TRAVELLER
‘Novels seem to have some of the authority of the eye-witness account, in providing the historian with enactment, particularity and individual testimony’ [1]
To catergorise De Quincey as a writer is difficult since he was ‘neither a cannonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal author’[2] It is in a way easier to talk of De Quincey as a walker first, to primarily describe him as a traveller going on a tour & taking us with him.
His constant show of erudition, as he writes his own Wordsworthian ‘Prelude’, is very like a travel guide. It may be that it is there to mask an uncertainty of where he is going with a certainty of what he has learnt. He begins as an anxious teacher telling us bits of fact & expounding on explanations as we are distracted from the journey with the unknown destination.
He had a strangely desperate need, felt early in his life ‘like a worm lying long at the heart of life and fretting its security’[3], to go on a tour away from the educational instituion & into an unrestricted life of a travelling vagabound. He has an inxpressible need to leave his burdens with its gothic terrors of the Whispering Gallery into the boundaries of the dangerous unknown. Whatever obscure motive or eclipsed reasoning he had it was evident that he simply had to walk away, to become a man in between places, to pick up his staff of faith & become a traveller.
TOURIST
The title sets up a disapointment for the self-confessed opium-eater waits until the middle of the book before he begins to eat opium. What the reader has to walk through in the first half is travel writing. We should be aware then that walking for De Quincey, as it was for Rousseau, was something more spiritual than getting to somewhere from somewhere.
As he arrives in London we could label him as the Tourist visiting the capital, watching the human zoo that are the pubs & theaters pretending to be like the lower class. Steven Earnshaw says that ‘he would regulate his intake to a Saturday night, to align himself with the lower classes…so he can empathise with their pleasures’.[4] This, as Earnshaw continues, ‘“Empathy”…reads more like a vicarious and voyeuristic thrill’
However one should question why De Quincey shouldn’t align himself with richer friends who could throw more elobrate, more luxurious, parties? What was it that the poor offered him? Earnshaw suggests that ‘What is really sought [by De Quincey] is that private space for contemplation of “human nature”’[5] If we can beileve that then what does that do to our idea of De Quincey as Tourist? Does he visit the lower classes for sovenigers or for meditation?
John Barrell suggests that ‘the search for a common human nature becomes a search for a means of reassurance…in the “masses”’.[6] Crowds, however, can be unsettling for the wanderer as Jokinen and Veijola indicate, ‘the crowd is a way of seeing things…but it is also the generator of shock-type experiences, horror and catastrophe.’[7] The horror of mass production with its questionable implications to the value of art & individuality would concern a litarate man such as De Quincey.
It seems that as this role of a Tourist De Quincey is trying to place himself as a individual man of literature & poetic sensibility in the morass of Victorian culture without quite fitting in anywhere. From this, De Quincey as Tourist does De Quincey as Flaneur emerge.
FLANEUR
‘Writing is a form of consolidating travel, just as travel is a form of writing’[8]
Does De Quincey run away much more in line with the poetic tradition of escaping the trappings of established living, such as Rimbard or Baudelaire, to satisfy a creative need? Or a is it more of a curious experiment in anticipation of Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception’? De Quincey probably best fits, typically, in between these two definitions of Poet & Creative Scientist. A better definition of him would be Flaneur who is the ‘man of the crowd as opposed to the man in the crowd’[9].
It is an interesting point to note that despite De Quincey’s romantic nature & his gothic outlook he doesn’t bolt for Italy looking for sublimity but stays in his own country. What De Quincey takes is a Grand Tour but it is an internalized tour. He does not activley wish to go to the ends of the world but to mentally head inwards into his unconscious wonder of his own country.
Chole Chard notes ‘this view of travel as an adventure of the self, in which the traveller is propelled across boundaries by his or her personal needs and desires, is voiced very often in early nineteenth-centuary narratives of encounters with the foreign.’[10] Except that what is foreign for De Quincey is his home & himself. If we beileve, like Stendal, ‘that travel entails a disregard of responsibility’[11] than it could be argued that De Quincey disregards the responsibilities of a student in order to discover his responsibilities as a person. He is on a curious tour that is ‘entangled in this tension between pleasure and guilt’[12]
Whatever deep gloom that worried him he entered a binding lock with opium that ‘by day the opium drove the misery away; by night it returned…and more virulent than ever’[13] Why, if opium only increased his misery, would he continue to use it? Maraget Russett says that for De Quincey ‘opium…offers a point of entry to the questions of purpose and valuation’[14]. It could be then that opium gave De Quincey a space to comptemplate his meaning as an individual despite the extra heaviness that opium returned to him. ‘On the whole’ writes fellow addict William S. Burroughs ‘one cannot but feel that he was better off for using opium that he would have been without it’[15]
Interestingly the orginal title when the book first appear as an article in the London Magazine is Confessions of an Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar. He certainly does have a wealth of schoarlly learning he wishes to impart to us but he has no clear, direct, lessons to teach, instead he wishes experience to be his master, which turns his escape into a pilgramage.
PILGRIM
‘What we are really doing when we walk in the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a journey , and this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken’[16]
We should start to think of De Quincey as not simply a desperate traveller, or a troubled poet, or a indulgent addict, but also as a questing spirit undertaking a spiritual journey. The title of Confessions implies that there is something Catholic to express but he does so using an Buddist mode hiding the religious aspect in experience & literary reference. His intial plan was, after all, to go & visit his poet of worship Wordsworth.
Consider for a moment the story of the prince Siddhārtha Gautama. The prince had been sheilded from the sickness, poverty & suffering of the outside world but once the prince had glimpsed this outside world he felt he could not carry on with his royalty & instead lives the life of an ascetic. Thinking of De Quincey’s religious education it would be better to compared him with the wandering Christ who lived & emphatsised with the poor. De Quincey writes that a ‘happier life I cannot imagine than this vagrancy’[17].
