When he was not much more than a teenager, Thomas de Quincey went to the Lake District. He was intending to visit the home of his hero, William Wordsworth. After much agonising De Quincey had eventually written to him, pledging his friendship in his typically overwrought, mannered style. The poet responded graciously, and gave what was effectively an open invitation for Thomas to stop by whenever he was in the area. And so he did. But the sight of Dove Cottage was too much for him. De Quincey stole away – he left without so much as a greeting.
This is a very familiar feeling to me. I feel it intensely, often with regards to anything I care about, and sometimes with things that are entirely inconsequential. I felt it just the other day in a mild form when going in to a new coffee shop for the first time; it was somehow so much worse because I’d walked past this shop what must be a thousand times, and now I was going in there to buy something new; and what business had I doing that? I am, after all, the person who walks away from opportunities. Would it not be easier to walk away? And frequently, I do.
The funny thing is that years later, De Quincey came back. And he and Wordsworth became friends for years. De Quincey even came to live in that place he’d once loved and feared, Dove Cottage. He lived there until the place became so full of books that for a while the house was used for nothing other than his library. All through his life books seemed to replicate and subdivide around him, forming new libraries within libraries wherever he stayed, new walls and halls of stacked paper.
De Quincey’s relationship with the Wordsworths was complicated. As a younger man, he was so close to them as to almost be part of the family. He was good with their children. But later, things degraded; there was the difficult co-production of a political pamphlet, with William writing and Thomas editing. There was the time De Quincey cut down the orchard at Dove Cottage, beloved by the Wordsworths. And De Quincey never quite forgave their contempt towards his wife, Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a local farmer.
He felt, in short, that they were ungrateful. He had given them much in the way of time and attention over the years and had received little in kind. But his position was much of his own making. His use of opium is now perhaps the thing for which he is best known, if only because his experience of it led to his most acclaimed writing. But until you read an account of his life it is perhaps difficult to understand the extent to which he gave his life over to the drug. In his work opium was a way of seeing; it’s harder to find within that the way of being that carried him from day to day.
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