SOURCE: “Introduction: This/That/the Other,” in The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 1-24.

A ‘compromised’ person is one who has been in contact with people or things supposed to be capable of conveying infection. As a general rule the whole Ottoman empire lies constantly under this terrible ban.

A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, 14n.

He described the present state of Syria as perfectly impracticable for travellers, or at least highly dangerous, from the united obstacles of marauders and pestilence. He saw a party of deserters marched in near Damascus, chained to each other, and occasionally a man free from plague joined hand in hand with one who was infected.

The Hon. Mrs Damer, Diary of a Tour, 1: 22.

I

Thomas De Quincey became a ‘regular and confirmed’ opium addict in 1813; before that, for ten years, he had used the drug, usually if not invariably in the form of laudanum, on a weekly rather than on a daily basis. When in London he would take it on Saturday nights, and with the idea of indulging in one of two competing pleasures. He went to the opera; or he became a flâneur for the evening, a watcher of the poor in their hours of relaxation. Most people, he acknowledges, ‘are apt to show their interest in the concerns of the poor chiefly by sympathy with their distresses and sorrows’, but ‘I at that time was disposed to express mine by sympathising with their pleasures’. Saturday night was the best time for experiencing this sympathetic pleasure, for then the poor, released from the bondage of labour, would congregate in family parties to ‘purchase their Sunday's dinner’ (so Mayhew explains) at the great street-markets of the metropolis. De Quincey's ‘sympathy’ was such that on Saturday nights he too began to feel that he was ‘released from some yoke of bondage, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy’. He would, accordingly, knock back his laudanum and ‘wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance’, to all those parts of London where this Saturday night spectacle could be enjoyed (3: 392; Mayhew 1: 10).

This early account of the pleasures of the flâneur communicates a very specific sense of the developing modern metropolis. Those that De Quincey calls the ‘poor’ are the working poor, probably largely employed as outworkers, and paid only on Saturday afternoons or evenings when they take their work to the warehouse. The market-traders must therefore work late on Saturday nights (and also on Sunday mornings) if the poor are to be able to purchase the necessities of life. It is the regularity and uniformity of the working week—regular even in its irregularities, its St Monday, its Friday-night ‘ghoster’—that produces this sudden and regular visibility of ‘the poor’ at a certain time in certain places—and that offers De Quincey the opportunity of ‘witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible’ this ‘spectacle’ of early nineteenth-century metropolitan life.¹

No less interesting is the nature and scope of what De Quincey represents as his sympathy with the poor. ‘If wages were a little higher,’ he writes, ‘or were expected to be so—if the quartern loaf were a little lower, or it was reported that onions or butter were falling—I was glad; yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consolation’ (3: 393). There is no pretence that this is a general concern for the well-being of the poor; their pleasures he could use, but he had no need of their sadness. Their job, therefore, was to remain cheerful and acquiescent even in adversity; and to a mind soaked in laudanum, they readily gave the impression of being so:

sometimes there might be heard murmurs of discontent: but far oftener expressions … of patience, of hope, and of reconciliation to their lot. Generally speaking, the impression left upon my mind was that the poor are practically more philosophic than the rich; that they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediable evils or irreparable losses.

(3: 392-3)

The consolations provided by these Saturday nights, it seems, were as much political as personal, and they are consolations familiar to those brought up within the class structure of Britain. The pleasure is not at all to pretend to be one of an inferior class; it is to pretend to be like them, fundamentally the same, but different in all that really concerns one's sense of identity and self-esteem. The search for a common human nature becomes the search for a means of reassurance, of making safe what seems to be threatening in the poor, in the ‘masses’, in the enormous numbers of the working class that the timetable of modern life sometimes permits to congregate together. Especially at those moments it becomes important to believe, as De Quincey puts it, that ‘the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of brotherhood’ (3: 393).

De Quincey's own fear of the working class is elsewhere very evident. They were ‘Jacobins’—he could still use the word in the 1850s to describe those whom he had first recognised as the inferiors and enemies of his own class when he was an eight-year-old schoolboy during the Terror. Grevel Lindop describes how in 1842 De Quincey wrote to Blackwood, of Blackwood's Magazine, about an essay he was writing on revolutionary movements and the working class. He had kept the ‘working poor’ under surveillance, he explained, for many years. He had listened carefully to what they said; he had taken every opportunity to encourage them into ‘the express manifestation’ of their ‘true secret dispositions’. ‘To a man I look upon the working poor, Scottish or English, as latent Jacobins—biding their time’ (L345). In the article ‘On the Approaching Revolution in Great Britain’, a jeremiad published in 1831 in anticipation of the passing of the Reform Bill, he disclosed that he had also been keeping his eye on the class of ‘petty shopkeepers’, who were just as bad:

I have observed them much, and long … no symptom has escaped me for the last sixteen years … the result of my observations is, that, with the exception here and there of an individual, bribed, as it were, to reserve and duplicity, by his dependence on some great aristocratic neighbour, this order of men is as purely Jacobinical, and disposed to revolutionary counsels, as any that existed in France at the time of their worst convulsions.

(B30 1831 323)

And in an essay of uncertain date, on Judas Iscariot, he writes of the same class:

They receive, and with dreadful fidelity they give back, all Jacobinical impulses. … In times of fierce political agitation these are the men who most of all are kept au courant of the interior councils and policy amongst the great body of acting conspirators.

(8: 182n.)

This is the other side of the jovial flânerie amongst the families of the poor, the market-traders, the small shopkeepers of London: a fearful suspicion, a paranoia, that in the apparently routine and good-natured transactions of a Saturday-night shopping trip, conspiratorial words are being whispered, glances exchanged. While De Quincey is watching the poor, they are watching out, for the moment to strike; and as they have no real grievances, the revenge they are contemplating is stimulated by nothing but a ‘plebeian envy’, a ‘low-minded jealousy against the aristocracy’ (B30 1831 324).²

The need to denounce these petty shopkeepers may have been influenced by the habit, noticed by De Quincey, of referring to them in Scotland as ‘merchants’. De Quincey's father, a member of high bourgeois society in Manchester, had described himself as a merchant, and Thomas himself had announced, in the Opium-Eater, his pride in being the ‘son of a plain English merchant’. But the devaluation of the term in Scotland, where Thomas spent the last half of his life, was a threat to whatever degree of social distinction he had inherited as his birthright. That birthright had always been problematic, however, and in England especially, where the disdain for ‘trade’, however lucrative, and however much an unacknowledged component of the fortunes of those who passed as ‘landed’, had always represented the De Quinceys as inferior to the polite and leisured classes that he and his mother wanted so badly to be part of. It was those ambitions that had led De Quincey's mother to decorate the family name—originally plain ‘Quincey’—with what he calls ‘the aristocratic De’. When even she had abandoned it, he retained it, as if to reassure himself that, though apparently a hack writer, permanently on the run from his creditors, he was a member of some noblesse de plume (8: 182n.; 1971 61; 1: 30; 3: 459).

