Book Review

Laudanum, Fantasy, friendship

The English Opium Eater: a biography of Thomas De Quincey

The story of Thomas De Quincey and his friend Ann of Oxford Street is one of the most haunting episodes in his memoir Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The stubborn young runaway, just 17 years old, makes his way south from Manchester, escaping a despised school. In London, he sinks rapidly into destitution and homelessness. A moneylender allows him to shelter at night in his empty house in Greek Street, Soho. Wandering the streets all day, going hungry, he meets Ann, a teenage prostitute. They enjoy a passionate friendship until he has to leave town briefly. It is winter; Ann has a cough. They sit down in Golden Square and share their meagre funds.

Thomas expects to return in a week; they agree that in five nights’ time she will wait for him at the bottom of Great Titchfield Street, and every night thereafter until they meet again. She weeps and they part. Night after night on his return he goes to the meeting place, to no avail. All his enquiries draw a blank, hampered by the fact he does not even know her surname. “To this hour I have never heard a syllable about her,” he wrote 50 years later. By this time he was one of the most famous journalists in the land. London had simply swallowed her up.

Robert Morrison, an academic at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, finds De Quincey’s account of his relationship with little Ann decidedly unconvincing. This failure to find her again was De Quincey’s “heaviest affliction”, or so he claimed later, yet Morrison points out that he made no contemporary record of the episode: “All his accounts of Ann – in fact, the only accounts of her at all – come in his reminiscences, the first of which was not written until nearly two decades after they met.” Though “genuine experience no doubt played a role”, Morrison finds Ann to be a literary construct, modelled on such types as Mary Magdalen and the noble, suffering poor of Wordsworth’s poems in the smash-hit collection Lyrical Ballads. De Quincey, notes Morrison, also seems to have conflated poor, lost Ann with his favourite sister, Elizabeth, whose gruesome death when he was a child shocked him profoundly. Thomas’ account of his chaste relationship with the idealised young prostitute doesn’t ring true. “At the same time he was fantasising about saving Ann, Thomas may also have been having sex with her.”

This isn’t a debunking biography, just a properly sceptical one, and it’s clear that Morrison’s enthusiasm for the man and his writings does not obscure his judgement. De Quincey was one of the strangest geniuses of the Romantic period and that, of course, is saying something. His great works, the Confessions and a handful of bizarre and ori­ginal essays such as “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts” have been profoundly influential, not just here but in Europe (Baudelaire was a fan). But his life-writing, as Morrison demonstrates, is not to be taken at face value.

He was born plain Thomas Quincey (he added the aristocratic “De”) in 1785 in Manchester. The family was well-to-do, though his linen-merchant father died when he was young. He was a brilliant scholar, picking up Italian in a matter of weeks and professing himself disgusted when at Oxford his examination paper was set not in the expected ancient Greek but the easier Latin. He began to collect books, an enthusiasm which became in time a ruinous obsession. While still a boy, he conceived a passion for Wordsworth and, as soon as he could, made his way to the Lake District to be near his idol. He even rented Dove Cottage. Initially charmed by the tiny, goblin-like scholar, the Wordsworth family came to regard him with little more than contempt. Despite the bond in opium, De Quincey seems never to have been close to Coleridge.

By 1813 he was addicted to the drug, and battled with it for the rest of his life. He also developed a dependency on the alcohol in which the opium was dissolved to form laudanum. His intake could reach thousands of drops a day. Morrison quotes friends and acquaintances on the peaks and dips of his dependency; he sank into stupors, could not be roused from his bed. And yet he was ­massively productive, a witty and well-informed political commentator much sought after by rival publications. (Morrison is very good on the spite and rivalry between the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, and the way De Quincey played them off against each other.)

Despite his prosperous background, De Quincey pursued penury like a vocation; no matter how much money flowed in from his pen, his outgoings exceeded his income, sometimes in ways it is very difficult to understand. Even at his most poverty-stricken, he thought nothing of renting two expensive lodgings simultaneously, one for his books and papers. His later life in Scotland, filled with children and bailiffs and angry landladies, is delineated by Morrison with wry humour.

Above all, he was a wonderful talker, a spellbinder who left people dazed with his erudition. This quality, of course, can never be resurrected, but it’s to Morrison’s credit that he makes this maddening, self-deceiving and slippery man so fascinating and ultimately loveable.

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