The Sublime to the Practical, how uncomfortable was Thomas De Quincey

Elizabeth Penson. Thomas De Quincey's mother.

Miniature by Thomas Hazlehurst 1760-1818

It's difficult to get away from De Quincey's reactionary views on pretty much everything from the Peterloo Massacre to opposing the Abolitionist Movement. De Quincey didn't approve of slavery, he recognized it as a moral evil which had been around too long, he wouldn't have owned a slave himself, but much better for everyone if slave owners freed their own slaves rather than sending in the navy to sort out slave traders. De Quincey was a monarchist with little faith in the common folk. He thought British Imperialism an obvious solution to the world as it was and three years after his father died, his mother, the wife of a very successful textile merchant changed the surname to De Quincey. An association with Norman Royalty which her son Thomas learned to appreciate.

In his growing up De Quincey confronted a number of what some might call hurdles. His father died when he was seven, his older sister, who he "adored" died when he was six, and in 1796 his older brother who was like a hero to him died at fifteen years of age. His three surviving brothers and his surviving sister were normal, Thomas wasn't. He was what they call Intellectually Precocious, when he was eight he was fluent in Latin and Greek but he struggled with the shyness of Social Dyssynchrony, which is when a somewhat sickly person allows their intellect to isolate them from peers.

Say what you like about De Quincey's mum, she had the right idea taking her most difficult child out of King Edward's School in Bath and sending him to an inferior school in a small village called Wingfield in Wiltshire which was run by a strictly religious Vicar in the hopes of knocking the pompous social dyssynchrony out of him and by so doing giving him a chance to fit in.

In those days when the bread-winner croaked leaving large sums of money and business interests to the widow they used to have this whole guardian thing, which I think still happens. The Quincey family as it morphed into the De Quincey family was attended to and cared for by three guardians. The guardian put in charge of making the ultimate decisions for Thomas De Quincey's share of the inheritance was a man called Mr. Pringle. Put simply, Pringle was a religious nut who didn't approve of anything resembling joy. The shy and precocious, demonic, Thomas had problems with Mr. Pringle.

Safe to assume that Mr. Pringle's thinking on the subject of Elizabeth Quincey's son Thomas would run along the following lines: Brilliant but wayward, immensely vexing and difficult to manage, dangerously unsuitably for a stable career, fiscally irresponsible and incapable of handling his substantial inheritance. Mr. Pringle was a good Christian, I'm not blessed that way, but I can translate he nuances of decent language. What Pringle meant was this: Thomas was a real pain in the neck, he was needy and uncomfortable to be around, if he knocked on your door you'd hide in a cupboard rather than spend time with him.

When he was seventeen, young Thomas ran away from Manchester Grammar School, where he'd been sent to get him ready for The University of Oxford. He couldn't handle the life he was being forced to live any longer, he didn't want to go home to have to deal with his Guardian, a dogmatic, unimaginative man who was incapable of understanding genius. His battle now was food and shelter, hithertofore all that and luxuries had been provided for by his family. But that early morning in July of 1802 might not have been what we were all thinking. A brave man making a break for freedom, begin life anew!

Young Thomas had been in correspondence with his mother, a woman who understood genius and rather wished it hadn't fallen upon one of her children. She knew that Thomas had decided to runaway from his obligations to Mr. Pringle and the family. She hated the idea of it becoming a matter of public knowledge. She would have talked to Mr. Pringle about it. And she talked to Colonel Penson, her brother about it. Decisions were made. Conferences on the matter of what to do about Thomas were measured and very Christian, the  answer was to let him run wild for a bit, find out for himself, and Colonel Penson, rather than the Quincy estate would send him a Guinea a week. Which, Pardon my French, for a wayfarer, a homeless person, was a flecking Fortune. In today's money it would be about 200 dollars a week. 

At this point in my understanding of Thomas De Quincey, I find myself looking at a spoiled rotten, manipulative, self centered, little brat. And then I remember that when he ran from boarding school, he climbed out a window taking with him a bundle of possessions that included a collection of Greek Plays and a copy of Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads." 

