Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

Frances Wilson

Bloomsbury (£25)

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

SOME days are perfect for calling on the dead. One such – dreich, drizzly, dun-coloured sky – was earlier this year. Finding myself at the west end of Princes Street I decided to seek out Thomas De Quincey’s grave which I knew to be in St Cuthbert’s kirkyard. After much aimless wandering among soot-stained stones, many of which the weather had scoured of their inscriptions, I came across a member of the congregation who pointed me to the sunless spot where in December 1859 the infamous “Opium-Eater” and “the last of the romantics” was laid to rest. He is buried with his long-suffering wife Margaret. His date of birth, 1785, and its place, Greenway, Manchester, are given correctly. Above ‘Manchester’, however, someone has scratched an asterisk, as if to highlight that his remains are far from his roots. In death, as in life, it seems, De Quincey was the kind of man who resists pinning down.

Frances Wilson’s biography takes its title from De Quincey’s description of himself. “Guilty thing” comes from Act 1 of Hamlet: “like a guilty thing/ Upon a fearful summons.” Wilson tells us that De Quincey first applied the phrase to himself to describe his reaction to the death of his older sister, Elizabeth. He was six when she died at the age of nine, suddenly, from hydrocephalus, or water on the brian. On the day of her death, he stole into her room and, hearing footsteps on the stairs, kissed her “marble lips” for the last time and slunk away, “like a guilty thing”. Later, he eavesdropped while two doctors carried out a post mortem on Elizabeth’s corpse, sawing through her skull and inspecting the liquid deposits around her brain.

We know all of this gory detail because De Quincey himself wrote about it. It was his mother, also called Elizabeth, who instilled him a disabling sense of guilt. He grew up, we are told, believing himself to be a great criminal and spent much of his life on the run, invariably from creditors. The De Quinceys – the ‘De’ was added by his mother, who sought associations with those and such as those – were the unluckiest of families, though much of their lucklessness was of their own making. Thomas was the fourth of eight children. He barely knew his father; his chief memory of him was of learning, aged seven, that he was coming home from the West Indies to die. Dying and death were regular occurrences as the eighteenth century morphed into the nineteenth and fed the young boy’s inherent morbidity. De Quincey was a small boy who grew into a small man. He was also precocious which his mother did her best to puncture, leading him to believe that it was “a point of filial duty to believe ourselves the very scamps and refuse of the universe”.

Books were where De Quincey found succour from a cruel world. His mother wanted him to attend Eton but he was opposed to that even though he was intrigued by a story he was told of a pack boys who had beaten a porter near to death while the masters stood insouciantly by. Nor was he that keen to go to Oxford University and when he did he bolted before his viva which he could doubtless have passed in his sleep. But this was typical of the “guilty thing”. De Quincey was congenitally programmed not to do what was expected of him or what he expected of himself. When next he applied that damning verdict of himself it was when he went twice to the Lake District to visit William Wordsworth. Again, however, on both occasions he retreated, a philosophising ditherer like Hamlet, “whom”, notes Wilson, “De Quincey was starting to resemble”.

In due course, fortified with opium, which he first started taking as a nineteen-year-old to assuage rheumatic pains in his face, he did meet, befriend, hymn and fall out with Wordsworth. Opium, writes Wilson, was the making of him, turning him into another person, “the Opium-Eater”, which helped dispel nightmares and gave him the courage to enter rooms and hold court. Murders were what truly enthralled him. His account of the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders, which provides a dramatic overture to Wilson’s book, in which two families in London’s East End were battered and stabbed to death, prefigured Truman Capote’s study of the killing of the Clutter family, In Cold Blood. Indeed, it is as an essayist, memoirist and reviewer – and a merciless one at that – on which De Quincey’s reputation lies. Among those influenced by him, Wilson cites Jorge Luis Borges, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Alfred Hitchcock, Baudelaire, JG Ballard and Vladimir Nabokov, concluding: “We are De Quinceyan now.”

That’s as may be. Hereabouts few now know of him and little has been done to commemorate his sojourn among the seers of Enlightenment Edinburgh and Glasgow. In the former he and his family lived for a while in the debtors’ sanctuary at Holyrood. Later he packed his wife and children off to Lasswade while he stayed in the city never far from penury. Knowing of my interest in him, a friend told me that he had once visited 42 Lothian Street, one of De Quincey’s many abodes, where on the floor were strewn a number of quills. Were they De Quincey’s? I like to think they were. As for Frances Wilson’s biography, it is, like its subject’s own best work, written with studied panache, respectful irreverence and relish of the macabre.