Guilty Thing (54 page)

From his mother De Quincey received a scolding for writing ‘
in a disreputable magazine
on subjects and in spirits afflicting to your real friends'. His lapse of taste, Mrs Quincey assumed, was down to ‘opium delirium'.

De Quincey's final word on his relationship with Coleridge can be found buried in an essay for
Tait's
on ‘Milton v Southey', which appeared in 1847. ‘
Any of us
,' he wrote, ‘would be jealous of his own duplicate; and, if I had a doppelgänger, who went about personating me, copying me, and pirating me, philosopher as I am, I might. . . be so far carried away by jealousy as to attempt the crime of murder upon his carcass. But it would be a sad thing for me to find myself hanged; and for what, I beseech you? for murdering a sham, that was either nobody at all, or oneself repeated once too often.'

The subject of this passage was ostensibly Wordsworth, who had no equal. ‘If you show to Wordsworth a man as great as himself, still that great man will not be much like Wordsworth – the great man will not be Wordsworth's doppelgänger.' De Quincey, meanwhile, now had his own American duplicate, a man who went about personating, copying and pirating him. His name was Edgar Allan Poe.

Now resuming his
Autobiographic Sketches
, De Quincey explained that he had ‘not mentioned, in the “Opium Confessions”, a thousandth part of the sufferings I underwent in London and in Wales. . . Grief does not parade its pangs, nor the anguish of despairing hunger willingly count again its groans or its humiliations.' His current grief, anguish and despairing hunger were more real and far worse than anything he had known in 1802, but De Quincey would never describe them in his journalism.

He eventually gave up the lease of Dove Cottage in the summer of 1835. The house rendered up for him, he wrote, ‘
echoes of joy
', of ‘festal music' and ‘jubilant laughter', the ‘innocent mirth of infants' and the ‘gaiety, not less innocent, of youthful mothers', but alongside the ‘reverberation of forgotten household happiness' were the ‘re-echoing records of sighs'. Closing the door of the cottage after his final visit, De Quincey felt ‘the weight of a world' fall from his shoulders. ‘I now possess my mind,' he told Tait, ‘heretofore
I was under a possession
.'

His precious books, papers and letters were taken to Lingstubbs, the Penrith farmhouse in which Margaret had been so unhappy, where they snowed up another set of rooms. Three years later, having despaired of receiving any rent, the landlord of Lingstubbs put them up for sale. De Quincey's letters to Margaret, and quite possibly his diary from Everton days, were perused by prospective purchasers, and his library was sold.

‘
Yet in the lowest deep
,' he would write in his tale ‘The Household Wreck', ‘there yawns a lower deep.'

The death that year of Uncle Penson filled him with hope: he would surely be remembered in the old man's will. It was not to be. The £100 annuity he had already been receiving he continued to receive, added to which he inherited his uncle's clothes, household linen and crockery. Furious, De Quincey lashed out at his mother: ‘
Not only has she absorbed
2/3rds of my father's fortune, but she has intercepted the whole of a second, and almost the whole of a 3rd (my uncle's). All these it is true come eventually. . . to myself. . . Now if all men had mothers living to ages so excessive and mothers by strange coincidence of accident absorbing one estate after another, who would escape embarrassment?' For Tait, De Quincey submitted an uncharitable account of his time in Everton in the company of William Roscoe, James Currie and William Shepherd.

His family were back in Holyrood in November 1836 where Margaret caught typhus, commonly known as jail fever. On 7 August 1837, aged forty-one, she died; later that day, De Quincey was sued for the sum of £12 1/ 8½d. Florence, aged ten when she lost her mother, described her father as ‘
unhinged' by sorrow
and by ‘the overwhelming thought of being left with a family of such differing ages and needs, and with no female relative at hand to help him'. He had been drinking in Eton when Ann disappeared and taking laudanum in London when Catherine Wordsworth died: De Quincey was at least with his wife when her life ended in the debtors' sanctuary, miles away from her Lakeland home.

Margaret De Quincey, like Mary Wordsworth, has come down to us as a phantom wife. De Quincey leaves little sense of her character, but from Florence we have a moving description of her mother's effect on the few who knew her: ‘
Delicate health
and family cares made her early withdraw from society, but she seems to have had a powerful fascination for the few friends she admitted to intimacy, from an old charwoman who used to threaten us, as though it were guilt on our part, “Ye'll ne'er be the gallant woman ye're mither was”, to a friend who had seen society in all the principal cities of Europe, and who, with no reason for exaggeration, has told us he had never seen a more gracious or a more beautiful lady than our mother.'

Grief, De Quincey wrote in the introduction to his series of ‘Letters from a Modern Author to his Daughters', cannot be shared. Like opium, it locks us up inside our own citadels. The sole consolation for ‘
those who weep in secret
for the vanished faces of their household' is ‘love'.

