Book Review: De Quincey by David Masson

• Title: De Quincey
• Author: David Masson
• Published: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1887. Pages-198. (Part of the English Men of Letters series edited by John Morley)

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was an English writer widely known as the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater.  The surname might suggest a French importation, but De Quincey was sensitive to this and stressed that his family had come in with the Conquest and even consisted of some Earls of Winchester in the thirteenth century.  Today we might not think much of that, but in De Quincey’s day it was an important distinction.

His father was Thomas Quincey (abt. 1752-1792), it seems De Quincey resurrected the “De” with his generation.  His father was a literary man and wrote a book A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England, performed in the Summer of 1772: together with an Account of a Similar Excursion undertaken September, 1774.  Masson gives us his impression of the father’s book: “There is an eye also for the picturesque in scenery, and for architectural beauties or defects in towns, churches, and country-seats; and the style is that of a well-educated man, accustomed to write English.  Once or twice the language rises towards the poetic, and once there is an admiring quotation from Beattie’s Minstrel, the first part of which had recently appeared.”[1] The father died when De Quincey was seven years old of pulmonary consumption, or what we would now refer to as tuberculosis.

His mother was Elizabeth Penson (abt. 1755-?), a lady who came from a good family and was well connected.  She had two younger brothers who served in Bengal as officers in the service of the East India Company.  The marriage resulted in eight children, four sons and four daughters, between the years 1779 and 1792.  Our De Quincey was the fifth child and second son and was born in Manchester, England, on August 15, 1785, his father and mother being about 33 and 30 respectively.  The youngest son, Henry, was actually born shortly after his father’s death.  Two children died before the father, these were two older sisters of De Quincey.  As one could imagine, he was greatly affected by both.  The first was Jane, who died just before De Quincey was two years old and is most likely his earliest memory.  The other was Elizabeth who died when she was nine and De Quincey was only around six years old.  He fondly recalled her as “the gentlest and best beloved, his instructress and constant companion.”  The oldest sibling was William, who “tyrannized” over his younger brother and provided De Quincey with many anecdotal stories of his youth and sadly died as a young man, with great artistic promise, of typhus fever.

It is important to understand a little more of De Quincey’s mother since his father died when he was relatively young.

“Of stately social ways and refined tastes, and of even rare natural endowments, she was, De Quincey says, though in no sense professedly a literary woman, yet emphatically “an intellectual woman,” whose letters among her friends, if they could have been collected and published, would have been found hardly inferior, for the racy grace of their idiomatic English, to those of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  But there was, he hints, a too much of Roman firmness or hardness in her, which, especially after her friendship with Hannah More and other notables of the Clapham Evangelical Sect had confirmed her in their rigid views of religion, disqualified her for the peculiarly sympathetic treatment required by at least one of her sons.”[2]

His earliest reading consisted of works from the Bible, Dr. Johnson, Cowper, Mrs. Barbauld, and the Arabian Nights.  He learned Latin and the Greek before he was eleven years old.  In 1796 the family moved to Bath and De Quincey took lessons at the local Grammar School for two years, where he was known as a prodigy for his Latin.  He became very good at reading and speaking Greek at this time.  This schooling was interrupted by an accident which resulted in a blow to De Quincey’s head.  He had to recuperate for several weeks and the result was that Mrs. De Quincey would no longer send her children to that school but would instead find a private tutor. At the age of thirteen we find he has read Sir William Jones’ Asiatic Researches, Milner’s Church History, Johnson’s Rambler, Hoole’s Translations of Ariosto and Tasso, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.  He was also learning French.  De Quincey and his little brother were sent to a private school at Winkfield, in Wiltshire, of whose primary claim to fame was the religious fame of the master.

In the summer of 1800 De Quincey had a unique opportunity to visit parts of England and Ireland with Lord Westport, a young boy of approximately his own age, who was the only son of John-Denis, third Earl of Altamont of the Irish peerage and later Marquis of Sligo.  It was in this company that De Quincey actually had a conversation with King George III.  He also attended at least one fête which the Queen gave at Frogmore.  His time in Ireland coincided with the completion in the Irish Parliament of the Bill for the Union of Ireland with Great Britain and he witnessed the installation of the Knights of St. Patrick.

