The Opium-Eater

by David Morrell

“Your dead sisters?” a man asked.

  De Quincey drew a long breath.

  “Please don’t, Father,” Emily said.

  “My younger sister Jane died when I was four and she was three. When a strange fever struck her, she was taken to a sickroom from which she never emerged alive. A servant—annoyed by the constant vomit that needed to be cleaned—struck her in exasperation. That was my first experience with evil.

  “My sister Elizabeth was the next to die. I was six, and she was nine, my constant playmate, the joy of my life. She, too, experienced a strange fever. After she died, I snuck into her room and stared at her corpse. She had an unusually large head. A physician theorized that perhaps water on her brain had caused Elizabeth’s death. I found out later that before she was buried, a surgeon sawed into her skull and declared that her brain was the finest he had ever examined.

  “Catherine Wordsworth’s head was large also. Perhaps that’s why I was reminded of Elizabeth and why the affection for my sisters was transferred to Catherine. As one year and another passed, I often visited Wordsworth’s house to see Catherine. Frequently she came to Dove Cottage and spent the day with me. When she napped, I sat next to her, gazing at her innocent face. She had a spirit of joyousness that made me feel as if my sisters had been reincarnated.

  “In June of 1812, I was in London. I received a letter from Wordsworth’s sister. It had a seal of black wax, and I can never forget the words. ‘My dear friend, I am grieved to the heart when I write to you—but you must hear the sad tidings. Our sweet little Catherine was seized with convulsions last night. The fits continued until after five in the morning when she breathed her last. She never forgot you, De Quincey.’”

  He paused, trying to steady his voice. “Catherine had difficulty saying ‘De Quincey’ and called me ‘Kinsey.’ The Wordsworths told me that when I was traveling, she used to search their house to try to find me. She was only three years old, the same age as my sister Jane when she died. But never, not even when Jane and Elizabeth died, did I feel so fierce a grief as that which struck me when I learned of dear little Catherine’s passing.

  “I hurried back to Grasmere as swiftly as I could. I went to Catherine’s grave in the churchyard at St. Oswald’s, and I found the thought of being away from her so unbearable that every night for the next two months, I stretched upon that tiny resting place and clawed at the earth. People later told me that in the darkness they heard me moaning there. When I wasn’t in the graveyard, I took long agonizing walks through the valley. On the opposite side of every field, Catherine and my sisters materialized. They each carried a wicker basket filled with flowers. They walked toward me, their short legs moving in the long grass, but they never gained any distance.”

  De Quincey picked up his glass and studied the ruby-colored remnant.

  “I first became acquainted with opium when I was nineteen. A toothache led me to a chemist’s shop where, for only pennies, I made my first purchase of laudanum. In an hour, oh, heavens, what a lifting of my inner spirit. That my pain vanished was a trifle compared to the immensity of pleasure that opened before me. This was an abyss of divine enjoyment, a panacea for all human woes. Paradise! Or so I mistakenly believed. For the next eight years, I indulged in opium on an occasional basis, foolishly convinced that I was stronger than it until, by the time I was twenty-seven, it got the better of me, torturing me when I tried to stop, forcing me to ingest ever greater quantities merely to feel reprieved from hell.

  “Catherine Wordsworth’s death tipped the balance. Throughout the last of June and then all of July and August, my frenzy of grief persisted until, at the end of that summer, having relied on opium in a desperate attempt to relieve my sorrow, I was doomed.”

  De Quincey looked at the man who had asked the question that began it all.

  “When I first came in here, you saw me pour laudanum into this glass and wanted to know why I became an opium-eater—or, in this case, an opium-drinker. Was Catherine Wordsworth’s death to blame? Was Sarah Green’s daughter to blame for feeding Catherine uncooked carrots and causing the convulsions that crippled the darling little girl and permanently damaged her health? Were the deaths of George and Sarah Green to blame, flooding the Grasmere valley with tears, prompting villagers, including the Wordsworths, to take the children into their households? Was the long-ago faithless suitor to blame for tricking Sarah into surrendering her virtue and conceiving an illegitimate daughter, the fate of which so worried Sarah that she and her husband descended into Langdale forty-seven years ago today and then returned without hope, dying in the mountains?

