THE WORKS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Edited by Grevel Lindop
7, 980pp. 7 volumes. Pickering and Chatto. £550.
TLS £530.
1 85196 518 1
Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater presented itself as a medical case history rather than an all-encompassing autobiography; it was to be the 'instructive record” of a “remarkable period” of his life. In practice, however, he gave a remarkably full account of his personal trajectory. He described how he had run away from school as a sixteen-year-old, wandered through parts of England and Wales, and finally found his way to London, where he lived for some time as a down-and-out. He told the story of Ann, the Oxford Street prostitute who had befriended him in his adversity, rushing off to get a glass of brandy in Soho Square when he was on the brink of collapse. He also told how they had finally come to be separated, and how he had “looked into many, many myriads of female faces” in the vain hope of meeting her again. Details such as these were designed to explain the painful circumstances that first led him to take opium. But they had another purpose as well, which was to introduce the images and experiences that, many years later, came back to haunt him in his dreams. Certainly it is possible to read the Confessions as a kind of case study, a book full of information about opium and its effects; but there are very few readers who have not felt that it was also about something more universal. Delving deep into past history in an attempt to understand the present, the Confessions is structured on the Wordsworthian principle that “the child is father to the man”. The crucial difference is that, whereas in the “Immortality Ode” or The Prelude childhood recollection brings about a renewed sense of latent destiny and prospective purpose, in the Confessions it signifies a continuing enslavement to the past. At the end of the narrative, the opium-eater claims (quite wrongly as it turned out) to have “unwound, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which bound him”. Nevertheless, the broader message is that life does not constitute a progress, but rather an endless repetition of past traumas played out in a world of bewildering contingency, waste and loss. It was this rhetoric of sublime passivity, what he himself called “a music of preparation and of awakening suspense”, and not the detailed discussion of opium, that led writers such as Poe and Baudelaire to think of De Quincey as a true modern.
The sense of suspense that makes De Quincey so bewitching as an autobiographer can make him difficult to assess as a critic. Born in 1785 in Manchester, to moderately prosperous parents, he spent much of his youth as a gentleman scholar and amateur. It was only in his early thirties, in the face of mounting debts, that he was forced into periodical journalism. This was in 1818, when he took up the editorship of the Westmorland Gazette. His literary character was evident from the start; he was supercilious, he was scholarly, he had a strong tendency towards facetious animosity, but he did also have a great gift for subtle, sonorous prose. He was a champion of German literature and philosophy, English poetry and the new science of political economy (his three great heroes were Wordsworth, Kant and Ricardo); he was also deeply read in history, philology and the classics. He shared many of these intellectual interests with his mentors Wordsworth and Coleridge, and, like them, he was an ardent Tory. But whereas they continued, even in later life, to carry lingering traces of their former radicalism, he was one of the most unequivocal reactionaries of his age –extolling empire, defending slavery and resisting constitutional reform. Undoubtedly De Quincey had an impressive range of interests and opinions; what is not so clear is whether they developed much with time. Even before 1820,the combined effect of opium addiction and chronic poverty had all but destroyed his capacity for sustained work, and, by the end of the decade, he must have known that the magnum opus reconciling transcendental philosophy and modern political economy was never going to be written. With the Confessions of 1821, he had emerged fully armed from the brow of his age; but from then on, it could be argued, he did little but rattle his equipment.
It is the fragmentary, fissiparous nature of his work and not its intrinsic quality that is at issue here. He wrote a number of fine essays during the 1820s.“On the Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth” (1823) and “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827) are brilliant meditations on the relationship between morality and aesthetics. His “Letters to a Young Man Whose Education has been Neglected” (1821–4) are full of interesting ruminations on education and authorship. There are also a number of highly diverting Gothic tales. But they are almost always one-off performances, few and far between. He produced nothing to compare with Hazlitt’s “Table-Talk” series, or Lamb’s “Essays of Elia”. In one sense, he was very well suited to periodical journalism; creativity flowed most easily for him when he was very definitely not writing “the great work”. But he did find it difficult to consolidate himself in print. The first version of the Confessions conforms to this model. Written at a time when De Quincey was hiding out in taverns and coffee-houses to avoid his creditors, it is, for all the magnificence of its rhetoric, a surprisingly slight piece, much larger in the mind than it is on the page. Thirty-five years later, when he came to revise it for Selections Grave and Gay (1850–9), he added a lot of new material in an attempt to fill in some of the gaps. Characteristically, the expanded version, though wonderful and interesting in its own way, is no more complete or definitive than the original. De Quincey himself was unsure whether it constituted an improvement.