SOURCE: “De Quincey's Discovery of Lyrical Ballads: The Politics of Reading,” in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 511-40.

[In the following essay, Roberts examines De Quincey's reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry within the context of De Quincey's literary life and the development of his political views.]

Thomas De Quincey's early reading of Lyrical Ballads has been widely hailed as the germinal event of his literary career. Biographers and critics have focused on De Quincey's astonishing recognition, at the age of fifteen, of Wordsworth as the predominant poetic figure of his age.¹ By the age of seventeen, De Quincey had declared to Wordsworth his unsurpassed admiration for “those two enchanting volumes” of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; and in 1834, over three decades on, he still regarded his discovery of Lyrical Ballads as “the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind.”² The testimony of De Quincey's Diary of 1803, his youthful correspondence with Wordsworth, and his later absorption into the poet's family circle all testify to the extraordinary precognition of De Quincey's first reading of Lyrical Ballads. Yet, despite the seminal importance accorded to De Quincey's early reading of Lyrical Ballads and to the Wordsworth/Coleridge influence derived therefrom, critics and biographers have been surprisingly tardy in addressing the prior issue of mediation involved in such a textual encounter.³ The canonical status of Lyrical Ballads as a foundational text of English romanticism has perhaps tended to obscure the mediatory aspects of De Quincey's reading experience. It has been assumed that the young De Quincey's discovery of Lyrical Ballads was made in some more or less direct fashion, the elemental simplicity and genius of the poems achieving an instant impact on the imaginative and sensitive boy. It is not my intention to challenge here the premises of Coleridge's and Wordsworth's genius, or of De Quincey's imaginativeness as a reader—both of which I hold to be essential for an appropriate understanding of De Quincey's reading of Lyrical Ballads—but to suggest in addition that “genius” and “imagination” are themselves not unconditioned, and that it may require greater circumstantial attention than previously granted to understand why De Quincey's imaginative sympathy was so finely attuned to the reception of Lyrical Ballads.

In the following paper I shall attempt to uncover some of the likely contexts in which De Quincey encountered Lyrical Ballads and to suggest thereby a more politicized view of his childhood reading and imagination than has hitherto obtained. My procedure will be to expose some of the contradictions involved in De Quincey's own versions of events, and to question the biographical traditions based on this evidence. Beginning from De Quincey's retrospective account of his encounter in 1801 with the Liverpool literary circle including William Roscoe and James Currie, I will indicate that De Quincey's attitude to them involves an implicit but suppressed connection with Lyrical Ballads and that such an attitude is crucially revelatory of the shifting ideological significance of the work for De Quincey. It will be shown that De Quincey's attitude also points to a further unexplored relation between Currie's popular and influential edition of Burns in 1800 and the second edition of Lyrical Ballads as companion manifestoes for a new conception of poetry with political implications that were strikingly similar but not identical between the two works. Another contextual reference for De Quincey's reading of Lyrical Ballads which has not been adequately examined by critics lies in the influence of reviews, particularly that of the notorious Edinburgh Review of which De Quincey was clearly aware. I shall conclude by examining two episodes from De Quincey's early life and autobiography, his visit to Ireland in 1800, and his flight from the Manchester Grammar School in 1802 to indicate the place of Lyrical Ballads in terms of his developing political consciousness during this time. Such a procedure, I trust, will help reinscribe De Quincey's reading of Lyrical Ballads in an ideological context from which it has been so far held exempt.

In general, the biographical obfuscation I am suggesting may be related to the concept of “Romantic Ideology,” now familiar to students of romanticism, whereby an earlier significance of a work is reinterpreted through the lens of a later ideology.⁴ My concern is specifically with De Quincey's revisionist attitude to his reading of Lyrical Ballads. An important distinction to be made here is between the evidences of the private contemporary records of De Quincey's reading of Lyrical Ballads and his later public representations of the event. Though in his various later recollections De Quincey is consistently appreciative of the importance of his early reading of Lyrical Ballads, it is a significant omission that he does not seek to explain the circumstances of his reading of the work. We are told for instance that “We are Seven” had been “handed about in manuscript” while he was on a school holiday, but whose “manuscript” copy this was, and who had shown it to him, are not mentioned (Jordan 36). While the 1803 Diary shows him eagerly accessing information about Coleridge and Wordsworth from persons such as Miss Barcroft, Mr. Bree and others (190-91), his subsequent reminiscences tend to consign these sources to oblivion. The teasingly undeclared “private source,” mentioned in the 1834 essay on Coleridge, to whom he had been obliged for Coleridge's name, is immediately castigated for his “profane way of dealing with a subject so hallowed in my own thoughts” (R 34). Thus his later accounts tend to obscure the ethos in which his acquaintance with Lyrical Ballads was made in favor of a purely self-centered account emphasizing his own conviction in the “hallowed” nature of his subject, in contrast to the “profane” attitude of his informant(s). The religious metaphor tends to push the event into the realm of divine revelation, rather than suggesting a humanly achieved mediation. So also, his boast in the 1856 Confessions that he was alone “in all Europe” in quoting Wordsworth in 1802 was more than slightly off the mark.⁵ In fact, the popularity of Lyrical Ballads had necessitated a third edition of the collection in that year. Thus De Quincey's account seeks to assume greater credit for the originality of his reading than the facts warranted. Such a self-promoting attitude may be seen to involve a deliberate suppression of the radical ambience of Lyrical Ballads as originally encountered by De Quincey.

In his introduction to De Quincey's Diary, Eaton has commented on the strange apparent absence of political engagement in the Diary to suggest that De Quincey at this time was “living in a world of thought and feeling almost entirely.” Eaton here seems to be following De Quincey's lead in representing his adolescence (particularly in the context of his admiration for Wordsworth's poetry) as a period during which “my whole heart had been so steadily fixed on a different world from the world of our daily experience, that, for some years, I had never looked into a newspaper” (R 225). Eaton is however puzzled by the supposed lack of political interest on De Quincey's part in the light of his later career, so that it would seem that De Quincey misses the significance of the political events of the early 1800's which are taken to mark the incipient growth of nationalism as well as the radicalization of English class-politics, and which would culminate in the reform movement that was to engage so much of De Quincey's journalistic writing:

Bonaparte is discussed as if he were an intellectual problem; he reads a message to Parliament from the king, or a speech of Fox without any intimation that they were moving in a great national drama into which he might eventually be drawn.

(D 17)

As Eaton points out, De Quincey's 1803 Diary is coterminous with the resumption of Anglo-French warfare and the beginning of the Napoleonic war that was to last until 1815. While Coleridge was launching his career in the Morning Post with the letters to Fox that were to earn him the sobriquet of “apostate,” De Quincey, it would appear, was turning to dreams and introspection rather than to newspapers. De Quincey's seemingly detached attitude to politics prompts the influential conclusion that his admiration of Lyrical Ballads is located in a subjectively determined context of “imagination,” without recourse to a public realm.

Recent criticism has done much to uncover the political dimension of Lyrical Ballads, particularly as this was theorized in the Prefatory remarks added to the second edition of 1800.⁶ Grevel Lindop has hinted acutely that Mrs. Quincey's evangelically-minded strictures on Thomas to read “neither infidels nor Jacobins” might well have been prompted by “West Country gossip about the ‘Jacobin’ Coleridge” (Opium-Eater 58). It is important to realize just what a political figure Coleridge in particular did in fact cut in the 1790's and 1800's when De Quincey first encountered the two poets through reading and hearsay. By 1796 Coleridge had already made a name for himself as a radical lecturer in Bristol and had published various political pamphlets; early in that year he had embarked on a tour of the Midlands, preaching to several Dissenting congregations in towns such as Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester, and advertising his forthcoming journal entitled The Watchman. Yet the facts surrounding De Quincey's first knowledge of Coleridge have not elicited biographical speculation despite his leading statement in his 1834 essay on Coleridge that his curiosity in discovering the names of the authors of Lyrical Ballads had been defeated for two years until the publication of the second edition, which carried Wordsworth's name on the title page, whilst for Coleridge's he had been “‘indebted’ to a private source,” which however he does not name (R 34).

