Guilty Thing (7 page)

The story of Aladdin particularly fascinated De Quincey. ‘The sublimity which it evoked was mysterious and unfathomable. . . made restless by the blind sense which I had of its grandeur, I could not for a moment succeed in finding out
why
it should be grand.' Here was an example, De Quincey said, of the power of ‘
involutes
', a word he took from conchology (an involute shell is intricately spiral or whorled) but whose meaning is similar to the ‘spots of time' described in Book Eleventh of
The Prelude.
Wordsworth's spots of time are particular experiences (a drowned man rising bolt upright from the bottom of the lake) or scenes of imaginative convergence (a rock, a naked pool, a beacon, a woman with a basket on her head, a single sheep, a blasted tree) that penetrate the memory and allow us ‘to mount,/
When high, more high, and lift[. . .] us up when fallen.' De Quincey described as involutes those times, like the day he had crept into Elizabeth's bedroom, where ‘the materials of future thought or feeling' are ‘carried imperceptibly into the mind as vegetable seeds are carried variously combined through the atmosphere'. The experience is imbued with a complex of heightened imaginative responses forming ‘
compound experiences
incapable of being disentangled'. De Quincey's autobiographical writing is saturated with such moments.

It was the beginning of ‘Aladdin' which took on for him the power of an involute. This is how he remembered it:

At the opening
of the tale a magician living in the central depths of Africa is introduced to us as one made aware by his secret art of an enchanted lamp. . . The lamp is imprisoned in subterraneous chambers, and from these it can be released only by the hands of an innocent child. But this is not enough: the child must have a special horoscope written in the stars, or else a peculiar destiny written in his constitution, entitling him to take possession of the lamp. Where shall such a child be found?. . . The magician knows: he applies his ear to the earth; he listens to the innumerable sounds of footsteps that at the moment of his experiment are tormenting the surface of the globe; and amongst them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin.

So the magician ‘fastens his murderous intention upon one insulated tread', and in the ‘flying footsteps' of the small boy he reads an ‘alphabet' of ‘secret hieroglyphics'. The world, young Thomas understood as he trembled before these pages, was composed of correspondences – ‘so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys'.

But this image is nowhere to be found in ‘Aladdin'. In the version of
Arabian Nights
read in the De Quincey household the magician is guided by the stars to the boy who is capable of exhuming the lamp; he does not put his ear to the ground to catch his ‘flying footsteps'. Like so many of the formative memories layered in De Quincey's personal mythology, the origins of the footsteps are vaporous. The image may have come from a childhood dream, or from listening out for the sound of his father's carriage on the distant road; or perhaps it was the other way round and the ‘memory' of his dying father's return home was the result of his ‘memory' of
the opening scene of ‘Aladdin'
. Like many of the experiences he described as involutes, this one was not actual at all.

In the summer of 1797, after William departed for London, Elizabeth Quincey put Greenhay on the market and moved the family 170 miles south-west, to the watering-hole of Bath in Somerset. Now that the trading connection with Manchester was over, there was no reason to continue in the manufacturing North. On a stormy night in August, the house she had built for £6,000 was sold to the only bidder for £2,500. De Quincey had entered the world of rapidly disappearing money. Had his mother waited a few years, he later believed, she would have received six times that sum, but Elizabeth Quincey, like many a widow, wanted to start a new chapter herself.

North Parade, Bath, where De Quincey first read Wordsworth, the ‘greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind'.

2

Childhood and Schooltime

Genius of Burke!

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book Seventh

Number 11, North Parade was a Georgian terrace fronted with beehive-yellow stone, a stroll away from the Abbey and the Grand Pump Room. In the other direction, it leads into Pulteney Street where in
Northanger Abbey
 – written during the years that De Quincey lived in Bath – seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland took lodgings with Mr and Mrs Allen for the winter season. Catherine found Bath disappointingly jolly, containing none of the isolation and gloom of Ann Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho
. The Assembly Rooms were over-hot and over-full, and the roads so cluttered they were impossible to cross.

The contrast between life at Greenhay and life on North Parade could not have been greater, and this was evidently Elizabeth Quincey's aim; she was expanding into her freedom. She now had a rented house rather than the burden of her own home, with windows that looked onto other windows rather than over lawns and across fields. She laid her carriage up in a coach house, and moved around the town by sedan chair.