The fall of 1800 had De Quincey enrolled for the next three years at Manchester Grammar School of which he would only complete two.  Mr. Lawson was the head-master.  For some reason he found the school monotonous, and early one morning in July 1802, he ran away with an English poet in one pocket and an odd volume of Euripides in the other.  He was soon to be seventeen in the next month.  Needless to say, his mother was not happy, but his mother’s brother, a Colonel Thomas Penson, convinced his mother not to be too hard on the boy and arranged it so he could get a guinea a week to ramble about North Wales.  De Quincy took advantage of this and from July to November we see him visiting town, village, and country-inn experiencing little adventures that I wonder if he did not think of his father and how he had done much the same in Midland England.  This gave De Quincy an insight into the Welsh peasantry that I think added much to his character.  But the lure of books and society lured De Quincey away and led him to London.  He had heard of Jew moneylenders and he would go there to get a loan and jump start his career.  Masson describes his arrival in this ancient city of promise.

“It was late in November, 1802, when, having borrowed twelve guineas from two lawyer friends in Oswestry, De Quincey, after eight-and-twenty hours on the coach from Shrewsbury, was deposited in the streets of London.  Here what months he passed – what months of wild, haggard, Bohemian roaming and staggering from worse to worse!  He had lost no time in applying to a Jew money-lender named Dell; but Dell was never himself to be seen in such cases, and the negotiation had to be with Dell’s devil; or legal factotum.  This was a low attorney, called Brunell, who had for his place of business a house in Greek street, Soho, at the corner of Soho Square, with precautionary chains on the doors, and loop-holes through which those who knocked could be surveyed before they were admitted.  As we read the description of this house in Greek Street, with all its rooms unoccupied and unfurnished, save Mr. Brunell’s own sanctum, and some den for his athletic clerk, Pyment, and of Mr. Brunell’s arrivals in it every morning from no one knew where, and his disappearances in the evening, when his sanctum was carefully locked and the empty house was left in the sole keeping of a poor little wretch of a girl, ten years of age, who slept on straw as near as she could to the street-door, we feel as if we were in the midst of a novel by Dickens.”[3]

De Quincy would end up sharing the floor with this little girl and be glad to share stray crusts from Brunell’s breakfast table.  He would wander the city and the watchmen would recognize him as he dozed in doorsteps and rouse him from slumber and bid him on his way.  He met other street-walkers at this time.  One in particular is referred to as Ann of Oxford Street.    She was a poor girl of sixteen that took pity on him, used her own money to aid him when he had nearly collapsed from exhaustion.  Later a casual encounter with an old family friend took pity on him and gave him some money.  He left London, letting Ann know he would return in a few days, and went to see Lord Altamont so as he could vouchsafe for a loan from Dell.  Unfortunately, the Lord was not at home, for if so, he would have realized the young man’s predicament and most likely rescued this youth from the horrors of London.  But, De Quincy returned.  His Ann was gone.  He never found out what happened to her and this distressed him for the rest of his life.

He was soon rescued by friends from London and he returned to his mother for a short time before being induced to go to Worcester College, Oxford in the autumn of 1803.  The head of the college, Dr. Cotton, recalled of De Quincey at this time:

“During the period of his residence, he was generally known as a quiet and studious man.  He did not frequent wine-parties, though he did not abstain from wine; and he devoted himself principally to the society of a German, named Schwartzburg, who is said to have taught him Hebrew.  He was remarkable even in those days for his rare conversational powers, and for his extraordinary stock of information upon every subject that was started.”[4]

It is at Oxford that De Quincey delved into German Literature and Philosophy. He also came to see his own English literature not as a chaotic dispersion over the years, but rather as a great flow of national thought.  It was also at this time that he began to take opium.  I quote Masson below.

“His first experience of the drug was on a dull, rainy Sunday in the spring or autumn of 1804, when, on being on one of his visits to London, and having suffered for a week or two from neuralgia, he took the advice of a friend and purchased a phial of the tincture of opium at a druggist’s shop in Oxford Street, near “the stately Pantheon.”  The effect, when he took the first dose in his lodgings, was divine; and from that moment De Quincey was an experimenter in opium – never without a supply of the drug beside him in one or other of its forms, whether in the solid cakes or sticks of the dried substance, as imported from Turkey, Egypt, Persia, or India, or in the prepared red-brown liquid known as laudanum.  Nay, more, from that moment he was the apologist for opium, skilled, or fancying himself skilled, in all its effects, and distinguishing its negative effects in the mere relief of pain from its positive effects as an intellectual stimulant and exhilarant.  He suggests, indeed, that in continuing the use of the drug after its first service to him in an attack of neuralgia, he had hit by blind instinct on the specific for the pulmonary consumption to which he was liable by inheritance from his father.”