It is worth noting that during the summer of 1801—shortly after the appearance of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads—De Quincey was at Everton near Liverpool and was experiencing his first taste of a “literary society” in the liberal Whig circle frequented by William Clarke, a family friend and an erstwhile business contact of Thomas' late father. This was the society he was later to castigate—in the “Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater,” published serially in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine—as the pretentious literary coterie whose narrow view of literature was contrasted with his own great devotion to the authors of Lyrical Ballads:

to me, who, in that year, 1801, already knew of a grand renovation of poetic power—of a new birth in poetry, interesting not so much to England as to the human mind—it was secretly amusing to contrast the little artificial usages of their petty traditional knack with the natural forms of a divine art—the difference being pretty much as between an American lake, Ontario, or Superior, and a carp pond or a tench preserve.

(M 2: 129)

The Liverpool literary society described by De Quincey consisted of “Mr. Roscoe, Dr. Currie (who had just at that time published his Life and Edition of Burns), and Mr. Shepherd of Gatacre, the author of some works on Italian literature (particularly a Life of Poggio Bracciolini) and since then, well known to all England by his Reform politics” (M 2: 123). It should be remembered here that the essay is written in 1837. De Quincey's mention of the subsequent fame (or infamy) achieved by Shepherd on account of his “Reform politics” should put us on guard that the description of the literary society in question is after all a post-Reform Bill account of an earlier experience of the fifteen-year-old De Quincey. While De Quincey's reminiscence indicates an irritation with the politics of the Liverpool society, it is important to remind ourselves that the source of this irritation is more likely to be the retrospective wisdom gained from De Quincey's later experience in political journalism of the Reform period than his views at the time of his meeting with the Liverpool circle.

De Quincey's biographers have recorded this introduction to a “literary society” as significant but have failed to notice that his representation of the Liverpool literary society as utterly oblivious to the poetic revolution he could see in Lyrical Ballads was deceptively at odds with the facts of the case. As early as 1796, William Roscoe had written to Reverend John Edwards, a Unitarian minister at Birmingham and a correspondent of Coleridge's, describing his acquaintance with and admiration for Coleridge's works, the 1796 Poems on Various Subjects, the Conciones ad Populum and The Watchman, the last of which was the object of his particular concern on account of Coleridge's resolution to discontinue the journal in 1796. In order to promote Coleridge's talents as a political journalist, Roscoe offered to help set up a career for him in Liverpool. Coleridge's awareness of this missive and of Roscoe's literary success with the latter's then popular biography of Lorenzo the Magnificent is recorded in his letter of 22 August 1796 to Josiah Wade. This signalled the beginning of a literary acquaintance that has not been accorded much attention from Coleridge's biographers, but which reveals Coleridge's willingness to continue links with “radical” friendships beyond the 1790's. In July 1800, Coleridge visited Liverpool for over a week and wrote enthusiastically to Poole that he had seen “a great deal of Dr. Currie, Roscoe, Rathbone (Colebrook Reynold's Brother-in-law) & other literati.” Coleridge describes Currie as a “genuine philosopher” and Roscoe as “a republican with all the feelings of prudence & all the manners of good sense—so that he is beloved by the Aristocrats themselves.”⁷ Though William Roscoe and the Liverpool intelligentsia are now almost forgotten outside Liverpool city history and the DNB,⁸ in 1796 they had been instrumental in starting a new public library named the Athenaeum at Liverpool which Coleridge described to Poole as “most magnificent” (CL 1: 608). Mrs. Quincey, in writing to Thomas on 20 May 1801, advises him not to bring books to Liverpool since he would have access to Clarke's Greek and Latin authors, as well as the “noble library” of Liverpool which she describes as a “new institution, comprising a great collection.”⁹ Among the Liverpool worthies, Roscoe and Currie were among the first well known literary characters De Quincey encountered, though De Quincey did not accord Roscoe much importance in his Literary Reminiscences except by way of disparagement. According to De Quincey, Roscoe's verse displayed “the most timid and blind servility to the narrowest of conventional usages, conventional ways of viewing things, conventional forms of expression”; and regarding Currie's famed edition of Burns he prided himself on having “talked, then, being a school-boy, with and against the first editor of Burns” (M 2: 130, 135).

De Quincey was to spend the entire summer at Everton and to return to Manchester only by the end of August 1801. In July 1801, Coleridge was proposing to Southey a stay at Liverpool where they might meet Roscoe and Currie whom he promises that Southey would “like as men far, far better than as writers” (CL 2: 746). Thus Coleridge's letters reveal his continuing friendship with the radical Liverpool literary society at the very time when De Quincey made their acquaintance. Moreover, they would have known by 1800 from Coleridge of his part in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and must certainly have been discussing in 1801, at the time of De Quincey's acquaintance with them, the new edition brought out by Wordsworth earlier that year without acknowledgement by name to Coleridge.¹⁰ Lindop's description of De Quincey's smug attitude of superiority to the Liverpool literati on account of his knowledge of Wordsworth and Lyrical Ballads (53) is clearly based on De Quincey's later reminiscences and is discordant with the facts of the case. Such a version of events is influenced more by De Quincey's revisionist politics than by the evidence of the early records. In fact De Quincey's early knowledge of Lyrical Ballads renders it all the more likely that the topic of the new two-volume edition under Wordsworth's name had arisen between Thomas and the Liverpool circle during their literary discussions. From one of them De Quincey would probably also have learned of Coleridge's yet unknown part in Lyrical Ballads. This then would have been the “private source” mentioned above to whom De Quincey was obliged for Coleridge's name.

Roscoe's letter to Edwards has not been quoted outside the biography of 1833 written by his son Henry Roscoe, and deserves to be quoted at some length for an idea of Coleridge's significance to an early literary admirer in the 1790's, one of whose immediate circle—if not he himself—was likely to have introduced Coleridge's name to De Quincey:

I had, some time since, the favour of a letter from you, intended to have been delivered by Mr. Coleridge, but had not the pleasure of seeing him, as I believe he altered his intended route, and did not pay a visit to Liverpool.

I read with great pleasure his Conciones ad Populum, which I think contain marks of that disinterested ardour in the cause of liberty, and that abhorrence of violence and bloodshed under whatever pretence they may be resorted to, which in times like the present are so particularly necessary to be inculcated. Mr. Coleridge is one of the few individuals who have perceived the absurdity of the maxim, that it is lawful and expedient to shed the blood of those by whom it is likely that blood will be shed, and which thus authorises the commission of an immediate and actual crime, for the purpose of preventing one which is remote and uncertain, the pretexts of tyrants and of anarchists, at all times and in all countries.

It was with much concern I found he had adopted the resolution of discontinuing his periodical paper of the “Watchman.” I conceive he did not give it a sufficient trial, and that if he had persevered he would have found the extent of its circulation increase. Periodical works of this nature are generally slow in taking root, but when once established are very lucrative; and I have no doubt but the paper in question would, if continued, have been of very extensive utility.

With the little volume of Mr. Coleridge's poems I have been greatly delighted—his genius is of the highest class. The characteristics of a fervid imagination and a highly cultivated taste are visible in every page. I must, however, be allowed to remark, that where excellence is so abundant selection might be employed to advantage. He ought not, for a moment, to forget that he writes for immortality, which many have attained by condensing their excellencies, and many have lost by diffusing them through too large a mass. There are few authors who would not lose a considerable share of their reputation were the public in possession of all they wrote.

It would give me much pleasure to be informed, that Mr. Coleridge's prospects in life are such as are likely to give free scope to the exertions of those uncommon talents of which he is possessed; and I shall esteem myself much obliged by any information you can give me respecting him.

His concluding address to his “Watchman” deeply affected me, as it spoke the regret of a virtuous mind disappointed in its efforts to do good. I have since heard that Bristol is not a place likely to reward his merits. If so, might you not recommend it to him to pay a visit to Liverpool, where I know many who would be happy to see him, and who would have a particular pleasure in promoting any plan which he might suggest for rendering his talents advantageous to his country and to himself?¹¹

The letter is a flattering one and Coleridge, who was out of regular work, and had a month to go before a proposal to tutor Charles Lloyd would come in, might well have been tempted and certainly gratified. He had, however, turned down an offer of newspaper work in London and had declared his love for Bristol and commitment to the pursuit of philosophy and the Muse against an aversion for “local & temporary politics” such as a newspaper job would entail (CL 1: 227). Already, Coleridge was in correspondence with Wordsworth and had received his manuscript of “Salisbury Plain” with the request to make his comments on it before passing it on to Cottle for publication, while by April of that year Wordsworth had read Coleridge's Poems and remarked favorably on “Religious Musings.” It was clearly to Coleridge's millennialist view of revolution that Wordsworth was responding at this time while in turn Coleridge was aware of Wordsworth's influential visit to revolutionary France and already thought him to be “the best poet of the age” (CL 1: 216-17). By the time of Roscoe's letter to Edwards therefore, Coleridge's career was already moving in the direction of the association which would produce the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Roscoe's letter in contrast seeks to suppress Coleridge's Muse and to return Coleridge to the active public life he was now preparing to leave. While Coleridge's genius is allowed to be of the “highest class” his publication is indiscriminate and excessive, and it is his political journalism that Roscoe seeks to encourage.