The double vision that for De Quincey seems to have characterised the spectacle of the poor is clear enough in the Opium-Eater itself, where he describes his happy and hazy wanderings. He begins that description by assuring us that ‘the pleasures of the poor … can never become oppressive to contemplate’, but by the very next paragraph they have become precisely that: to the ‘opium-eater, when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment … crowds become an oppression’. The more opium he took, the more the spectacle of mass society produced the fears he had been trying to make safe; and if they disappeared in the evening, they were to return, years later, in a different but still recognisable form at night. There may seem to be a vast geographical and psychic distance between the cheerful bustle of a London street-market on a Saturday night, and the terrifying oriental imagery of the opium dreams, but De Quincey saw in one the representation and displacement of the other. Whatever else they were, the dreams were dreams of the terrors of ‘mass society’, which De Quincey often rationalised into a fear of popular Jacobinism—of those ‘myriads of murderous levellers’, for example, who had emerged from the ‘dark recesses’ and ‘gloomy dens’ of Paris, and ‘wallowed in the blood of illustrious victims’ (3: 392, 394; B28 1830 705).

‘The human face tyrannised over my dreams’; this tyranny, a kind of dream-dictatorship of the proletariat, was the result not only of the wandering from market to market, but of the continual search, when De Quincey was in London, to find, among the endlessly multiplied faces of the metropolitan crowd, the one face of Ann, the prostitute and ‘pariah’ who had befriended him on his first trip to London as a teenager, and with whom he had then lost touch.³ ‘I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of the word myriad, I must, on my different visits to London, have looked into many myriads of female faces’; and the search ‘pursued in the crowds of London’, was pursued also ‘through many a year in dreams’. On the last occasion that he saw Ann, he had been worried about the difficulty of attempting to find her again in ‘the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street’, and his later dreams literalised for him the expression ‘a sea of faces’ (3: 394, 375, 222, 368). As a result of this ‘searching for Ann amongst fluctuating crowds’ (fluctus, a wave), he writes, the ‘human face began to reveal itself’ upon the ‘rocking waves’ of an ocean:

the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing; faces that surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations: infinite was my agitation; my mind tossed, as it seemed, upon the billowy ocean, and weltered upon the weltering waves.

(3: 441)

This sense of the sheer terrifying numberlessness of the world's population, of its ‘hunger-bitten myriads’, of ‘surplus’ or ‘redundant’ people (7: 257-8), re-emerges in the preamble to the opium dreams as a terror inspired by ‘the enormous population of Asia’. ‘The difficulty in India is in individualizing your man’, wrote the Baptist missionary Joshua Russell (265); and De Quincey like most other Europeans conceived of Asia beyond the Tigris as a place where people seemed to run into each other, to replicate each other, to compose one mass without divisions or features. ‘South-eastern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions’. The phrase ‘officina gentium’, ‘factory where people are made’, is also used by De Quincey, in an incident we shall look at later, to describe a factory, full of ‘Jacobins’, that frightened him in childhood. Differently construed, it is probably this phrase that Disraeli had in mind when, in 1838, he described England's aspirations to be ‘the workshop of the World’; and the phrase may once have proposed a kind of equivalence between the ‘mass society’ of the industrial nations, and an idea of Asia as ‘swarming with human life’—with human beings who are evoked only to be dehumanised.⁴ In a late essay on China, De Quincey found in Canton, a city where the myriads were oriental, a final realisation of his nightmares: Canton, the city where Englishmen are ‘cut to pieces’ whenever they wander out alone; and the city which, as De Quincey acknowledged, was the creation of Europe, and of the European ‘factories’ there, as the trading warehouses were called (3: 442; 1857 7).

This terror of society in the mass, of what he calls in an earlier essay on China the ‘monstrous aggregations of human beings … in the suburbs of mighty cities’, is certainly not, as De Quincey sometimes suggests, the whole of what is displaced and represented as oriental in the description of the opium dreams and its elaborate preamble (B50 1841 688). It was the bit, perhaps, that he could most easily own up to, could acknowledge to himself, at the time when he was writing the Opium-Eater. Nor were humans growing like weeds, or swarming like ants or bees, the only ‘unimaginable horror’ to take on an oriental character in De Quincey's writing about his dreams. The turbaned ‘Malay’ who had once called in at Dove Cottage; the imagery of Hindu theology; the Hindu caste system; the vastness of space and time in India and China; the fauna of everywhere from Egypt to China, but chiefly snakes and crocodiles; pagodas, pyramids, forests, reeds, mud, the Ganges, the Nile, the Euphrates, and so on and so on—all these came together to form, in De Quincey's head, an eclectic visual style he described as the ‘barbaresque’, a cabinet of oriental curiosities, partly terrifying just because its contents were so unpredictably miscellaneous (14: 48-9, 55-9).

At one point De Quincey himself represents his ‘oriental imagery’ as composing, precisely, a collection:

under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Hindostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and her gods under the same law.

(3: 442)

What is being evoked here is perhaps not so much the random collection of oriental curios in the haphazard way of the mid-eighteenth-century virtuoso; it is the beginnings of the large-scale, scientific collecting of the nineteenth-century museum age, with its aspiration to represent everything—‘all creatures … all trees and plants’—in its galleries and in its botanical and its zoological gardens.⁵ Just as the experiences of urban society which find expression in this dream imagery speak to us of a very specific moment in the economic, social and cultural history of Britain, so does that imagery itself. The ‘barbaresque’ Hindu divinities, for example, had been elaborately depicted in Thomas Maurice's History of Hindostan (1795-9) and Edward Moor's Hindu Pantheon (1810). In rather less elaborate form they had illustrated Sir William Jones's essay ‘The Gods of Greece, Italy, and India’ in the Asiatic Researches, which De Quincey had read when a boy, and in which he would have read the first serious essays of British orientalists in India. The antiquities collected by the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt—hitherto regarded as too inhospitable a country for regular collectors—were confiscated by the British in 1801 and brought to England in 1802, to form the real basis of the collection of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum. The Chinese imagery, more generalised, seems to derive from the chinoiserie of eighteenth-century garden design and interior décor: pagodas, and tables and sofas ‘instinct with life’ because carved with the heads and feet of animals.

