Guilty Thing (51 page)

In late May 1830, however, we find him back in John Wilson's house. According to Wilson's daughter Mary, De Quincey turned up in a storm wanting a bed for the night and stayed for a year. She exaggerated: he stayed for six months.
^*
During this time De Quincey wrote like a fury, piling up pieces for Blackwood who paid him ten guineas per sheet – a sheet was equivalent to sixteen printed pages – with the promise of more money if the copy arrived early, which it never did. The Opium-Eater's appearance in June's ‘Noctes' gives us a sense of how Wilson found his friend's company. ‘
Mr De Qunshy
,' says the Shepherd,

you and me leeves in twa different warlds – and yet its wunnerfu' hoo we understaun ane anither aes weel's we do – quite a phenomena. When I'm soopin' you're breakfastin' – when I'm lyin' doon, after your coffee you're risin' up – as I'm coverin' my head wi' the blankets you're pitting on your breeks – as my een are steekin' ike sunflowers aneath the moon, yours are glowin' like twa gas-lamps, and while your mind is masterin' poleetical economy and metapheesics, in a desperate fecht wi' Ricawrdo and Cant [Ricardo and Kant], I'm heard by the nicht-wanderin' fairies snorin' trumpet-nosed through the land o' Nod.

Carlyle once described De Quincey's talk as consisting of a ‘diseased
acuteness
' and this is precisely what is caught in the ‘Noctes'. ‘Mr De Qunshy' is an earnest expounder of Coleridgean philosophy and Wordsworthian wisdom, delivered in a black letter English of antiquated deliberation and politeness. While he bores the Tickler to sleep, the Shepherd goads him on – ‘I would like to hear ye, sir, conversin' wi' Coleridge and Wordsworth – three cataracts a' thunderin' at once!' – and Christopher North keeps up an academic interest: ‘You have been touching, my dear Opium-Eater, on abstruse matters indeed, but
with a pencil of light
.' Wilson further teased De Quincey in a scene where the four friends debate the Wordsworthian crime of nest-robbing. ‘
Some one of my ancestors
,' says the Opium-Eater, ‘– for even with the deepest sense of my own unworthiness, I cannot believe that my own sins – as a cause – have been adequate to the production of such an effect – must have perpetrated some enormous – some monstrous crime, punished in me, his descendant, by utter blindness to all birds' nests.' ‘Maist likely,' responds the Shepherd. ‘The De Qunshys cam owre wi' the Conqueror, and were great Criminals – But did you ever look for them, sir?' ‘From the year 1811,' replies the English Opium-Eater, ‘– the year in which the Marrs and Williamsons were murdered – till the year 1821, in which Bonaparte the little – vulgarly called Napoleon the Great – died of a cancer in his stomach. . . did I exclusively occupy myself during the spring-months, from night till morning, in searching for the habitations of these interesting creatures.' De Quincey's preoccupation with the Ratcliffe Highway murders had now become a
Blackwood's
joke.

Back in Grasmere, Margaret and the children had, for reasons unknown, moved out of The Nab and were now installed in a farm called Lingstubbs near Penrith, whose landlady had a bevy of children of her own. The infants squabbled, the rent was late, the bills went unpaid, and Margaret wrote to her husband threatening to kill herself if he could not settle what was owed. The most he could earn from
Maga
was £100 a year; in response to her threat De Quincey sent William Blackwood one of his infamous begging letters, by which he made everyone other than himself responsible for his woes: ‘She assures me peremptorily that, if I do not hold out some immediate prospect of relief in my promised letter of tomorrow night, her present application shall be
the last letter she'll ever write
.' Handed the responsibility of Margaret's continued life, Blackwood advanced the necessary funds – a practice to which he became accustomed.

In December 1830 De Quincey's wife and bairns arrived in Edinburgh where they moved into 7 Great King Street, in the New Town; ‘a house', De Quincey blithely explained to Lockhart, ‘of that class which implies a state of expenditure somewhat above the necessities of a needy man of letters'. The rent was £200 a year. It was here that his three-year-old daughter Florence was ‘first awakened', as she later recalled, to the fact that she ‘
had a father
'.

His frozen debts began to thaw and De Quincey found himself in a fast-flowing river. In May 1831 a bookseller took action against him for the sum of £37 16/ 6d. The repayment was somehow made – presumably by Wilson. On 1 February 1832, De Quincey wrote to Wilson's brother asking for £30 to cover another debt: ‘
My extremity is complete
, for unless in 6 days of course I pay this bill, I am put to the horn.' Again, the debt was settled, presumably by Wilson's brother. The water company now threatened to cut off his supply unless he paid their bill; De Quincey borrowed £110 from his sister, and by the summer of 1832 the family had downsized to a slate-grey Georgian terrace at 1 Forres Street. The new address was kept secret but De Quincey's whereabouts was discovered, and before dawn on his forty-sixth birthday he went into hiding to escape arrest. This was the start of a decade of flight and disappearance as he evaded his pursuers; like all debtors, De Quincey saw himself as a victim of injustice while those to whom he owed money were villainous persecutors. ‘It would be dangerous to me, that any servant should know where I am,' he explained to Blackwood, adding that any correspondence sent to Forres Street would be delivered to his secret abode by his twelve-year-old son, Horace.