In their probable revelation of Coleridge's part in Lyrical Ballads to the young De Quincey, the Liverpool radicals may well have also revealed something of Coleridge's radical past. Moreover, the preference of such a person as Roscoe for Coleridge's public and radical career over his poetic one might serve to explain De Quincey's later statement in 1834 that his debt of knowledge regarding Coleridge's co-authorship of Lyrical Ballads had been “discharged […] ill, for I quarrelled with my informant for what I considered his profane way of dealing with a subject so hallowed in my own thoughts” (R 34). Here De Quincey's near devotion to Coleridge's literary productions might well have been ruffled by the somewhat condescending attitude Roscoe had adopted to his poetry. This would explain De Quincey's later irritation at Roscoe's poetic abilities in contrast to the “grand renovation of poetic power” he discerned in the efforts of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

De Quincey's reminiscence of the Liverpool literary society suggests a further connection with Wordsworth and Coleridge which has not been investigated hitherto. As we have seen, Coleridge visited the Liverpool group in early 1800 as the second edition of Lyrical Ballads was taking shape. By this time, Currie had recently brought out his new edition of Burns's Works, including his “Life of Burns,” with prefatory “Remarks on the Character and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry” and a “Criticism on the Writings of Burns.” This publication was issued for the benefit of Burns's widow and children, and it was to prove the standard edition of Burns for several decades, running into numerous separate editions as well as providing the basis for many others.¹² In 1801, Mrs. Quincey was writing to Thomas: “I am reading Dr. Currie's ‘Life of Burns,’ not without a sharply jealous eye to the Doctor's Jacobinism(!)” (Japp, Memorials 1: 62). It was after Coleridge's return to Grasmere however and only by September 1800 that discussion began with Wordsworth for a critical Preface to Lyrical Ballads which would explain the principles of their poetry to the public. On the face of it, there was no real need for a preface since the first edition had proved itself on the market, and even the reviews had been mainly favorable. As has been shown, moreover, the poems of Lyrical Ballads were not as “original” to the reading public as Wordsworth's Preface had made out.¹³ I would suggest that there is a remarkable similarity between the prefaces issued by Currie and Wordsworth, and that Wordsworth's self-representation of poetic character in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads could have been powerfully influenced by Currie's portrayal of Burns, as understood by him from Coleridge. Significantly, Wordsworth's Commonplace Book shows that by 29 September 1800 he had transcribed various fragments from Burns using the second volume of Currie's edition, so it is clear that he received and read the work at this time.¹⁴

Yet though the resemblances between Wordsworth's and Currie's prefaces are strong, there are important differences between the two works. Although Wordsworth later claimed in his Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816) that he well remembered “the sorrow with which, by my own fire-side, I first perused Dr. Currie's Narrative, and some of the letters, particularly those composed in the latter part of the poet's life,”¹⁵ it is worth nothing as well that no immediate account of his reading of Currie's edition of Burns has survived, and by contrast Coleridge's letter to Thomas Poole after his return to Grasmere and en route to Keswick enthused “I would have you by all means order the late Edition in four Volumes of Burns's Works—the Life is written by Currie, and a masterly specimen of philosophical Biography it is” (CL 1: 607). It would seem likely then that Coleridge had introduced the work to Wordsworth before Poole, but if there was any disagreement between them at that time on the nature of the service to Burns's reputation performed by Currie, this has not survived either.

De Quincey's attack in 1837 on the Liverpool Whigs, Currie, Roscoe and Shepherd concentrated on the reputation accorded to Robert Burns in Currie's edition of the poet. As I would suggest, this accusation reveals a political agenda which cannot be understood without reference to Lyrical Ballads. When De Quincey published the essay in 1837 in Tait's, there was an angry reply from Shepherd whom De Quincey had described as being ambitious of the title of a buffoon and whom he had expected to be by then merely “a name and a shadow” (M 2: 128, 135). Shepherd, who was still very much on this side of the grave, accused De Quincey of grievous inaccuracy with facts and took particular exception to De Quincey's portrayal of the politics allegedly professed by the Liverpool Whigs. According to De Quincey, Currie's view of Burns in 1801 was decidedly aristocratic in tendency; so much so that he faulted the Scottish poet with ingratitude to his patrons while the fifteen-year-old Thomas alone in that company made a “solitary protestation on behalf of Burns's Jacobinism.” This statement predictably drew the indignation of Shepherd who considered the entire episode a fabrication, and drew attention to an apparent contradiction in De Quincey's account on the point that “Mr. Shepherd continued to draw from the subject some scoff or growl at Mr. Pitt and the Excise” (M 2: 135). In his letter to the editor of Tait's, Shepherd demanded to know, “Why should I growl at the excise, except for the harshness of the excise board in its treatment of Burns?”¹⁶ Yet it is worth enquiring why De Quincey represents himself as being a champion of the Jacobinical Burns at a time when the radical Shepherd found reason to blame the poet. But first it is necessary to take a closer look at Currie's edition of Burns in its own context, and to consider its possible relation with Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The main thrust of Currie's representation of Burns lay in his affirmation of Burns's already popular reputation as a Scottish peasant-poet: “Burns was in reality what he has been represented to be, a Scottish peasant” (1: 2). Just as Wordsworth was to choose the human situation of “low and rustic life,”¹⁷ and to base that experience in his residence at Grasmere, Currie described Burns's poetic evolution in terms of his association with the Scottish peasantry. And just as Wordsworth had sought to recover the “very language of men” in his poetry, so did Currie emphasize Burns's use of the Scottish dialect:

His declared purpose was to paint the manners of rustic life among his “humble compeers,” and it is not easy to conceive, that this could have been done with equal humour and effect, if he had not adopted their idiom. There are some indeed who will think the subject too low for poetry. Persons of this sickly taste will find their delicacies consulted in many a polite and learned author […].

(1: 334)

Yet though the resemblances between Wordsworth's Preface and Currie's presentation of Burns are strong, there are several differences between the two works. An important variance from Wordsworth in Currie's portrayal of Burns, lay in his “natural” derivation of Burns from the rural milieu in contrast with Wordsworth's more conscious adoption of that originary space. Burns's marvel, of course, lay in the fact that a peasant of an assumed lowly level of education, and of rustic “manners” and language could produce such poetry, and Currie's essay dealt with the particular circumstances which qualified Burns for poetic endeavor. Far from providing a simplistic account of imagination as a rural commodity, however, Currie argued that the Scottish peasantry, despite their apparent rusticity, were in fact well educated and intelligent, unlike most of their counterparts in other regions of Europe:

A slight acquaintance with the peasantry of Scotland, will serve to convince an unprejudiced observer that they possess a degree of intelligence not generally found among the same class of men in other countries of Europe. In the very humblest condition of the Scottish peasants, every one can read, and most persons are more or less skilled in writing and arithmetic; and under the disguise of their uncouth appearance, and of their peculiar manners and dialect, a stranger will discover that they possess a curiosity, and have obtained a degree of information corresponding to these acquirements.

(1: 4)

The loyalty of the Scottish peasantry is asserted against the disaffection of the working classes in other parts of Britain, where the radicalization of the working class so well described by E. P. Thompson¹⁸ was already underway:

Since the Union, Scotland, though the seat of two unsuccessful attempts to restore the house of Stewart to the throne, has enjoyed a comparative tranquillity, and it is since this period that the present character of her peasantry has been in a great measure formed, though the political causes affecting it are to be traced to the previous acts of her separate legislature.

