Guilty Thing (17 page)

London was, and still is, composed of self-contained districts with distinct identities, and De Quincey had washed up in the Bohemian quarter. Bounded from north to south by Oxford Street and Leicester Fields, and from east to west by St Giles and Royal St James, the once aristocratic parish of St Anne's, Soho was now known for the turbulence of its inhabitants. De Quincey later spoke of Greek Street as an obscure enclave, but it had been, until recently, the literary heart of the city. On the other side of the street stood the Turk's Head tavern, where Dr Johnson's celebrated ‘Literary Club' had met for twenty years, until 1783. Members included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick and the botanist Joseph Banks, who still lived with his sister in Soho Square. De Quincey may well have sat on their front doorstep and watched as Miss Banks left the house every day with her pockets full of books, followed by a six-foot servant with a cane as tall as himself. ‘Miss Banks,' the locals noted, ‘when she wanted to purchase a broadside in the streets, was more than once taken for a member of the
ballad-singing confraternity
.' Another local was the Royal Academician, George Dawe. Known by his friends as ‘the grub', Dawe washed once a week and then, according to Charles Lamb, applied water only to the ‘inner oval, or portrait, of his countenance, leaving the unwashed temples to form a
natural black frame
'. Soho's middling sort were indistinguishable from its paupers, and De Quincey was camouflaged by his rags.

Forty years earlier Casanova had lodged in great discomfort at 47 Greek Street before finding himself more salubrious accommodation in Pall Mall. He was visiting his former lover, the Venetian courtesan Teresa Cornelys, whose home, Carlisle House, on the corner of Soho Square and Sutton Street, was, during the time of the Literary Club, the city's centre of sexual intrigue. A double-fronted five-storey mansion, Carlisle House had been the scene of lavish masquerades to which thousands came. Mrs Cornelys transformed the building into a seemingly endless space; crowds flooded the Tea Room, the Gallery, the Bridge Room, the Star Room, the Stage Room, the Chinese Room and the Pavilion, which was ‘
ceiled with looking glasses
' and decorated as a ‘delightful garden' with ‘the choicest Flowers and bordered with a thicket of the most curious shrubs'. In the supper rooms diners found ‘an elegant walk, bordered with two regular green hedges', while the tables themselves were ‘enriched with trees'. Soho Square had been an epicentre of deception and disguise. The balls at Carlisle House were occasions when high and low or, as Horace Walpole said, the ‘righteous and the ungodly', hid behind their dominoes. Countesses dressed as courtesans, courtesans dressed as queens, and rich young men dressed as paupers.

Across the square stood the White House, a high-class brothel masquerading as a house of horror. A set of lavishly themed rooms contained springs, traps and various other contrivances; skeletons sprung forward from behind curtains, coffins rose from the ground. Carlisle House had closed in 1788, but the White House stayed open until the year De Quincey arrived here. His Soho Square was a ghost town where Mrs Cornelys was a folk memory, and the White House a creepy reminder of Mr White's Manchester museum. Since then the Duke of Portland, who owned the Square, had sold the freeholds and the residents now managed the garden themselves. Standing at its centre, the once handsome statue of Charles II had adopted the local uniform of desiccation and abandonment.

The area was teeming with prostitutes, and as a ‘peripatetic' De Quincey ‘naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are called street walkers'. He romanticised ‘
the outcasts and pariahs
of our female population', not least because those he met pitied him and took his part ‘against watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps where I was sitting'. He says nothing about the appearance of his defenders but the radical tailor, Francis Place, described London's prostitutes as wretched figures in ‘
ragged dirty shoes
and stockings and some no stockings at all. . . their gowns were low around the neck and open to the front, those who wore handkerchiefs had them always open to the front to expose their breasts. . . but numbers wore no handkerchiefs at all in warm weather and the breasts of many hung down in the most disgusting manner, their hair among the generality was straight and “hung in rat tails” over their eyes, and was filled with lice, or at least was inhabited by considerable colonies of insects. Drunkenness was common to them all.' One of these figures, a fifteen-year-old girl called Ann, became De Quincey's friend. He never knew her surname – De Quincey's London was a blur of anonymity – and he tells us nothing about her save that she was kind, innocent and plain. Stressing Ann's plainness was De Quincey's way of reassuring his readers that he did not take advantage of her, but their relationship may well have been sexual. De Quincey, longing to prove himself a man, had hinted to his mother already that he knew ‘women of the town' while he was at Manchester Grammar. Enjoying Ann's undernourished body would account for the crippling guilt he would always feel about her, and explain his drawn-out insistence on her saintly virtue. A child of the outdoors, Ann was like Wordsworth's ‘Ruth', but De Quincey did not want to be seen as the villain who abandoned her to madness.