The thing is, no matter what he took with him, he'd not be the only person to have run away from an English Boarding School. When Baxter was a bead in the eye of our heart, he and I made our run for it. We went missing at night, we had Leopards adrift on the slopes of Mount Elgon to worry about, and in a practical vein we took buttered bread from the school dinning room to feed upon. But with De Quincey I can be sure his pursuit of the sublime was a worship first enabled by the grant of one Guinea a week and the Laudanum he took for a tooth ache which he could afford to buy because of his uncle's money.

However, the title of his best selling, most memorable and lasting book "The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" which the wide eyed and innocent can still get new, was his own brilliant practical work of marketing.

 

The White Bear and War Torn Revolutionary France

Pitt the Younger. 1759-1806

The Last Prime Minister of Great Britain and the first Prime Minister of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

You can't really talk about Thomas Paine or John Walking Stewart without coming across a Coaching Inn established in 1685 which was first called The Fleece and was later called The White Bear. The Inn was in a part of London England nowadays called Piccadilly.

In the 1790's Piccadilly was frightfully fashionable, relatively peaceful, in modern parlance it was a hub for the social, literary and political elite. It had posh grocery stores, and a gathering of highfalutin bookshops were people went to talk about stuff, and worth noting that in the 1790's the drinking of coffee was all the rage, with over 3000 coffee shops across England. And I have to say that I was very disappointed when I found out that around 1791-92 John Walking Stewart was a lodger at the White Bear.

It just shows how the wish factor that aligns your thinking can often hit hurdles and how easy it is to yell "Fake News" when your feelings are hurt. I should have guessed that something like that would happen to my attempts at balance. It should have been obvious! Walking Stewart had been a general for Hyder Ali, and after pissing off Hyder Ali he'd reacquainted himself with East India Company by becoming a member of the Nabob of Arcot's inner circle. Stewart had money aplenty for his walk from Madras to London. The so called threadbare Armenian private soldier's jacket he'd wear, he'd probably paid for. And indeed you have to ask whether John Walking Stewart had ever actually slept in a hedgerow or befriended a very young streetwalker like Ann who when De Quincey was on the run from his family had filled his dream time with confusion and pity. Later in his life a vision of her regularly visited him in the rush of his opium highs, poor chap.... 

Anyway, you might want to know what on earth a founding father was doing lodging with Walking Stewart at the White Bear in the fashionable Piccadilly of 1791-92. Go ahead, quarrel all you want, Paine may not have signed the bit of paper but he was a revolutionary intellectual and former disgraced English custom and excise officer whose words and writings shaped a nations 'Founding Ideals.' If the prissy fingered passionless Yankees with their attention to detail and ridiculously big army can't handle a Thomas Paine being a founding father, then f-em in the ear. 

In the 1790's The French Revolution was the talk of the town. From rural England it all looked very European, it was just one big war after another big war, but "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" did appeal to a good few intellectual types in Piccadilly amongst whom lopping the head off a tyrannical yoke wasn't that big a problem if it was done "For the People and By the People." Perhaps not Walking Stewart's opinion, the only people he really trusted were the Laplanders

Thomas Paine had just written and published a book he'd called "Rights of Man" and lo, Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister of the British Islands and her colonies, Great Britain as it was called through the 1700's until 1800, had decided to start banning books and arresting authors who didn't really see a problem with radical changes like those French Revolutionaries were engaged in, and on this subject, Pitt the Younger, despite being a man who'd remained obedient to his doctor's advice to drink a bottle of port every day since he was 14, couldn't help but notice that Thomas Paine, a particularly incendiary rabblerouser who'd had great success in the Americas had written another book and was dolling around in Piccadilly as an unmarried male and probably drinking coffee. 

But it was because he was lodging at the White Bear in a very fashionable part of town, and not hiding in a hedgerow, Thomas Paine was warned by his friend the Poet, Painter and Madman William Blake just in time for a Founding Father to run away to France where he was already an elected representative and was receiving income as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais region to the National Convention of France.

