A Very British Murder (2 page)

Their world was rural and well ordered, with country houses and cottages alike inhabited by readers of the
Daily Mail
. Into its confines, the writers of the detective novel’s golden age sowed the seeds of passion and violence. But in their tens of thousands of light novels, a detective character entered the scene, cleared away the body, solved the crime, punished the wicked and neatly tidied up all the loose ends. In the years following the First World War, people wanted leisure reading to numb, not to stimulate, their capacity for experiencing horror.

However, by 1939 something had come to seem a little too cosy about elderly ladies solving puzzles in vicarages. Graham Greene, with his insights into the mind of a killer, and James Bond, the swaggering spy, made them seem completely old hat. The old-fashioned detective may dodder on in fiction today, but since the Second World War he or she has been eclipsed by nastier, more violent colleagues in the thriller section.

Today, one in every three books sold is a crime novel, but many people look down on them as trash, often containing a crude, indeed simplistic, message that good shall triumph over evil. But crime fiction was the relatively unsophisticated genre which taught working-class people how to enjoy reading. And despite its lack of artistic merit, the literature of murder tells us not what people thought they ought to read. It tells us what they
really read
.

It was the very essence of a guilty pleasure. In the pre-war, prelapsarian words of Dorothy L. Sayers: ‘Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other subject.’ Sitting down after a hard day’s work, slippers on, guard lowered … for the last 200 years murder has been the topic to which readers turn for comfort and relaxation.

Let’s find out why.

‘I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reed and Nilotic mud.’

Thomas De Quincey
, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(1821)

DURING A TRIP
to London in 1804, a student from Oxford’s Worcester College began to experience ‘rheumatic’ pains in his head. They were caused, he believed, by having gone to bed with wet hair. He suffered from an ‘excruciating’ pain for about 20 days in a row, until by chance he ‘met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium’.

Thomas De Quincey remembered with immense clarity for the rest of his life the mundane events of a damp weekend that followed this chance encounter. Although he would only realize it later, this
illness, this meeting and this commonplace conversation formed a major turning point upon his life’s journey.

It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless … my road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near ‘the stately Pantheon’ (as Mr Wordsworth has obligingly called it) I saw a druggist’s shop. The druggist – unconscious minister of celestial pleasures! – as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on a Sunday; and when I asked for tincture of opium, he gave it to me just as any other man might do, and furthermore, out of my shilling returned to me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer.

Like so many of his contemporaries, De Quincey greatly admired the poet William Wordsworth, whose description he quotes of the famous Oxford Street assembly rooms called ‘The Pantheon’. Few, at the date of his first taste of opium, knew that Thomas De Quincey also had literary ambitions of his own.

As the months passed, the student found himself making further sorties to the big city as a break from his studies, and for a little recreational drug use. His explorations of London’s streets, and his trips to the opera, were made stranger and more appealing by doses of the drug available with such ease at any druggist’s counter. He found himself traversing immense distances, for ‘an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motions of time’. Inevitably, he got lost, but it seemed amusing rather than tedious. In these enjoyable,
early days as an opium-eater, he was still in control. ‘I used to fix beforehand how often within a given time, and when, I would commit a debauch of opium. This was seldom more than once in three weeks, for at that time I could not have ventured to call every day, as I did afterwards, for
“a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar”
.’

Laudanum was the liquid form of the drug, dissolved in alcohol, often consumed in warmed wine, and, like the pills De Quincey obtained from the druggist, there was nothing shameful or unusual about the sight or use of it in late Georgian London.

Readily available medicines such as ‘Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup’, or ‘Godfrey’s Cordial’, or ‘Kendal Black Drop’ sound beneficent, even health-giving, and yet the ingredient upon which they relied was poppy-based. Mrs Beeton recommended that the wise housewife keep a good stock of opium in her cupboard. De Quincey’s fellow users of opiates included the ultra-respectable and the creative: Florence Nightingale, Jane Morris and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He himself listed the opium-eaters he knew as including ‘the eloquent and benevolent —, the late Dean of —, Lord —, Mr. — the philosopher, a late Under-Secretary of State … and many others hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention’.

And opium-eating was not limited to high society. De Quincey claimed that in Manchester, the city of his birth, ‘workpeople were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating; so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening’.

A bottle of ‘Kendal Black Drop’, a popular brand of tincture of opium, readily available at late Georgian chemists’ shops.