  “The string of causes and effects is overwhelming. Suppose my sisters hadn’t died as they did. Suppose a sudden storm hadn’t trapped George and Sarah Green. Suppose they were able to arrive home when they’d promised they would. Suppose another of the Green children, and not young Sarah, had joined Wordsworth’s household. Suppose I hadn’t idolized Wordsworth and lent Coleridge three hundred pounds so that Coleridge would favor me enough to arrange for me to meet my idol. Remove any one of these elements, and the chain is broken. I wouldn’t be sitting here tonight holding this empty glass.”

  De Quincey peered up at Emily, tears trickling down his face, tears that Ryan would have thought impossible an hour earlier when he’d noted that De Quincey’s melancholy eyes had a dry glitter, as if years of sorrow and regret had exhausted his capacity for tears.

  “I weep for George and Sarah Green. I weep for Catherine Wordsworth. I weep for my weakness,” De Quincey told his daughter.

  Emily hugged him tightly. “And I weep for you, Father. Please, will you go with us now?”

  This time, Ryan and Becker didn’t need to try to raise him. He set down the glass and slowly stood. Emily led the way, the crowd silently parting for them.

  AFTERWORD:

  “The Opium-Eater” PHOTO ESSAY

  Dead children prompted my fascination with Thomas De Quincey, which is appropriate because, as “The Opium-Eater” indicates, dead children had a major effect on him. In my case, the dead children were my son, Matthew, and my granddaughter, Natalie, both of whom died from a rare bone cancer, Ewing’s sarcoma. Natalie’s death occurred in 2009. Shortly afterward, my preoccupation with grief led me to watch a film about that subject, Creation, which dramatized the nervous breakdown that Charles Darwin suffered after his favorite daughter died in 1851.

  But Darwin didn’t know that he was having a breakdown. He thought that his headaches, heart palpitations, stomach pains, and insomnia had a physical cause, and he was frustrated when his doctors couldn’t find one. In the film, a friend advises him about the then-radical theories of Thomas De Quincey, who believed that thoughts and emotions can affect us in ways that we don’t understand. This sounds like Freud, but Freud didn’t publish his theories until a half century later.

  Curious about De Quincey, I learned that he’d invented the word subconscious and believed that the mind contained “chasms and sunless abysses” in which an alien nature might live, undetected. I also learned that De Quincey was one of the most controversial, brilliant authors of the Romantic and Victorian periods. His Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) made him notorious for being the first person to write about drug dependency. Brilliant and prolific, would he have been even more so if opium hadn’t controlled him, or did opium account for his brilliance? Whatever the cause, De Quincey deserves credit for many other literary firsts. He created what he called psychological literary criticism in his famous essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” His fascination with the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811—the first publicized mass killings in English history—prompted him to write “Postscript (On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts),” in which he dramatized those murders with such vividness that he created the modern true-crime genre. He influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who in turned inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes, another drug user.

  The list could go on, but for our purposes, it’s impor
tant to emphasize that in the early 1800s, De Quincey was among the few who championed the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge at a time when their work was dismissed and even ridiculed. Decades later, having helped to establish their reputations, De Quincey wrote several magazine articles in which he described his friendship with those now-revered poets, providing remarkably intimate portraits of them: their daily habits, their conversations, their meals, their hikes, and even how Wordsworth used a greasy butter knife to slice the pages of an uncut book.

  Those poet essays are part of a series of reminiscences in which De Quincey describes what it was like to live in the Lake District during the early 1800s. They were eventually collected in Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, edited by David Wright, and in one of those essays, De Quincey tells the melancholy story of the deaths of George and Sarah Green. In another essay, De Quincey writes about the aftermath of those deaths and how his life changed with the death of young Catherine Wordsworth, which he links to the death of the Greens.