Paine missed his trial date for seditious libel, which had been set for December 18th 1792. The Magistrate declared him guilty, he was convicted of being an Outlaw, no better than a Highwayman, new warrants were issued for his arrest and on January 15th 1793, Thomas Paine, fulfilling his obligations as citizen of the world who represented the Pas-de-Calais region of France, was called to speak to the French National Convention on the subject of Executing Louis XVI (the sixteenth), husband of Marie Antoinette and King of France.

Thomas was of the opinion that the Republic shouldn't execute Louis, instead they should exile him. Thomas' reasons were like this: First of all, Louis wasn't all bad, if it hadn't been for Louis supporting the Americans in their war of independence from the British there would be no Constitution of the United States. Second of all he argued against the Death Penalty by suggesting it was a barbaric method of punishment favored by Monarchy and the French Republic shouldn't stoop to the level of monarchs. And thirdly, there was no point in turning Louis and his dumb-ass family into martyrs for the Royalists Cause. Thomas Paine voted against executing Louis, and for his trouble he was arrested and jailed during Robespierre and the journalist Marat's rule by fear. This was the period of French history referred to as the Reign of Terror. Thomas, a very brave man in defense of his beliefs, was lucky not to have been executed himself.

Interestingly, for those who in our difficult time may have a fever for karma, Marat, the journalist and ideas man, was stabbed to death in a bath by a supporter of the Moderate Girondin faction, a striking woman called Charlotte Corday, sometime in the year of 1793.  And  then a badly wounded Robespierre, who was the progeny of a lawyer marrying a brewer's daughter, was dutifully and formally executed for counter revolutionary activities in the July of 1794.

Vive La Belle France was by 1799 yearning for a Napoleon to tell his Grenadiers to fix bayonets. 

The Outsider In Walking Stewart

Woodland for the trees

We can't just toss the word untutored around and then accuse people of accusing other people of being untutored, and of course back then at the turn of the 18th Century, with the world rapidly reconfiguring there was sickness, disease and poxes aplenty, being untutored was often the least of your disfigurements.

So let's look at it.

Thomas De Quincey mentioned John Walking Stewart in three essays. All three essays were published after Walking Stewart was dead. For De Quincey, Stewart was all of the following: He was a "sublime visionary." He was a "Lion of London," an eccentric character who could be seen everywhere. He was the most eloquent man on the subject of nature the world had ever seen. He was a "Man of genius but not of talents."

De Quincey might have measured Stewart with a degree or two of envy, leading him to make sure everyone knew the Walking Stewart in the white hat was limited. Stewart's genius, De Quincey suggested, was wanting an organ through which to manifest itself. Stewart's ideas were crude, they were imperfect, obscure, ill-disciplined and half developed. They were not producible to a popular audience and they were poorly written. 

No matter what De Quincy, a nervous little man with a crush on Wordsworth, had to say about this and that, The Romantics thought Walking Stewart wonderful. This whole, untrained, untutored stuff was gold, it was Rousseauian poetry in a world that was slowly filling up with untethered throngs, homeless urchins, horrible smells, smoke and  things made of iron. They loved Stewart's rock star qualities, the naturalness of his eloquence on the universality of sentience, a mixture of Hindu, Buddhism, strands of the French Materialism of the 1700's that declared religion an inadequate source for an enlightened metaphysics, matter was all and everything. Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson and Alfred Whitehead were all well tutored minds we've looked at.

In most ways John Walking Stewart was an outsider as much as he was untutored. He was an expression unto himself. His companion in later life was a Miss Wilson and he must have been hell to live with. The lesson to learn from him is an insight into how we achieve understanding. For De Quincey, his book The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an account of his unending struggle with ghosts and with exploring himself. John Walking Stewart didn't have that trouble, he was a blockhead, he didn't need to belong, he remained an outsider, he made his own pattern of thinking.

So yes, our man was untutored!

Meeting your Benjamin or the Golden Mean of Good and Evil.

Shroom in the Woods

The Victorian coterie that included William Wordsworth (English Romantic Poet) and Thomas De Quincey (Confessions of an Opium Eater) would have considered John Walking Stewart an untutored mind.

