Drugs, destructiveness, debts, disaster

BIOGRAPHY: A Biography of Thomas De QuinceyBy Robert Morrison, Weidenfeld Nicolson, 462pp, £25

WITH HIS Confessionsof 1821, first published in instalments in the London Magazine, Thomas De Quincey became the most celebrated English addict of the 19th century. He initiated a new genre, the drug-fuelled "outsider" account of the systematic derangement of the senses (in Auden's phrase), with the protagonist achieving a state of grace and damnation simultaneously. Ultimately destructive, this state could seem like an exquisite advancement of perception. "I am a Hedonist;" De Quincey wrote, "and, if you must know why I take opium, that's the reason why."

As an explanation, of course, this is rather tongue-in-cheek; it doesn’t take into consideration De Quincey’s complex, and in many ways rebarbative, personality. Born in Manchester in 1785, he was the fourth child and second son of a well-to-do cotton merchant, also named Thomas Quincey (the “De” was added later) and his evangelical wife (a disciple of Hannah More). What began as an auspicious childhood for De Quincey was soon disrupted by “the deep deep tragedies of infancy”, the most profound of which was the death of his beloved sister, Elizabeth, when he was six years old. No other death, neither that of his father nor his older brother William, had so severe an impact on his well-being.

De Quincey’s career as an absconder began early. At 16 he ran away from Manchester Grammar School (a piece of “self-willed insubordination”, his put-upon mother raged); he left Oxford without taking a degree; he tramped through Wales, often sleeping rough; he went to London and, down to his last half-guinea, gained a vagrant’s knowledge of its seedier pursuits. This was a boy with an adequate private income but a spendthrift’s instincts – indeed an incorrigible improvidence, once opium had entered the picture. De Quincey’s drug addiction began in a small way, with a terrible toothache and the laudanum recommended as a palliative. Laudanum, his biographer reminds us, was as common at the time as aspirin is today, and served the same purpose as a supposedly innocuous painkiller. Its effect, though, for someone predisposed to excess, was both liberating and lethal. Before he was 30, De Quincey had gone “from consuming laudanum to being consumed by it”.

Long before this, however, he’d embarked on a life of disorder and contradiction. He was a “gentleman”, a snob and a High Tory who married a poor farmer’s daughter from a Radical Westmorland background, a man of genius, a great essayist and linguist whose potential was largely unfulfilled, an acolyte with the strongest sense of his own superiority. The young De Quincey, in thrall to the mystique of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their circle, transplanted himself to the Lake District to be close to these objects of veneration, and even took over the tenancy of Dove Cottage when the Wordsworths moved to nearby Rydal Mount. However, the extremely cordial relations which prevailed at the start of the Wordsworth/De Quincey association – “like one of our own Family”, Dorothy Wordsworth enthused to a friend – gradually gave way to adverse judgements on both sides.

The snideness of the Wordsworth-Southey-Coleridge attitude to De Quincey’s marriage didn’t help.

De Quincey himself was moving from pillar to post, often leaving his wife and family (eight children were born between 1816 and 1833) to struggle with adversities in Westmorland, while he led a fraught and procrastinating life in London. Drugs and debts were the framework of his existence. Commissions from magazine editors failed to materialise, over and over, despite reiterated promises on De Quincey’s part. When he did manage to complete a piece of work, however, it was of such a high quality that commissions kept on coming – often, again, to no avail, causing hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing in Edinburgh and London, where would-be employers bemoaned his utter unreliability.

Constantly on the run from creditors and editors, facing imprisonment for debt, subject to opium-induced nightmares, suffused with guilts from various causes, De Quincey's was not a equable life. At one point we find him dealing with a friend in the throes of madness, being bitten four times by a dog, nearly setting the house on fire, compulsively buying books (another addiction, on top of opium and alcohol), and enduring "a rheumatic affection" of the face. He is driven to pawn his clothes and ends up wrapped in a great-coat four times too big for him (he is very small), with nothing underneath. The pile-up of complex and largely self-induced miseries nearly becomes farcical. But through it all, De Quincey's faith in his own abilities never wavered – and, as this shrewd, illuminating and on the whole sympathetic, biography shows, it wasn't groundless faith. He could have achieved more, perhaps, but what he did achieve – Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,etc – is surprising and admirable, given his life of on-going troubles and distractions.

Robert Morrison has had access to material uncovered since the last life of De Quincey came out, nearly 30 years ago, and it adds some detail to the story of drugs and destructiveness, debts and disasters. Morrison makes no judgements about his subject's overwhelming irresponsibility, but tells it all with clarity and dispassion. The English Opium-Eaterenhances our understanding of De Quincey's profligate and cross-grained nature.

Patricia Craig’s biography of Brian Moore was published by Bloomsbury in 2002