Guilty Thing (56 page)

We are also indebted to De Quincey for the best portrait of Dorothy that we have. ‘A happier life, by far, was hers in youth,' he rightly said, comparing the woman whose dawn had ‘fleeted away like some golden age' to ‘the Ruth of her brother's creation'. The man to whom Ruth had ‘dedicated her days' had abandoned her, and De Quincey implies that Wordsworth did the same. ‘Miss Wordsworth suffered not much less than Coleridge,' De Quincey boldly declared.

He was able to reveal a good deal about the Wordsworths, but there was a good deal De Quincey did not know. He was unaware of Wordsworth's French mistress, Annette Vallon, and his illegitimate daughter, Caroline; he knew nothing of Coleridge's love for Sara Hutchinson; he believed – wrongly – that Dorothy had spent much of her childhood with the royal family in Windsor Castle. He depicted himself as both inside and outside the magic circle: at one point he called himself Wordsworth's ‘sole visiting friend' in the tight community of the vale, and at another he described the surfacing of a memory which brought with it a ‘
pang of wrath
': walking with Wordsworth and Southey, the subject of Charles Lloyd, then seriously ill, had arisen. Wordsworth said something which De Quincey did not hear; when asked to repeat his comment, Wordsworth replied that ‘in fact, what he had said was a matter of some delicacy, and not quite proper to be communicated except to
near friends of the family
.
This to me! – O ye gods – to me
. . .'

It is easy to imagine De Quincey alone in his Lake adventures, but he is accompanied throughout by a huge yellow-haired man who shares his every experience and mirrors his every attitude. Whether they were travelling together, sharing a room, or sharing a bed, De Quincey and Professor Wilson would fall into ‘a confidential interchange of opinions upon a family in which we had both so common and so profound an interest'. ‘Let me render justice to Professor Wilson as well as myself,' De Quincey writes after describing Wordsworth's ingratitude: ‘not for a moment, not by a solitary movement of reluctance or demur, did either of us hang back in giving the public acclamation which we, by so many years, had anticipated. . .' ‘I shall acknowledge then on my own part,' De Quincey says elsewhere, ‘and I feel that I might even make the same acknowledgement on the part of Professor Wilson,' that while they both treated Wordsworth ‘
with a blind loyalty of homage
' which had ‘something of the spirit of martyrdom', to ‘neither' has he repaid such ‘friendship and kindness'. Of the poet's marriage,
‘
to us who
. . . were Wordsworth's friends, or at least intimate acquaintances – viz., to Professor Wilson and myself – the most interesting circumstance. . . the one which perplexed us exceedingly, was the very possibility that it should ever have been brought to bear'. Of Dorothy: ‘
All of us loved her
, by which
us
I mean especially Professor Wilson and myself. . .' It is with a tribute to the poet's sister that the essays on Wordsworth end: ‘
Farewell, impassioned Dorothy!
I have not seen you for many a day – shall never see you again, perhaps; but shall attend your steps with tender thoughts, so long as I hear of you living: so will Professor Wilson.'

Wordsworth would claim not to have read De Quincey's recollections of him in
Tait's
, which ran between January and August 1839, and he was probably telling the truth. His response to their appearance was to state that De Quincey had forced himself upon the family from the start: ‘
My acquaintance with him
,' said Wordsworth, flicking away an afternoon fly, ‘was the result of a letter of his own volunteered to me.'

On a Sunday evening in the late summer of 1839, De Quincey called at the home of one of his creditors, a solicitor called McIndoe who lived at 113 Princes Street. Two of De Quincey's sons had lodged here from February to May that year, and he still owed the McIndoes rent. While Mrs McIndoe repaired their guest's torn coat, the men talked. By twelve o'clock the coat was not yet mended; it was too late to ‘leap the boundary' of sanctuary and so De Quincey was given a bed for the night in a chamber next to the dining room.

The following month he was still there. Mrs McIndoe now sued him for the unpaid rent and De Quincey bolted back to Holyrood, where Miss Miller was also in pursuit of payments. Ricocheting between irate landladies, De Quincey returned to Princes Street with his hoards of books, letters and manuscripts – including ‘about 8 separate works' by Giordano Bruno, bought back in 1809, and ‘one or two' other books, ‘equally rare' – where he stayed for the next three years. During this time he developed a horror of the McIndoes, whom he regarded as his jailers. The McIndoes felt equally trapped by De Quincey. Were he to have sold his editions of Bruno, De Quincey would have been a free man, but he would not part with them for ‘a thousand guineas'.

While he described himself as ‘persecuted' by McIndoe's ‘hostile attitude' and his ‘violent attempts' at ‘ejection', McIndoe hung on De Quincey's promises of payment. So bitter were relations in the Princes Street household that at various points the two parties communicated only by letter, and in the third person. ‘Mr McIndoe. . . requests that Mr De Quincey shall remove tonight for he is resolved that no further communication shall take place between them on this subject and that before 10 o'clock, so as to prevent any unnecessary steps being taken,' wrote McIndoe, pushing the missive beneath De Quincey's door. McIndoe's object, De Quincey explained in desperation to Blackwood's son, Robert, who was now editing
Maga
, was to ‘possess himself of my papers, and hold those as a means of
extracting money
ad libitum
'. It was stalemate. ‘If I am to go away at this moment,' argued De Quincey, ‘I should draw upon myself a sort of legal persecution which at present would be ruinous.
I wish to stay a month longer
.' And if McIndoe put him to the horn, De Quincey would simply bounce back into and out of sanctuary. De Quincey saw himself not as a betrayer of trust but as a victim of extortion: McIndoe received whatever money his tenant earned, often directly from Blackwood himself, but he always demanded more. ‘
I spend months after months
in literary labour,' De Quincey told Blackwood in despair:

I endure the extremity of personal privations; some of which it would be humiliating to describe; (but by way of illustration I may mention – that having in a moment of pinching difficulty for my children about 10 months since pawned every article of my dress which could produce a shilling. I have since that time had no stockings, no shoes, no neck-handkerchief, coat, waist-coat, or hat. I have sat constantly barefoot; and being constitutionally or from the use of opium unusually sensible of cold, I should really have been unable to sit up and write but for a counterpane which I wrap round my shoulders).

