Guilty Thing (29 page)

De Quincey told Dorothy that he had left Oxford because he was ill, but the most likely explanation for his departure lay in his growing relationship with laudanum. Hoping that the drug would calm his nerves and improve his thought, he may have dosed himself up with Coleridgean quantities and found himself unable to function. Coleridge's recent appearance served as a deterrent: were De Quincey to go ahead with the viva, his performance might resemble the chaos on the podium at the Royal Institution. Another of laudanum's effects is to open the mind to suggestion: why, De Quincey must have asked himself, suffer fools when he had found himself a superior university in Grasmere? The only praise worth having came from Wordsworth. But there was another possible reason for his flight: what if he did not distinguish himself in his viva? He had gone through his life promoting himself as singular: there was too much to lose in putting his superiority to the test.

He moved into the rooms of a former college friend at 5 Northumberland Street in the parish of St Marylebone, at the other end of Oxford Street. His windows looked onto a workhouse which was built to accommodate a thousand tramps and ‘casual poor', including any foundling abandoned on the doorstep.

From here, De Quincey made himself indispensable to Coleridge, who was still living at the
Courier
offices. He visited the invalid every day, found him rare books, and discussed his work in progress. Coleridge's respect for De Quincey is apparent in the letters he dispatched across London: ‘
I do therefore ask you
as proof of Friendship,' he implored, ‘that you will so far get over your natural modesty and timidity as without reserve or withholding to tell me exactly what you think and feel on perusal of anything I may submit to you.' By February 1808, Coleridge was sufficiently dependent on De Quincey's visits to feel panic when he did not see him. ‘
I have suffered considerable
alarm,' he wrote one Tuesday evening, ‘at not having seen you for so many days. . .' It was probably now that the event took place which De Quincey described in his
Confessions
. The two men were leafing through Piranesi's
Antiquities of Rome
, when Coleridge told De Quincey about another a set of plates by Piranesi called ‘Dreams' which recorded ‘the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever'.

Some of them
(I describe only from the memory of Mr Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. expressive of enormous power to pull forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.

Piranesi did not produce a series called ‘Dreams', and De Quincey is almost certainly describing the
Carceri d'invenzione
(‘Imaginary Prisons'). Never seen by him, the images came from the ‘memory' of Coleridge. Perhaps Coleridge had not seen them either and only knew them from the memory of someone else, in which case De Quincey's description is of what he imagined Coleridge to have imagined Piranesi to have imagined; the memory of the Piranesi becomes a form of palimpsest in which De Quincey imposes an impression on the surface of Coleridge's impression, which is itself imposed on another impression.

The series of thirteen prints, published in 1750, depict a gargantuan dungeon without entrance or exit, floor or ceiling; the building is simply an infinite interior of stairs, chains, vaults, bridges, pulleys and chasms. De Quincey's purpose in describing the image in his
Confessions
is to compare Piranesi's ‘dreams' with the ‘endless growth and reproduction' of the architecture in his own opium dreams, but he saw architecture like this everywhere. His whole world was a stage-set designed by Piranesi: the most modest domestic interiors are given by him vertiginous climbs and perilous descents. While Wordsworth found poetry in nature, for De Quincey a building was a poem, and nature itself a Piranesi prison. Gowbarrow Park, at Ullswater, contains an ‘
aerial dungeon
 . . . frightful to look down'; retreat for the walker is ‘impossible', the ‘chasm' is the only escape from danger. In relation to Grasmere, Easedale is ‘
a chamber within a chamber
, or rather a closet within a chamber – a chapel within a cathedral – a little private oratory within a chapel'.

More fascinating than the endlessly repeated staircase in the non-existent Piranesi engraving is the figure he imagines ascending them. While De Quincey describes the climber as Piranesi, it is himself he sees here pursuing his ‘aspiring labours'. These are De Quincey's own thwarted journeys, the abysses only he looks down. This scene recurred in De Quincey's nightmares: he is trapped; every staircase he climbs ends with the same ‘abrupt termination', but instead of falling into the depths below he simply reappears on another staircase, facing another abrupt termination, the brink of another abyss, and so on. Each of his experiences would be duplicated, not once but an infinite number of times.

The ‘Imaginary Prisons' capture De Quincey's style as an autobiographer. The story of his life is one of labour and repetition: this is how much I mourned when my sister died; this is how hard I worked to get to Oxford; this is what I went through in order to meet Wordsworth. And on each occasion, when it seems he can go no further in his agony, when he depicts himself looking with terror over a literal or a metaphorical gorge of Hammerscar, he appears on another staircase making another dramatic ascent. In meeting Wordsworth, De Quincey was nearing the pinnacle of his ambition; and with no more stairs to climb, he had only the depths below.

It was Dorothy, of course, who invited him to return to Grasmere. The Wordsworths had left Dove Cottage and moved into Allan Bank, the abomination on the other side of the lake. They had little choice in the matter; if they were to stay in the vale they had to take what was available. Their household now consisted of Wordsworth, Mary, Dorothy, Sara Hutchinson, two servants and the three young children. Coleridge soon moved in as well (looking, said Southey, ‘about half as big as the house') and Hartley and Derwent joined them all for weekend visits. Allan Bank had ten rooms rather than six, and more breathing space – just. But, Dorothy complained, the house was uninhabitable, having chimneys which wouldn't draw. The problem was severe and apparently insurmountable; smoke blackened the windows, soot covered the dishes, and to keep themselves warm the women and children were forced to their beds in the middle of the day.

