THOMAS DE QUINCEY

“DeQuincey and Dickens have not moderation enough. They never stutter; they flow too readily.”

–JOURNAL, September 8, 1851

ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY ATTITUDES ON DICKENS

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

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1785

August 15, Monday: Thomas “De” Quincey was born in Manchester, England, son of Thomas Quincey, a textile importer, and Elizabeth Penson Quincey (it would only be at a later date that his parent would add this “De” into the family name).

Just over a year after the original assignation after midnight on the grounds of the palace of Versailles, the Queen’s Necklace Affair was brought into the open. Immediately before he was to say mass on Assumption Day, Louis, prince de Rohan, cardinal bishop of Strasbourg was detained and brought before King Louis to be questioned by him personally. He was then escorted to imprisonment in the Bastille. The Cardinal, duped by his mistress Jeanne de Saint-Rémy de Valois, Madame de La Motte (who had been taking money from him in the name of Queen Marie Antoinette), had purchased in the name of the queen a diamond necklace worth 1,600,000 livres.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Thomas De Quincey “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1790

Thomas “De” Quincey was four or five years of age when his little sister Jane, age three, died.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

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1792

Thomas De Quincey was six or seven when his big sister Elizabeth, age nine, died.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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1793

Thomas De Quincey was seven or eight when his father died.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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1796

The widowed mother of the Quincey family changed the family’s name to “De Quincey” and relocated to Bath, where Thomas Quincey was registered as Thomas De Quincey at King Edward’s School.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Thomas De Quincey “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1799

“That boy,” Thomas De Quincey’s master at King Edward’s School in Bath reported, “that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” His mother, somehow displeased by this, promptly packed him off to an inferior establishment, the Winkfield School at Wiltshire. There, however, Thomas would encounter William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s recently published LYRICAL BALLADS — which later he would characterize as “the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind.”

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Thomas De Quincey “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1800

At age 15, Thomas De Quincey’s translation from Horace’s TWENTY-SECOND ODE won 3d prize in a contest and was published in The Monthly Preceptor. Accidentally, he encountered King George III in the Frogmore gardens near Windsor Castle. During his summer holiday he went to Ireland. He was sent to the Manchester Grammar School because in that establishment he might after studying for 36 months qualify for a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford (he would not, however, complete this agenda, for after 19 months he would run away in an attempt to make contact with William Wordsworth). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1801

Summer: Thomas De Quincey, age 15, spent this summer in Everton near Liverpool, England, where he was able to meet various noted Whig intellectuals such as William Roscoe and James Currie. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1802

July: Thomas De Quincey had run away from the Manchester Grammar School with the intention of seeking out the author of LYRICAL BALLADS. He had discovered himself unable to actually complete such an act, and instead had turned up in Chester where his family was staying, trying to make secret contact with a sister. He was caught during this attempt by older members of the family. An uncle, Colonel Penson, defused the situation by promising to provide him with a guinea a week so he could go off on a solitary walk through the Wales countryside.

November: Provided with a guinea a week for his expenses, Thomas De Quincey had gone off on a solitary summer walk through the Wales countryside. However, because he neglected to keep the family informed of his whereabouts, the guinea per week stopped arriving. He borrowed some money to get to London, and there for five months he lived in the streets. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1803

In London, Commercial Road, from Whitechapel to Limehouse, was built. Astley’s Amphitheatre burned down. Thomas De Quincey was discovered by chance by friends, living in the streets, and taken home.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Summer: Reconciled with his mother and guardians, the runaway Thomas De Quincey spent the season in Everton reading avidly in Gothic romances. He began to think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the “greatest man that has ever appeared.” He wrote a fan letter to William Wordsworth, who responded, and a correspondence began. At the end of this vacation season he was allowed to enter Worcester College, Oxford on a reduced income. Wordsworth’s Poems, in Chronological Sequence • Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803 • Departure from the vale of Grasmere, August 1803 • At the Grave of Burns, 1803. Seven years after his death • Thoughts suggested the Day following, on the Banks of Nith, near the Poet’s Residence • To the Sons of Burns, after visiting the Grave of their Father • To a Highland Girl • Glen Almain; or, The Narrow Glen • Stepping Westward • The Solitary Reaper • Address to Kilchurn Castle, upon Loch Awe • Rob Roy’s Grave • Sonnet. Composed at ——— Castle • Yarrow Unvisited • The Matron of Jedborough and her Husband • Fly, some kind Harbinger, to Grasmere-dale! • The Blind Highland Boy • October 1803 • There is a bondage worse, far worse, to bear • October 1803 • England! the time is come when thou should’st wean Thomas De Quincey “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• October 1803 • To the Men of Kent. October 1803 • In the Pass of Killicranky, an invasion being expected, October 1803 • Anticipation. October 1803 • Lines on the expected Invasion • The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale • To the Cuckoo • She was a Phantom of delight • I wandered lonely as a cloud • The Affliction of Margaret ——— • The Forsaken • Repentance. A Pastoral Ballad • The Seven Sisters; or, The Solitude of Binnorie • Address to my Infant Daughter, Dora • The Kitten and Falling Leaves • To the Spade of a Friend • The Small Celandine (third poem) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1804

Thomas De Quincey first took opium, while at Worcester College, Oxford, to cope with the pain of facial neuralgia.

In this year, also, he first met Charles Lamb.

The Reverend John Josias Conybeare, being an enthusiast for chemistry and geology, set up his own laboratory in Oxford. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1805

Thomas De Quincey journeyed to the Lake District of England to meet his famous pen-pal William Wordsworth, only to suffer a failure of nerve and turn back. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1806

Earliest possible year for any of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems in THE ESDAILE NOTEBOOK (latest written 1813).

Thomas De Quincey journeyed a 2d time to the Lake District of England, in his attempt to actually meet his famous pen-pal William Wordsworth, only to again suffer a failure of nerve and turn back. Wordsworth’s Poems, in Chronological Sequence • November 1806 • Address to a Child, during a boisterous winter Evening, by my Sister • Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1807

August: Thomas De Quincey had absented himself from his course of studies at Worcester College, Oxford. Samuel Taylor Coleridge met him in Bristol and handed him £300 with the pretence that it was a loan. De Quincey then escorted the Coleridge family to the Lake District and finally was able to meet his famous pen- pal William Wordsworth, at Grasmere. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1808

January: Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivered his initial lecture on poetry and principles of taste at the Royal Institution in London.

Thomas De Quincey would be seeing Coleridge daily to assist him in this lecture series.

During his final exams in this year De Quincey would suddenly leave Oxford, not completing the exams and therefore sacrificing any expectation of receiving a diploma from Worcester College.

WORCESTER COLLEGE

During this year De Quincey would obtain an introduction to John Wilson, who would become the “Christopher North” of Blackwood’s Magazine, and they would become chums. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1809

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Friend was being published, and he was making frequent stopovers at the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth in Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the beautiful Lake District of England, where Sara Hutchinson was residing.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote five or six poems into The Esdaile Notebook.

Thomas De Quincey rented Dove Cottage because it had been Wordsworth’s home. He would reside there for a decade.

In this year he supervised the printing of Wordsworth’s pamphlet on “The Convention of Cintra,” and contributed a lengthy “Postscript on Sir John Moore’s Letters.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1810

Thomas De Quincey entered his period of greatest intimacy with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He read the manuscript of “Prelude.” He, John Wilson, and Alexander Blair contributed the “Letter of Mathetes” (μαθητής means “disciple” or “student”) to Coleridge’s metaphysical gazette, The Friend. That gazette folded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1812

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s REMORSE was published and performed. The author made an unsuccessful visit to the Lake Country to reconcile with William Wordsworth. He continued to lecture on Shakespeare. Half his life annuity of £150 per year from the fortune of the Wedgewood brothers was withdrawn.

Thomas De Quincey was griefstricken at the death of Wordsworth’s 3-year-old, Catherine. He briefly enrolled at the Middle Temple with the intent of reading for the Bar. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1813

The Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance damned not only rum, but all of the “kindred vices, profaneness and gambling” and beseeched members to “discourage... by ... example and influence, every kind of..... immorality.” THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

During this period retailers’ and distillers’ licenses would bear a federal tax, although beginning in 1818 the industry would begin to enjoy a tax-free era which would endure until 1862.

In England, by this point Thomas De Quincey had become a “faithful and confirmed opium-eater” with a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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decanter of laudanum always by his elbow.

His relations with William Wordsworth became strained. He courted Margaret Simpson, daughter of a Lake District farmer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1814

Samuel Taylor Coleridge placed himself under the care of a Dr. Daniel on account of his opium dependency and depression, and fears that this would lead him to suicide.