Oh, how much did his father’s death haunt him and worry him that he might fall to the same fate.  Opium seemed to be a panacea for all his troubles.  He later meets with Coleridge and casually brings up the use of opium, and Coleridge recoils in horror and begs him not to indulge in it.  For those that do not know, Coleridge was also an opium addict and struggled with it his entire life.  Our epidemic of today is nothing new.  History tells us we have struggled with this problem for a long time.  Hopefully, someday, we can come up with a solution.

In London he had the acquaintance of Charles Lamb, Sir Humphry Davy, William Godwin, William Hazlitt and others.  He delighted going to the Opera to hear Grassini sing.  He somehow came upon a good deal of money, Masson is unsure how this came about, either through his coming of age of majority, or through the money-lending of the Jews.  During this time an opportunity to escort Mrs. Coleridge and children to the Southey estate at Keswick.  This provided the introduction of himself and William Wordsworth.  This was a very fortunate occurrence and led to De Quincey being offered Wordsworth’s old cottage in the Lake District as a residence, which the Wordsworth’s had left for a larger house called Allan Bank.

When De Quincey moved into the cottage in November 1809, he officially became one of the Lakists.  For 27 years this would be his home.  Sometimes he stayed away for long periods of time, but, this was his fortress of solitude.  Here he enjoyed the company and conversation of William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Wilson “Christopher North,” Dr. Richard Watson the Bishop of Llandaff, Charles Lloyd.  John Wilson was just a few months older than De Quincey and they became good friends.  I recently did a review of “Christopher North” A Memoir of John Wilson by Wilson’s daughter Mrs. Gordon.  There are numerous references and letters from and to De Quincey.  Masson gives a comparison of the two men.

“De Quincey one of the smallest and feeblest-looking of mortals, hardly more than five feet high, while Wilson was one of the most magnificent young athletes that ever attracted men’s or women’s eyes in street or on heather.  His stature close on six feet, his frame proportioned into the very ideal of a Hercules-Apollo of the Scandinavian or yellow-haired type, masking immensity of strength under the litheness of a leopard, he carried also one of the noblest and most poetic of heads ever set on beautifully squared shoulders.  Then, what a reputation he had brought with him from Oxford, where, strangely enough, he had been a gentleman-commoner of Magdalen College all the time of De Quincey’s residence in the University, though they had never then met!  While De Quincey had been creeping around through the University, a bookish, opium eating recluse, Wilson had been the most observed man of all the colleges, not more for his magnificent physique and his unapproachable applications of it in pugilistic matches, leaping matches, and all other kinds of University sports, than for his universal sociability, exuberance of humour, easy triumphs in the classics and whatever else he cared to compete in, and promises of some unusual form of literary effulgence not yet distinctly featured.  With this kind of reputation preceding him from Oxford, it was as if he had bounded into the Lake District, rather than merely settled in it; and already the splendid young Mr. Wilson of Elleray, to whom his father, a Paisley manufacturer, had left a clear fortune of 50,000£, was known not only to all his neighbours that were likely to think of that matter, but also to every boatman, every innkeeper, every crack wrestler or boxer, every band of gipsies or other vagrants, over the whole region.”[5]

This friendship led De Quincey to Edinburgh with John Wilson.  There he would meet Sir William Hamilton, Thomas Hamilton, William Allan, Robert Pierce Gillies, John Gibson Lockhart, and many others.  Gillies gives us a glimpse of what a conversation with De Quincey might be like.

“The talk might be of ‘beeves,’ and he could grapple with them, if expected to do so; but his musical cadences were not in keeping with such work, and in a few minutes (not without some strictly logical sequence) he would escape at will from beeves to butterflies, and thence to the soul’s immortality, to Plato, and Kant, and Schelling, and Fichte, to Milton’s early years and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, to Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Homer and Aeschylus, St. Thomas of Aquin, St. Basil, and St. Chrysostom.”[6]

De Quincey was 31 when he married the 18-year-old Margaret Simpson, daughter of a small Westmoreland farmer in 1816.   During this time, he reduced his opium consumption from 320 grains, or 8000 drops, a day, down to 40 grains, or 1000 drops; this lasted for about a year.  He was elated to find that the deep melancholia that had settled over him and the cloud that obscured his thoughts was lifted.  This produced a most productive period of writing.  But this was short lived, and he again returned to his future levels and consumed even more opium, sometimes reaching 12,000 drops a day.