In short, this oriental imagery is the imagery of an early but well-established imperialist culture, an imagery which had been collected and become familiar to the British imagination, to this degree and in this combination, only in the very last years of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth. Its availability depended on the combination of military, naval, mercantile and scholarly endeavours and acquisitions which was especially typified by the activities of the Asiatic Society in Bengal around 1800; but the increase of British ‘interest’ in Asia further east than India, for example, and the increasing awareness in Britain of the Ottoman Empire as sick but surviving competitor in the Near East, were contributing their own ingredients to this miscellaneous oriental soup. These ingredients did not come only or mainly as material objects—animals, ornaments, exhibits; they came as narratives too, circulated by newspapers, by engravings, and by melodramas, pantomimes and plays. At the centre of these narratives was a succession of oriental characters drawn from fictions such as the Arabian Nights, or from barely less fictionalised accounts of history and politics—Nadir Shah, Siraj-ud-daula, Haider Ali, Tipu Sultan, Ali Pacha, Runjeet Singh—‘oriental despots’ who were the forerunners in the European imagination of Khomeini, Ghadaffi, and Saddam Hussein—all individualised by the different ferocities imputed to them, but more or less identical to each other in their power to thrill the nursery and the theatre, and to enrage the drawing-room and the club.

The various ingredients, material and immaterial, of the oriental soup, had only two things in common. They were images of an exotic world east of the Mediterranean and still only haphazardly penetrated, not to put too fine a point on it, by western European power; and they were especially serviceable, as forms, images, ideas which could be used to represent ‘unimaginable horrors’, precisely because the East entered the western European imagination as an unknown, empty space—empty of everything, that is, except its appropriable resources, imaginative as well as material. Of all those resources, the abundantly decorated surfaces of the artefacts of Turkey, Egypt, Persia, India and China, intricately abstract or flamboyantly figurative, were perhaps particularly valuable and easy to appropriate. So crowded, to western eyes, were the surfaces of oriental objects, covered with decoration and imagery not understood and not thought worth understanding, that they could become the very opposite of what they appeared to be—blank screens on which could be projected whatever it was that the inhabitants of Europe, individually or collectively, wanted to displace, and to represent as other to themselves.

II

In De Quincey's writing, however, there is often a particular process or scheme of displacement at work, one which suggests that a simple binary model, of self and other, might not always be adequate for thinking about the uses and dangers of the oriental to the western imagination. An especially interesting example—interesting because it seems to occur playfully, anecdotally, as if nothing very much is at risk—occurs in his discussion of the highly differentiated topography of John Palmer's mail-coaches, in the first section of the long essay ‘The English Mail-Coach’.⁶ The essay either records or invents a fascinating moment in the history of class division, the moment when—according to De Quincey—it became a fashionable, a sparkish thing to do, for young gentlemen to travel on the outside of the coach, next or near to the coachman, rather than on the inside, the traditional and more expensive refuge of the genteel. The fashion took hold, according to De Quincey, at some time in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Before that time, the relation between the division of space on the coach and the division of class among the passengers had apparently been unambiguous; those on the outside were, precisely, outsiders, ‘Pariahs’ as De Quincey puts it. When the fashion became established, and young gentlemen took to travelling on the outside, the insiders attempted to behave as if the usual etiquette which governed the behaviour of the two types of passenger at inns and staging-posts, and which kept them apart at meal times especially, could still universally be applied. This attempt was strongly resisted by the sparkish young gents.

The division was reinforced by the simple binary terminology in which it was described. In addition to ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, the politics of the first decade of the nineteenth century made available the terms ‘aristocrat’ and ‘democrat’. And because since the early and middle 1790s to be a ‘democrat’ was to be allied, in the eyes of ‘aristocrats’, with the un-English, Francophile, and therefore treasonous politics of revolution, De Quincey can describe the relations between insiders and outsiders in terms of treason and the suspicion of treason. No insider would have dreamed, he tells us, of exchanging one word of civility with an outsider: ‘even to have kicked an outsider’, he writes, ‘might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of blood’. If outsiders attempted the treasonous act of breakfasting with insiders, the act would have been so incomprehensible as to be regarded as ‘a case of lunacy … rather than of treason’. Though the outsiders were ‘gownsmen’, they were ‘constructively’, by virtue of where they sat, ‘raff’ or ‘snobs’—varsity slang for (mere) townsmen—there is a reference here to the controversial crime of ‘constructive treason’, and a suggestion that, by sitting outside, the young Oxford gentlemen ‘lose caste’. In spite of all this, however, the young gentlemen managed to effect ‘a perfect Revolution’ in ‘mail-coach society’.⁷

Characteristically, or so it will soon appear, De Quincey attempts to heal the breach between insider and outsider by treating it, in the first place, as not really a breach at all, there being no real class difference between the two varieties of passenger; and then by looking round for a third object which both the first two can agree to regard as other to themselves. He remembers a coach from Birmingham, some ‘tawdry’, ‘plebian’, ‘jacobinical’ ‘“Tallyho” or “Highflyer”’, which once had the temerity to race against the mail. ‘The connexion of the mail with the state and executive government’ enables him to argue that for ‘such a Birmingham thing … to challenge us … has an air of sedition’; and for it actually to win would have been ‘treason’. It is not enough, however, to represent the ‘poor Brummagem brute’ as plebeian, even as Jacobinical; to complete the processes of identification and abjection in which he is engaged, the rival coach must be orientalised. It had, noted De Quincey scornfully, ‘as much writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor’. The accusation of un-Englishness, expressed in the terms ‘pariah’ and ‘traitor’, and originally used to distinguish between insiders and outsiders on the Royal Mail, is now used to unite them, by being levelled at the oriental and treasonous ‘Brummagem coach’. It is a characteristic of true Englishness, we are reminded—of the Englishness of the polite classes—that they practise understatement, by contrast with the plethora of meaningless signification which characterises the East, and which has come to be connected, somehow, with the tawdry, the gimcrack, and with whatever other vulgarities are conjured up by ‘Brummagem’. The connection of all these terms—pariah, vulgar, traitorous, un-English—is finally underlined when the triumph of the English mail-coach, in leaving the Birmingham vehicle far behind, is enjoyed by all except ‘a Welsh rustic’, who for the playful purposes of the essay can be regarded as a true, because foreign and plebeian, outsider (13: 273-83).