(1: 3)

Despite the known liberalism of the Liverpool circle and the fears of Mrs. Quincey regarding Currie's “Jacobinism,” in fact Currie's presentation of Burns, as Davis has recently argued, tends to deflect Burns's political concerns, particularly his Jacobinism and Scottish nationalism, by its deployment of an overriding medical discourse which renders the work politically acceptable in terms of wider British national and colonial interests (43-60). De Quincey's comment that Currie had stifled the Jacobinical aspect of Burns's work is thus a most astute one, even if, as we shall see, it carries its own revisionist agenda.

Currie's equation between disaffection and the lack of educational opportunities suggests one of the paths taken by the radical movement from “Jacobinism” to Reform in the post-Revolutionary era. As in Wordsworth's Preface, education is a central theme of Currie's text; but while Wordsworth appears to favor a non-curricular education in his emphasis on the “beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (245) and in such poems as “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned,” Currie turns more practically to the “legal provision for parochial schools” which he finds have been enforced in Scotland for a similarly long period as in the “Protestant Cantons of Switzerland” and even more suggestively “in the counties of Westmoreland and Cumberland” (1: 353-54). Here Currie's reference to the inhabitants of the Lake District is an indirect compliment to the experiment he knew to be attempted by Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads, and, in return, his allusion to the peasantry of Switzerland is later taken up by Coleridge in his characterization of the “stronger local attachments and enterprizing spirit of the Swiss, and other mountaineers, [which] applies to a particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of property, that permit and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of artificial cultivation.” Currie's more formal understanding of “education” is in this case akin to Coleridge's later qualifications of the Preface which emphasized the imprudence of Wordsworth's identification of himself with the “low and rustic” subjects of his poetry: “Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant.”¹⁹

De Quincey's portrayal of Currie's political sympathies as being out of tune with Burns's “peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence, [which] came a generation too soon” (M 2: 132) seeks to appropriate to himself an extraordinarily foresightful revolutionary zeal which Currie as a republican Whig ironically lacked. De Quincey attempts to read Burns, who died in 1796, as a champion of “revolutionary reform” such as the Liverpool society prided themselves on supporting:

In this day, he would have been forced to do that, clamorously called upon to do that, and would have found his pecuniary interest in doing that, which in his own generation merely to attempt doing loaded him with the reproach of Jacobinism. It must be remembered that the society of Liverpool wits on whom my retrospect is now glancing were all Whigs—all, indeed, fraternizers with French Republicanism. Yet so it was that—not once, not twice, but daily almost, in the numerous conversations naturally elicited by this Liverpool monument to Burns's memory—I heard every one, clerk or layman, heartily agreeing to tax Burns with ingratitude and with pride falsely directed, because he sate uneasily or restively under the bridle-hand of his noble self-called “patrons.” Aristocracy, then, the essential spirit of aristocracy—this I found was not less erect and clamorous amongst partisan democrats—democrats who were such merely in a party sense of supporting his Majesty's Opposition against his Majesty's Servants—than it was or could be among the most bigoted of the professed feudal aristocrats.

(M 2: 132-33)

It is worth noting that De Quincey's remarks are published in the liberal Tait's magazine (rather than his usually-favored Blackwood's) and that they are part of his continuing politico-literary reminiscing, between the articles on Coleridge in 1834 and those on Wordsworth in 1839. De Quincey's criticism of the modern Whig party is thus attached to his reminiscences of Currie's failure to defend Burns's “Jacobinism” at a time when a present-day Tory like himself had (even as a boy) risen to Burns's defense.

As we have seen, De Quincey's account of the Liverpool society had its discrepancies to an actual survivor of that period like Shepherd.²⁰ What is more important to us however is De Quincey's willingness to identify himself with a youthful “Jacobinism.” Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, De Quincey admits to a youthful revolutionary sympathy but distances himself from the false modern claimants to the revolutionary inheritance who would argue Reform in the name of Revolution. Just as De Quincey's reminiscences represent the familiar view of Wordsworth and Coleridge as early revolutionaries whose zeal had been tempered by experience, so also they conversely represent the Liverpool circle as false revolutionaries, whose early commitment to revolutionary principles was suspect. While the true revolutionaries, Wordsworth and Coleridge, were now identified with the Tory party, it was the false revolutionaries, such as Currie and Roscoe, who were now crying Reform as sustainers of a radical tradition. De Quincey thus reverses the common criticisms of the Lake poets as apostates, by accusing the Liverpool circle of political inconsistency. Moreover, De Quincey's representation of himself as a Jacobinical defender of Burns brings into question the nature of his sympathy with the “poetic revolution” he had first discerned in Lyrical Ballads.

Eaton's judgment that by 1803, De Quincey “was living in a world of thought and feeling almost entirely” has obscured the keen interest shown by De Quincey in various critical issues and publishing details surrounding the literary works that he was reading at the time. Modern scholarship has done much to reveal the radical nature of the literary milieu of the 1790's and the 1800's, and of the political provenance of such a work as Lyrical Ballads. Such a background is worth considering through the literary interests pursued by De Quincey in the Diary. De Quincey's later representations of his reading of Lyrical Ballads suggest a revelatory quality at the expense of the details of mediation and context through which these poems were made available to him. An important reference to the powerful medium of review literature which has not drawn adequate editorial comment is De Quincey's note of 14 May 1803, mentioning his “talk with Mr. W[right] about Edinburgh Review;—about Coleridge—Wordsworth—Southey—Cottle—Longman and Rees […]” (D 171). Longman and Rees as well as Cottle were of course importantly associated with the early publications of the Lake poets, and the reference to the Edinburgh Review in this connection is highly suggestive. It may be remembered that Jeffrey's famous attack on the Lake poets had begun in the very first issue of Edinburgh Review for October 1802 in the course of a review of Southey's Thalaba. Also to be noted is the fact that De Quincey is reading Southey's Thalaba during the period covered by the Diary. The reference to Jeffrey's damning review which treated Southey's work as a product of Wordsworth's theory in the 1800 Preface, might hence have grown out of De Quincey's interest in Southey. In fact, the connection between Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth may well have been drawn for him by Jeffrey's review because his list of poets made in April 1803 places the three of them together: a collocation which may be obvious to modern students of romanticism, but may not have been so obvious to a seventeen-year-old in Everton near Liverpool in 1803, without knowledge of the earlier association between Southey and Coleridge and of the contemporary residence of the three poets in the Lake District.²¹ Again, it is important not to underestimate the role of such a character as Wright, whose profession as a bookseller would have acquainted him with important details of the literary reception of the Lake poets. Jeffrey's attack on the “sect of poets” which included Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey had crucially admitted “a very considerable portion of poetical talent” among them, but had condemned their ability “to seduce many into an admiration of the false taste (as it appears to us) in which most of their productions are composed.”²² De Quincey's later letter to Wordsworth of 31 March 1804 in reply to the latter's complaint about the parody of “The Idiot Boy” published by Peter Bayley does make it clear that he had read (at least by then) the offending article by Jeffrey:

Wherever indeed (as in the solemn and profound analysis of your poetry by the Scotch reviewers) I have seen men impressed with a sincere belief that you had founded a school of poetry adverse to the canons of true taste, I have always felt any momentary indignation at their arrogance overbalanced by compassion for the delusions they are putting upon themselves and the disordered taste which such a belief argues.

(Jordan 39-40)

De Quincey's reference to the issue of “taste” identifies the cutting edge of Jeffrey's criticisms of the Lake school: not that they were not talented poets, but that their talents had been misused to “seduce” a large number of readers to a “false taste” in poetry.

Apart from the reference to Edinburgh Review, De Quincey's Diary shows several indications of being engaged in the crucial issue of literary value that Jeffrey's famous review symptomatized. This was the old debate which had rumbled through the eighteenth century about the respective merits of the “ancients” versus the “moderns” that new literary productions such as Wordsworth's and Coleridge's had raised afresh. Robert Mayo has shown how in many vital respects the poems in Lyrical Ballads “not only conformed to the modes of 1798, and reflected popular tastes and attitudes, but enjoyed a certain popularity in the magazines themselves” (486). Thus Jeffrey's influential criticism of the Lake poets was directed against their attempt, in the manner of much of the new poetry appearing in the journals of the day, to invoke a new subject matter and style. Though Jeffrey's criticisms of Burns were to appear rather later in 1809, they were, given his particular critical orientation, completely predictable in essence. In particular, Wordsworth's attempt to turn from a received “poetic” diction and form to the situations and language of “low and rustic life” was for Jeffrey an heretical attempt to subvert the received canons of “taste” and “feeling.” In this context, it is worth noting that De Quincey's list of favorite poets in 1803 includes Burns along with the Lake poets, and his Diary also records a comparison of Southey and Burns (D 145, 160).

