Guilty Thing (52 page)

On 23 May both De Quincey and Margaret were put to the horn for the non-payment of rent on 1 Forres Street. The money was found, and two days later the family moved into Caroline Cottage in Doddington, on the edge of the city. Here the unbearable stress of their lives was alleviated by moments of joy. Florence remembered her father, on ‘
bright summer mornings
. . . capturing my baby sister, fresh from the bath. . . and dancing her about the garden, the child with its scanty white raiment and golden head, looking like a butterfly glowing among the trees'. On 14 August, the day before his forty-eighth birthday, De Quincey went ‘suddenly' into hiding, ‘in expectation of a process of arrest', and remained invisible until 2 September. A few days later, the De Quinceys' youngest son, Julius, died in his mother's arms. Most wretched of all for Margaret was that she believed the boy's fever had broken and had not realised that his struggles, ‘which she had supposed to be expressions of resistance to herself, were
the struggles of departing life
'. She never ceased to reproach herself for having appeared, when Julius last looked up at her, displeased with him. There was nothing, De Quincey afterwards said, more painful than the death of a child between three and five years old; it was vital to believe that the lives of those who died young had been happy ones, and that they departed this world knowing they had been loved. This had not been the case with Julius; De Quincey was haunted by the discovery, ‘which but for the merest accident I never
should
have made – that [Julius's] happiness had been greatly disturbed in a way that afflicted me much'.

With Julius in the churchyard laid, the De Quincey children were now seven. On the day of the funeral De Quincey had to flee Caroline Cottage to avoid arrest and later that month The Nab was sold by auction. Inevitably, he had missed his first mortgage repayment; his mother sent £180 to cover the second and third repayments, subtracting the sum from her son's regular allowance, and De Quincey came up with madcap schemes to enable the Simpsons to keep their home. Foreclosure, however, was inevitable. In a vicious letter, Margaret's brother accused De Quincey of ‘swindling' them all, and the house that had been in the Simpson family for generations was now lost to them. Within weeks, Margaret had lost both her child and her childhood home. Shortly afterwards her mother also died, and Margaret's father and half-witted uncle joined the De Quincey household in Edinburgh.

In November De Quincey was put to the horn once more, this time for non-payment of his daughters' music lessons. That month he took advantage of sanctuary and placed himself in accommodation with Mr Brotherton, landlord of one of the hovels in the precincts of Holyrood Abbey. It was the second time in his life that De Quincey had made his home in a monastery.

To live without money, said Hazlitt in ‘On the Want of Money', ‘is to live out of the world'. Holyrood was a world outside the world; it had its own government, its own court, its own prison, its own economy, its own streets and shops and small-town life; it even had its own wild terrain – Holyrood Park contained one half of Duddingston Loch and all of Arthur's Seat, a dormant volcano with a panoramic view of the city. Having paid the bailie (or governor) two guineas, the inmates – known as the ‘Abbey lairds' – could roam within a radius of six miles, and from midnight on Saturday until midnight on Sunday they were free to leave the precinct without fear of arrest, frequently returning in full flight from their creditors as the clock struck twelve. Architecturally, Holyrood resembled the Priory but in other ways the life of an Abbey laird was like that of an Oxford undergraduate, not least because the university operated a similar curfew. In a rare sighting of him inside the abbey, William Bell Scott described De Quincey as resembling ‘the ghost of one whose body had not received the clod of earth to entitle it to rest in peace'. Meanwhile, De Quincey's ‘growing son' – most likely William – was ‘getting well into his teens like
an uncared-for dog
'.

Caroline Cottage was on the edge of the abbey boundary, but to avoid harassment De Quincey did not return during his first few weeks in Brotherton's lodgings. We find him back home in the spring of 1834, but after being horned once more he returned to Holyrood. Sanctuary did not come free: De Quincey needed to find twelve guineas a month to cover the rents for Brotherton and for Caroline Cottage, and both fell into (or rather, began in) arrears. He was now unable to buy either ink or opium and could not leave Holyrood ‘without very urgent danger' as ‘emissaries are on the watch in all directions'. In April 1834 he was put to the horn again – for an unpaid book bill – and sued by a servant for her wages. In June he was sued by the grocer, and he exchanged Brotherton's lodgings for ‘miserable' rooms with Miss Miller, where his vast family, to save on rent, joined him. To write in peace, De Quincey rented another set of rooms within the abbey from a Miss Craig. On two occasions in 1834 he was sued in Holyrood's own court for non-payment of rent to Miss Miller and Miss Craig, and he only narrowly avoided the shame of being imprisoned within the sanctuary itself.