Opium was cheap, and it was everywhere.

As his larking about in London suggests, Thomas De Quincey was not a particularly conventional or diligent student. He’d experienced a period of homelessness before arriving in Oxford. In a fit of alienation, he’d left home, embarked upon a walking tour of Wales, spent all his money and got into debt by borrowing against the expectations he had of a legacy. Estranged from his family, he ended up living in an empty house in Greek Street, Soho, comforted only by a prostitute named ‘Anne of Oxford-street’.

But De Quincey had immense talent as a writer. After writing fan mail to William Wordsworth, he struck up an epistolary friendship with the writer whose
Lyrical Ballads
(assembled with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and with some involvement from his sister Dorothy) had become the centrepiece of the Romantic movement.

When he reached the end of his Oxford career, De Quincey performed brilliantly in the first day of his examinations but lost his nerve and failed to show up on the second. Soon afterwards, he departed for the north, to live in the Lake District at what is today called Dove Cottage, a house upon Grasmere formerly rented by his hero Wordsworth.

De Quincey lent money, when he had it, to his new friends in Grasmere. But then he fell into a deep depression after the death of Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine, to whom he had become close, and ‘often passed the night upon [her] grave’. His use of opium, which at first had been merely an occasional dip into an ‘abyss of divine enjoyment’, now became a daily necessity. The collection at Dove Cottage still contains a set of delicate nineteenth-century Chinese scales made out of bone, for weighing out opium in powdered form. It’s usually very hard to say with certainty to whom such utilitarian items from the past might have belonged, but the wooden case in which these particular scales live is carved with a clear – and rather convincing – ‘TQ’. And he must have had frequent need of them. Two hundred and fifty miles distant from London, he described his life as being: ‘Buried in the depth of mountains. And what am I doing among the mountains? Taking opium.’

As well as taking opium, he was reading Kant, studying German metaphysics and living on what his fellow gentlemen would have called
his ‘private fortune’. He spent a good deal on expensive books as well as drugs. One visitor described his rather chaotic living arrangements, which contained ‘a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all over the floor, the tables, and the chairs – billows of books’.

But De Quincey’s inherited income was too inadequate to fulfil his needs. Financial necessity compelled him to leave behind his indolent ways and start to write essays for periodicals. He found it hard work. ‘He has always told me,’ wrote his editor, ‘that he composes
very slowly
; that his language costs him a great deal of attention.’ De Quincey had to persevere, though, for as time went by he acquired further financial obligations in the form of numerous children. He married a farmer’s daughter, after having a child with her out of wedlock, and together they would go on to produce eight more offspring.

In 1821, with creditors snapping at his heels, he finally produced the piece of writing for which he is best known.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
outlines the bizarre oriental fantasies he had at first enjoyed under the influence of the drug. It made his name almost instantly. The fabulously creative visions he described, combined with the horrific squalor of his addiction itself, were equally shocking and attractive.

Thomas De Quincey’s reputation would wane in the twentieth century, as his florid, luscious word games were seen as overblown. With the growth of counter-culture in the 1960s, however, he became celebrated once more as a visionary and an example of a creative drug-user. Those seeking validation for the powers of narcotics point to the fact that De Quincey’s best writing is inspired by opium, and that his productivity rose and fell alongside his consumption.

On the other hand, De Quincey himself wrote his
Confessions
explicitly to warn others of the dangers of addiction, and to share the pain of his weaning himself off his dependency. He was not entirely successful in the former. The glamorous example he set seduced, among others, the Brontë sisters’ disappointing brother, Branwell, into similar debauchery – without, however, similar achievements.
The Family Oracle of Health
, published in 1824, censoriously noted how:

the use of opium has been recently much increased by a wild, absurd and romancing production, called
The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
. We observe, that at some late inquests this wicked book has been severely censured, as the source of misery and torment, and even of suicide itself, to those who have been seduced to take opium by its lying stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense.

And De Quincey’s own troubles were not eased by his notoriety. People jealous of his success publicized the fact that he had fathered an illegitimate child. His family were evicted from their house for unpaid rent and his wife was threatening to commit suicide. De Quincey was failing to meet the demand for his articles from the editors of
The London Magazine
. Desperate for money, he roused himself to produce some essays for
Blackwood’s Magazine
. Among them was a playful, creative, coolly humorous piece called ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.