The process we have been observing begins by identifying an apparently exhaustive binary: there is a self, and there is an other, an inside and an outside, an above and a below. The self is constituted by the other, and it requires that other to mark out its own limit, its own definition; yet the two are implacably hostile, and their confrontation appears unavoidable, for there is no third term, no other identity conceivable, nowhere else to go. This is the situation we are presented with at the start of ‘The English Mail-Coach’, and if De Quincey himself starts off on the outside, and so apparently in the place of the other, that is only an early indication of how easily the distinction is about to be, not abolished exactly, but accommodated. The scheme of this accommodation is given in the title of this chapter: the terms self and other can be thought of as superseded by ‘this’ and ‘that’, in a narrative which now says, there is this here, and it is different from that there, but the difference between them, though in its own way important, is as nothing compared with the difference between the two of them considered together, and that third thing, way over there, which is truly other to them both.

I could borrow Gayatri Spivak's distinction here between a ‘self-consolidating other’ and an ‘absolute other’, for what is involved is precisely an act of consolidation of the self. If I prefer my own way of putting it, that is because it seems to dramatise how what at first seems ‘other’ can be made over to the side of the self—to a subordinate position on that side—only so long as a new, and a newly absolute ‘other’ is constituted to fill the discursive space that has thus been evacuated. In an essay on the mutiny, rebellion or war of independence in India in 1857, De Quincey describes his writing as a matter of ‘putting this and that together’; and the phrase seems to make the point that to talk of ‘this’ and ‘that’ is always to suppose or to require ‘the other’, a continually reinvented third term which acknowledges that whenever two things have been ‘put together’, something else has been pushed aside (Spivak 1985b 131; U1: 311-12; 1: 102).⁸

There is a whole historical and geopolitical system in De Quincey's works which is constructed by using the same spatial scheme as is at work in ‘The English Mail-Coach’. There is a ‘this’, and there is a something hostile to it, something which lies, almost invariably, to the east; but there is an East beyond that East, where something lurks which is equally threatening to both, and which enables or obliges them to reconcile their differences. The translation of the London poor, experienced as oppressive, into ‘the enormous population of Asia’, may already have provided an example of the process used to make safe more serious threats than the one offered by the ‘Brummagem thing’ to the genteel mail-coach. It may be the representation of the poor as oriental, when they are experienced as ‘oppressive’, that enables them to be experienced also as ‘sympathetic’: whatever is bad about them is characterised as exotic, as extrinsic, as not really them at all, with the effect that they are separated from, and contrasted with, their own representation as oriental. There are the cities of London and Westminster; there is the East End; and there is the East. It is by this means that the limited class solidarity essential to an imperial power, and especially to its ruling class, is produced, for it enables the differences between one class and another to be fully acknowledged, and then represented as almost trivial, when compared with the civilisation they both share, but which is emphatically not shared by whatever oriental other, the sepoys or the dervishes, is in season at the time (see Kiernan, 316-17). Here are some more examples.

FRENCH HISTORY

The village where Joan of Arc was born, Domrémy, stands on the Meuse, which divides France from the territories of the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine. Despite its significance as a political frontier, the river did not divide the populations; it was crossed by bridges and ferries, there was a good deal of intermarriage between the left bank and the right, and so, ‘like other frontiers, it produced a mixed race, representing the cis and the trans’. ‘The Dukes of Bar and Lorraine had for generations pursued the policy of eternal warfare with France on their own account, yet also of eternal amity and league with France in case anybody else presumed to attack her’. This river was a frontier, therefore, only when no third party was to be taken into consideration. There was however another frontier, to the east—the mountains of the Vosges, covered with vast, impenetrable and mysterious woods. This formed the true ‘eastern frontier’ of France and Lorraine alike, the dividing line between two Empires of East and West, not unlike ‘the desert between Syria and the Euphrates’ (5: 390, 394-5).

GREEK HISTORY

In the time of Herodotus, Persia was the sole enemy of Greece, and at that time the whole of the known world consisted of the Persian Empire, and of the countries more or less within the orbit of Greek civilisation or knowledge. In that sense the known world was divided between Greece and Persia, and it is easy to think of the ‘terrific collisions’ between the two as engrossing all that there then was of history and the world. But if the Greeks, seen in this light, had an interest in the defeat of Persia, they had still greater interest in the stability of the Great King and his Empire. For in another light Persia was ‘a great resisting mass interjacent between Greece and the unknown enemies to the north-east or east’. The sense of uncertainty, caused by ignorance of what ‘fierce, unknown races’ lay eastwards of Persia or in the easternmost reaches of the Persian Empire, meant that the Great King could also be seen ‘as a common friend against some horrid enemy from the infinite deserts of Asia’, though to be sure he appeared more often to the Greeks as an enemy than as a friend (10: 176-7).

ROMAN HISTORY

The garden of Greenhay, a small country house to the south of Manchester, was divided from the surrounding countryside by the Cornbrook, a stream crossed by a small bridge at the front gate of the garden. The territory on one side of this stream belonged to Romulus, on the other side to his scornful brother Remus, and the two territories may have corresponded to the kingdoms of Gombroon and Tigrosylvania. The brothers were engaged in continual conflict with each other. The northern boundary of the area formed by their two conjoint territories was the River Medlock, and the bridge over this river was held at one time or another by Carthaginians and by various other enemies of Rome—Goths, Vandals—in equal need of deletion. In their long-continued war with these peoples, the Roman brothers were always if uneasily united (1: 69-117).

BYZANTINE HISTORY

Because of the habit of regarding the Roman Empire as in a state of more or less permanent decline from as early as the reign of Commodus, and because of the hostility of the refined and effeminate Byzantine Court to the simple and manly Crusaders, ‘we have all been accustomed to speak of the Byzantine Empire with scorn’. This is a great mistake; for though in many respects western Christendom and the Byzantine Empire appear as binary opposites, masculine and feminine, Roman and Greek, in another light they must be seen as united in their resistance to the formidable powers of the further East. However effete the Byzantine Empire may have been, its forces were capable in the seventh century of crossing the Tigris deep into Persia; more recently, it has been the ‘capital bulwark’ against the forward march of ‘Mahometanism’, the ‘great aegis’, indeed, of western Christendom (7: 255-6).

