Guilty Thing (8 page)

Twenty years earlier, 11 North Parade had been home to the Earl of Clare, patron of Oliver Goldsmith, and Goldsmith – another of De Quincey's favourite authors – had stayed in the house. But the most recent occupant was none other than Edmund Burke, politician, polemicist and author of the decade's most talked-about book,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
. Burke, whose wife was born in Bath and whose doctor was based here, occupied 11 North Parade for the first six months of 1797, moving out a month before the Quinceys moved in. He had been, as De Quincey put it, in ‘
decaying condition
', and would die at home on his estate in July that year.

Thomas De Quincey's biographers pass over in a sentence the coincidence that he replaced Burke in North Parade, as though this experience made no impression on the boy who went on to become a house tourist. It was now that De Quincey's sense of entitlement set root; he was inhabiting the former rooms of the man who was the spirit of the age. Burke was also the spirit of the house; De Quincey was charging down stairs that Burke had ascended, slamming doors that Burke himself, just weeks earlier, had opened, and sitting at the desk where Burke had penned his last pamphlet, ‘Letters on a Regicide Peace'. Not knowing that the great man had left town, the ‘
crowds of inquirers
' who called to pay their respects were greeted by young Thomas at the door instead. Aged eleven, De Quincey found himself the representative of Edmund Burke.

If Elizabeth Quincey had not already purchased
Reflections on the Revolution in France
she would certainly have got hold of a copy now, when a French invasion was expected at any moment. The tension was palpable; seventy miles south, in the Quantock Hills, Wordsworth and Coleridge, planning their forthcoming
Lyrical Ballads
as they strode the coastline, were thought by the locals to be French spies.

‘Reflections', published in 1790, was an antidote to the Francophilia popular amongst English intellectuals; selling 7,000 copies in the first two weeks, it triggered a debate about liberty which split Burke's own Whig party. His position on the French Revolution was the opposite of parliamentary colleagues such as Fox, and of fledgling poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth, visiting France in 1790, saw ‘a People risen up,/ Fresh as the Morning Star'. For Burke, the ‘morning star' was Marie Antoinette herself, ‘just above the horizon. . . glittering [with] life and splendour and joy'. Back on earth were what Burke described as the tyrannical ‘swinish multitude', a phrase De Quincey loved to repeat when he referred to crowds. Thomas Paine, who remarked that Burke pitied the plumage but forgot the dying bird, responded to
Reflections
with the
Rights of Man
, published the following year. ‘
The very idea
of hereditary legislation,' Paine wrote in his strong, plain prose, ‘is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate.' The murder of the French king and queen and the subsequent Terror proved Burke right in his fears for France, but then, as Fox famously said: ‘Burke is often right, only he was right too soon.'

His lament for a country in which ‘
the age of chivalry
' had been replaced by ‘sophisters, calculators and economists' was wholeheartedly shared by De Quincey, ‘bred up' by his mother ‘in a frenzied horror of Jacobinism' and ‘French excesses'. Flinging a knife to the floor in a parliamentary debate, Burke had proclaimed it his ‘
object
to keep the French infection from this country, their principles from our minds and their daggers from our hearts. . . When they smile, I see blood trickling down their faces.' De Quincey likewise feared the bloodthirsty French, incarnated in Bonaparte, the bogeyman of his childhood, and in the opening paragraph of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
he quoted Burke's description of the Jacobins ‘rudely' tearing off ‘the
decent drapery of life
'.

Burke's first book,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, had been in the library at Greenhay. A beguiling treatise on the most fashionable subject of the age, the ideas expressed in the
Enquiry
were to influence De Quincey as much as those in ‘Reflections'. If the Enlightenment venerated the beautiful, the Romantic age would aspire to the sublime. The difference between the sublime and the beautiful had become a national obsession and Burke, the first writer to attempt a categorisation of aesthetic responses, drew the distinction along psychological lines: the sublime is linked to horror, gloom and infinity, while we find beautiful those things that are calm, safe and small. The beautiful gives pleasure and relaxes the body, while sublimity contains the destructive element. ‘
Suddenness
' is sublime while ‘smoothness' is beautiful; a parish church is beautiful, a cathedral sublime; a bull is sublime while a cow is beautiful; a king is, of course, sublime – as is everything grand and powerful. Burke's suggestion that all subjects can ‘branch out to infinity' chimed with De Quincey's own thinking, as did his belief that ‘clear ideas are little ideas' and the ‘ruling principle of the sublime' is ‘terror'.

To have taken over these hallowed rooms was also a feather in Elizabeth Quincey's cap. De Quincey's mother was a celebrity hunter and around the corner from North Parade, at 76 Great Pulteney Street, lived the celebrated Hannah More. Like Burke, Hannah More was both a household name and a moral icon. Burke had been one of Mrs More's close friends, and Mrs More now became one of Mrs Quincey's close friends. So Mrs Quincey balanced pleasure and prestige with a lesson in high-toned evangelicalism.