Thomas De Quincey visited Edinburgh, Scotland with John Wilson, and they met various denizens of the literary scene such as James Hogg the “Ettrick Shepherd” and J.G. Lockhart (who would become the biographer of Sir Walter Scott). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1816

Margaret Penson bore a son to Thomas De Quincey. The couple named their infant William Penson.

In this year De Quincey became estranged from William and Dorothy Wordsworth. ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY Wordsworth’s Poems, in Chronological Sequence • Ode. — The Morning of the Day appointed for a General Thanksgiving, January 18, 1816 • Ode • Invocation to the Earth, February 1816 • Ode composed in January 1816 • Ode • The French Army in Russia, 1812-13 • On the same occasion • By Moscow self-devoted to a blaze • The Germans on the Heights of Hochheim • Siege of Vienna raised by John Sobieski • Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo, February 1816 • Occasioned by the same battle • Emperors and Kings, how oft have temples rung • Feelings of a French Royalist • Translation of part of the First Book of the Aeneid • A Fact, and an Imagination; or, Canute and Alfred, on the Seashore • To Dora • To ———, on her First Ascent to the Summit of Helvellyn • Vernal Ode HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1817

In this year appeared the 1st edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s two-volume BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, OR BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF MY LITERARY LIFE AND OPINIONS, his SIBYLLINE LEAVES, his 2d LAY SERMON, and his ZAPOLYA.

“Dejection: An Ode,” which had been originally published in 1802, was republished. The poet had described this condition of the soul as “grief without a pang” that “finds no outlet, no relief, / In word, or sigh, or tear.”

Thomas De Quincey got married with Margaret Simpson.

William Blackwood founded and began to edit Blackwood’s Magazine, with John Wilson, J.G. Lockhart, and James Hogg the “Ettrick Shepherd” as major contributors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1818

In this year Thomas De Quincey, an English opium addict,1 wrote his mother that his intention was to become the intellectual benefactor of “my species,” to place education upon a new footing, to be the first founder of

1. In studying the early 19th Century in the US, we are studying a period in which opium was legal, omnipresent, and cheap. A child could push a penny across a market counter and obtain opium to make it through the school day, literally. Yet nowhere do we find any remark about opium withdrawal presenting any sort of problem. Today, I understand, opium is widely used in elder homes in England, and the chief problem with this is that it tends to cause a degree of constipation. The nurses need to keep after these oldsters to hydrate themselves and add fiber to their diets. Today, of course, there would be much talk about addiction and withdrawal. However, do we know for sure that opium is addictive? It may be that the “addiction and withdrawal” scenario which we have constructed is a social consequence of a socially imposed illegality and scarcity and expense. It may be that we focus on this “addiction and withdrawal” scenario in order to legitimate our social taboos about recreational drug use. Too sudden withdrawal from a customary dose of opium can definitely be unpleasant and can definitely have health side-effects. Illegality, and the consequent scarcity and expense, however, have created this situation in which withdrawal from a customary dose of opium can easily become too sudden. For instance, nowadays a person who is accustomed to a daily dose of opium may be arrested for theft (because due to the artificially high cost of a dose of opium, theft had become a way of life for them), and when thrown into jail, suddenly the customary dose would be unavailability and the result would be a very unpleasant and unhealthy “cold turkey” withdrawal. However, the determinants of that scenario would be in the social situation as now constructed by us (illegality, scarcity, expense) rather than in the substance itself or in the practice itself. I have been told, and I don’t know whether this is accurate or inaccurate, that in China, when a person has needed to withdraw from opium use for one reason or another, withdrawal has not been regarded as any sort of problem. One simply reduces one’s dose gradually until use ceases. The 1994 movie “To Live” (directed by Zhang Yimou based on a novel by Yu Hua) may be instructive in that regard, for in this movie a wealthy opium user is portrayed as losing his money by gambling, and needing consequently to discontinue his opium use, and in this movie, although his financial loss is depicted as having a great impact on his life and the life of his family, his withdrawal itself is treated by the script and the director as being entirely unremarkable. We do know that there is such a thing as “the addictive personality.” There are in fact compulsions and they do in fact cause problems. A person who is compulsive in this way may select opium use as his or her compulsion, and this may be an unpleasant thing, but I would wonder: is the unpleasantness of this a consequence of the substance, opium, or is it a consequence of the mental condition, compulsiveness? If the unpleasantness of this is indeed a consequence of the substance, opium, then of course we are doing the correct and the effective thing, in attempting to control use of the substance. However, if the unpleasantness of this is a consequence of the mental condition, compulsiveness, then what we are doing, in attempting to control opium, is evading the real problem, while persecuting people who have the mental disorder of being compulsive. It seems to me that we simply have not done the research which would indicate to us, whether the problem is opium (or, expanding this, recreational drugs in general) or whether the problem is compulsiveness (in its many manifestations). Until we have done that research, I would suggest, we are the blind leading the blind, and cannot even begin a proper study of the 19th Century, let alone a proper management of the 21st Century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a true Philosophy, and to be the re-establisher in England (with great accessions) of Mathematics.

With Wordsworth, De Quincey published CLOSE COMMENTS UPON A STRAGGLING SPEECH, a Tory denunciation of Henry Brougham, an Independent Whig candidate in the parliamentary election campaign at Westmorland. He was appointed editor of the local Tory newspaper, The Westmorland Gazette. He slid deeper into debt.

Another English opium eater, William Wilberforce, was in this year managing with medical assistance to bring HDT WHAT? INDEX

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himself down to a maintenance dosage of 12 grains a day.

During this year and the next the daily dosage maintained by Walter Scott, who had completed ROB ROY and THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN and was writing THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR, would be 200 drops of laudanum HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and 6 grains of opium.2

2. Hayter, A. OPIUM AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION. London, 1968. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At the author’s request the Scottish Regalia, which is to say the Crown and Sceptre and Sword of State presented in 1507 to James IV by Pope Julius II, were recovered from a dusty trunk and displayed to him.

Robert Jamieson and Walter Scott edited the 5th edition of a 1754 volume, LETTERS FROM A GENTLEMAN IN THE NORTH OF SCOTLAND TO HIS FRIEND IN LONDON: CONTAINING THE DESCRIPTION OF A CAPITAL TOWN IN THAT NORTHERN COUNTRY, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF SOME UNCOMMON CUSTOMS OF THE INHABITANTS; LIKEWISE AN ACCOUNT OF THE HIGHLANDS, WITH THE CUSTOMS AND MANNERS OF THE HIGHLANDERS. TO WHICH IS ADDED, A LETTER RELATING TO THE MILITARY WAYS AMONG THE MOUNTAINS, BEGUN IN THE YEAR 1726 (two volumes, London: Printed for Rest Fenner, Paternoster-Row). EDWARD BURT’S LETTERS EDWARD BURT’S LETTERS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1819

Thomas De Quincey got canned as editor of The Westmorland Gazette. He, John Wilson, and J.G. Lockhart prepared a review of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s THE REVOLT OF ISLAM for Blackwood’s Magazine.

During this year and the following three years, Samuel Taylor Coleridge would be making occasional contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1821

Opium use had become endemic among the Fenish peoples of Britain, where use was tolerated but was successfully controlled by informal social mechanisms. Concerns were growing, however, over increasing use, particularly in the sedation of infants. Facing competition from other poppy Papaver somniferum growers, the British stepped up their efforts to increase their exports to China.

Thomas De Quincey went to London to dispose of some translations from German authors, but was persuaded first to write and publish an account of his opium experiences, which soon appeared in the London Magazine and proved to be even more popular with the reading public than Lamb’s ESSAYS OF ELIA, which were then appearing in that periodical. THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER would soon appear also in book form.

His translation of Friedrich Schiller’s “The Sport of Fortune” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. However, he quarreled with William Blackwood. In this year he had conversations with John Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1822

The chronic alcoholic stupor and antics of the Vice President of the United States of America, the Honorable Daniel D. Tomkin, had been embarrassing the Senate –in which of course he was the presiding officer– and finally his colleagues prevailed upon him to just go the hell home, for the remainder of his term of office. DOPERS

Thomas De Quincey’s CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, which had appeared in the previous year in London Magazine, at this point was printed as a book.

He projected a work to be entitled CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERER (this would not materialize). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1823

Thomas De Quincey’s NOTES FROM THE POCKET BOOK OF A LATE OPIUM-EATER, including “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” appeared in London Magazine. He began to appear also as “The Opium- Eater” in “Noctes Ambrosianae,” a series of dialogues published in Blackwood’s Magazine that would continue until 1835.

DOPERS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1824

Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP appeared in the London Magazine, and was reviewed there by Thomas De Quincey.