Considering De Quincey's Diary with the preceding background in mind, we may now notice the many references to the Jeffreyan debate about the comparative merits of “ancient” versus “modern,” “classical” versus “English” literature that are strewn through its pages. I quote a single example:

we talk about classical knowledge, which Mr. W. regrets not having paid more attention to;—he says he supposes I have a knowledge of the ancient languages … which I assent to;—he mentions Lord Monboddo;—I take occasion thence of speaking of his unqualified admiration of the ancients—Horne Tooke's lashes on him and his compeer Harris—of asserting the superiority of modern to ancient lore—though in genera[l] terms.

(D 198)²³

De Quincey's reference to Horne Tooke indicates his awareness of Tooke's radical critique in The Diversions of Purley which Marilyn Butler has described as having taken “to a political extreme those efforts to democratize language which are specially characteristic of the last three decades of the century.”²⁴ Like The Diversions of Purley, Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads was clearly an argument in favor of returning the notion of linguistic propriety to the vernacular usage rather than the privileged medium associated with the learning of the upper classes. This was also the aspect of the Lake poets' ideology that was singled out for quotation and ridicule by Jeffrey in his review of Thalaba in 1802:

One of their own authors in deed, has very ingeniously set forth, (in a kind of manifesto that preceded one of their most flagrant acts of hostility), that is [sic] was their capital object “to adapt to the uses of poetry, the ordinary language of conversation among the middling and lower orders of the people.”

For the politically liberal Jeffrey, the Lake poets clearly exemplified a radically anti-institutional critique of society:

A splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society, seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments. Instead of contemplating the wonders and the pleasures which civilization has created for mankind, they are perpetually brooding over the disorders by which its progress has been attended. They are filled with horror and compassion at the sight of poor men spending their blood in the quarrels of princes, and brutifying their sublime capabilities in the drudgery of unremitting labour. For all sorts of vice and profligacy in the lower orders of society, they have the same virtuous horror, and the same tender compassion.

Such a tendency is attributed by Jeffrey to the influence on the Lake poets of the “great modern reformers” of Germany, and more specifically to “the great apostle of Geneva.” One of the elements of their productions is described as:

The antisocial principles, and distempered sensibility of Rousseau—his discontent with the present constitution of society—his paradoxical morality, and his perpetual hankerings after some unattainable state of virtue and perfection.²⁵

In this connection, it is worth noting that among the various literary discussions De Quincey mentions in the Diary is one

with Mr. Bentejak about Rousseau's Emile—Julia—Social Contract. Mr. B. Said it was generally believed Rousseau did not write the “Confessions” in the Emile.

(D 93)

Even if the young De Quincey's response to Lyrical Ballads was certainly antithetical to the critique issued by Jeffrey, it might appear that the latter was in fact strongly instrumental in contextualizing the work for the young reader. On account of his critical support for the “moderns” in the eighteenth-century literary debate mentioned above, De Quincey's reading of Jeffrey serves to contextualize Lyrical Ballads for himself against the grain of Jeffrey's argument. Jeffrey's tirade against the presumptuous attempt at literary innovation by the Lake poets would have paradoxically rendered them favorable to the strong supporter of the “moderns” (in literature) in the young De Quincey.

I hope to have shown by now that the unconditioned realm of “thought and feeling” suggested by Eaton is not an appropriate description of De Quincey's early writings in the Diary nor of his state of mind in approaching Lyrical Ballads. By way of a conclusion to this section I would like to examine De Quincey's 1803 description of the operation of a “press-gang” to suggest some of the converse ways in which his reading of Lyrical Ballads was shaping the nature of his political experience at this time. The forced consignment of men (termed “impressment”) to military service during the war with France naturally aroused much discontent and it is significant to note De Quincey's youthful participation in this sense of popular outrage:

Among the men was one who hid his face to conceal his emotions: his two sisters stood on the pier among the crowd—weeping and telling his story to the spectators. Immediately a general exclamation ran along—“Ay that’s poor Jack—the boatman”—who is he? I said. “Ay! bless him! he’s neither father nor mother; he’s quite desolate.” On this general tribute of sympathy and affection, the poor fellow, who had hitherto hid his face to stifle or conceal his grief, could bear it no longer; but, sobbing aloud, lifted up his eyes and fixed them with such mingling expressions of agony—gratitude—mournful remembrance on his friends—relations—and his dear countrymen (whom very likely he was now gazing at for the last time) as roused indignation against the pressers and pity for the pressed in every bosom; and not an Englishman stood by … that did not manifest the sensibility of his nation. Never did I behold such exquisite sorrow contendg with such manliness of appearance

The look, with which he look’d
Shall never pass away.

Eaton has remarked of this description that it is made “with a certain romantic air as if the scene might have come from one of the many novels he had been so busily reading” (D 17, 162). The comment is just in that De Quincey's perception is strongly influenced by literary sources, but I would suggest that in the particular emphasis on “low” life rather than high tragedy, De Quincey's real model is Lyrical Ballads, which of course commands the highest literary appreciation to be found in the Diary. Indeed the quotation with which De Quincey ends the description (unidentified by Eaton) comes from “The Ancient Mariner” (247-48), describing the fixed gaze of the Mariner's dead shipmates: “The look with which they look’d on me, / Had never passed away” (LB 20). The radically abolitionist sensibility of Coleridge's poem is well fitted to lament the fate of forced impressment that meets the boatman.²⁶ De Quincey's application of Coleridge's description to the sorrowful countenance of the boatman suggests the feelings of guilt and complicity evoked in the viewers by Jack's plight.

In some of the particularities of composition as well, it is obvious that the closer comparison to De Quincey's style must be sought in Lyrical Ballads rather than in the gothic novels he was then devouring in an addictive manner but without much evidence of critical sympathy. For example, the slightly inconsequential reply from bystanders to De Quincey's question, “who is he?”: “Ay! bless him! he’s neither father nor mother; he’s quite desolate” reminds us of the repeated use of questioning in poems such as “We are Seven” and “The Idiot Boy” to yield replies which, though not strictly engaging the questions, still provide at a further level an answer to them:

“How many are you then,” said I,
“If they two are in Heaven?”
The little Maiden did reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”

(LB 68)

As in Wordsworth's poem, De Quincey takes on the role of interlocuter and purports to record his conversation in a faithful register to the idea of “low” life thus represented. Moreover, it is the very inconsequentiality of the reply that provides the poignancy to the representation. The question of original identity posed by De Quincey (“Who is he?”) is shown to be meaningless against the apparent lack or loss of parental origins displayed by the subject. This was the nub of Jeffrey's grouse against the Lake poets, that the mean social position of Wordsworth's characters was the ruin of his poetic abilities.

De Quincey's character takes on in this manner the elemental simplicity and communal significance of the marginal and desolate characters thronging the pages of Lyrical Ballads in such portraits as the Female Vagrant, Simon Lee, Lucy, Ruth or the Ancient Mariner, whose origins are mysterious but whose elemental existence seems simply to be taken for granted. Just as these characters are nameless or carry a symbolically commonplace name, so the boatman is identified by only his first name, Jack, and his profession, but is otherwise left undefined by nomenclatural means. Another similarity with Lyrical Ballads is evident in the delicate touch provided by the unsustained aversion of countenance to express a “manly” sorrow, Jack's hiding of his face “to stifle or conceal his grief,” which reminds us of a poem such as “The Last of the Flock”:

He saw me, and he turned aside,
As if he wished himself to hide:
Then with his coat he made essay
To wipe those briny tears away.

(LB 79)

Such a moment of private sorrow, undistinguished by the prominence of the character, but providing in the unguarded instant of grief, when Jack is able to “bear it no longer,” the kind of insight into human nature celebrated in Wordsworth's 1800 Preface, suggests once more the true influence on De Quincey, of those characteristic situations of “low” life which constitute the particular poetic moment of Lyrical Ballads.