It was the London Magazine in 1821 that would first see De Quincey’s literary works in print by the publication in installments of Confessions of an Opium-eater, being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar.  This was shortly followed by On the Writings of John Paul Frederick Richter under the pseudonym “Grasmeriensis Teutonizans.”  We then see a year go by with nothing.  The Confessions above was only part one and the public eagerly awaited more.  In 1823 the Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected continued for several months, along with a sketch of Johann Gottfried Herder in The Death of a German Great Man.  Many other articles were released this year, including one of my favorites, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.”  The year 1824 De Quincey continued to produce many works.  This is the same year that Thomas Carlyle, ten years junior to De Quincey, released his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which I really enjoyed reading.  De Quincey no longer published anything with the London Magazine after 1824.

With the help of Wilson, he started writing for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1826, which naturally led De Quincey to Edinburgh.  He released Lessing’s Laocoon, translated with Notes, and The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, and On Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts, and Toilette of the Hebrew Lady, along with others.  In 1830 he moves his wife and children to Edinburgh in part to be with him and in the other on the coaching of Dorothy Wordsworth as to the financial advantages to not keeping up multiple residences.

If you think today that the rivalry between Democrats and Republicans is a heated debate, hold my beer while I tell you about the Whigs versus the Tories in Edinburgh.  No one, I repeat no one, was allowed to have a middle opinion.  You were either for the Tories, and well supported by other Tories, or you were a scumbag Whig; and vice versa.  Duels were fought, reputations ruined, political manipulations of officials, editors horse-whipped, etc., the whole nine yards.  One was not allowed to stay out of the debate.  I am reminded of Charles Dicken’s Pickwick Papers where the rival political groups, Blues and Buffs, go at it full steam.  But that really trivializes both sides and is not a fair assessment.

The years of 1833-1837 were tragic for De Quincey.  His family suffers from three deaths: the first, his youngest son, Julius, who died of fever at age five, followed William, his oldest boy, in 1835, and then in 1837, his wife, Margaret Simpson, died, leaving him at age 52 a widower with six children, the oldest a girl in her teens.  However, he continued to relentlessly write and publish articles.  The family moved to Lasswade and managed quite well.  Many odd tales are told of De Quincey in his wanderings and walking around the town and countryside late in the night.  Masson gives the following that I feel encapsulates a part of De Quincey that one should know.

“The danger is that, in dwelling so much on the eccentricities of De Quincey, it should be forgotten that all the while the cottage at Lasswade was really his home.  It was there that he would have been detained always by those dearest to him; and it was there, in fact, with all allowance with his wanderings and fugitations, that he did spend most of his time.  Very soon, if left to himself, he would have taken possession of every room in the house; one after another, and “snowed up” each with his papers; but, that having been greatly prevented, he had one room to work in all day and all night to his heart’s content.  The evenings, or the intervals between his daily working-time and his nightly working-time or stroll, he generally spent in the drawing-room with his daughters, either alone or in company with any friends that chanced to be with him.  At such times, we are told, he was unusually charming.  “The newspaper was brought out, and he, telling in his own delightful way, rather than reading, the news, would, on questions from this one or that one of the party , often including young friends of his children, neighbours, or visitors from distant places, illuminate the subject with such a wealth of memories, of old stories, of past or present experiences, of humour, of suggestion, even of prophecy, as by its very wealth makes it impossible to give any taste of it.”  The description is by one of his daughters; and she adds a touch which is inimitable in its fidelity and tenderness.  “He was not,” she says, “a Re-assuring man for nervous people to live with, as those nights were exceptions on which he did not set something on fire, the commonest incident being for someone to look up from book or work to say casually, Papa, your hair is on fire; of which a calm Is it, my love? And a hand rubbing out the blaze was all the notice taken.”  The music, which was so frequently a part of those in-door pleasures, and the variations of the character of the evenings now and then by the presence of distinguished visitors, British or American, may easily be imagined.  What has chiefly to be borne in mind, we repeat, is that, at the center of all De Quincey’s Bohemian roamings, real and repute, there was this home of warmth and comfort for him on the banks of the Esk.”[7]

A little later Masson makes this summary statement that I particularly find contemplative.  What do others truly know of who we are?  In this day and age, if someone was to determine who you were, what emails, what social media posts, what exactly would remain to tell the story of who you are?  What friends and family would speak up and be on record for their thoughts?  And in the end, how well did we truly know ourselves?