Enclosed within a lush green valley, Bath is an assemblage of squares, circuses and crescents. Tobias Smollett, in
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
, predicted that the city would soon also have a ‘star', after which ‘
all the signs of the Zodiac
' would be ‘exhibited in the architecture at Bath'. The soft inland murmur of the River Avon could be heard from North Parade, and its presence felt in other ways too; Mrs Quincey battled with the damp and in 1799, when the river burst its banks, the damage she faced would have been immense. It was a small price to pay. Having lived amongst Northern philosophers for the sake of her husband, Elizabeth Quincey arrived here with the aim of launching her children, the youngest of whom was three, on the social ladder. No more mummified corpses in clock cases for Thomas; from now on her morbid and self-absorbed son would look outwards rather than inwards, and having formerly known only siblings, servants, family friends and private tutors, he would start to mix with the right sort. ‘What a delightful place Bath is,' Jane Austen's Mrs Allen repeatedly says, ‘and how pleasant it would be if we had any acquaintance here!' Mrs Quincey wasted no time in getting to know the neighbours.

Bath Abbey was built as the result of a dream. Bishop Oliver King had a vision of an olive tree from which ladders reached into the far blue sky. Looking up at the west front, De Quincey could see angels climbing up to the throne of God on their stone steps. At the eastern end is a vast window, extending the full height of the wall, through which the morning sun still shines in torrents of splendour, irradiating the vaulting, nave, aisles, bays and lanes. For a child used to the glass of his parish church in Manchester, the sublimity of such a scene was overwhelming; there could be no finer window through which to seek the face of Elizabeth formed by billowy clouds.

Along the walls are 700 memorials, one of which, on the south side, commemorates Richard Nash, Master of Ceremonies and self-crowned ‘King' of Bath. ‘Beau' Nash, as he was known, had died in 1761, but his influence had by no means been forgotten. Every street bore his mark. Bath was Nash's invention, and for fifty-seven years it had been his kingdom. Arriving in 1704, Nash had taken over the management of the sleepy town much as one might a private member's club. Under his eye, Bath became a stately pleasure dome; Nash was responsible for the Assembly Rooms with their ballroom, tea room, card room, and the Octagon, where nightly concerts were held. To accommodate the influx of tourists, he oversaw the construction of the rows of Palladian revival buildings which posed as palaces but were actually lodging houses. If London, as De Quincey would discover, was the city of disappearances, Bath was the city of appearances. The classical façades of many of the finest buildings, such as North Parade itself, were designed by John Wood the elder; purchasers bought a length of John Wood frontage and then employed their own architect to construct the interior according to their own requirements. De Quincey's new home, built in 1741, was one of many Bath houses with a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back.

While maintaining its function as a health resort, Nash turned Bath into a centre of gossip, style and fashion. During De Quincey's childhood waistlines were growing higher, necklines were sinking lower; fabrics were light, skirts flowed and shoes had rounded heels. Bath was the only city in England designed entirely for diversion – as Monaco is today – and the first urban centre in which aristocrats and the newly rich merchant classes mingled on an equal footing. Evenings were filled with music, fireworks and the roaring of swells: ‘
Another stupid party
last night,' wrote Jane Austen to her sister during one of her visits. Smollett described the city as ‘the very centre of racket and dissipation', a place obsessed with matrimony or what he called ‘
mattermoney
'. This was civilised living as spectacle, and still a work in progress. The year before the Quinceys arrived, the Pump Room had been little more than scaffolding and workmen whistling; Sydney Gardens, where Thomas went to read, was spanking new. Here he found a maze, a grotto, and the sort of sham ruined castle which would have thrilled Catherine Morland.

Until recently, Ann Radcliffe herself had been a resident of Bath and in 1801 Jane Austen and her family would move to a house in Sydney Place, overlooking Sydney Gardens. With the intersection of Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen we see one of the contradictions of the age in which De Quincey was raised. The paranoid Gothic, with its inwardly recessive architecture, rested alongside what Horace Walpole called the ‘
cold reason
' of Enlightenment rationality. Nailing his colours to the Gothic, De Quincey never moved on. His daughter Emily later explained that ‘
no one
will make much out of my father who does not take in the extreme mixture of childish folly joined to a great intellect. The novels of his youth were of the Mrs Radcliffe order, full of mysteries, murders, highwaymen, mysterious people and dark corners. . . he never got beyond the Mrs Radcliffe stage and he was but a poor judge of a novel.'

He would remain as unaware of Jane Austen's novels as she would of Thomas De Quincey's essays. And while Bath stifled Austen, who fell into silence and depression when she lived here, the city had the opposite effect on De Quincey, who absorbed all it had to offer. It has been suggested that having previously enjoyed a country childhood, living in North Parade must have been ‘
purgatory
' for De Quincey. But it was the making of him.