THE HISTORY OF ‘FRANKISTAN’

But then again, and in yet another light, Christendom and the ‘Mahometan nations’ should not be seen as in all respects exhaustively and irrevocably antagonistic. Both have this in common, that they subscribe to true religions; ‘true’, not in the sense that both have equal access to the absolute truth, for when all is said and done, Christians are Christians and masculine, and Muslims are emasculated infidels. But the religions of both are, truly, religions and not mere superstitions: they are both, as the Muslims say, ‘religions of the book’; they are monotheisic, and they consist in a body of doctrine and of moral teaching, and not simply in a set of ritual observances. And even if we do think of Christendom and Islam as ineluctable opposites, and as connected only by their hostilities, they have become familiar to each other, even companionable, by that very opposition. This is true, at least, of the Ottomans, Arabs and Moors. To these peoples, and to European Christendom, we might apply the collective name Frankistan, to differentiate them from the peoples of southern and eastern Asia, whether the effeminate ‘Mohammedans’ of Bengal, or the ‘Hindoos’ and Buddhists, for example, with their ‘foul’, ‘monstrous idolatries’, and (especially) the ‘pollution’ of ‘Hindoo polytheism’. This process of rapprochement between Christendom and western Islam has been accelerated in the nineteenth century, as a result of the decay of the Ottoman Empire (according to De Quincey, ‘cancered’, ‘crazy’, and ‘paralytic’), and the growth of steam power, science, and European travel and trade to the Levant. ‘Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria—all that lies west of the Tigris’, is coming ‘within the network of Christian civilisation’, and has been ‘taken under the surveillance of the great Christian powers’ (1: 373; 7: 275; 8: 207-43, 308; J1: 41, 290; J2: 12n.; 7: 212; B48 1840 559-62).⁹

III

The kind of imaginary geography represented by De Quincey's ‘this/that/the other’ formula had its historical equivalent in British imperial policy or (for they were not always the same thing) the policy of the East India Company: the attempts to ‘play off’ Muslim against Hindu, or Sikh against Muslim, are obvious examples, and so is the tortuous policy of the Company towards Afghanistan. Here is the Edinburgh Review, pronouncing on imperial policy in 1840:

It is of vital importance to British India that Afghanistan should be interposed as an effectual barrier between the great Mahomedan power of Central Asia—urged on by Muscovite intrigue, and supported, whenever a favourable opportunity may offer, by Muscovite troops—and all that is inflammable within the peninsula.

(E71 1840 339)

The 1838 invasion of Afghanistan—the country to which the terms ‘barrier-state’, ‘buffer-state’, were first applied—was only the clearest instance of that ‘monomaniac’ zeal which, as Henry Lushington pointed out, could entertain no other conception of the country than that its destiny was to be a ‘barrier to British India’ (Lushington 55).¹⁰

In Afghanistan, indeed, to which between 1840 and 1844 De Quincey devoted no less than three essays, two competing ‘systems of diplomatic calculation’ were kept from colliding with each other only by the buffers interposed by the inhabitants and the geography of that country: it was here that in the 1830s and early 1840s British imperialism met itself coming back, as it were. For as it gazed eastward from Britain, the Tigris appeared as the last ditch between a manageable and an entirely hostile other; but as it gazed westward from India, the Indus became the ‘river of separation’ between a vulnerable and over-extended empire and the fantasised rapacity of Persia and Russia. In two essays from the early 1840s, by no means untypical of mid-century writing on the imperial theme, De Quincey attempts to ‘arrange’, to ‘settle and determine the idea of Persia’—the other large country, besides Afghanistan, between the Tigris and the Indus—not according to any Persian notion of that country, but according to what it might be convenient for a version of British foreign policy to believe. ‘The Turkish or western chambers’ of ‘Southern (or Mahometan) Asia,’ he announces, ‘may be viewed as reaching to the Tigris; the middle, or Persian part, from the Tigris to the desert on the west frontier of Affghanistan; the third or Affghan chamber to the Indus’. The Indus is thus proclaimed as ‘the true natural eastern boundary of Cabul or Affghanistan’; and the same river, before the annexation of Sind and the Punjab carried the frontier still further west, was often represented as the ‘natural boundary’ of India—the more natural because one of its other names, the ‘Attok’, so the traveller G. T. Vigne explained, ‘is derived from Atkana, or Atukna, signifying in Hindustani, to stop; no pious Hindoo will venture to go beyond it of his own accord, for fear of losing caste’ (B52 1842 280; B48 1840 562; E71 1840 355; Vigne 1840 30).¹¹

This is not the occasion to attempt a discussion of the effects on the imperial imagination of these complementary yet also competing systems of geography—systems which at times the British sought to impose by force on the imaginations of others. But the attempt to annex Afghanistan, and the continued anxiety about the security of the North-West frontier, must have contributed much to that sense of divided positionality which—as Homi Bhabha in particular has argued—became a characteristic of the British in the mid-nineteenth century, in Britain as well as in India. De Quincey, who shared Tory doubts about the wisdom of sending the expeditionary force to Kabul, probably suffered less than many from this particular symptom of ambivalence, the dis-orientation produced by the discovery of enemies to the west as well as to the east. He attacked the Afghanistan campaign on the grounds that it was an attempt to raise ‘a powerful barrier’ against ‘enemies who might gather from the west’ (my emphasis), but who had never been clearly identified (B56 1844 139). His own horror of the Orient was so great that for him the primary geopolitical significance of the Indus was probably as an additional line of defence, keeping the Hindus where they belonged. ‘Such is the wonderful attachment to the British uniform’, wrote Vigne, ‘that in the late expedition to Afghanistan, the native Sepahis [sepoys], many of them Rajpoots, cheered loudly when they saw the British flag flying at Bukkur, and passed the bridge over the Indus with enthusiasm’ (Vigne 1840 30-1). That image alone is enough to explain De Quincey's hostility to the Afghanistan adventure: the image of Hindus, in arms, crossing the Forbidden River, advancing towards the Tigris and Frankistan, and threatening to reclaim that barrier state for the other.

