Guilty Thing (28 page)

But De Quincey immediately liked and sympathised with Lloyd, a fellow opium-eater who was then ‘
at the zenith
of the brief happiness that was granted to him on earth'. A critic of ‘gossamer subtlety' and ‘exquisite sensibility', neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge, De Quincey later wrote, ‘suspected the amount of power. . . latent' in this man, and Lloyd ‘firmly believed that they despised him'. The same was of course true of De Quincey: Coleridge had his suspicions, but Wordsworth had no idea that this mild creature, so keen to please, would be capable of writing about them with such candour. Wordsworth, whose character, De Quincey noted, wore a ‘masculine or Roman hardness', ‘
ridiculed
' Lloyd for being ‘effeminate', while Coleridge parodied Lloyd's writing. Psychologically fragile, Lloyd later lost his mind and his family fell apart; Dorothy had taken De Quincey to what he called a ‘
doomed household
', and shown him, as through a dark glass, a version of his future self.

What about Dorothy? De Quincey was twenty-two when they met and Dorothy thirty-five, although he remembered her as twenty-eight. Their bond was immediate, and De Quincey, hammering home her absence of ‘personal charms', protests too much about how unattractive he found her. He described Dorothy's unconventional appeal as ‘impassioned', ‘ardent', ‘trembling' and ‘inevitable'. ‘Beyond any person I have known in this world,' De Quincey said, Dorothy was ‘the creature of impulse', and the words De Quincey returns to like a mantra are ‘wild' and ‘fervent'. She was ‘the very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known'; she was fervent in all she did. Dorothy was like one of the heroines later imagined by the Brontës, who owed a good deal to the depictions of the Wordsworths in De Quincey's ‘Lake Reminiscences'. None of these rare qualities, however, are apparent in the chatty letters Dorothy wrote to De Quincey. Here we see only the warmth and kindness he craved.

Did Dorothy hope that her new friend, whose arrival in her life delighted her so much and whose company she enjoyed more than that of any other visitor, might marry her? De Quincey's sister, Jane, certainly teased him about the prospect of having Dorothy as a sister-in-law, anticipating, in her letters, visits to see the future ‘Mrs De Quincey' in Grasmere. ‘I would like to know Miss Wordsworth,' Jane wrote, ‘and see what sort of a
woman you admire
.' To ‘admire' was a term of sexual appreciation, and De Quincey ‘admired' Dorothy. ‘
All of us loved her
,' he recalled, and she had ‘several offers, amongst them one from Hazlitt; all, without a moment's hesitation, she rejected decisively.' Aside from her independence of spirit, Dorothy was of course the creation of her brother and for this attribute alone she ‘won the sympathy and respectful regard of every man worthy to approach her'. Dorothy, said De Quincey, was Wordsworth's ‘
gift from God
': her ‘mission' was to love, counsel and cheer her brother, to ‘wait upon him as the tenderest and most faithful of domestics' and to ‘ingraft, by her sexual sense of beauty, upon his masculine austerity that delicacy and those graces which else. . . it would not have had'.

It may be that De Quincey was rejected by Dorothy but it is more likely, given her future sensitivity, that she felt rejected by him. De Quincey was clearly eligible: he was a gentleman and he had money. A marriage between the two would seem natural, and harmless enough. Dorothy's life with her brother would continue much as before, while De Quincey's place in the community would be confirmed.

His visit to Grasmere lasted only one week; by mid-November he was back in Oxford for Michaelmas term. The acerbic tone De Quincey took in his ‘Lake Reminiscences' does not reflect his initial experience of the Wordsworths, which was one of adulation. His excursion had exceeded all expectations, and he had achieved the near-impossible: he had won the trust of Coleridge, been welcomed into the home of Wordsworth, walked with the poet's immortal sister, endeared himself to his eldest son, and discussed his work in progress. Many people adopt an alternative family who they feel to be more suitable than their own, and De Quincey adopted the Wordsworths. The poet could see into his heart: De Quincey had known this since the day ‘We are Seven' was first placed in his hands.
Lyrical Ballads
was his steering chart, and Grasmere was his journey's end.

At ten o'clock on 12 November, Wordsworth and Dorothy saw De Quincey onto the night coach at Ambleside. As he rolled away, listening to the ‘half-flute, half-clarionet' whistling of the driver, he projected himself into the future. Perhaps one day this road, this vale, these people, would be his. ‘What happy fortune were it here to live!' Wordsworth had written in ‘Home at Grasmere', with ‘One of thy lowly Dwellings [as] my Home'.

Imaginary Prisons
by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1761.

De Quincey compared the endless growth and reproduction of the architecture in his dreams to Piranesi's
Carceri
, described to him by Coleridge.

8

Home at Grasmere

. . . to have a house

It was enough (what matter for a home?)

That owned me. . .

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book Seventh

No sooner had he returned to Oxford in the late November of 1807 than De Quincey fell ill with ‘a determination of blood to the head'. Always anxious about this part of his body, he consulted a London surgeon who advised him to stay off wine and avoid bending his neck. So for the next few months he transported himself like an automaton, his chin rigid, his shoulders stiff, his eyes, when not aimed straight ahead, flicking to the left and right. It was in this guise that he re-engaged with Coleridge, whose lecture series on ‘Poetry and the Fine Arts' had now begun. De Quincey had promised Dorothy that he would attend and report back.