Goethe’s 1811-1813 autobiography AUS MEINEM LEBEN: DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT was presented in English as MEMOIRS OF GOETHE: WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1825

Thomas De Quincey produced a translation and abridgement of a German pseudo-Waverley novel entitled WALLADMOR. In all probability, he visited Germany. In all likelihood this was the period in which he was working on his manuscript “Peter Anthony Fonk,” which he would later attempt to incorporate into a sequel to his “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” He resigned from the staff of The London Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1826

Thomas De Quincey rejoined the staff of Blackwood’s Magazine and reviewed Robert P. Gillies’s newly published 3-volume GERMAN STORIES; SELECTED FROM THE WORKS OF HOFFMAN, DE LA MOTTE FOUQUÉ, PICHLET, KREUSE, AND OTHERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1827

February: Thomas De Quincey’s initial article “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine.

FINE ARTS OF DE QUINCEY

During this year he began also to write for The Edinburgh Saturday Post, the initial issue of which would appear on May 12th.

Thomas Carlyle began his friendships with Francis Jeffrey and with Thomas De Quincey. ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY

BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES preserves for us the following snippets of Carlyle dating to this year:

• Literary men are... a perpetual priesthood. — STATE OF GERMAN LITERATURE. Edinburgh Review, 1827. • Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying, — imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics, — “Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of — the air!” — RICHTER. Edinburgh Review, 1827. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1828

Thomas De Quincey’s “The Toilette of the Hebrew Lady” and “Elements of Rhetoric” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. From an uncompleted follow-up to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” we have a manuscript fragment entitled “To the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine.”

The first of Richard Henry Horne’s poems to be published, “Hecatompylos,” appeared in the newly founded The Athenæum. London Literary and Critical Journal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1829

Thomas De Quincey’s “Sketch of Professor Wilson: in a Letter to an American Gentleman” appeared in three parts successively in the new Edinburgh Literary Gazette (John Wilson was professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1820 to 1851; at this time De Quincey was residing at his home). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1830

Thomas De Quincey relocated permanently to Edinburgh, Scotland. He prepared “Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays,” “Richard Bentley,” and a string of Tory diatribes such as “French Revolution” and “Political Anticipations” for Blackwood’s Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1831

Thomas De Quincey prepared “Dr Parr and his Contemporaries, or Whiggism in its Relations to Literature” for Blackwood’s Magazine.3

He was prosecuted by creditors and was obliged to spend a short period at the Debtor’s Prison.

3. Samuel Parr, who had recently deceased, had been a schoolmaster and curate and was almost appointed Bishop of Gloucester. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1832

Thomas De Quincey’s KLOSTERHEIM: OR, THE MASQUE, an attempt at Gothic romance, was published by William Blackwood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1833

Thomas De Quincey translated for to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine –a Scottish rival of Blackwood’s Magazine– Herr Professor Immanuel Kant’s “Age of the Earth” (his analysis »Die Frage, ob die Erde veralte, physikalisch erwogen« had been based entirely upon walks in the district of Königsberg and had been offered as recently as 1754; the professor had arrived at an inference that the planet was aged approximately 6,000 years), and offered an assessment of Mrs Hannah More.

His son Julius De Quincey died at the age of three.

On two occasions taken to court by creditors, the author applied to the Baille of the monastery of the Holy Rood for refuge at Holyrood, an acknowledged debtor’s sanctuary five miles in circumference.

(The above is one of the brass markers placed in the cobblestone pavement, that served until 1880 to indicate the boundary in Holyrood Park within which on weekdays debtors were supposed to be secure from arrest. These debtors did, however, have the entire freedom of the town each Sunday so that they would be unimpeded in their attendance at the worship of their choice.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

For the following six years autobiographical offerings by Thomas De Quincey would be appearing in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine under the rubric LAKE REMINISCENCES — what he would reveal would be considered by William Wordsworth and other of the Lake poets to constitute an offensive invasion of their privacy. Upon the death of William Blackwood his sons Robert and Alexander Blackwood would take over management of this magazine.

During this period the author would be three times summoned into court on account of his debts. ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY Wordsworth’s Poems, in Chronological Sequence • Lines written in the Album of the Countess of Lonsdale. November 5, 1834 • To the Moon. (Composed by the Seaside, — on the Coast of Cumberland) • To the Moon. (Rydal) • Written after the Death of Charles Lamb • Extempore Effusion upon the death of James Hogg • Upon seeing a coloured Drawing of the Bird of Paradise in an Album • Composed after reading a Newspaper of the Day • By a blest Husband guided, Mary came • Sonnets • Desponding Father! mark this altered bough • Roman Antiquities discovered at Bishopstone, Herefordshire • St. Catherine of Ledbury • Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant • Four fiery steeds impatient of the rein • To ——— • Said Secrecy to Cowardice and Fraud HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1835

In Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Thomas De Quincey’s “Oxford” and “A Tory’s Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

In Blackwood’s Magazine, Thomas De Quincey’s “The Revolt of the Tartars.” He supplied articles on Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Pope to the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.

The author’s wife Margaret De Quincey died.

During this year the author was twice summoned into court on account of his debts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

In Blackwood’s Magazine, Thomas De Quincey’s tales of terror “The Household Wreck” (January) and “The Avenger” (August). In Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, two articles on his “Recollections of Charles Lamb.”

THE PROSE WORKS OF CHARLES LAMB. IN THREE VOLUMES (London: Edward Moxon). Henry Thoreau would quote from “Specimens from the Writings of Fuller, the Church Historian” in this set of volumes in his journal for Fall 1846 and at two places in A WEEK. LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, I LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, II LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, III

A WEEK: If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are PEOPLE OF not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon A WEEK the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read. As Fuller said, commenting on the zeal of Camden, “A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate still surviving out of which the city is run out.” When Solon endeavored to prove that Salamis had formerly belonged to the Athenians, and not to the Megareans, he caused the tombs to be opened, and showed that the inhabitants of Salamis turned the faces of their dead to the same side with the Athenians, but the Megareans to the opposite side. There they were to be interrogated.

THOMAS FULLER WILLIAM CAMDEN LAMB ON FULLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A WEEK: What is called common sense is excellent in its PEOPLE OF department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the A WEEK army and navy, — for there must be subordination, — but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. Some aspire to excellence in the subordinate department, and may God speed them. What Fuller says of masters of colleges is universally applicable, that “a little alloy of dulness in a master of a college makes him fitter to manage secular affairs.” “He that wants faith, and apprehends a grief Because he wants it, hath a true belief; And he that grieves because his grief’s so small, Has a true grief, and the best Faith of all.” Or be encouraged by this other poet’s strain, — “By them went Fido marshal of the field: Weak was his mother when she gave him day; And he at first a sick and weakly child, As e’er with tears welcomed the sunny ray; Yet when more years afford more growth and might, A champion stout he was, and puissant knight, As ever came in field, or shone in armor bright. “Mountains he flings in seas with mighty hand; Stops and turns back the sun’s impetuous course; Nature breaks Nature’s laws at his command; No force of Hell or Heaven withstands his force; Events to come yet many ages hence, He present makes, by wondrous prescience; Proving the senses blind by being blind to sense.”

THOMAS FULLER LAMB ON FULLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

Thomas De Quincey’s “Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” in Blackwood’s Magazine. His “William Wordsworth” in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

The Reverend Issachar J. Roberts , despite his lack of any training in the Chinese language, had picked up enough to be able to create by this point four tracts, Tzu Pu Chi Chieh or “Explanation of the Radical Characters,” Chen Li Che Chiao or “The Religion of Truth,” Chu Shih Chu Yeh-su Hsin I Chao Shu or “New Testament of the Saviour Jesus,” and Wen Ta Su Hua or “Catechism in the Macao Dialect.” This last tract included a small map of Asia with its surrounding lands and seas.

The Opium Wars ended mandarin control of British trade with China. (This would be followed by the 1842 Treaty of Nanking which would cede Hong Kong to the British and open numerous ports to Europeans and Americans. Under a further 1858 treaty, foreigners would be enabled to travel anywhere in the interior of the empire. That the Chinese were humiliated by this was irrelevant.)

It had become apparent that opium use was on the increase in Britain, but there was not agreement as to how harmful this was. On the whole the dangers of the use of this substance were being downplayed, and few people saw any parallel with the Chinese situation. Concerns over abuse did not rise to the same level as the British concern over the abuse of alcohol.

Thomas De Quincey’s “Style” and “The Opium and the China Question” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. De Quincey was again prosecuted for his debts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1841

Thomas De Quincey visited John Pringle Nichol, Regius Professor of Astronomy, at the Glasgow Observatory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

William Thomas Green Morton left the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery without graduating to study dentistry in Hartford, Connecticut under Dr. Horace Wells, with whom he would share a brief partnership.

Death of Thomas De Quincey’s son Lieutenant Horace De Quincey in China at the age of 22. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

Thomas De Quincey moved into Mavis Bush Cottage, at Lasswade outside Edinburgh.