IV

The scheme we have been examining has clear affinities to the rhetorical figure Barthes described, in relation to the politics of class, as ‘inoculation’. This consists in ‘admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound institution the better to conceal its principal evil’. His more general, supplementary description of inoculation is for our purposes more useful: ‘one immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion’ (Barthes 150). The apparently mixed metaphor here, which seems to identify political opposition and disease, is particularly appropriate to De Quincey's scheme, which figures the oriental as infection, and also as rebel, mutineer or subversive immigrant. De Quincey's life was terrorised by the fear of an unending and interlinked chain of infections from the East, which threatened to enter his system and to overthrow it, leaving him visibly and permanently ‘compromised’ and orientalised. ‘It is well known’, he writes,

that the very reason why the Spanish beyond all nations became so gloomily jealous of a Jewish cross in the pedigree was because, until the vigilance of the Church rose in ferocity, in no nation was such a cross so common. The hatred of fear is ever the deepest. And men hated the Jewish taint, as once in Jerusalem they hated the leprosy, because, even whilst they raved against it, the secret proofs of it might be detected amongst their own kindred; even as in the Temple, whilst once a Hebrew king rose in mutiny against the priesthood (2 Chron. xxvi. 16-20), suddenly the leprosy that dethroned him blazed out upon his forehead.

(13: 210)

The ‘oriental leprosy’, ‘oriental cholera’, ‘oriental typhus fever’, the ‘plague of Cairo’, the ‘cancerous kisses’ of the Egyptian crocodile: the fear and hatred projected on to the East kept threatening to return in one such form or another, as in dreams they did return; and it is against these that De Quincey inoculates himself, taking something of the East into himself, and projecting whatever he could not acknowledge as his out into a farther East, an East beyond the East.¹² The Eurocentric nomenclature of imperialism is absolutely to the point here, in its definitions of a treacherous but sometimes manageable ‘Near East’, a terrifying ‘Far East’, and between them an ambiguous and hard to locate ‘Middle East’, which seems (like the Middle West in America) to wander around the continent on its own tectonic plate, turning up here or there according to need—a kind of itinerant barrier or buffer between what can possibly be allowed in, and what must be kept out at all costs.

The process of inoculation we have been examining in De Quincey's geopolitical schemata is rather less successful, however, than Barthes suggests. It never immunises against the infections of the East; at best it enables the patient to shake them off for a time, or gives him the illusion of having done so, but always with the fear that they will return in a more virulent form, as supergerms now themselves immune from the attacks of antibodies. The process of inoculation involves simultaneously protecting someone against a disease and infecting them with it, and the troubling ambiguity of this process is often visible in the very language in which it is described. ‘The finished and accomplished surgeon’, writes De Quincey, explaining why he refused to pick a quarrel with one, ‘carries a pocket-case of surgical instruments,—lancets, for instance, that are loaded with virus in every stage of contagion. Might he not inoculate me with rabies, with hydrophobia, with the plague of Cairo’? (5: 353). To be inoculated against the disease is at the same time to be inoculated with it, and in De Quincey's case the process was accompanied by a higher than usual degree of risk; for he already had the disease he was attempting to immunise himself against. As we will see, the disease was always an external materialisation of an internal psychic anxiety, something first projected and rejected, then taken back in; and there was no guarantee that he might not rediscover that disorder in the East he had ingested as well as in the East he had thrown away.¹³

A case in point is his use of opium. To begin with, the phrase ‘English Opium-Eater’ itself can be read as an example of inoculation. The use of opium was associated in the English imagination with every Asian country from Turkey, through Persia and India, to China, but to describe oneself as an ‘eater’ of opium was to claim kinship with a recognisably Turkish identity—a kinship qualified, however, and hopefully made safe, by the adjective ‘English’ (L249). At one point in the Opium-Eater—we can worry about the precise point later—De Quincey playfully describes his long experience of ‘East Indian and Turkish’ opium as a sequence of medical experiments conducted ‘for the general benefit of the world’. He tells us of various surgeons who for the purposes of research had inoculated themselves with cancer, plague, and hydrophobia. Like these, De Quincey had ‘inoculated’ himself ‘with the poison of eight thousand drops of laudanum per day’, in search of ‘happiness’, and against the return of the ‘misery’, the ‘blank desolation’, the ‘settled and abiding darkness’ which had first made him a habitual user of the drug. By day the opium drove the misery away; by night it returned, by the agency of the opium itself, and more virulent than ever (3: 406, 231).

It cannot have helped that the practice of inoculation itself, no less famously than the practice of taking opium, had been borrowed from the Turks—the method of protecting oneself against the oriental was itself oriental—and no one knew better than De Quincey that his inoculations rarely provided the immunisation they promised. The opening section of ‘The English Mail-Coach’, his most light-hearted rehearsal of the ‘this/that/the other’ scheme, seems to function as the architectural plan for a system of fortification which is normally to be found only as an archaeological ruin, as the trace of an overwhelming defeat at the hands of a persistent and ferocious invader. We have seen how, in the first part of the essay, insiders and outsiders are brought together by the identification of something truly outside, plebeian and oriental. But no sooner has this rearrangement been managed, than De Quincey discovers (we shall see how later) that the coachman perched up beside him on the box of the mail-coach itself, loyally dressed in the King's livery, has been transfigured into an Egyptian crocodile, quite close enough to threaten De Quincey with his ‘cancerous kisses’ (13: 289).

Likewise, the vast sea of the metropolitan poor, the ‘myriads’ of human faces that tyrannised over De Quincey's dreams, were transformed at one stage in the description of the opium dreams into the ‘abominable head of the crocodile … multiplied into ten thousand repetitions’—and this at the point where the crocodile takes over from the Chinese as the worst possible thing to find yourself next to, and to be forced to live with. Or still worse, the coachman appears as the very proof of the dangers of inoculation—part man, part reptile, a horrifying mixture of human and inhuman, English and oriental, a crocodile grafted on to a man, the product of ‘the horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures’. In botany, ‘inoculation’ can involve the grafting of one genus or species on to another, and that is exactly what has happened here. The appearance of the coachman as crocodile is one mise en scène—one of many, as we shall see—of De Quincey's horrified discovery that his is (to use Homi Bhabha's term) a hybrid identity; that his relation with an imaginary East, like that of an imperial power with its colonial ‘dependencies’, is a relation (at best) of symbiotic interdependence, and can no longer be thought of in terms of a safe transaction between a self and an other (3: 443; 13: 291n.; Bhabha 20-2).¹⁴

The continual attempt to create places of safety, the continual return of an ‘alien nature’ which has been so carefully expelled, the repeated rediscovery of hybridity, of cultural/racial impurity, is described by De Quincey in these terms

The dreamer finds housed within himself—occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain—holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart—some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated,—still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even that—even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness—might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? These, however, are horrors from the kingdom of anarchy and darkness, which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment, and gloomily retire from exposition.