De Quincey, who died in 1859 at the age of 74, had a knack for the Ancient Greek language. He'd pointed out that in translations of the Bible from Greek into English the Greek word metanoia had often been erroneously translated as either repentance or conversion. Metanoia, as far as De Quincey was concerned meant the infinitely less dramatic a change of mind. None of this impressed his mother who was rather hoping he wouldn't turn into a self impressed pompous a-hole, so she sent him to a very poor quality schools in the hope that he would buck-up, and the first twenty odd years of his life he spent either running away or trying to run away from his home or his school.

Wordsworth died in 1850 aged 80. His mother taught him to read. He first went to a tiny school of "low quality" in Cockermouth which is a small town in a part of England referred to as the Lake District. Then he went to a school for "upper class" children in Penrith which is a small town a couple of dozen miles east of Cockermouth. While at school in Penrith William Wordsworth met Mary Hutchinson who he later married and had five children with.

The only non-boring thing about Wordsworth was the affair he had with a French woman in France called Annette Valon. The two lovers had both been inspired by Rousseau's ideal that all human beings were essentially good, and we'd all been hopelessly corrupted by society.

Annette and William  had a child together, he didn't marry her because you know he was only in France to test out a few Rouseauian Ideals, see what the French Revolution looked like before settling down to writing poetry and marrying a gal his mother approved of that he'd met long before his years at Cambridge, when he was a lad at school in Penrith. 

While in France Wordsworth met a man called John Stewart. What was John Stewart doing in Paris in 1791? No one really knows for sure, but apparently he was too much of a blockhead to survive Harrow, or ever find respectable work in England so his father had shipped him off to work for the East India Company when he was 15 years old. And having done his time in the colonies, he was on his way home to England.

John Stewart had a recent scar on his face, which was still sort of in the process of healing, but he looked fit enough even if he was still anxious to find an Edinburgh trained doctor rather than a shaman.

What had a happened!

The thing about the East India Company was they were incredibly corrupt, in their business dealings they treated people very badly. John couldn't handle it. But it was a big country, not all of it run by the East India Company. He found gainful employment in the service of the Sultan of Mysore. He'd led the sultan's soldiers against the East India Company's mercenaries as well as against rival Princes and he'd actually used Mysore Rockets against Elephants, which was sort of an ugly business and then in a more peaceful moment the Sultan had wanted him to collect unpaid dues from unwilling subjects. What option did he have but to again quarrel with his employer and this time he'd had to make a run for it. One thing had led to another and he'd basically walked to Paris from Southern India, he was looking forward to seeing London again, meanwhile he was rather enjoying the French Revolution and the sort of interesting people it had attracted .

In London, John Stewart was financially OK, had done well enough to make a claim for back pay in the English courts which were redistributing the Nabob of Arcot's Estate. In London, Stewart had written several books on materialist philosophy, he was a big fan of ecological balance, he was responsible for many a radical pamphlet some of which had resulted in him having to leave England to avoid a wrathful response from servants of the Regency who didn't need any more advice on how to manage Mad King George.

In his pursuit of the Golden Mean of Good and Evil, Stewart had loved his visit to Lapland, they were a perfect people. He'd had to cut short his visit to the city of Boston in the Americas because a friend of his had been accused of blasphemy and the church of the Americas was knocking on doors looking for him.  But of all his exploits and ideas, being considered untutored by an intelligentsia he'd both admired and had influenced, hurt John Stewart.

It was an intelligentsia that included a fellow pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who happened to be a founding father after meeting Benjamin Franklin in London. Paine was engaged in writing the The Rights of Man when he met John Stewart. There was Wordsworth, a Poet Laureate of England. And there was De Quincey a lazy savant who reckoned slave owners should be persuaded, not forced, to liberate their slaves and who'd once written that John Walking Stewart was the most eloquent man on the subject of nature he and Wordsworth had ever met. Put simply, Stewart, like the disgraced Customs and Excise Officer Thomas Paine, could talk, he could read and write, but he'd not been trained by the right people, he'd not met his Benjamin as he searched for his Golden Mean

When John Walking Stewart decided he was too old to live happily, he took laudanum on last birthday, the 19th of February, 1822. His body was discovered the following day, by friends. He was 75.