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Introduction 1 Knowledge and Power Notes Introduction 1. Robert Maniquis, Lonely Empires: Personal and Public Visions of Thomas De Quincey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Josephine McDonagh, De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 42–65. 1 Knowledge and Power 1. Sigmund K. Proctor, Thomas De Quincey’s Theory of Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1943), pp. 107–22; John E. Jordan, Thomas De Quincey, Literary Critic: His Method and Achievement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), pp. 38–42. 2. William Hazlitt, “The Indian Jugglers” (Table-Talk, 1821; originally in The Examiner, Feb. 7, 1819), equates the distinction between “power” and “knowledge” with that which exists between “intellectual” and “mechan- ical excellence”; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. W. Dent & Sons, 1930–4), VIII: 77–89, esp. 83–6. 3. De Quincey did not write a “theory of theory itself.” He did, however, raise the question “What is Theory” (manuscript, Royal Institution of Cornwall MS ENYS 396). This fragment, written 1823 or early 1824, was a response to Kant’s essay, “Über den Gemeinspruch: das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis” (1793; On the Common Expression: that may be true in Theory, but it is useless in Practice); it anticipates De Quincey’s examination of Ricardo’s “theory of value” in the “Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy” (London Magazine IX, March, April, May, 1824). As in the opening to “Suspiria de Profundis,” De Quincey attempts to redress the overwhelm- ing social preoccupation with material and practical concerns by defend- ing the necessity of subjective deliberations. On political economy and power, see Charles J. Rzepka, “The Literature of Power and the Imperial Will: De Quincey’s Opium War Essays,” South Central Review, 8 (1991): 37–45; on the subjective dimensions of political economy, see Josephine McDonagh, ch. 2: “Debt and Desire,” in De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 42–65. 4. One of De Quincey’s projected plans for the completion of the “Suspiria de Profundis” was published, with commentary, by Japp, PW I:4–5. 5. The extent to which De Quincey anticipates Freud has been persuasively documented: Charles L. Proudfit, “Thomas De Quincey and Sigmund Freud: Sons, Fathers, Dreamers – Precursors of Psychoanalytic Developmental 161 162 Notes Psychology,” in Thomas De Quincey Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 88–108. Augmenting Freud’s study of the unconscious with Lacan’s analysis of the internal conflict with mirrored selves, Robert Maniquis explains De Quincey’s evocation of fear and violence, “The Dark Interpreter and the Palimpsest of Violence: De Quincey and the Unconscious,” in Thomas De Quincey Bicentenary Studies, pp. 109–39. For the relevant Freudian texts see especially: “Die Methode der Traumdeutung: Die Analyse eines Traummusters” and “Zur Psychologie der Traumvorgänge,” in Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900), Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe, 10 vols., eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey (Frankfurt/aM: S. Fischer Verlag, 1972), II:117–40, 488–588. See also Lancelot Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), esp. pp. 83–8. 6. On paradoxes as propositions “seeming to be true and turning out false” and “wearing an air of falsehood and turning out true,” M 1:199. In the essay on “Secret Societies” (Tait’s, August and September 1847), De Quincey writes: “Now paradox is a very charming thing; and, since leaving off opium, I take a great deal too much of it for my health. [ … ] Here follows a rigorous definition of paradox in a Greek sense, Not that only is paradoxical which, being really false, puts on a semblance of truth; but, secondly, that, also, which being really true, puts on the semblance of falsehood. For, liter- ally speaking, everything is paradoxical which contradicts the public doxa ( ), that is, contradicts the popular opinion or the public expectation, which may be done by a truth as easily as a falsehood” M 5:205–6. 7. Ferrier, Lectures on Greek Philosophy and other Philosophical Remains, eds. Sir Alexander Grant and Edmund Law Lushington, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1866), I:481–5. 8. Because it opens with reference to “the inadequate impression produced at the moment by Mr. Ferrier’s paper,” and because it also goes on to make specific references to “The Philosophy of Consciousness,” De Quincey’s review could not have been written long after the publication of the seven installments in Blackwood’s (February, April, June, August, October, 1839; February, March, 1839). De Quincey’s review was apparently unpublished; a fragmentary manuscript is in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Knight Collection MA 903. De Quincey’s review may have been written in 1842, at the time of Ferrier’s application for the chair in Civil History at the University of Edinburgh. In 1852, John Wilson resigned his chair as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. James Frederick Ferrier, who had been Professor of Moral Philosophy and Political Economics at St. Andrews since 1845, became a candidate, but failed to secure the appointment. De Quincey’s testimonial for Ferrier appeared in the Advocate’s Library, 1852 (reprinted in the Manchester Quarterly, 1898). 