The man who had once gazed through windows at shining fires was now himself spied upon: a solicitor called William Muir had Forres Street watched for four hours one day, but De Quincey was nowhere to be seen; the next day Muir had the neighbourhood searched but could still ‘obtain no trace of him'. Some sources suggested that the debtor might be ‘at the Lakes, and others that he was in the environs of Edinburgh'. Officers followed up every report of sightings ‘at different times of the day & upon different days, but did not fall in with him'. One officer, having waited a ‘whole day in the Meadows where in the Twilight he discovered a person corresponding to the marks given him of Mr De Quincey. . . followed and watched through many turns & windings & finally lost sight of him
about the South end of Clerk Street
'. Like Poe's ‘Man in the Crowd', De Quincey had disappeared into the tumultuous sea of human faces. He was eventually arrested ‘near the top of Montague Street'. It is the great inconvenience of poverty, as Hazlitt observed, that it makes men ridiculous.

In September 1832 De Quincey was put to the horn for the first time, for the £10 owed to the landlord of his former lodgings on Duncan Street. Unable to repay the full sum – Wilson had evidently put his foot down – he found himself imprisoned in the Canongate Tolbooth, a damp, black and airless Elizabethan jail at the end of the Royal Mile. He wrote nothing about this experience but within hours he had exploited the loophole of the sick bill, by which prisoners who were dangerously ill could be released on condition that they stayed within the boundaries of the city. He was arrested again the following month, but this time managed to repay the debt.

Throughout this hellish year De Quincey produced a roster of essays for
Blackwood's
as well as the Radcliffian novel
Klosterheim; or, The Masque,
which Blackwood published in a single volume – making this the first independent book, as opposed to journalistic paper, that De Quincey wrote. Were
Klosterheim
to succeed, he believed, ‘it will
deliver me from an abyss
of evil into which few have ever descended'.

As a novelist, De Quincey is generally regarded as having failed. ‘He cared nothing for delineations of character,' his daughter Florence observed, ‘and I do not think he cared much for pictures of modern life.' He was mystified by the Brontës and by Charles Dickens, themselves great admirers of De Quincey, and avoided meeting Thackeray when given the chance. He diagnosed his own disease as one of meditating too much and observing too little; Virginia Woolf put it differently: De Quincey needed to adjust his fictional perspectives ‘
to suit his own eyesight
'; in a De Quinceyan landscape, nothing must ‘come too close'. While his heroines were lifeless – literally so, for the most part – and his dialogue dead on the page, De Quincey's plots have propulsion and an anarchic energy gives his narratives a nervous pulse rate.
Klosterheim
centres on the ‘purloining' of a ‘long and confidential letter' – the idea was to inspire Poe's ‘The Purloined Letter' – and the labyrinthine city in which the dramas take place becomes a metaphor for the Opium-Eater's mind. In the novel's midnight masquerade, De Quincey propels us into a ‘life below a life' where ‘all was one magnificent and tempestuous confusion, overflowing with the luxury of sound and sight'. What distinguishes De Quincey's fiction is its reflection of inward states. From the preface to the
Lyrical Ballads
he learned that the feeling ‘gives importance to the action and situation, and
not the action and situation to the feeling
'. If Southey's poems were Gothic tales in verse, with ‘so many lines written before breakfast', De Quincey's Gothic tales were poems, whose length he measured with a ruler. Would Blackwood like another chapter, De Quincey asked? It would be no trouble to dash one off and fling it over to him.

Coleridge admired
Klosterheim
for its ‘purity of style and idiom', and told Blackwood that De Quincey had reached ‘an excellence to which Sir W. Scott. . . appears never to have aspired'. He would like, Coleridge said, to write to his ‘old friend, De Quincey', to tell him so.

By 1833 De Quincey had no credit in any shops and was two years in arrears for the rent of Dove Cottage. Losing this house with its hold on the past was too much to bear, and to placate the landlord, John Benson, he offered to pay double the rent, or purchase the place for £130. Benson insisted he leave, and De Quincey, consulting lawyers, won the right to ‘stay' until Candlemas 1834. ‘For the last fifteen or sixteen days,' he told Blackwood, ‘having a family of 12 persons absolutely dependent upon me, I have kept up with the demands upon me for mere daily necessities of warmth – light – food, etc., by daily sales of books at the rate of about 30 for 1s. In that proportion have been my sacrifices; and I have now literally no more to sacrifice that could be saleable.' He did, however, have something more to sacrifice: during this period one of De Quincey's children was kidnapped until a particular debt had been honoured.

On 10 February, Carlyle informed his brother that De Quincey was ‘said to be in jail' but, ‘at all events', remained ‘invisible', and on the 22nd of that month Margaret gave birth to her eighth and final child, Emily. On 29 March, Carlyle told his brother that ‘Dequincey [sic], who has been once seen out this winter, sent me word he would come and see me; he will do no such thing, poor little fellow: he has hardly got out his
cessio bonorum
.'
Cessio bonorum
was a declaration of bankruptcy, enabling the debtor to purchase immunity from prison in exchange for yielding up his worldly goods to his creditors. De Quincey's
Cessio bonorum
calculated his goods at £762 9/, and his debts at £617 16/; he included in the list of monies due that Coleridge had owed him £300 since 1807, plus £393 interest. In April, Carlyle told John Stuart Mill that De Quincey had seen ‘no man, except Bailiffs, it appears, for the last eighteen months; he is said to be in the uttermost, unaidable embarrassment; bankrupt in purse, and as nearly as possible in mind . . .' De Quincey was, Carlyle added, one of the ‘
most irreclaimable Tories now extant
, despising Poverty with a complete contempt'.