The Recent Biographies

I have. suffered. from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case.

(De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)

I am indebted to the three most recent biographies of De Quincey.

In The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, Grevel Lindop (1948-) confined himself to a useful historical account of the life as it could then (1981) have been known from the available facts. Lindop's biography remains beautifully written, insightful and evocative despite some inaccuracies which he himself would be key in bringing to light as he went on to edit the Pickering and Chatto Works of Thomas De Quincey (21 volumes, 2000-2003), an achievement that has transformed De Quincey studies and made possible some outstanding work since.

Robert Morrison's The English Opium Eater (2009) is the most compelling and comprehensive single-volume survey of De Quincey to date, and the first to use the findings of the Pickering and Chatto Works of Thomas De Quincey. Morrison's is also one of the very few full-length studies of De Quincey, William Wordsworth or Coleridge so far to take seriously (and handle with further accuracy) Daniel Roberts's insight into the central importance of De Quincey to William Wordsworth and Coleridge. I will pursue this insight further still, including some consideration of De Quincey in relation to Dorothy Wordsworth, whose significance I will bring out, showing how it broadened and nuanced De Quincey's position in the Wordsworth Coleridge circle.

Frances Wilson's (1964-) Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (2016), the 'most De Quinceyan' of the available biographies, focuses on some of the deeper regions of De Quincey's mind and work, and it throws into worthwhile relief some shadowy and unsettling shapes. Wilson's De Quincey is a man of secret habits and 'composed of multiple tendencies' (GT 7) - a transgressive consumer who purchases and enjoys certain things compulsively, and often when he is not being watched. There is a startling diary entry of Saturday 4 June 1803 in which the 17-year-old De Quincey seems (as if foreshadowing Dorian Gray) to have indulged himself in commercially available sex and then experienced (what Lord Henry Wotton would have referred to as) the luxury of a regret: 'go to the same fat whore's as I was at the last time; - give her. my cambric pocket handkerchief; - go home miserable' (Works i. 46).

Robert Morrison - whose biography has been Wilson's 'constant guide' (GT 381) - has noted that as a teenager De Quincey was beginning to realise that the obsessive and repetitive nature of his behaviours (such as buying quantities of books beyond his means) was extending to his burgeoning sex life, and he 'clearly felt distressed at his inability to curb his passions' and continued confounding himself with the speed at which he was 'losing his sense of shame' (EOE 60). De Quincey was containing and denying - and thence making more lurid - the sort of energies that would later lose their shadowy self-determination as modern psychology assimilated them, minimising and medicalising their cries, and showing as shallower the depths from which they cry.

Morrison has shown how often De Quincey's wife Margaret was left at home in the Lake District with the children for months at a time while he was working (and almost certainly spending his time and money on those compulsive pursuits long familiar to him) in London. 'When he visited prostitutes in Liverpool as a teenager, he came home ashamed. If he was again in the company of London prostitutes, thoughts of Margaret probably brought on guilt in larger and more complicated shapes, not least because each encounter would have cost him money and introduced the possibility of disease' (EOE 205). His daughters Margaret, Florence and Emily would come to know, as well as his wife Margaret, how toxically irresponsible he could be. Florence said: 'He was not a reassuring man for nervous people to live with.' Margaret said: 'for Papa, we are at constant war with him' (EOE 359).

Morrison has not presented any hard evidence of De Quincey's having been a regular in any of London's stews of infamy, but Morrison's surmise, having been arrived at with such dignity and discretion, seems the more strikingly revelatory for its remoteness from any interest in discovering additional disgrace and raising another rumpus.

And yet despite Morrison's exemplary tact, some readers might still be left wondering if those 'larger and.. complicated shapes' of guilt might be given some additional definition in the light of a more prurient approach: how far-reaching was De Quincey's delinquency? How deep-rooted and damaging to him (and his family) was his libertinism? How often did he pay for sex? Was he as dependent on the company and caresses of his favourite 'noble-minded' (SW 20) sex worker as he was on the assistance of his 'immortal' (SW 36) seller of opium? Did he hear the devil's laughter directly after each purchased copulation? Did he do it again and again and each time say to himself afterwards never again? Did he debate with himself whether to go to her tonight - for just one last time - or not? Maybe she would not be available every time he wanted her. Maybe she was too much in demand.

Perhaps (having read and taken to heart Milton's Paradise Lost as a schoolboy) he saw his own internal conflict as his Pandæmonium in which part of him would argue like a suddenly eloquent orator who has jumped to his feet after being silent a while. How exactly could going to see her just one more time make things any worse? As long as you do not get caught. You have not been caught up to now.

Did he then, like Victor Frankenstein, find himself hastening to the object of his obsession with a desire all the more enflamed and his resolve to satiate that desire all the more furious? As he got closer to the street where he knew he would find her, did he walk more slowly, thinking even now that he could turn back and knowing he would go on?

Did he notice the extent of her misery, yet still press lustfully ahead with the transaction, blinding himself to her troubles as well as to his own nastiness, brutishness and shortness, only to find himself afterwards trembling like a guilty thing surprised?

His contemporary, Mary Shelley (1797-1851), would write very insightfully about how the pangs of a driven man's remorse will find their way from his waking hours into his dreams, breeding nightmares.

I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured; and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain: I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth [italics added in recognition of the coincidence: Frankenstein's adopted sister and De Quincey's sister share the Christian name], in the bloom of health, walking in the streets. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror (Frankenstein chapter iv).

Did De Quincey sometimes force himself to go without for weeks on end and then, unable any longer to endure the consuming necessity of self-control, release himself back into the sexual swamp (knowing, even as he began again unbuttoning and browsing, that he was stirring still more furies for himself)? Did each guilty gratification come with the agonised suspicion that he had already passed on the clap or worse to Margaret? How morally messed up did he feel having exploited the young 'female peripatetic', or 'Street-walker' (SW 20), Ann of Oxford Street, about whom he would write with the vagueness and borrowed vehemence of Thomas Gray (1716-1771) among the paupers' graves?

What did he do with his conscience? Did he dispense with it altogether or did he make it more robust? Were there unanticipated emotional involvements in paying for sexual services, and were these too sharply negative to be enfolded unnoticeably in the scholar's self-esteem? How happily could he compartmentalise?

Before he ever even spoke to Ann, did he stalk her? Did he look at her across streets, through shop windows, from shadows, reducing her as he did so to the object of his darker desires? Having done this for a while under cover of anonymity, did he at some point find himself wrongfooted and exposed, finally having to introduce himself? Did she provoke gallantries, which made her smirk? Were there any winks or playful references from others on the street to his diminutive stature? Did he present an absent-minded, ghostly quality (rooted in the grief he felt over the loss of his sister)? And was he also intent on concealing the outer, more...