9. Horace, Carmina, 2.2.23: “quisquis ingentis oculo irretorto spectat aceru- ous,” literally “eye not turned back”; The Complete Works of Horace, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), p. 183: “solely for not squinting / Sideways for treasure.” Notes 163 10. Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) wrote numerous antislavery books and pamphlets and was active as an agitator. In 1806, Wordsworth wrote to Mrs. Cookson of Kendal, to inform her that he is “getting up a Petition for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Writing on William Wordsworth in the series of articles, “Lake Reminiscences, from 1807 to 1840,” Tait’s (January, February, April, July, August, 1839), De Quincey refers to “Mr. Slave-Trade Clarkson” (M 2:236). He may also have intended an allusion to Thomas Clarkson in the character of Mr. Tempest, defender of Henri Christophe, in the tale “The King of Hayti.” 11. De Quincey, “Suspiria de Profundis” (Lindop 104): “Often I have been struck with the important truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes.” 12. Ferrier, “The Philosophy of Consciousness,” Blackwood’s Feb., 1838, pp. 187–9, retells from the Arabian Nights the story of the young man who inherited a magic lamp with twelve branches, which when lighted summoned twelve dervishes, “each of whom, after performing sundry circumvolutions, threw him a small piece of money and vanished.” The tale goes on to relate how the young man consulted a magician to learn how to draw greater wealth from his lamp. Ferrier intends the magic lamp of the tale to represent consciousness, and the magician to repre- sent the philosopher. 13. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: a Study on the Ways of the Imagination (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflan, 1927), p. 23. 14. In discussing the theses plagiarized from Schelling, I have pointed out two significant differences in Coleridge’s presentation: (1) he has logically restructured Schelling’s argument; (2) he has developed it with visual metaphors not found in Schelling at all. Burwick, “Perception and ‘the heaven-descended KNOW-THYSELF,’” Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria”: Text and Meaning (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 127–37. 15. Freud, “Das Unbewußte” (1915), in Psychologie des Unbewußten, vol. II of the Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe, 10 vols., eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey (Frankfurt/aM: S. Fischer Verlag, 1972). 16. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: a Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 25–47, argues that De Quincey’s intrusion into the bedroom of his dead sister is a “grotesque version of the primal scene,” in which De Quincey’s subcon- scious asserts a fantasy of sexual desire which his conscious mind cannot repress, even with his redemptive overtures to Palm Sunday. 17. Friedrich Schelling, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, 2 vols. (Jena: Christian Ernst Gabler, 1800–1; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), I:100–36; II:3–87; Gotthelf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden: Arnoldische Buchhandlung, 1808; rev. edn., 1818); see also G. H. Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes (rev. edn. Bamberg: Carl Friedrich Kunz, 1821). 164 Notes 18. In “The Romantic Concept of Mimesis: Idem in Alio,” in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 207–8, I discuss De Quincey’s revised version of the Brocken episode, entitled “Dream-Echoes Fifty Years Later” (1853), which he introduces as exhibiting the effect of symbols as “dependent upon the great catholic principle of Idem in alio” (M I:51). 19. Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: John Murray, 1832), pp. 127–30. Brewster translates the report of “M. Haue, who saw it on the 23rd of May, 1797,” as recorded in J. F. Gmelin’s Göttingischen Journal der Wissenschaften, vol. 1, part iii (1798). Grevel Lindop states in his note to “The Apparition of the Brocken” that “De Quincey’s account is based closely on Sir David Brewster’s” (Lindop 250); there are, however, two significant departures from the details provided by Brewster: (1) there is no mention in Brewster’s pages of the distance of the Brocken from Elbingerode, which De Quincey mentions as a sta- tion too distant to allow for a convenient ascent to the top by dawn, the only time for viewing the phenomenon; (2) there is nothing in Brewster’s account to justify De Quincey’s claim that “more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday than on any other day.” 20.
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