Blackwood, ‘pained beyond measure' by this letter, sent De Quincey £4.

The McIndoes, on their own downward slope, were also pawning their belongings: ‘I suppose that
a more absolute wreck of decent prosperity
never can have been exemplified,' De Quincey grandly observed of the couple. ‘
If I give him nothing
, he will immediately take occasion to write me a violent letter full of abuse. He will insist on my leaving his house. No matter what rights I may afterwards establish in law, he will obtain his immediate object of retaining my Papers – now a vast body, far above portability.' Back in Holyrood, Miss Miller – ‘for vindictive purposes' – held out the same threat.

Tracing the growth of one of his debts as it is recorded in Miss Miller's passbook, which contains records of De Quincey's accounts between 3 May 1836 and 14 August 1840, Horace Eaton, the best of his biographers on the business of money, allows us to watch a seed sprout into Jack's beanstalk:

Beginning with the small sum
of £2 3s., small considering that De Quincey had apparently been living under her roof for two years, the amounts owed varied from month to month. It was increased by charges for milk and vegetables, by small loans, by the use of Miss Miller's credit with grocers when De Quincey's credit was nil. It reached £33 in April 1837, in spite of occasional payments; falling to £12 in May, rising through 1838 and 1839, until when the rooms were finally surrendered, it reached the not inconsiderable sum of £175 4s. 2d. This debt troubled De Quincey until his death and was finally settled by his executor.

To get a sense of the scale of De Quincey's difficulties, we must imagine acre upon acre of similar saplings.

‘
Caught and chained
' by his papers, De Quincey dared not leave his room. The scene is reminiscent of his childhood in Greenhay, when he had been placed under arrest by his brother William (‘Who could put
you
under arrest?' he had then imagined his guardian saying; ‘A child like
you
?') A relative of the McIndoes, visiting their house as a girl, remembered with awe the closed door behind which the mysterious tenant sat writing. ‘
The last body who went into that room
,' the servants teased, ‘was put up the lum [chimney] and never came out.' De Quincey's door creaked open only to receive his meals which, because his teeth were mostly gone, consisted of tea, coffee, sops of bread and tender slivers of mutton. Fascinated, the girl once managed to peep inside the room and see the famous ocean of paper. Meanwhile, Mrs McIndoe, whom De Quincey suspected of ‘tampering with locks, listening, eaves dropping', shook any letters that arrived for him in case they contained money. One of these was from Branwell Brontë: affected by
Confessions
and himself now an opium-eater, Brontë sent De Quincey a poem and some translations of his own. The previous year Branwell had made the pilgrimage to Grasmere where he knocked on the door of Hartley Coleridge, the present incumbent of The Nab. Too preoccupied to take much notice of his young acolyte, De Quincey did not reply.

It was while he was imprisoned by the McIndoes that De Quincey returned to the subject of household murder. His ‘Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts', composed as a letter from XYZ to Christopher North, appeared in
Blackwood's
in November 1839, at the same time as
Tait's
was running De Quincey's ‘Lake Reminiscences'. For those subscribing to both journals, the murder story and the Wordsworth story could be read alongside one another.

‘A good many years ago,' XYZ began, ‘you may remember that I came forward in the character of a
dilettante
in murder.' Few readers will have remembered De Quincey's first murder essay, written twelve years before. Fewer still will have remembered the Ratcliffe Highway murders to which he once again referred. XYZ reveals that he has a ‘horribly ambitious' nephew who fancies himself ‘a man of cultivated taste in most branches of murder'; the boy's ideas on the subject, says his uncle, are all ‘stolen from me'. Not all murders, XYZ goes on to explain, are in ‘good taste'; like statues, paintings and ‘epic poems', they each ‘have their little differences and shades of merit'. A career as a murderer is a downward path, ‘for
if once a man indulges himself in murder
, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination'.

One of the connoisseurs, known from his misanthropical disposition as ‘Toad-in-the-hole', despairs of modern murder: ‘
Even dogs are not what they were, sir
 – not what they should be. I remember in my grandfather's time that some dogs had an idea of murder. . . but now. . .' Holding the French Revolution responsible for the degeneration in his art, Toad-in-the-hole retires from society in 1811. It is widely assumed he has hanged himself, but one morning in 1812 he is seen cleanly shaved and gaily attired, ‘brushing with hasty steps the dews away to meet the postman'. The cause of his jollity is ‘the
great exterminating chef-d'oeuvre
of Williams at Mr Marr's, No 29 Ratcliffe Highway'. What took place twelve nights later, at Mr Williamson's, was by ‘some people pronounced even superior', but Toad-in-the-hole demurs. ‘One, perhaps, might suggest the Iliad – the other the Odyssey: what do you get by such comparisons?' In celebration of Williams's achievement, a splendid dinner is given by the society to which all the connoisseurs are invited. Toasts are drunk to ‘the sublime epoch of Burkism and Harism', to ‘Thugs and Thuggism', to the Syrian assassins, and the Jewish Sicarii.