Guilty Thing (6 page)

His next project was to form an army with Thomas as a foot soldier, and to wage a two-year-long war with the boys who worked in the cotton factory which lay between Greenhay and the city of Manchester. De Quincey had a country childhood but one in which the city, a place of speed, mayhem and blank anarchy, loomed large as an alternative, more dangerous, life form. Twice a day, on either side of a road called Oxford Street (a name with great significance in De Quincey's narrative), the opposing sides hailed stones at one another. It was a re-enactment of events in France, with Oxford Street as the cordon sanitaire dividing the gentrified De Quincey brothers from the sans-culottes who were ‘
slovenly and forlorn
in their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally neglected, and always covered in flakes of cotton'. William and Thomas, dressed by their mother in hessian boots and trousers – the latter garment being ‘at that time unheard of except amongst sailors' – were mocked as ‘bucks', which Thomas thought preferable to being labelled either cowards, thieves or murderers. But William considered the term an insult. On one occasion when he was taken prisoner of war, De Quincey, not a natural warrior, fell into the hands of a group of factory girls by whom he was petted; he was subsequently placed ‘under arrest' by his brother for not performing his regimental duties. On these occasions his bedroom became a prison. During one period of incarceration he pictured a visit from one of his guardians:

Guardian
. –
What is this I hear, child?
What are you fretting about?

I.
 – Because I'm under arrest.

Guard
. – Arrest! Nonsense! Who could put
you
under arrest? A child like
you
? Who was it?

Peace did not return to De Quincey's life until William, who had shown evidence of a talent for drawing, was sent to London to be apprenticed – in return for a fee of 1,000 guineas – to one of Europe's most successful artists, Philippe de Loutherbourg, who had been shown some of the boy's sketches. It was an ideal pairing of master and pupil: Loutherbourg, who was also an illusionist, occultist, engineer, scientist and faith-healer, specialised in creating stage effects for London theatres and had designed scenery and lighting for David Garrick. He was also an artist at the forefront of the apocalyptic sublime, and his invention of the ‘Eidophusikon', a mechanical theatre, six foot by eight, was one of the sights of London. A precursor of the cinema, the Eidophusikon's most famous production, in 1782, was a Gothic movie scene from
Paradise Lost
showing a bronze city apparently composed of incombustible flames, entitled
Satan arraying his troops on the banks of the Fiery Lake, and the rising of the Palace of Pandemonium
. Coloured lights, sound effects, three-dimensional models and clockwork automata produced a spatialising of sin terrifying to the audience who came to look at the fallen angel and the hell that was within him.

Before breakfast on the day that William left Greenhay, a ‘
most splendid
' day in a ‘splendid June', the children were once again gathered on the front lawn of the house. Running alongside the garden was a brook with a bridge and a gate; De Quincey, constrained, as ever, by his brother's exuberance, stood alone by the running water while his siblings span around their leader on the grass. The sound of their play was broken suddenly by the roar of a mob in the direction of Oxford Street, and a large dog ‘suddenly wheeled into view'. Barred from the garden by the closed gate and the brook, the dog – foam oozing from his mouth, his eyes ‘glazed, and as if in a dreamy state' – stopped in his tracks and looked directly at De Quincey, whose sympathy went out to the persecuted dreamer. The mob, wielding pitchforks, then appeared in view and the pariah took off; the pursuit continued for a further twenty-four miles, ending only when the ‘deranged' creature was eventually run over by a cart. The threshold moments in De Quincey's life were often accompanied by an image of disaster hurtling in his direction; separation from William and narrowly avoiding being mauled to death by a rabid dog blended into a seamless story: ‘freedom won and death escaped, almost in the same hour'.

Without William to stand in his way, Thomas's own greatness would now shine. Another chapter had closed on another midsummer day. It was now the start of what he called ‘
a new book
'.

De Quincey's mother provided the first enigma for the boy whose world was composed of signs and symbols. Described by her son as a handsome but ‘freezing' figure who ‘delighted not in infancy, nor infancy in her', Elizabeth Quincey was a stickler for order and hierarchy. From a military family, she addressed her servants only through the intermediary of the housekeeper, and her presence was compared by a housemaid to that of a ghost. Distant, unyielding and holy as a nun, every day for six years Mrs Quincey had her children ‘roll out' of their nursery ‘as mail-coaches go down daily to London', in order that she might inspect their appearance, from back posture to skin pallor. ‘
Were the lamps of our equipage clean and bright?
Were the linch-pins secured?' Before pronouncing them ‘to be in proper trim' she performed ‘two ceremonies that to us were mysterious and allegorical': she sprinkled the hair and faces of each with lavender water and milk of roses, and bestowed on their foreheads a single kiss. For the rest of his life De Quincey pondered the significance of these rituals.

There are many indications, however, of Elizabeth Quincey's softer side, not least the pet name of ‘Pink' given to her son, Richard, as a tribute to his prettiness. She also had a weakness for fashion and her children were paraded in the latest styles. De Quincey did not share his mother's concern with appearances but he inherited other characteristics and interests, including her restlessness and enthusiasm for houses. She also implanted in him, in a tale about nearly drowning as a child, an image that would return in his opium dreams. As his mother came near to death, ‘
a mighty theatre
expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act – every design of her past life lived again – arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. . . her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.'

Mrs Quincey's primary legacy to her children was a sense of guilt: ‘
Trial by jury, English laws of evidence
, all were forgotten; and we were found guilty on the bare affidavit of the angry accuser.' De Quincey grew up believing himself to be a great criminal; not only must he be responsible in some way for the catalogue of ills which had befallen his family, he was also to blame for his precocity and for any praise his intelligence might receive. ‘Usually mothers defend their own cubs right or wrong,' he remembered. ‘Not so my mother.' Should a visitor or a tutor compliment one of her progeny, Mrs Quincey, rather than flushing with maternal pride, would protest ‘so solemnly. . . that we children held it a point of filial duty to believe ourselves the very scamps and refuse of the universe.'

