thomas, and Thomas had ‘
a perfect craze
for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing.' This pertinent observation goes to the heart of De Quincey's nature. He also had a craze for being afraid, which was fed by William on a nightly basis. Between the ages of seven and twelve, De Quincey was dominated by his brother. He pictured himself, under William's tyrannical rule, as an ‘Irish hodman' running up and down a ‘vast Jacob's ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league', trying to reach the ‘top of any Babel' his assailant might ‘choose to build'. Whether he was seeking the face of his dead sister or keeping up with the demands of his living brother, De Quincey saw himself as a figure on a perpetual staircase.

William, he said, was a ‘tiger'. He was everything that Thomas was not: William was masculine while Thomas was, as he put it, ‘effeminate'; William was wilful, athletic, bossy, noisy and boisterous while Thomas was fragile and introverted. Unlike Thomas, William ‘
detested all books
excepting only such as he happened to write himself', one such work being ‘How to raise a Ghost; and when you've got him down, how to keep him down'. There was seemingly nothing that William could not do and he ruled over the nursery like a sorcerer. Literally so: William practised necromancy, ‘legerdemain' – or sleight of hand – and ‘thaumatology', the study of miracles. As well as magic and illusion, he fascinated his siblings with lectures on natural philosophy and displays of pyrotechnics; to demonstrate the laws of physics he strapped cats into parachutes and dropped them from great heights. He boasted that he could walk on the ceiling like a fly and blamed his failure to do so on the friction from the plaster of Paris; if the ceiling were coated with ice, he insisted, it would be different. He then constructed an apparatus for getting himself launched like a humming-top in the hope that he could ‘spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis – perhaps he might even dream upon it'. These performances only ended after one of his sisters orchestrated a mutiny, at which point William devoted himself to the writing and production of a bloody tragedy in which his siblings were all massacred in the first act.