THE REVOLUTIONARY ETHIC OF LYRICAL BALLADS

De Quincey's retrospectively-claimed ultra-Jacobinical reading of Burns (more radical than the liberal Whigs, Currie and Shepherd) suggests the extremely politicized tendency of his reading at this stage, in contrast to the imputation of a depoliticized world of imagination that he was supposed to be inhabiting at the time. In the following section I would like to proceed from the above understanding of De Quincey's early political interests to an ideological examination of two early episodes in De Quincey's childhood from the viewpoints of his contemporary records as well as of his later representations of these events. The two episodes I am examining are De Quincey's visit to Ireland in early 1800, and his flight from the Manchester Grammar School in 1802. As I shall show, though De Quincey later reinscribes both events from a mature post-revolutionary point of view, his contemporary descriptions of these events evidence a marked transformation developing in De Quincey's thought during this time.

Even apart from his discussions of the politics of Burns's political reputation, De Quincey's reminiscences of and correspondence with Lord Altamont, an Irish peer, on the issue of the Irish Act of Union in 1800, indicate his interest in popular and political issues at this time. The English response to the French revolutionary threat and the Rebellion of 1798 had been to dissolve the separate Irish parliament in return for a largely ineffectual Irish representation at Westminster. Pitt's earlier measures of Catholic relief had failed by 1795 to fulfill the expectations raised, leading to the increasing radicalization of Irish political feeling. Attempts to suppress the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Society of United Irishmen in 1794 led to its reconstitution as a secret society which would become openly republican and predominantly Catholic under Theobald Wolfe Tone. The Rebellion of 1798 reflected the fragmentation and the growing sectarianism of Irish political life. The Irish willingness to draw on French support to achieve its revolutionary ends pointed also to the important links which existed between Irish republicanism and English radicalism in the early nineteenth century.²⁷ It is worth examining De Quincey's interest in this political matter for some indication of the nature of his political sympathies at the time, and of how these might have been transformed into the ideological stance which he associates with his reading of Lyrical Ballads.

Writing to his mother from Ireland, the young De Quincey was attempting to balance the English reports of the Rebellion with the very different ones of the local population:

As to the rebellion in Ireland, the English, I think, use the amplifying, and the Irish the diminishing hyperbole; the former view it with a magnifying glass, the latter with a microscope. In England, I remember, we heard such horrid accounts of murders, and battles, and robberies, and here everybody tells me the country is in as quiet a state as England, and has been so for some time past.

Yet De Quincey's suspicions are clearly aroused by the Irish accounts of the Rebellion which he considers as being deliberately underplayed: “What makes me suspect the truth of these smooth-tongued messengers is that the rebellion, even at its greatest height, they affect to treat with indifference. …”²⁸ In a letter to Thomas dated 22 September 1800, Altamont refers to Thomas as being “so good and zealous an Englishman,” no doubt on account of the opinions he expressed to the former on this issue. Popular Irish feeling on the score of England would have been at a low, and it would appear that De Quincey had had occasion in discussion to rise to the defense of his country. Altamont himself, as one of the Irish peers who had gone over to the English parliament, would have been compromised by popular feeling. His letters to De Quincey reveal him to be an English supporter on the issue of the French Revolution and its effect on Ireland:

I never hear of anything like another Revolution in France without trembling for the effect it may have upon us here; for our rebellions and the French invasion have left bad effects, which it will take many years wholly to wipe out

(Japp, Memorials 1: 42, 49).

De Quincey's early association with Westport and Lord Altamont thus show him to be a “zealous […] Englishman” on the issue of the Irish Union, favoring the measures taken by Pitt to suppress the Irish radical movement.

As with his reminiscences of the Liverpool literary society, De Quincey's later account of the Irish Rebellion reveals several significant variations from what the early documents suggest. De Quincey's recollections of these events in his 1834 “Autobiographic Sketches” for Tait's claim his “profoundest sympathies” for the Act (M 1: 217). In describing the nature of his sympathy De Quincey crucially enlists the aid of Wordsworth's republican sonnet “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic” to a reversionary significance:

Wordsworth's fine sonnet on the extinction of the Venetian Republic had not then been published, else the last two lines would have expressed my feelings. After admitting that changes had taken place in Venice, which in manner challenged and presumed this last mortal change, the poet goes on to say, that all this long preparation for the event could not break the shock of it. Venice, it is true, had become a shade; but, after all,

“Men we are, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great has pass’d away.”

But here the previous circumstances were far different from those of Venice. There we saw a superannuated and paralytic state, sinking at any rate into the grave, and yielding, to the touch of military violence, that only which a brief lapse of years must otherwise have yielded to internal decay. Here, on the contrary, we saw a young eagle, rising into power, and robbed prematurely of her natural honours, only because she did not comprehend their value, or because at this great crisis she had no champion. Ireland, in a political sense, was surely then in her youth, considering the prodigious developments she has since experienced in population, and in resources of all kinds.

De Quincey's retrospective appeal (in 1834) to Wordsworthian republicanism to express his sentiments on the issue of the Irish Union tends to reinscribe the event in the light of his later influence. Furthermore De Quincey represents Westport and Altamont as being secretly in sympathy with the revolutionary movement opposed to the Union:

Yet oftentimes it seemed to me, when I introduced the subject, and sought to learn from Lord Altamont the main grounds which had reconciled him and other men, anxious for the welfare of Ireland, to a measure which at least robbed her of some splendour, and, above all, robbed her of a name and place amongst the independent states of Europe—that neither father nor son was likely to be displeased should some great popular violence put force upon the recorded will of Parliament, and compel the two Houses to perpetuate themselves.

(M 1: 217)

Just as De Quincey's own sympathies are rewritten from a Wordsworthian point of view, so also it may be seen Lord Altamont's and Westport's views are now aligned with a revolutionary sympathy quite at odds with Altamont's correspondence. Far from supporting Pitt's measures to repress revolutionary activities in any form, De Quincey is in fact offering a critique of that repression from the perspective of early-Wordsworthian republicanism. I would suggest that such a reinscription is itself some indication of the political significance De Quincey would associate in time with Wordsworth and Lyrical Ballads.

It is important to note however that at this stage there could have been no obvious disparity for the young De Quincey in the purposes of the two authors of Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge's private disagreements with “Wordsworth's” Preface begin to emerge only after 1802, while his public statement appeared only with the Biographia in 1817. To all appearances then, and in Coleridge's own words of 30 September 1800, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads represented the “joint opinions on Poetry” of Wordsworth and Coleridge (CL 1: 627). While, to avoid confusion, I shall follow the critical convention of referring to the Preface as the work of Wordsworth, it must be remembered that the critical differential now commonly accepted between the roles of Wordsworth and Coleridge simply cannot be accepted in terms of its early impact on a reader such as De Quincey. Though Wordsworth is prioritized by his own assumed authority in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge must be seen in a concerted and mutually supporting position with Wordsworth. We may now return to the politics of the revolutionary sympathy which De Quincey would recognize underlying Lyrical Ballads in examining the records, both contemporary and retrospective, of his escape from the Manchester Grammar School.

At least in retrospect, De Quincey's flight from the Manchester Grammar School was achieved with Lyrical Ballads strongly in mind. The centrality of Lyrical Ballads to this key event of De Quincey's youth may be gauged from his later assertion that the escapade was accomplished with a copy of Lyrical Ballads in his pocket, and that his first impulse was to head for the Lake District. Yet the “very motives of love and honour” attending such a “pilgrimage” as contemplated by De Quincey, drew him temporarily away from Wordsworth. Clearly it would not do for De Quincey to present himself to Wordsworth “in a hurried and thoughtless state of excitement.” Attempting to explain his careless sense of freedom in the 1856 Confessions, De Quincey located the cause of his joy

in what Wordsworth, when describing the festal state of France during the happy morning-tide of her First Revolution (1788-1790), calls “the senselessness of joy”: this it was, joy—headlong—frantic—irreflective—and (as Wordsworth truly calls it), for that very reason, sublime—which swallowed up all capacities of rankling care or heart-corroding doubt.