  As vivid as those essays were, they became even more vivid to me in October of 2013 when I journeyed from my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, leaving the high-desert mountains of the southwestern United States for the quite different, low, lush mountains of England’s Lake District. During the research for my first Victorian mystery/thriller about De Quincey, Murder as a Fine Art, and its sequel, Inspector of the Dead, I had formed an e-mail friendship with one of his biographers, Grevel Lindop (The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey), and now I was finally going to meet him.

  First we gave a De Quincey presentation at the Manchester Literary Festival, in the John Rylands Library, one of the city’s great old buildings. It resembles a church because Victorians believed that great libraries were cathedrals of culture.

  After a tour of De Quincey sites in Manchester (De Quincey was born there and his beloved sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, were buried there), Grevel and I drove north, our wives, Donna and Amanda, accompanying us.

  Enchanted, I watched the terrain rise magnificently until mountains surrounded us and we arrived in the village of Grasmere, stopping at one of the most famous buildings in all of English literature, Dove Cottage. Wordsworth lived there from 1799 until 1808. But De Quincey lived there longer, from 1809 until 1820, and he continued to lease the property, storing his multitude of books there until 1835.

  I had read De Quincey’s thousands of pages so often that I sometimes thought I was channeling him. That impression was reinforced when I stood outside Dove Cottage, where De Quincey himself had stood for the first time in October of 1807, the same month in which I now arrived.

  I felt as if I had come home, an eerie impression that continued as Grevel led us on a six-mile hike into the mountains, following a path that Wordsworth and De Quincey had often taken.

  That path was near the one that George and Sarah Green had used to journey into Grasmere from the remote seclusion of their farmhouse. Grevel’s reference to their terrible deaths refreshed my memory of De Quincey’s essay about them. Later, while touring the Wordsworth Trust museum next to Dove Cottage, I found other references to the Greens and felt so increasingly moved that I resolved to write about them.

  One detail that modern readers might wonder about is that of the uncooked carrots. There was a time when uncooked carrots were believed to be toxic for adults as well as for children. Even today, many parents wouldn’t think of giving an uncooked carrot to an infant because of the risk that the infant might choke. It’s possible that the uncooked carrots that young Sarah Green gave to baby Catherine Wordsworth did indeed make the child sick.

  But did the vomiting (De Quincey even refers to convulsions) cause Catherine to be permanently impaired? Or, as Grevel Lindop suggested to me, did Catherine suffer from what may have been Down syndrome, a genetic disease about which nothing was known in the early nineteenth century? Down syndrome is associated with many medical problems that were untreatable at the time and may have led to Catherine’s death.

  Whatever the explanation, De Quincey absolutely believed that Sarah Green’s daughter was responsible, thus linking the earlier deaths with the later one. In De Quincey’s view, if George and Sarah Green hadn’t died in the mountains, little Catherine Wordsworth wouldn’t have died either. For De Quincey, everything was connected.

  During my visit to Grasmere, I took photographs of the locations that De Quincey mentions in this story. This mountain trail is probably the one that De Quincey followed when he twice journeyed to the Lake District with the intention of introducing himself to Wordsworth but ultimately losing his nerve. He stayed in the village of Coniston in a neighboring valley and then climbed to a ridge that overlooked Grasmere.

  The following view of Grasmere and its lake shows the approximate place where De Quincey twice stopped, unable to muster the courage to continue downward and introduce himself to Wordsworth. The white building that’s dimly visible at the opposite side of the lake is a modern hotel. It conceals Dove Cottage. In 1805 and 1806, however, the white building that De Quincey saw would in fact have been Wordsworth’s house.

  Today, Dove Cottage appears more or less as it did in 1807 when De Quincey at last arrived there, hurried through the gate, and saw Wordsworth, “like a flash of lightning,” coming out to shake his hand.

  In 1809, after Wordsworth’s growing family prompted a move to a larger residence, De Quincey leased Dove Cottage, delighted that he could now sleep and eat where his idol had slept and eaten. But De Quincey’s respect for the hallowed property didn’t extend to the back of it, where he ordered workmen to remove shrubbery and a shelter at the top of a slope. Even though the Wordsworths no longer had any legal connection to the property, they were outraged by De Quincey’s changes. It was the first of several disagreements that would eventually cause the end of the friendship.