January 3, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau made reference in his journal to the RELIGIO MEDICI of Sir Thomas Browne, from Simon Wilkins (ed.) SIR THOMAS BROWNE’S WORKS, INCLUDING HIS LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE (London: W. Pickering, 1835: “It ... rhythm.” Volume II, in the library of Waldo Emerson), and to Thomas De Quincey’s report of William Wordsworth’s explanation of a psychological state conducive to imagination.

Tuesday Jan 3d 1843 I hardly know of any subject upon which so little to the purpose has been said as Musick — few ever have indicated their sense of this inadequacy so that I am inclined to m ark a passage which expresses any such feeling— Richter’s single line is a gem. De Quincey shows that he heard music in the lines— “Music is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to the temperament of him who hears it. And, by the bye, with the exception of the fine extravaganza on that subject in Twelfth Night, i do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature: it is a passage in the Religio medici of Sir T. Browne; and, though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects.” The whole of the passage referred to is this. “It is my temper, and I like it the better, to affect all harmony; and sure there is music, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain “the music of the spheres”: for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church-music. For myself, not only from my Catholic [this word “Catholic” does not appear in most editions] obedience, but my particular genius, i do embrace it; for even that vulgar and tavern-music, whicch makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer. There is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and creatures of God, — such a melody to the ear, as the whole world, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God. It unties the ligaments of my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself, and by degrees methinks resolves me into heaven. [This previous sentence is omitted in most editions.] I will not say, with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its nearest sympathy unto music: thus some, whose temper of body agrees, and humors the constitution of their souls, are born poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto rhythm.” SIR THOMAS BROWNE, II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

Blackwood published a 1-volume treatise on THE LOGIC OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY by Thomas De Quincey.

Also from this period, we have a manuscript fragment labeled “a new paper on Murder as a Fine Art.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1845

Prosper Merimee’s novel about CARMEN, a feisty Gypsy girl in an Andalusian cigarette factory.

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley was invalided by what would eventually be discovered to be a tumor in her brain.

John Quincy Adams wrote to the Reverend Samuel H. Cox: “In my early youth I was addicted to the use of tobacco in two of its mysteries, smoking and chewing. I was warned by a medical friend of the pernicious operation of this habit upon the stomach and the nerves.”

Thomas De Quincey’s “Coleridge and Opium-Eating” and “Suspiria de Profundis” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. His “On Wordsworth’s Poetry” and “Notes on Gilfillan’s Gallery of Literary Portraits: Godwin, Foster, Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats” (which would run until 1846) appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. SUSPIRA DE PROFUNDIS

Perry Davis’s patent vegetable painkiller consisted of opiates and ethanol and –as is evident in the globe map on its label– originated from that known center of “Joy to the World” sensory satisfaction, Providence, Rhode Island: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS DE QUINCEY THOMAS DE QUINCEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

Thomas De Quincey’s “System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescope” appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine.4

ASTRONOMY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

Thomas De Quincey’s “Joan of Arc” and “The Nautico-Military Nun of Spain” appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine.

4. William Parsons, 3d Earl of Rosse, had constructed a 72-inch reflecting telescope at Borr Castle in Parsontown, County Offaly that was and would remain for the remainder of the 19th Century, the largest (above is a photo of a reconstruction of it). He had been the 1st to describe in a galaxy a spiral structure, and here is his 1845 sketch — and the galaxy known as M51: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1848

Thomas De Quincey’s “Final Memorials of Charles Lamb” in The North British Review.

February 12, Saturday: At the home of Mrs. Crowe in Edinburgh, Waldo Emerson met Thomas De Quincey, who had walked ten miles through stormy weather to attend the supper and was still wet, and Robert Chambers, whose anonymous 1844 VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, or whose equally wrongheaded 1845 elaboration EXPLANATIONS: ASEQUEL TO “VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION,” had encouraged him to be misconceiving evolution in a conventional self-congratulatory Hegelian and unDarwinian manner, as a mere progressive ascent from volvox globator through the animalcule savages of the waterdrop, through the ape, through the Negro, “up to the wise man of the nineteenth century,” that is, up to himself the pinnacle, the apex, the paragon, the reward. CHARLES DARWIN

Having given up not only on The Nation but also on the Irish Confederation, John Mitchel put out the first issue of his The United Irishman. This newspaper would openly espouse the preparation of his countrymen for rebellion against their English overlords. Its target audience was to be “that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property.” The newspaper would characterize His Excellency Lord Clarendon as “H(er) Majesty’s Executioner General and General Butcher in Ireland,” and would write openly of its project to “sweep the English out of Ireland.” All this would be for a few weeks ignored by the British authorities. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 19, Saturday: Waldo Emerson dined by invitation with Thomas De Quincey at his home in Lasswade outside Edinburgh:

He lives with his three daughters Margaret, Florence, and ———. Thither I went, with Mrs. Crowe and Dr. Brown, in Mrs. C.’s carriage. The second daughter, Florence, has a pleasing style of beauty. His son, Francis, was also present, who is a medical student in the University. De Quincey told us how his acquaintance with Wilson began; for, though they were at Oxford together, they had never met, but De Quincey, traveling in Wales, had arrived at an inn, where he learned that a gentleman lay sick and sore with his wounds. For Wilson, in some of his mad pranks, had paid attention to a country girl at a theatre, and after the play was over, her lover and his friends had waylaid him and most ignominiously mauled him. And De Quincey, learning who it was who was in the house, sent up his card and made his acquaintance. Of Turnbull (whom I had seen with Dr. Brown) it was told that he had said “he would go to hell for Sir William Hamilton.” Mrs. Crowe insisted that De Quincey should go back to Edinburgh with us in the coach and should go to my lecture, a proposition to which he somewhat reluctantly assented, as, I think, he said he had never attended a public lecture, — or not for a good many years. But the victorious lady put him into the carriage. As we entered Edinburgh, he grew very nervous, and Dr. Brown saw the reason, and assured him that his old enemy (Mrs. MacBold) had removed to another quarter of the city. “Ah,” said De Quincey, “if one of the Furies should arrive in Edinburgh, it would make little difference at what hotel she put up.” Dr. Brown and Mrs. Crowe told me in detail the story of his rescue from the hands of this Mrs. MacBold, who was his evil genius, and had exercised a reign of terror over him for years, — a very powerful and artful, large-limbed, red-haired beldame, from whom flight to Glasgow and concealment there was the only help, whilst his friends, with Wilson, contrived the extrication of his valuable papers and literary manuscripts from her custody. The woman followed him to Glasgow, met Dr. Nichol’s daughter in the street (a child), and asked her pleasantly if she knew where Mr. De Quincey lived. The child said Yes, and, at her request, conducted her to his retreat! He fled again. At Edinburgh she sent a little girl to Professor Wilson (with a napkin of his own by way of token) “with Mr. De Quincey’s compliments,” asking him to send him back by the bearer the bundle of papers he had left with him, — and he sent them! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

Thomas De Quincey’s “The English Mail-Coach” was his last essay for Blackwood’s Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

Thomas De Quincey began to write frequently for James Hogg’s Instructor.

ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY

At Boston, the firm of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields began publication of DE QUINCEY’S WRITINGS, reprinting them with permission directly from magazines without any revision by the author (this project would amount to a grand total of 24 volumes not completed by James Thomas Fields until 1859; Henry Thoreau would be reading frequently in this convenient series, obtaining the volumes evidently from the Concord Town Library). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I. CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, AND SUSPIRA DE PROFUNDIS. CONFESSIONS, SUSPIRA...

II. BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS. BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS

III. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS

IV. THE CÆSARS. THE CÆSARS

V. LITERARY REMINISCENCES. VOL. I. AUTOBIOGRAPHY LITERARY REMINISCENCES I

VI. LITERARY REMINISCENCES. VOL. II. AUTOBIOGRAPHY LITERARY REMINISCENCES II

VII. NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. VOL. I. NARRATIVE MISC. VOL. I

VIII. NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. VOL. II. NARRATIVE MISC. VOL. II

IX. ESSAYS ON THE POETS, AND OTHER ENGLISH WRITERS. ESSAYS ON THE POETS

X. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS. VOL I. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL I

XI. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS. VOL II. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL II

5 ? AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES, 1853. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES

5. This volume issued in 1853 took the place in the series of an 1851 “Life and Manners” in regard to which, at least as captured now in Adobe Books electronic PDF, there seems to have been something very seriously doofus in the manner in which the pages had been assembled into signatures, at the 19th-Century print shop. LIFE AND MANNERS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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XII. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES, 1854. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES

XIII. ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS, AND OTHER MEN OF LETTERS. VOL. I. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS I

XIV. ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS, AND OTHER MEN OF LETTERS VOL. II. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS II

XV. LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN, AND OTHER PAPERS. LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN

XVI. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME I. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS I

XVII. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME II. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS II

XVIII. THE NOTE BOOK OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. NOTE BOOK OF AN ENGL...

XIX. MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME I. MEMORIALS, ETC. I

XX. MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME II. MEMORIALS, ETC. II

1857. TO THE ABOVE WAS ADDED A VOLUME OF “SKETCHES, CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHIC.” SKETCHES, CRITICAL AND BIO.