Coleridge was also ill. De Quincey found him living in the
Courier
offices in the Strand, a guest of the editor, Daniel Stuart, where he was ‘enveloped in night caps' and ‘surmounted by handkerchiefs endorsed upon handkerchiefs'. To quell the racket of the printing press outside his door and the roar of the street coming up through the window, he was taking ‘more than ordinary doses of opium'. The first of his lectures – which De Quincey missed – had been on ‘Taste' in poetry, and the next two were postponed due to his health. The second lecture took place on 5 February 1808 and De Quincey sat in the audience at the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street and watched Coleridge ‘
struggling with pain
and overmastering illness'. The steep, semi-circular theatre had magnificent acoustics but Coleridge, whose habit was to propound without notes, ‘seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower'. He fumbled and froze in a ‘feverish heat', his lips were baked ‘black'; he drank glass after glass of water but nothing could quench his thirst (De Quincey's imagery comes from ‘The Ancient Mariner': ‘Water, water, everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink,' and ‘With throats unslaked, with black lips baked'). What Coleridge said lacked heart and when, to the relief of the audience, he read aloud from one of the books piled on the podium he chose, at random, passages of interminable duration. This was the effect not of opium, but of its withdrawal. The mariner's performance, De Quincey concluded, was ‘a poor faint reflection of jewels once scattered in the highway by himself'.

Walking home that night, De Quincey repeated to himself lines from the soliloquy of Milton's blind Samson.

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse

Without all hope of day!

All further lectures were cancelled until 30 March. It is a dismal description of Coleridge and impossible to miss De Quincey's relish, in his ‘Lake Reminiscences', in the comic horror of it all, from the excess of handkerchiefs to the blackened lips. He does not mention that Coleridge recovered enough to give twenty of the twenty-five scheduled talks, or that he had taken meticulous notes beforehand and thought deeply about their content.

Hearing reports that his friend was dying, Wordsworth arrived at the
Courier
offices on 24 February. ‘
Wordsworth the great poet
,' teased the mischievous Lamb, ‘is coming to Town. He is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a mind to try it. It is clear then nothing is wanting but the mind. Even Coleridge a little checked at this hardihood of assertion.' The diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, who now met Wordsworth for the first time, left a memorable portrait of him during this visit: the great poet was a ‘
sloven
' whose ‘manners though not arrogant yet indicate a sense of his own worth. He is not attentive to others and speaks with decision of his own opinion. He does not spare those he opposes.' On 3 March, Coleridge gave a tea party from his bed, inviting Wordsworth, Lamb, the radical philosopher William Godwin and De Quincey as his guests. De Quincey's first foray into London salon society was a stolid affair. Coleridge was muted and Wordsworth cold; the occasion was saved by the playfulness of Lamb, who now redeemed himself in De Quincey's eyes.

Two days later De Quincey was back in Oxford, preparing for his own great challenge. He had been persuaded to sit for the honours examination, where he could at last prove himself the superior of his tutors. His recent wanderings had set back his studies and in order to be prepared, he told Dorothy, he needed to read thirty-three Greek tragedies in one week. This he could do with the help of a book stand sent by his mother, which allowed him to turn the pages without bending his neck. Anxiety prevented him from sleeping; when he did he dreamed of ‘finding the whole university on tiptoe for the approaching prize-fighting and myself in a state of palsy as to any power of exertion'. He was reminded of a recurring dream he had as a child, in which he was pursued by a lion and unable to move. He worried about the effect of all this study on his brain, fearing that it would bring on the dreaded hydrocephalus. He did not reveal to the Wordsworths how much of his pride and self-worth were invested in getting his degree. Instead, he told Dorothy that he was motivated by duty alone: ‘
having been treated
with very great kindness by my college, I cannot endure to disappoint their expectations'.

De Quincey's first examination, on 14 May, went triumphantly. ‘
You have sent
us today the cleverest man I ever met with,' one of the examiners told the Worcester College dons. ‘If his
viva voce
examination tomorrow correspond with what he has done in writing, he will carry everything before him.' The viva was to be in Greek, and De Quincey had been looking forward to it. At the last minute, however, the rules were changed and he learned that while the questions would be asked in Greek, he was expected to answer in English. Oral examinations were public events where the examinees performed before an audience, and De Quincey had been speaking Greek since his schooldays: if he could not distinguish himself now, his honours degree would be ‘without honour'. All the examination would prove was that he was able to do what any other undergraduate was able to do. He pronounced himself disgusted by his examiners, who were not worthy of his respect.

So the night before his viva De Quincey bolted. He leaves no account of the circumstances around his departure, but his thought processes must have been similar to those that accompanied his moonlight flit from Manchester Grammar. ‘Leave this house,' he had then told himself, and ‘a Rubicon is placed between thee and all possibility of return.' Now, once again, his conscience spoke in ‘sullen whispers' against his ‘irrevocable' action, and having left the city of Oxford, De Quincey never went back.

He took himself to London, home of runaways, where he joined the audience for Coleridge's final lecture on 8 June.