(13: 92n.)

An ‘alien nature’, once its presence within one has been suspected, can sometimes be represented, it seems, as a repetition or a ‘double’ of one's own nature, not the self, exactly, but not the other, either—a ‘that’ to one's own ‘this’. To treat it like this is to produce a psychic economy which is bearable, but barely so; the self may still be a kind of sanctuary, though hardly an inviolable one. It may be, however, that the ‘alien nature’ is so very alien as to be the enemy of one's own, in which case it will have to be represented as beyond the cordon sanitaire which defines what can be accepted as one's own nature, and which constitutes that nature. But what if it won’t go quietly? or what if it has the power of reproducing itself infinitely, so that as each alien nature is tamed, domesticated, recuperated, another appears in the very place, the very chamber of the brain, the very sanctuary which has just been swept, swabbed down, disinfected, fumigated?¹⁵

The oriental is for De Quincey a name for that very power, that process of endless multiplication whereby the strategy of self-consolidation, of the recuperation or domestication of the other, always involves the simultaneous constitution of a new threat, or a new version of the old, in the space evacuated by the first. The Orient is the place of a malign, a luxuriant or virulent productivity, a breeding-ground of images of the inhuman, or of the no less terrifyingly half-human, which cannot be exterminated, except at the cost of exterminating one's self, and which cannot be kept back beyond the various Maginot lines, from the Vosges to the Tigris, that De Quincey attempts to defend against the ‘horrid enemy from Asia’. In the Opium-Eater he speaks of the Chinese and ‘the barrier of utter abhorrence placed between myself and them’, but though the abhorrence was real enough, there was no barrier at all, and no ‘between’. Clive, writes Macaulay (1: 508-9), ‘was no sooner matched against an Indian intriguer, than he became himself an Indian intriguer’. De Quincey was all the figures from the Orient that appear in his writings. He was Chinese; he was the Malay that haunted his dreams; he was the crocodile. In one of his essays on Roman history he repeats the story told by a late Roman historian—he treats it as absurd, as an example of the ‘anecdotage’ of Rome in decline—of how Julius Caesar so enjoyed tickling the ‘catastrophes’ (the posteriors) of crocodiles (presumably he had some in a pool) that he ‘anointed himself with crocodile fat, by which means he humbugged the crocodiles, ceasing to be Caesar, and passing for a crocodile, swimming and playing amongst them’. Like Caesar, De Quincey had become smeared with the fat of crocodiles, the mud of the Nile, the oil of opium, with whatever varieties of slime the Orient afforded, and so he had ceased to be himself (6: 439).

V

So far, the question of what anxieties, fears, terrors are figured by the oriental in De Quincey's dream narratives has received only one answer—his fear of the urban poor. He himself, however, gives other answers to the question: the visions, he suggests in the final preface to the Opium-Eater, are expressions of a fear of losing a woman, or they are repetitions of the story of how she is already lost. In this light, as we have seen, the myriads of faces seem to have meaning only as the manifestation of some ‘shadowy malice’ which occludes the sight of the ‘lost Pariah woman’—‘Ann the Outcast’; a nightmare vision self-consciously repaired in De Quincey's ‘Autobiography’, where the early death of his sister Elizabeth is represented as her absorption, ‘high in heaven’, into ‘a gleaming host of faces’. In other discussions of the origin and meaning of his dreams, he acknowledges that ‘some of the phenomena developed in my dream-scenery, undoubtedly, do but repeat the experiences of my childhood; and others seem likely to have been growths and fructifications from seeds at that time sown’. At another time there seems to be no content in the dreams worth considering that is not a displacement of De Quincey's ‘nursery experience’, as he calls it, or his ‘nursery afflictions’ (3: 222; 1: 50; 1985 92; 13: 339-40).

I have offered, in this introductory chapter, to write an account of De Quincey's fear of the Orient, and of the means by which he attempts to cope with that fear. What I have actually written, it will soon be apparent, is largely an account of his ‘nursery afflictions’, or of the mythic melodrama he created from his childhood memories and his adult fantasies. Only in the last five chapters will we discover De Quincey turning his attention to various ‘Eastern Questions’—the recent history of the Ottoman Empire, the Opium Wars, the first Afghan War, the Kandyan wars in Sri Lanka, the Indian ‘mutiny’—as matters of general public concern. It is, I hope to show, especially but by no means exclusively in the myth of his own childhood, as it is elaborated in his autobiographical writings, and as it re-emerges—by way of repeated patterns of imagery and structures of narrative—in his stories and essays, that most of the material is to be found which is pertinent to an account of De Quincey's terror of almost all things oriental. The scenery of that mythic melodrama is as much and as eclectically oriental as the scenery of the opium dreams themselves: the corpses that litter the stage are discovered against a backdrop of various eastern landscapes, from an orientalised East End to a demonised Far East; behind every palm-tree lurks an eastern assassin, human, animal or microbiological. The cast are all members of De Quincey's own family, some appearing as the terrified victims of the Orient, and some as its terrifying embodiment.

But this fear of the oriental, which at times will appear as a displacement of some primal and private terror, is also just what it appears to be: a fear of the ‘modes of life’, the ‘manners’, of a vaguely differentiated but universally abhorrent Asia. De Quincey himself seems to suggest that this fear, just because it is ‘deeper than I can analyse’ (3: 442), must be standing for the fear of something else; but this book will avoid (I hope) the attempt to establish a hierarchy of precedence, an organisation into the manifest and the latent, the surface and the depth, among the various objects of fear his writings disclose. One part of my argument will be that in De Quincey's writings the guilt of childhood is made over to a troop of wild animals and assassins who are especially terrifying because they are oriental; and that the peoples of the Orient—the Kandyans, the Hindus, the Chinese, the Malays—become especially objects of terror to De Quincey, just because they are used to represent the bogeymen and bogeywomen of his earliest years. It is equally possible, however, to conceive of the guilt which finds expression in the narratives of De Quincey's childhood as a fully social guilt, a guilt at his own participation in the imperialist fantasies that become so all-pervasive in the national imagination from the 1820s and 1830s, and which, because it cannot be avowed, can find a voice and can be rationalised only by being displaced. It seems best, indeed, to think of the relation between childhood and the oriental in De Quincey's writings as a relation between two forms of guilt, personal and political, in which each can be a displaced version of the other, and in which each aggravates the other in an ascending spiral of fear and of violence. …

Notes

1. I am indebted to Raphael Samuel for information on the Saturday night markets in London. When Monday was treated as a day of rest, or ‘holy day’, it was referred to by artisans, labourers and their critics as ‘St. Monday’. The term ‘ghoster’ may be anachronistic in the context of De Quincey: when East-End artisans of the 1880s and 1890s worked very late on Friday evening, or even all night, to complete their piecework by Saturday, they described themselves as working a ‘ghoster’. The practice, if not the term, must have been as common at the beginning of the century as at the end.