Soon after his sister Elizabeth's death, Thomas began to receive pocket money. It was a generous amount, too large, he thought, for a boy his age, and he spent it in the local bookshop. He could never have enough books. ‘
Had the Vatican
, the Bodleian, and the Bibliothèque du Roi all been emptied into one collection for my private gratification, little progress would have been made in this particular craving.' A regular customer, he soon found himself owing the bookseller, evidently touched by the earnestness of the child, three guineas. The debt unleashed in Thomas a great panic; ‘deep anxiety now began to oppress me as to the course in which this mysterious (and indeed guilty) current of debt would finally flow. For the present it was frozen up; but I had some reason for thinking that Christmas thawed all debts whatsoever, and set them in motion towards innumerable pockets. Now
my
debt would be thawed with all the rest; and in what direction would it flow? There was no river that would carry it off to sea. . .' He dragged his anxiety behind him like a ball and chain.

At the same time as he feared drowning in bottomless debt, Thomas ordered from the bookseller a multi-volume history of ocean navigation. This inspired a new fear: given ‘
what a huge thing
the sea was' and the number of men and ships ‘eternally running up and down it', the parts of such a work would surely themselves reach ‘infinity'. In a fresh panic about the size of his purchase, he took himself with pounding heart to the bookshop to ask ‘how many volumes did he think it would extend to?' The answer he was given would determine for the seven-year-old boy ‘whether for the next two years I was to have an hour of peace'. But instead of speaking to the kindly bookseller he knew, De Quincey was served by an unknown assistant who mocked his anxiety. ‘How many volumes? Oh! Really I can't say. Maybe a matter of 15,000, be the same more or less.' ‘
More
?' Thomas said in horror, imagining ‘supplements to supplements' in a series which ‘might positively
never
end'. In addition to the three guineas he already owed, the payments for this never-ending series would themselves never end – they would ‘stretch to the crack of doom'. De Quincey had a vision of being trapped in a lifetime of rapidly accelerating debt and eventually hanging from the end of a rope, like Highwayman Higgins.

As the fantasy took hold he imagined a knock ‘
at the front door
' of Greenhay, and a wagoner with ‘a bland voice' on the step announcing a delivery for him. ‘Looking out, I should perceive a procession of carts and wagons, all advancing in measured movements; each in turn would present its rear, deliver its cargo of volumes, by shooting them, like a load of coals, on the lawn, and wheel off to the rear, by way of clearing the road for its successors. . . Men would not know of my guilt merely,
they would see it
.' To his horror, De Quincey realised that he was reliving – ‘literally. . . in myself' – one of the tales he and Elizabeth had read together in
Arabian Nights.
In the story, a young man with a bundle of ropes – one of which Thomas doubtless imagined noosed about his neck – finds himself in the house of a wicked magician who has imprisoned a beautiful girl. The man pledges his love to the maiden and when he hears the magician returning he slips away, leaving the ropes behind. The next morning the magician knocks at his own front door, enquiring for the figure to whom the ropes belong. Whenever De Quincey and his sister reached this point in the story, Thomas would play the part of the guilty lover nervously approaching the door and say, in a quivering voice, ‘Oh Mr Magician, those ropes cannot be mine! They are far too good; and one wouldn't like, you know, to rob some other poor young man. If you please, Mr Magician, I never had money enough to buy so beautiful a set of ropes.'

But Elizabeth was now dead, and De Quincey saw himself saying those same lines, in that same voice, to the wagoner who would soon be depositing on the front lawn the wagonloads of books.

Books and infinity were bound together for De Quincey, who ‘fell', he said, ‘
into a downright
midsummer madness' at the thought of there being ‘one hundred thousand books' that he would never be able to read, or pictures that he would never see, or pieces of music that he would never hear. ‘Every man and woman,' he told himself, ‘was a most interesting book, if one knew how to read them. Here opened upon me a new world of misery; for, if books and works of art existed by millions, men existed by hundreds of millions. . . Nay, my madness took yet a higher flight. . .'

According to legend it is impossible to read
Arabian Nights
to the end. As vengeance against his faithless first wife, the king swears to take a new bride every few days and have her slaughtered: Scheherazade, his latest queen, diverts her husband's bloodlust with a ceaseless flow of tales.
Arabian Nights
is composed of stories within other stories which themselves contain further stories, all of which, with their attendant magicians, necromancers, illusionists, caliphs, genies and princes blend into one endless and ever-echoing palimpsest. Reading them through the filter of De Quincey's young mind there is clearly a resemblance between the fictional Baghdad of spires, alleyways and subterranean worlds and his later descriptions of East London.
Arabian Nights
, we also note, is a book without an author, which would have induced in the child endless wonder.

Jorge Luis Borges suggests that the Romantic movement began at the moment
Arabian Nights
was first read in France, in the translation by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717. It was through
Arabian Nights
that Coleridge had became ‘habituated to the
vast
', and De Quincey's own preoccupation with the sublime may well have seeded itself with these nursery tales which he knew only in an annotated edition. His love for Gothic novels – the popular fiction of the day – was certainly born at this point. He would have preferred the French title,
Les Mille et Une Nuits
, because, as Borges puts it, ‘To say “a thousand nights” is to say infinite nights, countless nights, endless nights. To say “a thousand and one nights” is to add to infinity. The title contains the suggestion of
an infinite book
.'