 “He had a very considerable fund of prejudice, temper, opinionativeness, animosity, pugnacity, on which he could draw when he liked; and sharp enough claws could be put forth from underneath the velvet.  He had also, we need not doubt, his deeper hours and reveries of self-communing when De Quincey was alone with De Quincey, and more came out and was discoursed between them than friend or enemy could ever know.  This mystery of the real De Quincey, however, has to be prosecuted through the whole biography and by means of the sum total of the materials, and receives little elucidation from the private letters.”[8]

The 1850’s was spent in working on what was eventually an abridged 16-volume collection of Thomas De Quincey’s works.  Mr. Hogg (a Scottish publisher, worked with him relentlessly over the years to get this finished.  One difficulty was that De Quincey had left papers scattered all over in various inns and residences over the years.  De Quincey died on the morning of Thursday, December 8, 1859, at the age of 74, with two of his daughters beside him.  His final moments follow.

“He had been in a doze for some hours; and, as it had been observed that in his waking hours since the beginning of his illness he had reverted much to the incidents of his childhood and talked especially of his father, regretting that he had known so little of him, so in this final doze his mind seemed to be wandering among the same old memories.  “Mt dear, dear mother: then I was greatly mistaken,” he was heard to murmur; and his very last act was to throw up his arms and utter, as if with a cry of surprised recognition, “Sister! sister! sister!”  The vision seemed to be that of his sister Elizabeth, dead near Manchester seventy years before, and now waiting for him on the banks of the river.”[9]

Looking over De Quincey’s literary career, we see that he wrote about 150 magazine articles.  The topics he wrote on were very diverse.  He was truly a philosopher, a seeker of knowledge and truth.  Masson notes that he entitled to the name of polyhistor, which we would call a polymath today.  Financial necessity, that great motivator, drove De Quincey to start publishing when he 35, if not he would have been content to study and learn, holed up in a room somewhere, continuing his scholarly ruminations and investigations on his own and sharing them with those few friends and family that surrounded him.  I am thankful that this was not the case and his thoughts were shared with us.  Masson shares his opinion of the collected works of De Quincey.

“De Quincey’s sixteen volumes of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to end.  At the rate of about half a volume a day, they would serve as a month’s reading, and a month continuously might be worse expended.  There are few courses of reading from which a young man of good natural intelligence would come away more instructed, charmed, and stimulated, or, to express the matter as definitely as possible, with his mind more stretched.  Good natural intelligence, a certain fineness of fibre, and some amount of scholarly education, have to be presupposed, indeed, in all readers of De Quincey.  But, even for the fittest readers, a month’s complete and continuous course of De Quincey would be too much.  Better have him on the shelf, and take down a volume at intervals for one or two of the articles to which there may be an immediate attraction.  An evening with De Quincey in this manner will always be profitable.”[10]

If the above sounds like an advertisement, you might not be far off the mark.  Masson is the editor of a collected works of De Quincey.  A little about the man, he was, David Mather Masson (1822-1907), a Scottish Literary Critic and Historian.  He was a Professor of English Literature at University College London and Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University. [11]

Masson completes the book with a semi-outlined classification and review of De Quincey’s writing which truly shows his didactic spirit.  The classifications seem reasonable and helpful.  I recommend this section to anyone who is actually studying De Quincey’s works.  The book overall is relatively short, being less than 200-pages, but it gives the reader a good overall view of Thomas De Quincey and his writing style.

After reading this book, I must admit, that I went online and ordered a copy of a fourteen-volume set of the Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey that was edited by Masson.  Keep an eye out for future reviews of De Quincey’s works!

Image: Thomas De Quincey, his daughters Emily and Margaret and his granddaughter Eva Craig, 1855, chalk on paper. By James Archer (1822-1904). Reference 2005.54.1 at the Wordsworth Trust website url: http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/wtweb/home.asp?page=FA%20item%20details&mwsquery=(({Object class}=*{fine art}) AND ({Identity number}={2005.54.1}))

[1] David Masson, De Quincey, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1887), 2-3

[2] Ibid., 7

[3] Ibid., 30

[4] Ibid., 35

[5] Ibid., 48-9

[6] Ibid., 57

[7] Ibid., 110-11

[8] Ibid., 129

[9] Ibid., 133

[10] Ibid., 139

[11] “Former Fellows of The Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783 – 2002 Biographical Index Part Two,” The Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed March 23, 2018, page 628,  ISBN 0 902198 84 X Published July 2006, https://www.rse.org.uk/cms/files/fellows/biographical_index/fells_indexp2.pdf.