(M 3: 279, 284)

De Quincey's transposition of Wordsworth's telling phrase to describe his sense of freedom in running away from the Manchester Grammar School figures his own reaction in the cast of Wordsworth's revolutionary joy. Again, it is important to remind ourselves of the retrospective nature of this interpretation; but as before it is worth asking why De Quincey was representing his experience in such a manner. It has been often noted that De Quincey's descriptions of his escapade from the Manchester Grammar School are clothed in a religious language reflecting a Miltonic fall from grace; less noticed has been the political language of rights and liberty in the terms of which the episode has also been presented in De Quincey's contemporary letters and retrospective descriptions. If one recalls the political importance of Milton's republicanism to the Lake school it is possible to see the connection between the two forms of discourse, at one level a Christian parable of man's disobedience, and at the other, a form of defeated, but not wholly suppressed, revolutionary aspiration.²⁹ In the following section, I will consider De Quincey's flight from Manchester Grammar School as a paradigm of the “revolutionary” aspect of Lyrical Ballads. This aspect of the work will also be seen to act as a counterweight to De Quincey's evangelical upbringing.

De Quincey's childhood politics have been somewhat uncritically branded as that of an “instinctual Tory” (Lindop, Opium-Eater 53) on the basis of his mother's influence and the background of conservative evangelicalism that characterized the “Clapham” sect of which Mrs. Quincey was a member. While evangelicalism might indeed be recognized as an important influence on De Quincey, I would point here to a more ambivalent attitude to evangelicalism than one of mere acceptance or rejection. It must be remembered moreover that the evangelical ethos was more complicated than the blanket label “conservatism” would suggest, and was profoundly oppositional on some aspects of government, most notably the slave-trade. Lindop has usefully pointed to the “traditions […] of earnest self-examination and apocalyptic fervour” to which Mrs. Quincey subscribed as an evangelical, and suggested their relevance to the “mystical” or “visionary” aspects of De Quincey's work.³⁰ I would like to take up from Lindop's reading of De Quincey's flight from the Manchester Grammar School as an evangelical, confessional narrative of De Quincey's fall from grace, to advance the case that De Quincey's school “rebellion” was simultaneously figured in political terms as well. I do not wish to imply of course that De Quincey's school revolt was performed as an act of consciously political significance—but then neither has it been claimed that De Quincey's supposed fall from grace was achieved as a consciously theological act of rebellion. The crucial recognition is of the interpretation that the act bears later, and of the kind of discourse that reportedly propels the action.

In his fine study of the social and political connotations of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, Boyd Hilton has written that “the moderate evangelicalism which developed after 1789 represented a shift in natural religion from evidences to paradoxes, that is, from examples of benign contrivance in the natural world to demonstrations of how superficial misery may work inner improvement.”³¹ Mrs. Quincey's brand of evangelicalism, which was of the rationalist and moderate kind like that of the other members of the Clapham Sect with whom she was associated, clearly fits Hilton's emphasis on a lapsarian theology as its determining telos. This emphasis on the acceptance of a fallen order may be seen to inform Mrs. Quincey's correspondence with Thomas, together with her insistence on her own right to assume a divinely dispensed jurisdiction over the lad. Mrs. Quincey's correspondence to Thomas at this time indicates her clear perception of the issue as essentially one of authority, with the yet legally bound lad displaying a premature desire for “liberty.” Her immediate reaction to De Quincey's proposal was to remind him of his obligations to his father's will, and the fact that it would not be long before he was free to exercise his choice:

I would urge you to consider that the language you use when you say “I must” or “I will” is absolute disobedience to your father's last and most solemn act, which appoints you to submit to the direction of your guardians, to Mr. Hall and myself in particular, in what regards your education. I cannot think you believe a total revolt from our rule will make you in any sense great if you have not the constituents of greatness in you, or that waiting the common course of time and expediency will at all hinder the maturity of your powers, if you have them.

(Japp, Memorials 1: 71)

In keeping with her evangelical beliefs, Mrs. Quincey saw herself as divinely invested with the power and the wisdom to decide Thomas's best interests. She had “an awful account to give as a parent” and evidently saw that De Quincey's chastisement was her chief duty at this time (Japp, Memorials 1: 73). De Quincey's subjectively defined “misery” was ironically better calculated to confirm Mrs. Quincey's original decision than to change it.

De Quincey's decision to flee his school and to claim his paternally inherited rights certainly fell foul of Mrs. Quincey's conception of his filial duties. Crucially Mrs. Quincey saw Thomas' desire for “unnatural liberty” as influenced by his reading, which is “all of a sort to weaken your mental optics,” so that she advises him to “let your daily reading be the works of men who were neither infidels nor Jacobins.” Thomas' “revolt” is viewed as a potentially threatening act, undermining Mrs. Quincey's authority, and likely to prove contagious with the other children as well. In his subsequent recollection of the topics of discussion between his mother and himself at the familial establishment of the Priory, just before his admission to Oxford in 1803, De Quincey cites the issue of “Government in relation to the duties (but also, which females are far too apt to overlook, in relation to the rights) of us outside barbarians, the governed.” Such a topic was clearly linked to De Quincey's recalcitrant behavior at this time. As Mrs. Quincey wrote angrily in response to De Quincey's proposal to leave the school forthwith, the issue at stake was “must you govern me or must I govern you?” The neat distinction here, recognized by the later De Quincey, between “rights” and “duties” reflects the terminology of the radical versus conservative ideologies that continued to set the agenda for political debate of the nineteenth century. De Quincey's reminiscence on the issue of government in relation to rights and duties thus points the political moral of his adolescent rebellion. Mrs. Quincey's assertion of her authority is clearly contested in a political context which is made clear by her defensive statement to Thomas that she was “not becoming a stickler for established systems as though they were perfect ones, but then good may and often has been obtained under them” (Japp, Memorials 1: 75, 78, 83-85, 100). It should be remembered here that the moderate evangelicals, particularly the “Clapham sect,” were an important oppositional force on the issue of the slave-trade (here is where Mrs. Quincey might have found sympathy for the liberal Whigs, Roscoe, Currie and Clarke, who were notable opponents of the large Liverpool slave-trade); and interestingly Thomas' arguments against the Manchester Grammar School on the grounds of its severe and monotonous regimen without any scope for recreational activities, might be seen to parallel some of the material arguments against the conditions of slavery. For the evangelicals however, as Hilton has pointed out, it was not the material arguments that ultimately counted but their theological belief in redemption as a matter of free-will individualism (Atonement 98). Mrs. Quincey's seemingly surprising failure to stop De Quincey's flight from Manchester Grammar School by reporting his plans to the headmaster may be seen within this context of a rationalist free-will suasion to which her letters bear testimony. Yet Mrs. Quincey's emphasis on spiritual and moral rather than physical coercion was of course inadequate to the profoundly variant beliefs now raised by De Quincey.

A crucial aspect of the clearly-differentiated perspectives adopted by Mrs. Quincey and Thomas was her insistence on the necessity of an established and systematic form of education, as opposed to the self-reliant scheme proposed by the latter. Here it is that the emphasis of Lyrical Ballads on a “natural” education in the Rousseauvian, prelapsarian sense poses the ideological challenge to the evangelistic parental authority attemptedly exerted by Mrs. Quincey. Although there are no direct references in the contemporary letters between Mrs. Quincey and Thomas to Lyrical Ballads as a motivating factor in the latter's decision to run away from the Manchester Grammar School, it may now be clear why Mrs. Quincey saw the boy's reading as so important to his rebellious outlook, and why De Quincey later figured Lyrical Ballads as central to his decision. Mrs. Quincey was a shrewd if rather authoritarian mother, and her warning to Thomas not to exalt “the most dangerous faculty of the mind, the imagination, over all the rest; but it will desolate your life and hopes, if it be not restrained and brought under religious government” (Japp, Memorials 1: 75) reads prophetically in the light of his career, as does his brilliantly subversive configuration of opium in relation to the Wordsworth-Coleridgean brand of romantic imagination. De Quincey's early letters to Wordsworth indicate his perception of Wordsworth as spiritual guide and teacher, an ironically displaced recognition of the role claimed ineffectually by his mother. Wordsworth's difference lay certainly in the fact that his authority was presented as a “natural” function, rather than in the impositional style assumed by Mrs. Quincey. Such an impression is conveyed by De Quincey when he writes to Wordsworth, “that your name is with me for ever linked to the lovely scenes of nature;—and that not yourself only but that each place and object you have mentioned … and all the souls in that delightful community of yours—to me “are dearer than the sun!” Of course, this is what Wordsworth, who had sought in the Preface to appeal to the untutored taste in poetry, would have wished to hear, and De Quincey is suppressing the implications of his apparently spontaneous love for Wordsworth. The spontaneity of De Quincey's recognition is seen to be a function of his ostensibly uncorrupted nature, a (mis)-representation that is reiterated in his claim later in the letter that “my life has been passed chiefly in the contemplation and altogether in the worship of nature—that I am but a boy and have therefore formed no connection which could draw you one step farther from the sweet retreats of poetry to the detested haunts of men” (D 185-86).

