De Quincey's Imperial Systems

Abstract

MUCH OF THE BEST RECENT CRITICISM OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY HAS FOCUSED on relationship between De Quincey and his erstwhile friend and mentor, William Wordsworth. Charles Rzepka and Alina Clej, for instance, read De Quincey's friendship and subsequent hostility to Wordsworth as an anxiety of influence, an attempt to upstage more illustrious writer. (1) Margaret Russett, in contrast, argues that De Quincey does not attempt to avoid Wordsworth's influence, but to parasitically profit from it: De Quincey befriends poet, inhabits his former house, and claims to interpret his genius for popular magazine audience. (2) I find Russett's account especially compelling because it explains De Quincey's continual tendency to stake his own literary authority on other people and agencies, whether Wordsworth, Ricardo, opium, or, as this essay will argue, mail. (3) While attention to Wordsworth-De Quincey relationship provides illuminating readings of De Quincey's early career, however, focusing on relationship between writers has prevented critics from noticing that De Quincey's later works shift from dependence on person such as Wordsworth to dependence on vast, impersonal national organizations. One example from De Quincey's revised Confessions of an Opium Eater can quickly illustrate this shift from an interpersonal to national context. In 1821 Confessions, when De Quincey explains his strong attraction to Lake District, he credits Wordsworth: Wordsworth's poetry has so amazed and intrigued him that he wants not only to meet poet, but to wander very hills depicted in his poetry. When De Quincey revised and expanded Confessions in 1856, however, he diminished role of Wordsworth and of poetry more generally in drawing him to Lakes. In 1856 Wordsworth appears (along with Anne Radcliffe and landscape painters) as merely one of many influences provoking his curiosity. De Quincey ultimately attributes his interest in Lakes to administrative divisions: due to mere legal fiction that southern section of Lakes was part of De Quincey's Lancashire home, Lakes held a secret fascination, subtle, sweet, fantastic, and even from [his] seventh or eighth year spiritually strong. (4) He cannot claim acquaintance with lake region, and he cannot claim that any similarity between landscapes or peoples connects this portion of Lakes to Lancashire. Still, writing retrospectively, De Quincey allows legal identity of Lakes to assign them spiritual meaning even before he reads Wordsworth's poetry. Even more than literature, local culture, or any author's personal charisma, the eccentric geography of law identifies De Quincey as native of Lakes. In moving from Wordsworth to English law, De Quincey refuses organic relationship to Lakes that Wordsworth claimed for his boyhood in Prelude. Equally crucially for my argument here, De Quincey shifts his interest in Lakes out of psychological register. Passing time cannot account for this change. Wordsworth-De Quincey friendship had already turned acrimonious by time De Quincey published earlier passage in 1821, and since Wordsworth was arguably more popular in 1856, after his death, than at time of first version of Confessions, De Quincey stood to gain just as much cultural prestige from his claim to be first to recognize Wordsworth's genius in 1856 as he did in 1821. (5) Instead, I will argue, De Quincey identifies with national bureaucracy because by 1856 he locates authorship within national system of information rather than in individual genius. This redefinition of authorship culminates in De Quincey's 1849 essay, The Mail-Coach. De Quincey's turn to Mail follows growth in importance of such organizations in Britain following Napoleonic wars. As imperial historian C. …