To consider this we have to take De Quincey’s sincerety as genuine &, unless he was consistantly clever or naturally decietful, there is no reason why we cannot take this view. Some take the view that he emphasised with the poor because he was afraid of them & to illustrate his perverted hypocritism they present the scene of him warming the little cold girl as they sleep. Taking into consideration, & assuming the autobiography is sincere, his highly refined poetic sensibility is it possible that he could have done anything untoward to the little girl? Is it not more likely that he would not have been able to find it within himself to damage or break such a beautifully tender scene of human vunrability that he recognises & identifies himself within that little girl?
Another epsiode with the girl Ann should provide an antidote to De Quincey as a Tourist. Failing to meet with Ann again De Quincey calls Oxford Street a ‘stony hearted stepmother’ who listens to the sighs of orphans & drinks childrens tears. Peter Ackroyd comments that ‘this compssionate attitude to the suffering of young female prostitutes rarely, if ever, emerges in eighteenth-centuary records, including that of Boswell’[18].
True, De Quincey did not commit his life to any charity or any political party of reform but from this I do not think it can be said that he is a passive tourist who only watches from afar. He has laid down in the same terrible conditions that has inflicted many children & has told people that such conditions exist. What else can we hope from writers of the best of liteature except an articulate statement of witness?
De Quincey writes ‘it would shock you that a journey which, with or without your consent, could not but assume the character of saintly pilgrimage’ [19] is this him telling us in a backhanded way that the purpose of his journey is in fact a spiritual one? In regard to the fact that De Quincey ‘takes to himself the identity of Wandering Jew’[20] this religious aspect might not be so far off the mark as he finds his spiritual identity from the poppy.
Opium for De Quincey becomes his religion, his church that he acknowledges himself to be Pope.[21] He is organised in his drug using only ritualistically taking it every Saturday as a type of Eucharist subsitute & he talks of the ‘just and righteous opium!’[22] His most peaceful & happy dream of reuniting with Ann occurs on Easter Sunday. Look, also, to his poetic passage on religion about the two grandeurs that are by Christianity married together[23].
We have to remind ourselves when reading the Opium-Eater that it is a life long of three De Quinceys & ‘his memory did not always serve him well’[24]. The first is the young De Quincey that has composed his writings in his mind as he first experienced it as a traveller. The second is the middle aged De Quincey that interfers with this rememebered expericence & recalls it as a flaneur. The third is the old De Quincey that revises his articles as he edits it into book format as a guide. More than confessing it is an attempt to understand the mysterious beginning of his emotional grand tour by mapping each point & pinning it down with knowledge as he, the walker/writer, moves from traveller to tourist to flaneur to pilgram marking each of his steps as he goes on his life’s journey.
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter, ‘London’, (Great Britain; Vintage, 2001)
Auster, Paul ‘The Invention of Solitude’ (New York: Penguin, 1988)
Barrell John, ‘The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism’, (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1991)
Burroughs, William, ‘God’s Own Medicine’ from ‘The Adding Machine’ (London; John Calder, 1985)
Chard, Chloe, ‘Pleasure and Guilt On The Grand Tour’, (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 1999)
Connor, Steven, ‘The English Novel in History 1950-1995’, (Great Britain: Routeledge, 2001)
De Quincey, Thomas, ‘The Confessions of an Opium Eater’, (Great Britain: The Temple Press Letchworth, 1939)
Earnshaw, Steven ‘The Pub in Literature’, (Great Britain: Manchester University Press, 2000)
Grayling, A. C, ‘The Mystery of Things’, (Great Britain: Phoenix, 2004),
Douglas, George, ‘The Confessions of an Opium Eater’, (Great Britain: The Temple Press Letchworth, 1939)
Jokinen, Eeva and Veijola, Soile, ‘The Disoriented Tourist’ from ‘Touring Cultures’ ed by Chris Rojek and John Urry, (London: Routledge, 1997)
Russet, Maragret ‘De Quincey’s Romanticism’ (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Mitchel, R.J. and Leys, M. D. R., ‘A History of London Life’ (Great Britain; Penguin, 1958)
[1] Steven Connor, ‘The English Novel in History 1950-1995’, (Great Britain: Routeledge, 2001), p1
[2] Maragret Russet, ‘De Quincey’s Romanticism’ (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997), pi
[3] De Quincey, p90
[4] Steven Earnshaw, ‘The Pub in Literature’, (Great Britain: Manchester University Press, 2000), p170
[5] ibid, p171
[6] John Barrell, ‘The Infection of Thomas De Quincey’, (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1991),, p2
[7] Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola, ‘The Disoriented Tourist’ from ‘Touring Cultures’ ed by Chris Rojek and John Urry, (London: Routledge, 1997), p27
[8] Connor, p5
[9] Jokenin and Veijola, p26
[10] Chloe Chard, ‘Pleasure and Guilt On The Grand Tour’, (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 1999),, p183
[11] ibid, p183
[12] ibid, p30
[13] Barrell, p17
[14] Russett, p136
[15] William Burroughs,‘God’s Own Medicine’ from ‘The Adding Machine’ (London; John Calder, 1985) p110
[16] Paul Auster, ‘The Invention of Solitude’ (New York: Penguin, 1988) p122
[17] De Quincey, p125
[18] Peter Ackroyd, ‘London’, (Great Britain; Vintage, 2001) p374
[19] De Quincey, p77
[20] Barell, p29
[21] De Quincey, p182
[22] De Quincey, p194
[23] ibid, p 86
[24] Edaward Sackville West, ‘A Flame In Sunlight: Life and Works of Thomas De quincey, (Great Britain; The Bodley Head, 1936)
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