While such a claim is patently untrue for the well-connected Thomas, whose acquaintances included Lord Altamont and Lady Carbery, De Quincey's representation of himself indicates in no uncertain terms the new direction that his thinking had taken. Although such a movement appears to detach itself from political considerations, it may be seen that De Quincey's reading of Lyrical Ballads is set in an ideological context that is profoundly challenging to his evangelical background. De Quincey himself retrospectively attempts to figure the formative moment of his reading of Lyrical Ballads in explicitly “revolutionary” terms, but though these are not strictly accurate descriptions of his youthful politics, they yet point to an emerging outlook at this time. De Quincey's early reading of Lyrical Ballads indicates however a strong sense of its contextual significance, drawn from sources which he later attempts to suppress, such as the redoubtable Liverpool literary circle disparaged in his 1837 article in Tait's. So also De Quincey's later representations of his Irish political sympathies, and his own flight from the Manchester Grammar School, are reinscribed by political sympathies which are the result of his later experiences in political journalism, but at the same time may be read together with his contemporary records to suggest a seminal ideological influence involving his reading of Lyrical Ballads.

Notes

1. See the major biographies by Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London: J. M. Dent, 1981) 31-32, 49, and Horace Eaton, Thomas De Quincey: A Biography (London: Oxford UP, 1936) 94-97, 114, as well as the more specialized work by John Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth: A Biography of a Relationship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1962) and numerous critical works such as D. D. Devlin, De Quincey, Wordsworth and the Art of Prose (London: Macmillan, 1983) 15-20; 22-24 and passim; John Beer, “De Quincey and the Dark Sublime: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Ethos,” in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. R. L. Snyder (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1985) 164-98 and Margaret Russett, “Wordsworth's Gothic Interpreter: De Quincey Personifies ‘We are Seven,’” SiR 30 (1991): 345-66.

2. Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth 30; Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 33 (hereafter cited as R).

   Though critics have disagreed on the date and edition of De Quincey's reading of Lyrical Ballads (Jordan suggests 1799 [7-8] whereas Lindop considers 1801 more probable [Opium-Eater 49]), it is clear from his 1803 Diary that he had read both the anonymous one-volume first edition and the two-volume second edition under Wordsworth's name alone. In his Diary, apart from referring to the two volumes of the second edition, he quotes a phrase from the 1798 text of “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” “Like God's own head,” which Coleridge altered to “Like an Angel's head” in the second and subsequent editions until 1817, when he returned to the original. The Diary also reprints a facsimile of De Quincey's letter dated 13 May [1803] which includes a sentence originally beginning, “I read the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ soon after their first appearance […]” but was later altered to read “From the strike though time when I first saw the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ […].” See Horace Eaton, ed. A Diary of Thomas De Quincey, 1803 (London: Noel Douglas, [1927]) [119], 155 (hereafter cited as D) and S. T. Coleridge, Poetical-Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (1912; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969) 190 (hereafter cited as PW). On this evidence, Jordan's estimate of 1799 appears more likely.

3. Lindop has interestingly suggested an evangelical source for De Quincey's acquaintance with “We are Seven” (Opium-Eater 31) but by and large there has been little speculation on the channels through which Lyrical Ballads might have become known to De Quincey.

4. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983).

5. David Masson, ed., The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889-90) 3: 302. Hereafter cited as M.

6. See especially Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (London: Macmillan, 1988) 46-55.

7. E. L. Griggs, ed. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956-71) 1: 607. Hereafter cited as CL.

8. For a good account of the political importance of the Liverpool group, see J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982).

9. A. H. Japp, ed. De Quincey Memorials, 2 vols. (London, 1891) 1: 60-62.

10. The catalogue of the Athenaeum shows that they purchased the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, but not the second or subsequent editions, despite the substantial new material in the later editions. Coleridge's unfair treatment by Wordsworth in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads would have been obvious to the likes of Currie and Roscoe, so perhaps the decision not to acquire the second edition was prompted by their support for Coleridge. On the impact of Wordsworth's suppression of Coleridge's name from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, see Richard Holmes, Coleridge: The Early Years (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989) 283-90 and Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989) 184-87.

11. Henry Roscoe, The Life of William Roscoe, vol. 1 (London: Cadell and Blackwood, 1833) 231-33.

12. J. Currie, ed., The Works of Robert Burns; with an account of his Life, and […] some observations on the character and condition of the Scottish Peasantry, 4 vols. (Liverpool, 1800). Regarding modern controversy surrounding Currie's editorship, see R. D. Thornton, James Currie the Entire Stranger and Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963); Donald Low, Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) 23-25 and passim; James Mackay, R. B.: A Biography of Robert Burns (1992; rpt. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1993) 647-62; as well as Leith Davis, “James Currie's Works of Robert Burns: The Politics of Hypochondriasis” SiR 36 (1997): 43-60.

13. Robert Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of Lyrical Ballads,” PMLA 69 (1954): 486-522.

14. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth's Reading 1800-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 35.

15. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, ed. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974) 118.

16. Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, ns 4 (1837): 340.

17. Brett, R. L. and A. R. Jones, ed. Lyrical Ballads: The text of the 1798 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the Prefaces (1963; London: Methuen, 1965) 245. Hereafter cited as LB. I have used this edition rather than the more recent Cornell edition since the latter favors a manuscript source over the printed version for its reading text, whereas my emphasis on reception requires the printed version to be held primary.

18. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working-Class (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

19. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol 2, ed., James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 45.

20. It must be noted that De Quincey chose not to republish his reminiscences of the “Liverpool Coterie” in putting together his “Autobiographic Sketches” for his collected edition of his own writings, the Selections Grave and Gay, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: James Hogg, 1853-60). In an unpublished letter, 5 March 1840, De Quincey warned Thomas Talford that if he did ever read his “Autob. sketches in Tait, bear in mind that I disown them” (De Quincey, Letters, Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, New York, Misc MS 104) I am indebted to Dr. Barry Symonds for the transcript of this and other letters of De Quincey which deserve to be published.

21. Apart from Jeffrey however, De Quincey may have learnt of the association between the three poets from the Liverpool literatures, Roscoe and others. Significantly he does not apparently renew his acquaintance with the Liverpool circle this time round at Everton judging by the absence of any reference to them in his Diary.

22. Edinburgh Review 1 (1802): 64.

23. See also his complaints regarding “the wretched drivellings of that old dotard Homer” (D 176) and his “great contempt for Porson as an editor” (D 206). (Porson's negative attitude to modern [English] poetry may here be seen to be instrumental to De Quincey's contempt for him.)

24. Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 19. John Horne Tooke, EPEA PTEPOENTA or The Diversions of Purley, vol. 1 (1786; 2nd ed, London: J. Johnson, 1798). For a discussion of Tooke's significance to Wordsworth and Lyrical Ballads, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 202-52.

25. Edinburgh Review 1 (1802): 63-66, 71. Incidentally, Jeffrey's strictures on the false aims in poetic language propounded by Wordsworth were to be the point of his later comparison of the Lake poets with Burns in 1809 (Edinburgh Review 13 [1809]: 249-76). Wordsworth's later desire for identification with Burns which as we have seen De Quincey was to recover through his own “Jacobinical” support for the Scottish poet is thus integral to Wordsworth's literary warfare with the Edinburgh Review.

26. See J. R. Ebbatson, “Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and the Rights of Man,” SiR 11 (1972): 171-206; as well as Peter Kitson, “Coleridge, the French Revolution and ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation,” The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 192-207.

27. See Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 11-15, 23-24.

28. Japp, Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings (1877; London, 1890) 37-38.

29. See David Erdman, “Milton! Thou Shouldst be Living,” The Wordsworth Circle 19 (1988): 2-9.

30. “Pursuing the Throne of God,” Charles Lamb Bulletin ns 52 (1985): 97-111.

31. The Age of Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 20.