Free Guilty Thing by Frances Wilson

De Quincey would continually describe his own life as a fall from Paradise. There is always a gain to illness, and De Quincey found that maternal tenderness and a ceaseless supply of literature were the rewards of this one – his mother thawed when her son lay helpless between the sheets. The tenderness was not to last: when his headmaster, a brilliant and celebrated scholar himself, implored Mrs Quincey to return her son to school, she was appalled by the compliments lavished on the child’s intelligence and to preserve Thomas’s modesty she withdrew him immediately. De Quincey’s education was now placed in the hands of an exiled French nobleman with romantic designs on his employer. The widow was evidently a catch, and De Quincey took on the role of driving his mother’s suitors away. Accordingly, he and his two younger brothers behaved as badly as possible, spending the school hours making faces through the window at the old lady who lived opposite. When the exasperated neighbour complained, Thomas apologised with such formality and charm that she thought him quite the nicest boy she had ever met. Meanwhile, the tutor returned to his battered country without having won the hand of Mrs Quincey, who would never remarry.
    At about this time, they heard that William, aged seventeen , had died from typhoid fever in London; this was presumably another reason for keeping Thomas at home. Three of his seven siblings, as well as his father, were now dead and De Quincey had become the male head of the family. The death of his father registered as wheels he was waiting to hear on a distant road; Jane’s death made its impact only when Elizabeth died; Elizabeth’s death took the form of the central tragedy of his life; and William’s death was described as the answer to a prayer. De Quincey expressed no ambivalence about this, and no guilt over his absence of grief. William ‘
had
controlled,’ he later wrote, ‘and for years to come
would have
controlled, the free spontaneous movements of a contemplative dreamer like myself .’ De Quincey had, however, luxuriated in this control and abandoned himself to his own slavish position; the sudden termination of the dynamic on which his identity was constructed was like the removal of scaffolding around an unfinished building. Nor was the high romance of William’s status as the family pariah lost on him. His brother was a warrior, a tiger, a destroyer of domestic calm, whose adventure in London – a place that De Quincey had only ever read about – had ended in tragedy.
    William’s death did not mean, any more than Elizabeth’s death, that he disappeared from De Quincey’s mind. The deaths of his siblings made their power over him all the more potent. The direction of his own life began to shadow that of his dead brother: just as William had been sent away to school when he became unmanageable, Thomas was now enrolled at a small boarding school in a nearby village called Winkfield, ‘of which the chief recommendation lay in the religious character of the master’. The staff had nothing to teach him, and he did much of the Latin and Greek teaching himself. There was, he told his mother, ‘no emulation, no ambition, nothing to contend for – no honours to excite one ’. Mrs Quincey had not only failed to protect her son from vanity but in so doing, he informed her, she had destroyed his education. Effortlessly at the top of the class, De Quincey was worshipped more by the pupils at Winkfield than he had been by the headmaster at Bath grammar. Bored, miserable, and still fretting about his head injury, he divided his school fellows into rival bands of Greeks and Trojans, and organised mock battles.

    Ten miles west of genteel Bath lay her sister city: teeming, money-grubbing, commercial Bristol, ‘the greatest, the richest, the best port of trade in Great Britain’, as Daniel Defoe