De Quincey fantasised about saving Ann, but it was she who saved him. One night, having wandered the length of Oxford Street, they turned wearily into Soho Square. Here they sat, as they were wont to do, on the steps of one of the mansions; she with her persistent hacking cough and he weak with hunger. Lying in her arms, De Quincey collapsed and ‘without some powerful and reviving stimulus' he would ‘have
died on the spot
'. Ann ran into Oxford Street and returned with a glass of port wine and spices, which instantly restored him. She had purchased it with her earnings, and had no expectation of the money being repaid. It was an act of kindness that he would never forget, and whenever he found himself ‘
by dreamy lamplight
' in the ‘great Mediterranean' of Oxford Street and heard again ‘those airs played on a common street organ', De Quincey ‘shed tears' at Ann's memory.

De Quincey's stories lead back not to events but to other stories, and his account of roaming the labyrinthine city with Ann as his world-weary guide echoes the legend of young Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage.

Planning to live by his pen, Johnson had newly arrived in London when he befriended Savage, a poet and convicted killer. Too poor to afford food or lodging, the shambolic, bear-like Johnson and the battered, nimble Savage spent their nights walking the London squares, talking politics and exchanging life stories. Savage's history was barely credible, and De Quincey would later ridicule Johnson's belief in its veracity. Claiming to be the illegitimate son of high-born parents, Savage blamed his current poverty on the cruelty of his putative mother, Lady Macclesfield, who had disowned him at birth. Pining for her love and recognition, he haunted her house in the hope of seeing her glide past a window or climb into her coach and on one occasion, finding the front door open, Savage crept upstairs to her bedroom. Assuming that he had come to kill her, Lady Macclesfield raised the alarm. It was not an unreasonable fear; Savage had killed a man in a pub brawl and consequently been imprisoned. Since his release he had written an accusatory autobiographical poem called ‘The Wanderer', and condemned his mother in another verse polemic called ‘The Bastard'.

De Quincey, who picked quarrels with Dr Johnson at every turn, took him to task in his
Life of Savage
for treating the poetry seriously and being conned by Savage's obvious ‘hoax'. Johnson saw Savage as a boy ‘de
fraud
ed by his mother. . . of the fortune his father had allotted him', and De Quincey saw Johnson as a man taken in by Savage's own ‘fraud'. Johnson, who described Savage as the spokesman for pariahs everywhere, including those ‘
beauteous Wretches
' who the ‘nightly Streets annoy', celebrated his friend as a ‘Man of exalted Sentiments, extensive Views and curious Observations'. Such a figure slept ‘among the Riot and Filth of the meanest and most profligate of the Rabble; and sometimes, when he had no Money to support even the Expences of these Receptacles, walked about the Streets till he was weary, and lay down in the Summer upon a Bulk, or in the Winter with his Associates in Poverty, among the Ashes of a Glass-house'. Johnson's Savage was trapped in his own inner darkness; he had ‘lulled his Imagination' with the ‘ideal Opiates' of self-exoneration. Savage was a man who, by ‘imputing none of his miseries to himself. . . proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle'. His friends – Johnson among them – suggested that he ‘exile himself from London' and ‘retire into Wales' to live the rest of his days on money they raised for him by subscription. Dragging his heels, Savage sloped off and stuck it out for a year, complaining throughout that his income was not sufficient. He then absconded to Bristol where, living off the generosity of further friends, he wrote a poem satirising the city and its inhabitants. Here he died, in a debtors' prison.

Dr Johnson's delicate, complex portrait of his strange friend became, as De Quincey put it, the young author's ‘
nest-egg
'. The beauty of biography was that the author could couple himself to his subject: Dr Johnson found fame by linking his name to that of Savage, just as Boswell was spoken of in the same breath as Johnson. De Quincey, who would write his own lives of the poets, took note.

Oxford Street, the threshold between London's low and high life, was the centre of De Quincey's new world. From here he would ‘
on moonlight nights
. . . gaze up every avenue in succession which pierces through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and the woods; for
that
, said I, travelling with my eyes up the long vistas which lay part in light and part in shade,
that
is the road to the North and therefore to [Wordsworth], and if I had the wings of a dove,
that
way would I fly to comfort'. He and Ann wandered the pavements, past the ‘Stately Pantheon', as Wordsworth called the theatre, past watchmakers, fan stores, drapers, silversmiths, confectioners and fruiterers. The shops stayed open until eleven o'clock and the road and pavements teemed with life. Streetlights blazed and black, lacquered coaches clattered along, two abreast.

Fourteen years earlier, a German visitor, Sophie von La Roche, had described looking through the illuminated windows of Oxford Street to the living rooms of the shopkeepers, where ‘
many a charming family scene
[was] enacted: some are still at work, others drinking tea, a third party is entertaining a friendly visitor, in a fourth parents are joking and playing with their children'. De Quincey, a seasoned watcher of windows, would have done the same. When, in later years, he returned to London he would revisit the house in Greek Street, which was ‘
now in the occupation
of some family, apparently respectable'. Through the glass, ‘no longer coated by paste composed of ancient soot and superannuated rain', he saw a chamber brightly lit with candles in which ‘a domestic party' was ‘assembled, perhaps, at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay'. They had inherited the rooms of the famous Thomas De Quincey, just as he had inherited those of Edmund Burke, Joseph Cotton and William Wordsworth.