There were two acts to More's life, and her intimacy with Elizabeth Quincey was formed at the point where she exchanged the first for the second. In the 1770s, More, an aspiring poet and playwright, had taken herself from Bristol to London to meet the actor-director David Garrick. Under Garrick's patronage, she had enjoyed success on the stage with her plays
The Inflexible Captive
and
Percy
. Brimful of confidence, Hannah More, said Hester Thrale, was ‘the cleverest of all us female wits', and her fame was sealed in 1779, when, posing in a Greek toga alongside the artist Angelica Kauffman, the soprano Elizabeth Linley Sheridan, and six other female luminaries, Hannah More was included in Richard Samuel's painting
The Nine Living Muses
. After a decade of gadding about in Covent Garden, she joined the Clapham Sect, a group of religious social reformers with William Wilberforce, a man much admired by De Quincey's father, at its prow. More then returned to her native West Country to preach patience to the rural poor and provide spiritual guidance during a time of political turbulence. The focus of her work when she met Elizabeth Quincey was the moral education of the lower orders; as well as setting up schools across Somerset, More had been immersed in the writing, production and nationwide distribution of 140 ‘Cheap Repository Tracts' whose purpose was to point out the pitfalls of drunkenness, sloth, gambling and debauchery, and show that salvation could be found in upward mobility. Despite widescale ridicule, More's ‘Tracts' were remarkably successful; by 1797, when Elizabeth Quincey began to introduce them to her own children, two million copies had been sold.

De Quincey later participated in the national sport of Hannah More-baiting, but the impact on his childhood of ‘Holy Hannah', as he referred to her, was formidable and he continued to visit her well into his twenties. He would describe several figures as his ‘first literary acquaintance', but More claims the honour. Apart from his father, the only writer De Quincey had ever known was Dr Percival, the physician who had cut open his sister's head. Hannah More was a definite improvement. De Quincey was always quick to reveal that his mother was an intimate of Mrs More and to mock, as only an insider could, her society. In later letters to the Wordsworths, he derided her conversation as ‘
epigrammatic
' and ‘full of trite quotations', and in a waspish essay written on her death in 1833, he remembered with pride how, in her presence, he never ‘
travelled
one hair's breadth beyond the line of frigid and distant politeness'. But it is hard to see the God-fearing boy being offensive to the woman who had God, and celebrity, on her side. De Quincey's exquisite manners were remarked upon throughout his life. His politeness was excessive and bewildering to those he met; he addressed servants, children, adults and friends in the same grave and elaborate formulations, using an English from a bygone age. The grand solemnity of his speech worked as a protective shield, his rhetorical flourishes creating a barrier between himself and the outside world.

In addition to her own celebrity, Mrs More knew, as De Quincey conceded, ‘everybody of celebrity in the last age', including Dr Johnson, his father's favourite author, and Horace Walpole, godfather of the English Gothic, whose sham castle outside London, Strawberry Hill, was one of the most famous houses in England. Hannah More knew
everyone of celebrity
in the present age as well; De Quincey described meeting the actress Mrs Siddons in Mrs More's drawing room, which suggests that Holy Hannah had not forsaken the theatre as entirely frivolous. Her piety never got in the way of her appreciation of glamour; in this sense More was more morally flexible than Elizabeth Quincey, who considered the theatre a den of iniquity. Compared to his mother, Mrs More was positively racy, and during his visits to her house De Quincey would draw from her anecdotes of ‘Edmund Burke – Garrick – Mrs Montague and her society – Dr Johnson &c'. It was De Quincey's habit to scorn the people to whom he owed a debt, and he owed everything to Hannah More.

He also owed a good deal to the mother from whom he would later distance himself. It was Elizabeth Quincey who taught Thomas to attach his life to that of the writer he most admired, to position himself as a planet orbiting a sun.

De Quincey, who had never been to school before, now started at Bath grammar where he ‘
was honoured
as never was man or boy since Mordecai the Jew'. A classical scholar of note, ‘at thirteen,' he boasted, ‘I wrote Greek with ease. . . owing to the practice of daily reading of the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish extempore.' His brilliance won him the admiration of his teachers and his arrogance provoked the taunts of his peers; another schoolboy war ensued, only this time De Quincey, who had grown boisterous and spirited, fought his side alone.

In January 1799 a teacher, aiming his cane at the shoulder of a miscreant pupil, accidentally landed the blow on De Quincey's head instead. Preternaturally anxious since his sister's death about damage to the skull, De Quincey was thrown into a panic, and the physicians who attended his injury were sufficiently alarmed by his expressions of pain to suggest trepanning. Instead, the boy's hair was shaved and six sucking leeches applied to the wound. For the next three weeks, as Thomas wrote in a letter to his elder sister, Mary, currently at school in Bristol, ‘
I neither read
, nor wrote, nor talked, nor eat [
sic
] meat, nor went out of the back drawing-room, except when I went to bed. In the first week I read for a quarter of an hour per day! and eat a little bit of meat; but I did not write. I now do everything as I used to do, except dancing, running, drinking wine. I am not to go to school till Easter.'

De Quincey was evidently in good humour. He makes a joke about his ‘unhappy pate! worthy of a better fate', refers to ‘Mademoiselle's ball, which was put off (as I suppose) on my account', and to his smart new friend ‘young Lord Westport', who will be coming soon to dine at North Parade; he signs off as ‘Tabitha Quincey', Tabitha being the name of the woman raised from the dead by St Peter – the undead being one of De Quincey's serious preoccupations, disguised here as a joke. The evidence suggests that before he was in his teens, Thomas was fond of dancing and drinking, and capable of manipulating a duo of doctors into being prepared to drill a hole through his skull. During his years in Bath, De Quincey was anything but the fragile melancholic he otherwise describes himself as having been.