Coleridge stayed in bed all day anyway. A famously difficult guest, he now excelled himself. Rising with the owls, he worked throughout the night on his latest project, a philosophical periodical to be called
The Friend
. Rejecting the Wordsworths' frugal fare, he put the maid to the trouble of preparing him a separate dinner of meat and roast potatoes, and was otherwise either mired in opium or withdrawing from its effects. In comparison, the porcelain-mannered De Quincey could do no wrong. ‘Mr De Quincey,' Dorothy enthused in a letter to her friend, Mrs Clarkson, ‘will stay with us, we hope, at least till the Spring. We feel often as if he were one of the Family – “
he is loving, gentle and happy
”.' Sara Hutchinson was, as ever, drier in her praise: ‘
Mr de Quincey has been here
3 weeks & I daresay will make a long stay – he is a good tempered amiable creature & uncommonly clever & an excellent scholar – but he is very shy & so reverences Wm & C that he chats very little but is content to listen.' As always, his shyness disappeared around the children, who adored him for his willingness to play and tell stories. Johnny, with whom he shared a bed, was, Dorothy noted, ‘passionately fond of him' but the child De Quincey loved most was baby Catherine, born in September 1808. Called by Wordsworth his ‘
little Chinese maiden
', Catherine may have had Down's Syndrome. (The suggestion, made by Grevel Lindop, is convincing: Mary was thirty-eight when Catherine was born, and the child's health problems – convulsions, difficulty with swallowing – are consistent with the condition.) De Quincey bonded himself to Catherine, bouncing her on his knee, sharing her mother's concerns about her sleep, and extracting a promise, Dorothy told Mrs Clarkson, that he was to be ‘
her sole tutor
, so that we shall not dare to show her a letter in a book. . . If, however, he fails in inspiring her with a love of learning, I am sure that he cannot fail in one thing. His gentle, sweet manners must lead her to sweetness and gentle thoughts.'

When Wordsworth looked up from his desk he saw a creature cooing at babies, drawing dragons for Johnny, and fussing with the womenfolk over every little cough in the nursery. De Quincey was neither one thing nor the other; no longer a child, he could not be described as an adult, but nor was he fully masculine: as far as Wordsworth was concerned, his houseguest was effeminate, particularly in contrast with his other young acolyte, John Wilson, who had also moved to the Lakes and who De Quincey now met for the first time one evening at sunset, when Coleridge was preparing for breakfast.

Wilson, whose fan letter to Wordsworth had preceded his own, cut a striking figure. Twenty years later he was described as ‘
a sixteen stoner
. . . a cocker, a racer, a six bottler, a twenty-four tumbler – an out-and-outer – a true, upright, knocking-down, poetical, prosaic, moral, professorial, hard-drinking, fierce-eating, good-looking, honourable, and straight-forward Tory', and we must add to this picture the energies of youth. A six-footer in a sailor suit with wild, yellow hair, De Quincey's first impression of him was of a man ‘in robust health' with an expression of ‘animated intelligence' and ‘an intense enjoyment of life'. Wilson, who won the Newdigate poetry prize at Oxford and left the university at the same time as De Quincey, but with a degree, lived off a sizeable inheritance with which he had bought, to be close to Wordsworth, an estate called Elleray which looked down on Windermere. Here he hunted, fished, rowed, wrestled with farmers and wrote Wordsworthian verse. In his later journalism he would be equally pugnacious. Wilson was, as Thomas Carlyle put it, one of those tropical trees that exhales itself in ‘
balmy odours
' instead of ‘producing fruit'.

Wilson's appearance in his life was exactly what De Quincey most dreaded. He had a horror of being rejected by Wordsworth for someone ‘
more brilliant
. . . who might have the power (which I feared I should never have) of talking to him on something like equal terms, as respected the laws and principles of poetry'. But rather than set himself up as Wilson's rival, De Quincey became his brother-in-arms. While Wilson has come down to us as a Rabelaisian extrovert and De Quincey as an introspective dreamer, the two men had a good deal in common. Born in the same year, Wilson also lost his father at an early age, also inherited money, also came to the Lakes to be near Wordsworth, and had been resident a full year before having the courage to call on his idol. Another Gothic novel-reading night-walker, Wilson had what De Quincey called a ‘furious love for nonsense –
head-long nonsense
'. They were bonded by their humour. Wilson's reputation as a man of letters has not survived, but he was a journalist of high jinks and knock-about brilliance. (The pleasure of reading his ‘Noctes Ambrosianae' in
Blackwood's Magazine
is hard to equal.) John Wilson excelled in the three areas considered during the Regency period to be the most important: personality, physiognomy and parody. The parodies of his literary friends and rivals are priceless, and he even wrote parodies of himself. He was, as De Quincey memorably said, ‘the very sublime of fun'.