Note that Thoreau was not reading in Thomas De Quincey in order to learn how to write well. In Thoreau’s estimation this English writer, like Charles Dickens, was insufficiently moderate in his writing. They flow too readily, do not affect us by a reserve of meaning, they say all they mean, their sentences are not concentrated and nutty; in particular Thoreau found the style of De Quincey to be no where kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant. What Thoreau was striving toward –by way of extreme contrast– were sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them — which do not merely report an old but make a new impression. To frame these that is the art of writing. Thoreau’s desire was to be able to state a fact simply and adequately, to digest some experience cleanly. Most things are said with reference to certain conventions or existing institutions, he pointed out, rather than absolutely, while if the writer can state a fact truly and absolutely that fact is taken out of the region of commonsense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance. Say it and have done with it was Thoreau’s considered advice — express it without expressing yourself, see neither with the barren eye of science nor the impotent eye of youthful poetry, but taste the world and digest it: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It is the fault of some excellent writers –De Quincy’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me– that they express themselves with too great fullness & detail. They give the most faithful natural & living account of their sensations mental & physical –but they lack moderation and sententiousnes —they do not affect us by an ineffictual earnesst and a reserve of meaning –like a stutterer— they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new impression— Sentences which suggest far mor than they say, which have an atmosphere about them — which do not merely report an old by make a new impression— Sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman Acqueduct To frame these that is the art of writing. Sentences which are expensive towards which so many volumes — so much life went — which lie like boulders on the page — up & down or across. Not mere repetition but creation. Which a man might sell his grounds & castle to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. — His style is no where kinked and knotted up into something hard & significant which you could swallow like a diamond without digesting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

Thomas De Quincey “Lord Carlisle on Pope,” his last essay for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine.

His CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, AND SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS: BEING A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER and LITERARY REMINISCENCES were reissued in Boston by the firm of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. (There would be a copy of this American edition in Bronson Alcott’s home library, and a copy in the Concord Town Library, but in all likelihood Henry Thoreau had already years earlier made himself familiar with this material, out of an English edition.) CONFESSIONS, SUSPIRA... LITERARY REMINISCENCES I LITERARY REMINISCENCES II

At the Concord Town Library, Henry Thoreau would copy from “Coleridge’s Conversations” and “Education of Genius” into his 2d Commonplace Book.

March 30, Sunday: It is clear from the content of Henry Thoreau’s journal that he has been reading in Thomas De Quincey’s THE CÆSARS (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851, one in an extended series of volumes of DE QUINCEY’S WRITINGS that would not to be complete for any number of years): THE CÆSARS

March 30: Spring is already upon us. I see the tortoises or rather I hear them drop from the bank into the brooks at my approach– The catkins of the alders have blossomed The pads are springing at the bottom of the water –the Pewee is heard & the lark.

“It is only the squalid savages and degraded boschmen of creation that have their feeble teeth and tiny stings steeped in venom, and so made formidable,” — ants, centipedes, and mosquitoes, spiders, wasps, and scorpions. – Hugh Miller. To attain to a true relation to one human creature is enough to make a year memorable. The man for whom law exists –the man of forms, the conservative– is a tame man. CARRYING OFF SIMS

A recent English writer (De Quincey), endeavoring to account for the atrocities of Caligula and Nero, their monstrous and anomalous cruelties, and the general servility and corruption which they imply, observes that it is difficult to believe that “the descendants of a people so severe in their habits” as the Romans had been “could thus rapidly “have degenerated and that, “in reality, the citizens of Rome were at this time a new race, brought together from every quarter of the world, but especially from Asia.” A vast “proportion of the ancient citizens had been cut off by the sword,” and such multitudes of emancipated slaves from Asia had been invested with the rights of citizens “that, in a single generation, Rome became almost transmuted into a baser metal.” As Juvenal complained, “the Orontes ... had mingled its impure waters with those of the Tiber.” And “probably, in the time of Nero, not one man in six was of pure Roman descent.” Instead of such, says another, “came Syrians, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Cappadocians, Phrygians, and other enfranchised slaves.” “These in half a century had sunk so low, that Tiberius pronounced her [Rome’s] very senators to be homines ad servitutem natos, men born to be slaves.”

August 22, Friday: Henry Thoreau characterized his writing agenda in AN EXCURSION TO CANADA just after jotting down a trial version of that book’s opening paragraph. TIMELINE OF CANADA

Dissecting the faults of “some excellent writers,” he specifically criticized Thomas De Quincey’s “first impressions on seeing London” as having been expressed “with too great fullness and detail”: LITERARY REMINISCENCES I LITERARY REMINISCENCES II

It is the fault of some excellent writers –De Quincey’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me– that they express themselves with too great fullness & detail. They give the most faithful natural & living account of their sensations mental & physical –but they lack moderation and sententiousnes —they do not affect us by an ineffictual earnesst and a reserve of meaning –like a stutterer— they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new impression— Sentences which suggest far mor than they say, which have an atmosphere about them — which do not merely report an old by make a new impression— Sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman Acqueduct To frame these that is the art of writing. Sentences which are expensive towards which so many volumes — so much life went — which lie like boulders on the page — up & down or across. Not mere repetition but creation. Which a man might sell his grounds & castle to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. — His style is no where kinked and knotted up into something hard & significant which you could swallow like a diamond without digesting. ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 18, Tuesday: Surveying these days the ministerial-lot. Now at Sundown I hear the hooting of an owl [Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus]–hoo hoó hóo—hoorer—hóo. It sounds like the hooting of an idiot or a maniac broke loose. This is faintly answered in a different strain apparently from a greater distance–almost as if it were the echo–i.e. so far as the succession is concerned. This is my music each evening. I heard it last evening. The men who help me call it the “hooting owl” and think it is the cat-owl. It is a sound admirably suited the swamp & to the twilight woods–suggesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized nor satisfied. I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark twilight unsatisfied thoughts I have. Let owls do the idiotic & maniacal hooting for men. This sound faintly suggests the infinite roominess of nature–that there is a world in which owls live– Yet how few are seen even by the hunters! The sun has shone for a day over this savage swamp where the single spruce stands covered with esnea? moss–which a Concord merchant mortgaged once to the trustees of the ministerial fund & lost–but now for a different race of creatures a new day dawns over this wilderness–which one would have thought was sufficiently dismal before. Here hawks also circle by day & chicadees [Black-capped Chicadee Parus HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Atricapillus] are heard–& rabbits & partridges [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus] abound. The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them He is not liable to exaggerate insignificant features. He really forgets himself– forgets to observe–and at night he dreams of the swamp its phenomena & events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there–or to go there, if he knows Where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth’s obs. on relaxed attention6) You must be conversant with things for a long time to know much about them–like the moss which has hung from the spruce–and as the partridge & the rabbit are acquainted with the thickets & at length have acquired the color of the places they frequent. If the man of science can put all his knowledge into propositions–the wood man has a great deal of incommunicable knowledge Dea. Brown told me me today of a tall raw-boned fellow by the name of Hosmer who used to help draw the sein behind the Jones’ House–who once when he had hauled it without getting a single shad–held up a little perch in sport above his face–to show what he had got– At that moment the perch wiggled and dropped right down his throat head foremost–and nearly suffocated him–& it was only after considerable time, during which the man suffered much that he was extracted or forced down.– He was in a worse predicament than a fish hawk [Osprey Pandion haliaetus] would have been. In the woods S of the swamp are many great holes made by digging for foxes

6. This citation refers to Thomas De Quincey’s report of William Wordsworth’s explanation of a psychological state conducive to imagination, which is in Thoreau’s journal entry for January 3, 1843. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

Thomas De Quincey began a sometimes extensive revision of his work for SELECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY, an edition being issued by the Edinburgh publisher James Hogg (14 volumes, not complete until 1860). AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES appeared as Volumes One and Two of SELECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY (complete in 1854).