De Quincey's love was countered by guilt and Rhadamantine rage, which found expression in his now open hatred of Wordsworth. In a letter to Tait, he described how, twenty-five years ago, his voice had ‘
trembled with anger
' toward this man ‘because he could not see the loveliness of a fair face now laid low in the dust'. Wordsworth had been ‘indifferent' to ‘an angelic sweetness in that face and an innocence as if fresh from Paradise which struck my own eyes with awe as well as love. I may say that I perfectly hated him for his blindness.' He might have been talking about little Catherine Wordsworth, whose beauty he also accused Wordsworth of having been blind to: De Quincey's dead loved ones all blend into one angelic form. Margaret's life had been hard, but not because Wordsworth was blind to the loveliness of her face. Whether or not she took tea with Mary Wordsworth will have been of less concern to Margaret than whether her children had enough to eat, but De Quincey fixated on the idea that his wife's suffering was due to social exclusion. The contrast between Wordsworth's treatment of the abandoned Margaret in
The Excursion
and his treatment of her soul sister, Margaret De Quincey, was too much for De Quincey to bear. He now idealised his married life, seeing it as a lost Eden. He forgot that Dorothy had been kind to Margaret in her hour of need, and that Wordsworth had called on at least two occasions and been refused entry. All De Quincey remembered was that his wife had been cut and that he, who had shared in the Wordsworths' own family sorrows, received no consolation from Rydal Mount following the wreckage of his own household.

De Quincey was now on the run from Holyrood, where he owed rent to Miss Craig and Miss Miller, and from his filial responsibilities, ‘a burden which I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off'. His eldest surviving child, eighteen-year-old Margaret Thomasina, took over the care of her siblings while her father hid in the second-floor apartment of 42 Lothian Street, the home of a Frances Wilson and her sister, Miss Stark. The building contained six similar apartments, accessible by a common staircase. From now on, the city of Edinburgh became De Quincey's sanctuary from the abbey. He was blessed in his new abode; Lothian Street was in a seedy part of the Old Town, composed of dwelling houses and worn-out shops, but Mrs Wilson and Miss Stark were cultivated and kind, and they treated their bereaved tenant with maternal tenderness. Left alone to write until six o'clock, De Quincey enjoyed ‘insulated' evenings where, in ‘the soft splendour' of lamplight, he sat in the company of his landladies. His month here was described by him as the happiest he had ‘known
in a long, long time
'. For Florence, left behind in the Holyrood ‘hole', her father had ‘deserted' his family, escaping ‘
for his own enjoyment
'. His whereabouts was eventually discovered by a former washerwoman at the abbey who ‘pursued' De Quincey's son Fred through the streets. De Quincey did not reveal his next address to his children, ‘for they have too little presence of mind and
too little discretion
'.

He found solace in blame, but also in writing. From his Lothian Street hideaway he poured his complex of emotions into ‘The Household Wreck', which was published by
Blackwood's
in January 1838. The hero of the story, whose name we are not given, has a tall and ‘dovelike' wife called Agnes who hails from the mountains. Described, using Wordsworth's phrase, as ‘A perfect woman, nobly planned,/ To warn, to comfort, to command', Agnes is seventeen when they marry and the couple move to a town many miles from her home. They are as happy as Adam and Eve, and the husband, who owes ‘
no man a shilling
', reads to his wife from
Paradise Lost
. But beneath their joy is unrest: he has ‘
never ridded myself
of an overmastering and brooding sense, shadowy and vague, a dim abiding feeling. . . of some great calamity travelling towards me. . . perhaps even at a great distance, but already dating from some secret hour – already in motion upon some remote line of approach'. He describes this calamity as ‘
the juggernaut of social life
', a thing which ‘pauses not for a moment to spare, to pity, to look aside, but rushes forward for ever'. This juggernaut careered into their lives on a spring day when Agnes went into town to do some errands. In an hour, it ‘accomplished the work of years'.

Waiting for Agnes to return home, her husband becomes increasingly anxious. Hours pass by until ‘
suddenly a sound
, a step: it was the sound of the garden gate opening, followed by a hasty tread. Whose tread? Not for a moment could it be fancied the dread step which belonged to that daughter of the hills – my wife, my Agnes. No; it was the dull, massy tread of a man; and immediately there came a blow upon the door, and in the next moment, the bell having been found, a furious peal of ringing. . . Who will go to the door? I whispered audibly. Who is at the door?'

It is a policeman with the news that Agnes has been accused of stealing lace in a haberdashery. She is thrown into a Piranesian jail, ‘vast, ancient, in parts ruinous', where debtors and criminals live cheek by jowl, and whose population is further swollen by the presence of the debtors' families. While she awaits trial, her husband contracts typhus from the mobs around the prison gates and sinks into a fever. During his two months of delirium their son dies of the same fever and his wife's fame grows to the point where all the world is talking of her case.

Did Agnes steal the lace? Theft, her husband reflects, is a crime of the lower classes which reflects badly on the man who should be the family's provider. Nonetheless he finds himself doubting her innocence. ‘
She is, or she is not, guilty
,' he tells himself, ‘there is no middle case.' The court finds her guilty and sentences her to ten years hard labour, but her then husband learns that Agnes was set up by a villain called Barratt whose sexual advances she had rejected. ‘
Wrath, wrath immeasurable
, unimaginable, unmitigable' now burns at his heart ‘like a cancer'. Aided by an under-jailer called Ratcliffe, he helps his wife to escape but she dies soon afterwards. Barratt then confesses his crime and is lynched by the mob. ‘
My revenge
,' says the hero, ‘was perfect.'