ONE BOOK WONDER
A feckless debt-ridden opium addict touched by literary genius, author Thomas De Quincey spent the majority of his adult life in Edinburgh
The unfulfilled talent of Thomas De Quincey
The author Thomas De Quincey is most frequently associated with London – the seamy underside of which he immortalised in, among others, On Murder Considered
As One Of The Fine Arts, about the Radcliffe Highway murders – and the Lake District, where he took over Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and which inspired his scandalously indiscreet Recollections Of The Lake Poets. But it was in Edinburgh that he spent the longest period of his adult life.
He is buried at the end of Princes Street, in St Cuthbert’s Churchyard, although none of the famous writers he knew – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, the poet laureate Robert Southey – attended his funeral. Indeed, all of them would have been immensely surprised that he outlived them all. Born in 1785, his poverty, ill-health and above all his opium addiction gave no suggestion he would reach the age of 74, dying in 1859. Being a precocious young man, he would have known about the French Revolution which started when he was four; being a tenacious old one he held on until the revolution was the backdrop for Charles Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities.
His father was a Mancunian industrialist who died when he was eight. His rather stern mother vacillated between
sending him to school and withdrawing him for fear he was becoming arrogant. He eventually went to Manchester Grammar School, but ran away after nineteen months. His idea was to walk to meet his literary idols, but he chickened out and walked home, borrowed some money (which he duly lost) and lived effectively as a tramp for six months. Too scared to go home, he wound up in London, where, as he recalled in later works, he formed a sickly, chaste and strange relationship with a teenage prostitute.
Eventually his friends and family recovered him and he was sent to Worcester College, Oxford. He had by this time started taking opium, and although he passed all his examinations, he failed to turn up for the oral viva and left without a degree. This time in earnest he set off for t he Lake District. He was a charming, if peculiar individual. His conversation was ‘like the elaboration of a mine of results’ and he soon won the poets over, forming a particular attachment to Wordsworth’s daughter. De Quincey was also stupidly generous with his inheritance, particularly given how feckless about money some of his heroes could be. Soon he was in debt again, and turned his attentions to what we might call journalism, or essays, but which are unclassifiable non-fiction works. In 1819 he became editor of the Westmoreland Gazette. His initial works for them do not show the promise of what was to come: a four part series on The Danish Origin of the Lake-Country Dialect. It is difficult to tell how much of the paper he wrote anonymously, but his political views – surprising reactionary; in praise of the Peterloo Massacre, violently opposed to Catholic Emancipation and fervently in defence of aristocratic privilege – may have been a contributing factor in the cessation of his employment.
Nobody reading these fugitive pieces would have suspected his next work would become a classic. The Confessions Of An English Opium
Eater, which appeared in the London Magazine in 1821 is both frank and phantasmagorical, scientific and nightmarish, full of oriental horrors and London sleaze. It has rightly been
said to be the beginning of addiction literature.
By this point De Quincey, as well as an opium addiction, had a family to support. His wife Margaret had eight children before she died; three daughters and a son survived. De Quincey did one of the most sensible things in his chaotic life and moved to Edinburgh. Scotland’s capital had significant attractions, not least a thriving literary magazine scene. He would write for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Blackwood’s, The Glasgow Athenaeum, Hogg’s Instructor, The Edinburgh Evening Post and others. The offices of Tait’s, to which he would walk eight miles there and back, stood close to where his grave now lies.
De Quincey wrote on everything from the philosophy of Kant, Shakespeare and Animal Magnetism to the War with China, shoe fashions and Joan of Arc.
His immersion in the magazine world meant that he suffered the acclaim and indignity of becoming a character in Blackwood’s. De Quincey became ‘the English Opium-Eater’ much as James Hogg was traduced and parodied as ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’. One skit even featured the Shepherd relating his experience of taking De Quincey’s drug of choice.
Edinburgh had one other major attraction, its relatively benign conditions for debtors. The Sanctuary at Holyrood, which debtors could leave unhindered on Sundays, was a far more pleasant proposition to the Marshalsea where the young Dickens grew up. De Quincey had many pseudonyms to avoid his debtors and to increase his literary productivity, from XYZ to T E Manners-Ellis to Rev. Tom Foggy Dribble.
Booksellers seemed particular ardent in their pursuit of him with one acquaintance describing him as ‘at home in a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the tables and the chairs – billows of books …’ He would often seek sanctuary at Holyrood or disappear to Glasgow, which he did more than once having got into debt with fellow inmates.
De Quincey also became involved in what he called ‘the boldest hoax of our times’, a novel called Walladmor. There had been a more significant gap between Scott’s Redgauntlet and any new work, and an enterprising German publisher wrote a novel purporting to be the next work of the still-anonymous author of Waverley.
At first De Quincey merely reviewed it, but then took it upon himself to translate it. How the English version ever passed as anything other than a hoax is astonishing. De Quincey could not keep himself from introducing sly jokes. At one point in Volume II, the narrator is in prison and finds the only reading matter is the Bible and Volume I of Walladmor. Nevertheless it was taken seriously and one can still find sets of The Waverley Novels in private hands with Walladmor included.
It is sometimes said that if De Quincey had not been beset with addiction, he would not have taken on so much journalism and have written some work of significance. Setting aside that he did, and more than once, it might also be that he thrived on the cycle of hit and slump, the pressure of deadlines and the relief of commissions. Either way it seems regrettable there is no formal memorial, other than his grave, to one of Edinburgh’s most eccentric, infuriating and ingenious adopted authors.