In Boston, the two volumes of De Quincey’s HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS and the two volumes of his NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS came off the presses of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields and wound up in the Concord Town Library, where Henry Thoreau would copy from the section “Philosophy of Herodotus” into his 1854 Fact Book. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL I HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL II NARRATIVE MISC. VOL. I NARRATIVE MISC. VOL. II

January 31, Monday: Henry Thoreau quoted from “System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” on pages 2-47 of Volume II of the NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS of Thomas De Quincey, which had just been published in Boston by the firm of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields: NARRATIVE MISC. VOL. II

January 31st: –Found an Ind. adze in the Bridle-Road at the brook just beyond Daniel Clark Jr’s house. A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only & ignorant with its ignorance– Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age. De Quincy (whose pains to prove that was not Christ’s mission to teach men science though he of course (!) knew it all, – suggested the above–) says– “This downward direction of the eyes, however, must have been worse in former ages: because, else it never could have happened that, until Queen Ann’s days, nobody ever AURORA hinted in a book that there was such a thing, or could be such a thing, as the Aurora Borealis; and in fact, Halley HDT WHAT? INDEX

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had the credit7 of discovering it.” SKY EVENT

ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY

7. De Quincey is of course mistaken, since the aurora borealis had already been seen, and named as such, by Galileo Galilei, before Edmond Halley fils was even a gleam in the eye of Edmond Halley pere.

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June 14, Tuesday: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow threw a going-away party for Nathaniel Hawthorne, and both Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell attended.

June 14. ...This seems the true hour to be abroad sauntering far from home– Your thoughts being already turned toward home — your walk in once sense ended– You are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincy, open to great impressions — & you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye — which you would not see by a direct gaze before– Then the dews begin to descend in your mind & its atmosphere is strained of all impurities– And home is farther away than ever –here is home –the beauty of the world impresses you– There is a coolness in your mind as in a well– Life is too grand for supper.– The wood thrush [Wood Thrush Catharus mustelina] launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain with all his heart and life and soul, of pure and unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another, and another at suitable intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds – the thrasher, mocking-bird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt. They know not what they say! There is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood thrush as between Thomson’s Seasons and Homer. The sweetness of the day crystallizes in this morning coolness.

GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 . . . to the carpet of sphagnum moss supporting the bog garden

in the middle of Gowing’s Swamp. Silently they stood gazing. Penguin Books USA Inc. “Better not all stand in one place,” whispered Mary, and they moved apart. The mossy surface billowed beneath their feet. It was not a place for talking. Slowly they walked around the green-gold garden among the dwarfed larches, the panicled andromeda, the swamp azalea and summersweet. Cotton grass lifted puffs of white on wiry stems. “Listen,” said Mary. They all looked up as a watery warbling began in the woods, a bell-like melody. A moment later it was Viking Penguin repeated in a higher register, the last notes rising out of hear- ing. They didn’t need to be told what it was. Homer looked at Mary. The singing stopped, then began again, a little nearer. . .

ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Famous Dead White Men (attending a famous dead party?): HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

Thomas De Quincey moved into town, taking lodgings at 42 Lothian Street in Edinburgh. His “Postscript” to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” appeared in Volume 4 of SELECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY. His friend Professor John Wilson, emeritus of Edinburgh University, died.

In Boston, De Quincey’s THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS and the two volumes of his ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS, AND OTHER MEN OF LETTERS came off the presses of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields and wound up in the Concord Town Library, where Henry Thoreau would copy from “The Toilette of the Hebrew Lady” into his Indian Notebook #9 and from “Analects from Richter” into his Commonplace Book #2. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS I THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS II PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS I PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS II

January 24, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau and H.G.O. Blake walked about six miles from Worcester into Holden and returned via Stonehouse Hill. In his journal entry for this date, Thoreau mentioned that he had not yet had an opportunity to study the latest volumes of the writings of Thomas De Quincey published in the previous year in Boston and available at the Concord Town Library. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL I HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

In America during this timeframe, immigrant Chinese laborers were introducing the habit of opium smoking.

When some drunken Englishmen murdered a Chinaman in China but the foreign government refused to turn them over to the local authorities for trial, there began what would become known as the “Anglo-French Expedition” or “Arrow War” or “2d Opium War.” The lorcha Arrow was searched by Chinese police, and of course the white men couldn’t put up with that sort of conduct. England’s opium traffic at this point was amounting to 50,000 to 60,000 chests per year. The war would go on for some years and be concluded by the Treaty of Tientsin in which opium was legalized. DOPERS

Thomas De Quincey seized upon the opportunity offered by a collected edition of his writings, to rewrite his famous CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER of 1821/1822.

CONFESSIONS, SUSPIRA...

This appeared as Volume V of SELECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY.

De Quincey began to contribute to James Hogg’s monthly magazine The Titan. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

Thomas De Quincey and James Hogg published a pamphlet on China.

Captain “Bully” Haynes took part in a raid by the authorities on a fleet of 30 armed pirate junks preying on Pearl River traffic between Guangzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong, and personally apprehended the pirate leader, Eli Boggs. (Both Haynes and Boggs were United States citizens.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 26, Sunday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Benjamin B. Wiley and attempted to explicate his parable in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS of the loss of the hound, horse, and turtle-dove.

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Curiously, he explicated it as if he were explicating his reference to Mencius’s remark about the loss of the “sentiments of the heart” in A WEEK where he had quoted as follows:

A WEEK: Mencius says: “If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well PEOPLE OF how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, A WEEK he does not know how to seek them again.... The duties of practical philosophy consist only in seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.”

MENCIUS

So what he sent off to Wiley was:

How shall we account for our pursuits if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of a common mint. If others have their losses, which they are busy repairing, so have I mine, & their hound & horse may perhaps be the symbols of some of them. But also I have lost, or am in danger of losing, a far finer & more etherial treasure, which commonly no loss of which they are conscious will symbolize — this I answer hastily & with some hesitation, according as I now understand my own words.

I would infer, from this confusion, that in Thoreau’s memory his quotation in THE DIAL and then in A WEEK of a parable from Mencius, a parable which referred to a fowl and a dog, and his invention of his own parable in WALDEN, which referred to a hound, a horse, and a turtle-dove, had, by 1857 at least, become commingled.

THE SCHOLAR. Teen, son of the king of Tse, asked what the business of the scholar consists in? Mencius replied, In elevating his mind and inclination. What do you mean by elevating the mind? It consists merely in being benevolent and just. Where is the scholar’s abode? In benevolence. Where is his road? Justice. To dwell in benevolence, and walk in justice, is the whole business of a great man. Benevolence is man’s heart, and justice is man’s path. If a man lose his fowls or his dogs, he knows how to seek them. There are those who lose their hearts and know not how to seek them. The duty of the student is no other than to seek his lost heart. He who employs his whole mind, will know his nature. He who knows his nature, knows heaven. It were better to be without books than to believe all that they record. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A WEEK: Mencius says: “If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well PEOPLE OF how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, A WEEK he does not know how to seek them again.... The duties of practical philosophy consist only in seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.”

MENCIUS

We should, therefore, limit the range of possible interpretations of Thoreau’s parable to those which are not blatantly discordant with the more decipherable intention of the Mencius parable. And immediately we notice that a key to the Mencius parable is that “loss” can mean such different things, that we may know how to recover from one “loss” but may have no clue as to how to recover from another “loss.” THOREAU AND CHINA

There is a marked difference in the meaning of the word “my” when it is applied to my hound, my horse, and my turtledove.

Did we suppose that “my” means the same in the expression “Please get my hat” as in the expression “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” No, we did not suppose that, nor are we to suppose that the possessive pronoun is the same when it is applied to a family pet with whom we share a long-term and deep affectional relationship, to a barn animal we saddle in order to go somewhere, and to a wild bird we glimpse as it disappears behind a cloud. In the sense in which the dog is my dog, the horse is not my horse. In the sense in which the horse is my horse, the turtledove is not my turtledove. And there is not only a difference in the definition of the possessive pronoun “my” when it is applied to my hound, my horse, and my turtledove, there is also a difference in the meaning of the economic term “loss.” For me to lose my hound is for this dog to run off after a scent and return when it chooses. For me to lose my horse is for this horse to be stolen by a horse thief, or for me to gamble it away, or for it to lie down and die. For me to lose a turtledove is — what? Thoreau didn’t need to clutch a turtledove, so how could he lose it? What he said was “In Boston yesterday an ornithologist said significantly, ‘If you held the bird in your hand–’; but I would rather hold it in my affections,” and the bird of which he and the ornithologist spoke might as well have been a turtledove as an eponymous anonymous bird of some other species. When one gets to the turtledove part of the saying, one recognizes that Thoreau’s parable of loss is a secret joke, a joke on the whole idea that in this world there could be such a thing as loss. We may well wonder how the idea of loss could have arisen in a world in which each instant of our lives is a gift to us, and is a gift over which we have no control whatever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Note that if we interpret the parable of the “loss” of the hound, horse, and turtle-dove as a secret joke on the whole idea that in this world there could be such a thing as loss, then the parable becomes an intrinsic part of the chapter, for the chapter, according to Stanley Cavell’s THE SENSES OF WALDEN, is, in its entirety, a parable about the unreality of loss and an attempt to subvert our customary deployment of economic terms such as loss when we attempt to deal with the affect of our lives:

The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.