2. For another example of De Quincey claiming to converse with ‘poor men’, and discovering that almost all are ‘jacobins at heart’, see ‘Anti-Corn-Law Deputation to Sir Robert Peel’, B52 1842 272. A hatred of Jacobinism, and a disposition to regard as Jacobin all political positions (and especially Brougham's) that could not be accommodated within the Tory party, is a feature of De Quincey's writing as early as 1818, if he is indeed the author of Close Comments upon a Straggling Speech (De Quincey 1818; attributed by Axon). For more of De Quincey's views on Jacobinism before 1830, see 1966, 51-2, 78, 284, and 366 and 391, where Lord Brougham's Jacobinism is again unmasked (as it is also in ‘The Present Cabinet in Relation to the Times’, B29 1831 148-9, 153-6). De Quincey's fear of Jacobinism was reawakened, though not immediately, by the events in France in 1830. His Blackwood's article ‘French Revolution’ of September 1830 (542-58) is relatively temperate; but in a series of articles thereafter his fear of popular Jacobinism became intense: see ‘France and England’ (B28 1830 699-718; ‘Political Anticipations’ (B28 1830 719-36); ‘The Late Cabinet’ (B28 1830 960-81); ‘The Present Cabinet in Relation to the Times’ (B29 1831 143-58); ‘On the Approaching Revolution in Great Britain’ (B30 1831 313-29); ‘The Prospects for Britain’ (B31 1832 369-91); ‘Mrs Hannah More’ (T4 1833 293-321). In ‘Hints for the Hustings’, Chartism is unmasked as another form of ‘the fierce Jacobinism which growls for ever in the lower strata of our … domestic population’ (B48 1840 309-13). In ‘Secession from the Church of Scotland’ (1844), we hear of ‘Christianity prostituted to the service of Jacobinism’ (14: 259).

3. On the figure of London as labyrinth in De Quincey's writings, see J. H. Miller 24-5.

4. Disraeli made the remark in a speech in the House of Commons on March 15th 1838.

5. For cabinets of curiosities and oriental collections, see Impey and MacGregor 251-80; for the early history of the British Museum, see E. Miller, esp. 19-90, 191-244; for a general history of the development of museums as institutions, see Murray.

6. For Palmer's coaches, see Copeland 109-14.

7. ‘Raffs’, according to Grose, is ‘an appellation given by the gownsmen of the university of Oxford to the inhabitants of that place’. It was at Cambridge, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that townsmen were called ‘snobs’. Other early to mid-nineteenth-century meanings of ‘snob’ include a person of the lower classes; an ostentatious person without breeding; one who seeks to associate with those of a higher class. ‘Raffs’, more generally, refers to the lowest class of society. In a note to the passage (13: 275n.) De Quincey suggests that the application of the term ‘snobs’ to shoemakers did not become current until some ten years after the incidents described in ‘The English Mail-Coach’.

8. For a useful survey of theories of colonial discourse, see Parry.

9. For Frankistan, or ‘Frangistan’, see also Lindsay 283.

10. There are several other such imaginary tripartite geopolitical divisions of the globe in De Quincey's writings. For example, if a belief in the unity of God is a crucial test, then Persia in the period of Xerxes and of Herodotus should be seen as belonging with the Jews of Israel to its west, rather than with the superstitious peoples of the further East. At that period Asia can be understood as divided by the river Tigris into Asia cis-Tigritana; and Asia trans-Tigritana; and although the Persian Empire was established on both sides of the river (7: 178), true Persia was to be found between the two great rivers, that is to say, it was cis-Tigritanian (J2: 242). For contemporary attitudes to the Afghanistan campaign, see Bearce 191-9. For another account of the differences that structure De Quincey's imaginary Orient see Maniquis 96-7.

11. In De Quincey's essay ‘The Opium Question with China in 1840’, he too had talked of ‘a monomania in this country as regards the Emperor of Russia’ and his ambitions in south central Asia (14: 203). De Quincey's Blackwood's article ‘Affghanistan’ is a review of Lushington's book (B56 1844). The main sources of De Quincey's knowledge of Afghanistan in the earlier articles were the writings of Burnes and Elphinstone's Caubul: by 1844 he is aware also of Eyre's, Havelock's and Nash's accounts of the war, as well as Lushington's. In ‘The Prospects for Britain’ (B31 1832 577-81, 89-90), the supposed territorial ambitions of Russia are regarded as altogether more dangerous, though it is conceded that Russia is (perhaps) ‘the “hammer” employed by the Supreme Ruler for crushing the Mohammedan faith’. By 1842, such anxieties are dismissed as ‘mere phantoms of crazy fear’ (B52 1842 271); see also below, pp.183-4. In De Quincey's essay ‘National Temperance Movements’ (1845) Bokhara has come to fill the intermediate position, barrier between everywhere and everything, that had also been filled by Afghanistan; see 14: 277 and n. For other European accounts of the Indus as Forbidden River, see for example Moore 1910 435n., J. Burnes 11-13.

12. ‘Farther East’—the phrase is W. H. Russell's—‘I am once more on my way to the East—another and a farther East’ (1: 1; i.e. farther than the Crimea, Russell's previous assignment).

13. For a different use of inoculation, as it were in the reverse direction, see 1857 12, where De Quincey despairs at the fact that the ignorant Chinese have never been ‘inoculated’ with true (i.e. with European) science.

14. The economic dependence of Britain on the East was a fact that came to be acknowledged by De Quincey in 1857, if not before: ‘Without tea, without cotton, Great Britain, no longer great, would collapse into a very anomalous sort of second-rate power’ (U2: 25); see also for example Osborn 10. This issue is an organising theme of Nigel Leask's forthcoming essay on De Quincey (see Acknowledgements).

15. On the ‘inexhaustible power of self-reproduction’ of the oriental images in De Quincey's opium dreams, see J. H. Miller 68ff. …

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