On the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, William Tait, the radical son of a builder, launched a journal to rival
Blackwood's
. The purpose of
Tait's
Edinburgh Magazine
was to provide a voice for the new electorate: while
Blackwood's
was for the educated elite,
Tait's
was for the common man. Despite his aversion to Jacobins, De Quincey – nothing if not Janus-faced – approached Tait, and it was Tait who encouraged his new author to write about himself. Blackwood, who continued to commission De Quincey, turned a blind eye to the Opium-Eater's duplicity.

His first essay for
Tait's
, which appeared in December 1833, was an anonymous sketch of ‘Mrs Hannah More', who had died, aged eighty-eight, in August that year. ‘
I knew Mrs Hannah More
tolerably well,' De Quincey began, ‘perhaps as well as it was possible that any man
should
know her who had not won her confidence by enrolling himself amongst her admirers.' The low temperature of his praise was maintained throughout. ‘Mrs H. More,' said De Quincey, was an egotist surrounded by fawning acolytes; himself impatient of such characters, he ‘never paid her a compliment'. Nor did he express any interest in her works, and he ‘appeared', in her presence, not ‘to know that she was an author'. As a friend and neighbour of ‘a lady' with ‘whose family' De Quincey ‘maintained a very intimate acquaintance', Hannah More had been introduced to him in Wrington in 1809; nothing was said about this ‘lady' being the author's mother (one of the fawning acolytes) or about De Quincey's having first met Mrs H. More in Bath in 1798. Nor was there any reference to her as the person who had introduced De Quincey to Wordsworth's ‘We Are Seven'. On the contrary, listed amongst Hannah More's crimes was her boast that she had ‘foresworn' poetry along with ‘
pink ribbons
', as though poetry were a childish indulgence rather than ‘the science of human passion in all its fluxes and refluxes'.

Beneath the mockery of Hannah More lay depths of nostalgia. De Quincey's prose is propelled by his pleasure in returning to the subject of his youth, his pride in having rubbed shoulders with fame. The full texture of his tone only becomes apparent when we remember the conditions under which he was writing: this was a man in freefall recalling the days when he had nothing to lose.

In ‘Tintern Abbey', Wordsworth had moved back and forth between the quiet present and the turbulent past. In Holyrood Abbey, De Quincey did the opposite. Liberated from
Maga
's macho pugilism, from now until the end of his life De Quincey's subject was a lost paradise.

In February 1834 he began a series of twenty-five essays which would run in
Tait's
over the next seven years. Initially called ‘Sketches of Men and Manners from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater', they were eventually known as
Autobiographic Sketches
. De Quincey's childhood was a fairy tale: ‘
I was born in a situation
the most favourable to happiness of any, perhaps, which can exist; of parents neither too high nor too low; not very rich, which is too likely to be a snare; not poor, which is oftentimes greater.' His father was a merchant with a copious library and his mother was well born; his boyhood days were passed in large houses with an abundance of servants, and the family income was £6,000 a year. De Quincey recalled his disruptive elder brother; how Greenhay had been sold at a loss; how his guardians had ‘grossly mismanaged' his fortune; how his mother had moved to Bath; how, on the ‘most heavenly day in May', he ‘beheld and first entered' the ‘mighty wilderness' of London; and how he had travelled across a turbulent Ireland.

De Quincey's most striking feature as an autobiographer was his romanticisation of first times. Here he was in tune with the age he was recalling. Coleridge's mariner had been ‘the first that burst into that silent sea'; Keats had described ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'; and Hazlitt had recorded in his 1823 essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets', how, as a youth, he had walked ten miles in the mud to hear, for the first time, Coleridge preach. The
Autobiographic Sketches
contain a catalogue of first times – ‘It was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly in the summer season, and certainly in the years 1807, that I first saw [Coleridge]'; ‘It was in the year 1801, whilst yet at school, that I made my first literary acquaintance'; ‘It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of 1803, that I first entered Oxford. . .'; ‘It was on a November night, about ten o'clock, that I first found myself installed in a house of my own – this cottage, so memorable from its past tenant to all men'; ‘It was at Mr Wordsworth's house that I first became acquainted with (then Mr) Wilson, of Elleray'. De Quincey described the first time he experienced loss as a child, his first coach journey as a boy, the first time he read
Lyrical Ballads
and, for the first time, he mentioned the death from hydrocephalus of his sister. It was at that point, he revealed, that he had become a ‘nympholept'.