Note also that if we interpret this parable of the “loss” of the hound, horse, and turtle-dove as a secret joke on the simpleminded presumption that “loss” is one single, unproblematic concept, then we are led directly back, full circle, to this citation of Mencius in A WEEK, the citation in which the “duties of practical philosophy” are specified.

A WEEK: Mencius says: “If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well PEOPLE OF how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, A WEEK he does not know how to seek them again.... The duties of practical philosophy consist only in seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.”

MENCIUS

Barbara Johnson, while agreeing that the parable has to do with losses, evidently disagrees with the idea that the chapter is intended to distance us from the easy application of such economic terms to the affect of our lives. Rather, she suggests, WALDEN wakes us up to our losses, evidently to the reality of our losses:

WALDEN’s great achievement is to wake us up to our own losses, to make us participate in the trans-individual movement of loss in its own infinite particularity, urging us passionately to follow the tracks of we know not quite what, as if we had lost it, or were in danger of losing it, ourselves. In order to communicate the irreducibly particular yet ultimately unreadable nature of loss, Thoreau has chosen to use three symbols [hound, bay horse, and turtledove] that clearly are symbols but that do not really symbolize anything outside themselves.

We may note also, here, that Johnson is attempting a pre-emptive strike at anyone and everyone who would make the three symbolic animals “symbolize anything outside themselves.” My own attitude toward this is that a good reader is an active reader, and seeks to read meaning into what she is reading. We should judge each attempt on its merits, and make no pre-emptive strike against the attempt to actively engage with the presented material. Concord April 26th HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857 Dear Sir I have been spending a fortnight in New Bedford, and on my return find your last letter awaiting me. I was sure that you would find Newcomb inexhaustible, if you found your way into him at all. I might say, however, by way of criticism, that he does not take firm enough hold on this world, where surely we are bound to triumph. I am sorry to say that I do not see how I can furnish you with a copy of my essay on the wild. It has not been prepared for publication, only for lectures, and would cover at least a hundred written pages. Even if it were ready to be dis- persed, I could not easily find time to copy it. So I return the order. I see that you are turning a broad furrow among the books, but I trust that some very private journal all the while holds its own through their midst. Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside. I should say read Goethe’s Autobiography by all means, also Gibbon’s Haydon the Painter’s– & our Franklin’s of course; perhaps also Alfieris, Ben- venuto Cellini’s, & De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater – since you like Autobiography. I think you must read Coleridge again & further –skipping all his theology– i.e. if you value precise definitions & a discriminating use of language. By the way, read De Quincey’s reminiscences of Coleridge & Wordsworth. How shall we account for our pursuits if they are original? We get the lan- guage with which to describe our various lives out of a common mint. If others have their losses, which they are busy repairing, so have I mine, & their hound & horse may perhaps be the symbols of some of them. But also I have lost, or am in danger of losing, a far finer & more etherial treasure, which common- ly no loss of which they are conscious will symbolize— This I answer hastily & with some hesitation, according as I now understand my own words. I take this occasion to acknowledge, & thank you for, your long letter of Dec 21st. So poor a correspondent am I. If I wait for the fit time to reply, it commonly does not come at all, as you see. I require the presence of the other party to suggest what I shall say. Methinks a certain polygamy with its troubles is the fate of almost all men. They are married to two wives – their genius (a celestial muse) and also to some fair daughter of the earth. Unless these two were fast friends before mar- riage, and so are afterward, there will be but little peace in the house. In answer to your questions, I must say that I never made, nor had occasion to use a filter of any kind; but, no doubt, they can be bought in Chicago. You cannot surely identify a plant from a scientific description until after long practice. The “millers” you speak of are the perfect or final state of the insect. The chrysalis is the silken bag they spun when caterpillars, & occupied in the nymph state. Yrs truly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Henry D. Thoreau EDWARD GIBBON THOMAS DE QUINCEY VITTORIO ALFIERI BENVENUTO CELLINI BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON

READ ALFIERI’S TEXT READ FRANKLIN’S TEXT

April 26. Riordan’s cock follows close after me while spading in the garden, and hens commonly follow the gardener and plowman, just as cowbirds the cattle in a pasture. I turn up now in the garden those large leather-colored nymphs.

P. M. — Up Assabet to White Cedar Swamp. See on the water over the meadow, north of the boat’s place, twenty rods from the nearest shore and twice as much from the opposite shore, a very large striped snake swimming. It swims with great ease, and lifts its head a foot above the water, darting its tongue at us. A snake thus met with on the water appears far more monstrous, not to say awful and venomous, than on the land. It is always something startling and memorable to meet with a serpent in the midst of a broad water, careering over it. But why had this one taken to the water? Is it possible that snakes ever hibernate in meadows which are subject to be overflown? This one when we approached swam toward the boat, apparently to rest on it, and when I put out my paddle, at once coiled itself partly around it and allowed itself to be taken on board. It did not hang down from the paddle like a dead snake, but stiffened and curved its body in a loose coil about it. This snake was two feet and eleven inches long; the tail alone, seven and a quarter. There [were] one hundred and forty-five large abdominal plates, besides the three smaller under the head, and sixty-five pairs of caudal scales. The central stripe on the back was not bright-yellow, as Storer describes, but a pale brown or clay-color; only the more indistinct lateral stripes were a greenish yellow, the broad dark-brown stripes being between; beneath greenish. Beneath the tail in centre, a dark, somewhat greenish line. This snake was killed about 2 P.M.; i.e., the head was perfectly killed then; yet the posterior half of the body was apparently quite alive and would curl strongly around the hand at 7 P.M. It had been hanging on a tree in the meanwhile. I have the same objection to killing a snake that I have to the killing of any other animal, yet the most humane man that I know never omits to kill one. I see a great many beetles, etc., floating and struggling on the flood. We sit on the shore at Wheeler’s fence, opposite Merriam’s. At this season still we go seeking the sunniest, most sheltered, and warmest place. C. says this is the warmest place he has been in this year. We are in this like snakes that lie out on banks. In sunny and sheltered nooks we are in our best estate. There our thoughts flow and we flourish most. By and by we shall seek the shadiest and coolest place. How well adapted we are to our climate! In the winter we sit by fires in the house; in spring and fall, in sunny and sheltered nooks; in the summer, in shady and cool groves, or over water where the breeze circulates. Thus the average temperature of the year just suits us. Generally, whether in summer or winter, we are not sensible either of heat or cold. A great part of our troubles are literally domestic or originate in the house and from living indoors. I could write an essay to be entitled “Out of Doors,” — undertake a crusade against houses. What a different thing Christianity preached to the house-bred and to a party who lived out of doors! Also a sermon is needed on economy of fuel. What right has my neighbor to burn ten cords of wood, when I burn only one? Thus robbing our half-naked town of this precious covering. Is he so much colder than I? It is expensive to maintain him in our midst. If some earn the salt of their porridge, are we certain that they earn the fuel of their kitchen and parlor? One man makes a little of the driftwood of the river or of the dead and refuse (unmarketable!) wood of the forest suffice, and nature rejoices in him. Another, Herod-like, requires ten cords of the best of young white oak or HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS DE QUINCEY THOMAS DE QUINCEY hickory, and he is commonly esteemed a virtuous man. He who burns the most wood on his hearth is the least warmed by the sight of it growing. Leave the trim wood-lots to widows and orphan girls. Let men tread gently through nature. Let us religiously burn stumps and worship in groves, while Christian vandals lay waste the forest temples to build miles of meeting-houses and horse-sheds and feed their box stoves. The white cedar is apparently just out. The higher up the tree, the earlier. Towed home an oak log some eighteen feet long and more than a foot through, with a birch with around it and another birch fastened to that. Father says lie saw a boy with a. snapping turtle yesterday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

In India, as a result of a dangerous rebellion, the British government finally dissolved the British East India company and the Moghul Empire and began to rule India directly. Subsequent to the mutiny, Monier Williams would no longer be able to teach Asian languages at the East India Company College.

The Reverend Charles Henry Appleton Dall’s A LECTURE ON TRUE PATRIOTISM IN BENGAL, OR, THE BENGALI AS HE IS, AND AS HE MAY BE.

Thomas De Quincey completed his articles on the Sepoy Mutiny for The Titan.

Having taken over the opium trade as of 1833, in order to increase revenues the British government of India inaugurated a period of “mad expansion” of opium cultivation. Except for land and salt, opium revenues would become its largest source of income. In Britain, meanwhile, proposals were increasingly being made to abolish the opium trade. The medical profession disagreed over the extent of damage caused by opium. Due to lower import duties, an opium high became cheaper than getting drunk on alcohol. The Pharmacy Act of 1868, one of the first laws restricting the sale of such substances, dictated that opiates could only be sold by registered chemists or druggists, but patent medicines are specifically excluded.