  This is the view from the back of Dove Cottage, with the shelter now rebuilt. Note the wall of flat stones in the background. They are common building materials throughout the Lake District.

  From the back of Dove Cottage, the mountains in the distance show the approximate location of the hidden valley where George and Sarah Green lived with their children.

  The wooded areas in the Lake District are often dense. The following photograph provides an example of the difficult terrain that the Greens would have needed to cross to reach Grasmere or Langdale.

  The following photograph shows what the Greens’ primitive mountain cottage looked like in the 1800s.

  And this is what the same cottage, considerably expanded and improved, looks like today. Tourists rent it for weekend retreats.

  This is St. Oswald’s Church in Grasmere.

  When little Catherine Wordsworth died, in 1812, Wordsworth chose not to provide a gravestone for her, believing that gravestones were a form of vanity. No one knows the location of the child’s grave, but it was in an area such as this at St. Oswald’s Church that De Quincey lay each night for two months, weeping over Catherine’s resting place, clawing at the earth.

  In the following photograph, the gravestone for George and Sarah Green stands in the foreground, to the left of the path at the back of St. Oswald’s Church.

  The weathered inscription is difficult to read.

  To the memory of JOHN HARTLEY… who died Nov 26th 1848. Aged 73. And of AGNES his Wife…who died July 5th 1842. Aged 67. Also of GEORGE and SARAH GREEN parents of the above AGNES who perished in the snow on Langdale Fell March 19th 1808. GEORGE GREEN aged 66. SARAH GREEN aged 43.

  In the Lake District, “fell” is the word for a hill or a ridge. The ambiguous phrasing suggests that Agnes, the little girl whom De Quincey made the heroine of his account, died in the snow along with her parents, but as we know, she in fact survived them. The inscription on the gravestone goes on to note that Agnes’s daughter and her daughter’s husband are buried here also.

  Note the difference in ages between George and Sarah (sixty-six and forty-three), perhaps the consequence of Sarah’s inabili
ty to find a younger man to marry her given that she had given birth to a child out of wedlock. It’s somehow reassuring to know that both Agnes and Agnes’s daughter lived to what was then an advanced age (sixty-seven and sixty-five, respectively). The gravestone was erected in 1870, more than sixty years after the Greens’ deaths. Perhaps Sarah Green’s great-grandchild erected it.

  When Wordsworth died, in 1850, he was then so famous that a gravestone was inevitable, despite his earlier negative feelings about them. He; his wife, Mary; his sister, Dorothy; and many other members of his family are buried here in St. Oswald’s cemetery, near one of the eight yew trees that Wordsworth had planted. The Wordsworth plot is bordered by the wrought-iron fence in the foreground.

  The following photograph shows the flat gravestone that commemorates Wordsworth, his sister, Dorothy, and his wife, Mary.

  The Wordsworth Trust museum, a splendid tribute to Wordsworth and De Quincey, is located next to Dove Cottage. Again, note the flat stones that make up the walls, typical of Lake District architecture.

  The following photograph shows another view of the Wordsworth Trust buildings. Dove Cottage is just around the curve to the left. This is the same road (unpaved at the time) on which De Quincey arrived with Coleridge’s wife and children in October of 1807.

  This is the library of the Wordsworth Trust museum. De Quincey biographer Grevel Lindop joined me for a De Quincey presentation here in October of 2013. Grevel is on the right.

  The painting that’s in the background depicts Thomas De Quincey, his daughter Emily, and another daughter, Margaret, holding her baby daughter Eva. A third daughter, Florence, was about to travel to India and marry an army officer. She commissioned artist James Archer to create this portrait so that she could remember her family when she was on the other side of the globe. De Quincey was sixty-nine and looks good for being a lifelong opium-eater. Emily, who is featured in Murder as a Fine Art, Inspector of the Dead, and “The Opium-Eater,” was twenty-two and looks glorious.