The Anglo-Chinese war or Opium War that began in 1856 wound toward an end, with the Treaties of Tientsin. Karl Marx, writing from London for the New-York Tribune, marveled at the opium war, that the “civilized nations of the world” were giving their de-facto blessing to the invasion of China, “a peaceful country, without HDT WHAT? INDEX

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previous declaration of war, for an alleged infringement of the fanciful code of diplomatic etiquette.”

The infringements in question were that:

1.) the ambassadors of the outer barbarians had been denied permission to establish a foreign compound within the city limits of the Chinese capital, Beijing,

and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2.) in a Chinese port, a ship had been searched by Chinese authorities for the presence of opium, and that ship had at that time been flying the British “rice flag.”

It is estimated that by 1900 roughly 90,000,000 people in China would have become addicted to the substance in question.

The official translator for the French at negotiations in Tientsin, a father Delamarre, took it upon himself to insert a few words into the Chinese version of the Sino-American, Sino-Russian, Sino-British, and Sino- French treaty being signed on his own behalf, and granted to his Catholics the privilege of purchasing or leasing land in the interior of China. Evidently, nobody noticed that he had added this.

This was Hong Kong strait in this year, depicted from Kowloon side on the Chinese mainland with Victoria Island in the background, per The Illustrated London News: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

December 8, Thursday: Boston had for some 30 years been intimately entangled with the financial affairs of the South. The shipping interests had been making money by moving the cotton produced by slaves, and the manufacturing interests had been making money by spinning it into cloth. Thus as soon as John Brown was safely dead (his last words had been “I am ready at any time — do not keep me waiting....”), there was created a political organization at Faneuil Hall, euphemistically named the Constitutional Union Party, which would commonly be known by the more accurate designator “Cotton Whigs.” These folks would do everything possible to suck up on a suspicious South.

Burial, with a note from Henry Thoreau (now lost) read last of all at the graveside. A choir of black neighbors sang the old man’s favorite hymn: Blow Ye the Trumpet Blow, The gladly solemn sound, Let all the nations know, To earth’s remotest bound, The year of Jubilee has come. The widow Mary Ann Day Brown continued to bear the year of Jubilee as best she could.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited her and then wrote A VISIT TO JOHN BROWN’S HOUSEHOLD IN 1859, and Edmund Wilson has famously commented in regard to this (page 247), that Higginson interviewed the “widow in her bleak little Adirondack farm with a piety that could not have been more reverent if Mrs. Brown had been the widow of Emerson.”

Thomas De Quincey died in Edinburgh. His body would be interred beside that of Margaret in St Cuthbert’s Churchyard. ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY

December 8. Here is a better glaze than we have yet had, for it snowed and rained in the night. I go to Pleasant Meadow, – or rather toward the sun, for the glaze shows best so. The wind has risen and the trees are stiffly waving with a brattling sound. The birches, seen half a mile off toward the sun, are the purest dazzling white of any tree, probably because their stems are not seen at all. It is only those seen at a particular angle between us and the sun that appear thus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Day before yesterday the ice which had fallen from the twigs covered the snow beneath in oblong pieces one or two inches long, which C. well called lemon-drops. When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. I am not surprised that certain of my neighbors speak of John Brown as an ordinary felon. Who are they? They have much flesh, or at least much coarseness of some kind. They are not ethereal natures, or the dark qualities predominate in them, or they have much office. Several of them are decidedly pachydermatous. How can a man behold the light who has no answering inward light? They are true to their sight, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind. For the children of the light to contend with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls. Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and then let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. Certain persons disgraced themselves by hanging Brown in effigy in this town on the 2d. I was glad to know that the only four whose names I heard mentioned in connection with it had not been long resident here, and had done nothing to secure the respect of the town. It is not every man who can be a Christian, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. The expression “a liberal education” originally meant one worthy of freemen. Such is education simply in a true and broad sense. But education ordinarily so called –the learning of trades and professions which is designed to enable men to earn their living, or to fit them for a particular station in life– is servile. Two hundred years ago is about as great an antiquity as we can comprehend or often have to deal with. It is nearly as good as two thousand to our imaginations. It carries us back to the days of aborigines and the Pilgrims; beyond the limits of oral testimony, to history which begins already to be enamelled with a gloss of fable, and we do not quite believe what we read; to a strange style of writing and spelling and of expression; to those ancestors whose names we do not know, and to whom we are related only as we are to the race generally. It is the age of our very oldest houses and cultivated trees. Nor is New England very peculiar in this. In England also, a house two hundred years old, especially if it be a wooden one, is pointed out as an interesting relic of the past. When we read the history of the world, centuries look cheap to us and we find that we had doubted if the hundred years preceding the life of Herodotus seemed as great an antiquity to him as a hundred years does to us. We are inclined to think of all Romans who lived within five hundred years B.C. as contemporaries to each other. Yet Time moved at the same deliberate pace then as now. Pliny the Elder, who died in the 79th year of the Christian era, speaking of the paper made of papyrus which was then used, –how carefully it was made,– says, just as we might say, as if it were something remarkable: “There are, thus, ancient memorials in the handwriting of Caius and Tiberius Gracchus, almost two hundred years old, which I have seen in the possession of Pomponius Secundus the poet, a very illustrious citizen. As for the handwriting of Cicero, Augustus, and Virgil, we very often meet with it still.” This too, according to Pliny, was the age of the oldest wines. “In one year the quality of all kinds of wine was peculiarly good. In the consulship of Lucius Opimius, when Caius Gracchus, disturbing the people with seditions, was killed, there was that bright and serene weather (ea caeli temperies fulsit) which they call a cooking (of the grape) by the heat of the sun. This was in the year of the city 634. And some of those wines have lasted to this day, almost two hundred years, now reduced to the appearance of candied honey (in speciem redacta mellis asperi).” [Bohn’s translation says, “have assumed the consistency of honey with a rough taste!!”] How is it that what is actually present and transpiring is commonly perceived by the common sense and understanding only, is bare and bald, without halo or the blue enamel of intervening air? But let it be past or to come, and it is at once idealized. As the man dead is spiritualized, so the fact remembered is idealized. It is a deed ripe and with the bloom on it. It is not simply the understanding now, but the imagination, that takes cognizance of it. The imagination requires a long range. It is the faculty of the poet to see present things as if, in this sense, also past and future, as if distant or universally significant. We do not know poets, heroes, and saints for our contemporaries, but we locate them in some far-off vale, and, the greater and better, the further off we [ARE] accustomed to consider them. We believe in spirits, we believe in beauty, but not now and here. They have their abode in the remote past or in the future. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1901

Now that WALDEN has become federally mandated reading for all High Schoolers during their junior year, it is interesting for us to recollect that our high estimation of Thoreau as an author is of very recent origin. For about one half century subsequent to his death Thoreau had actually been infra dig, of lesser worth.

A good example of this is to be found in a set of tomes published during the period 1901-1905, dealing with the literary reputations of an entire potfull of English and American authors: Charles Wells Moulton’s THE LIBRARY OF LITERARY CRITICISM OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN AUTHORS (Buffalo NY: The Moulton Publishing Company). Since each one of the eight tomes in this set is about 800 pages in length, we are dealing with 800x8 or a rough total of 6,400 pages of literary appreciation. In those thousands upon thousands of fine- print pages dealing with the remainders of hundreds upon hundreds of English and American authors, we ought to be able carefully to compare and contrast the attention given to Thoreau with the attention given to others. Shakespeare of course deserved a lengthy section, and Hawthorne, and Quarles, and Carlyle, and Dickens, and De Quincey — and even Thoreau’s friend Alcott received a surprising amount of space.

But here in its entirety is the rather briefer citation awarded to our guy: ATTITUDES ON THOREAU

(In these 6,400 pages the name of Thoreau also makes five other, minor appearances — because he had happened to make five incidental comments upon five English or American authors whose works were considered of cultural significance, to wit he had made recordable references to: Alcott, Carlyle, Hawthorne, Quarles, Shakespeare.) This, for the authors of this set of eight 1901-1905 volumes of literary appreciation, had been the valuable portion of Thoreau’s commentary on other authors: A SNIPPET ON ALCOTT A SNIPPET ON CARLYLE A SNIPPET ON HAWTHORNE A SNIPPET ON QUARLES A SNIPPET ON SHAKESPEARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Peruse it all if you dare! TOME NUMBER ONE TOME NUMBER TWO TOME NUMBER THREE TOME NUMBER FOUR TOME NUMBER FIVE TOME NUMBER SIX TOME NUMBER SEVEN TOME NUMBER EIGHT

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas De Quincey HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: September 28, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.