I happened to be in (Tory) Canada while England’s (Tory) Prime Minister was in America this week, making nice with our (essentially very Tory) President. As it happened, while I travelled I was reading a book in which it was surprising to find out a lot about the origins of contemporary English conservatism—surprising because it was, in fact, Robert Morrison’s very fine, newish (2009, actually) biography of Thomas De Quincey, the Romantic critic and poet who wrote “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” the first and still the greatest of all junkie testaments, as even later junkie testament writers like William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson have acknowledged. De Quincey is what flap-copy writers like to call a “fascinating” figure—though in this case he really is. It turns out that De Quincey, trying to make enough money to feed his habit, helped start the kind of right-wing journalism that has since made so much noise, here and over there, and that may at last be running down, what with Cameron having been at least a little caught up in the Murdoch scandals, which have involved his circle of friends and a key aide. It turns out that the grandfather of “The Rum Diaries” was also the great uncle of Fox News and the New York Post.
I had always had the vague notion that De Quincey was a kind of romantic user, slipping down into an opium den in Limehouse, like Sherlock Holmes did, for a week’s escape. Not a bit of it; he was the real thing, a hard-core, every day, drink it down (rather than shoot it up) opium and laudanum man. A brilliant Oxford student, who came close to having a first-class degree but backed out of the examinations at the last moment, he was also one of the first great followers of German philosophy, and a close friend of Wordsworth, Lamb, and, especially, Coleridge—who, it turns out, was also a stone-cold junkie. Having come not long ago from reading Keith Richards’s “Life”, the resemblance between Keith’s account of his addiction and De Quincey’s of his, was startling, and also startling was the close correspondence between Keith’s relationship with Mick Jagger and De Quincey’s with Wordsworth. Keith frequently complains in his book that Mick took on musical ideas that Keith had strummed out, in a stupor, returning with them later as though they were his own. Thomas, if we can call him that, had the same suspicions about Bill W.: “He appropriates whatever another says, so entirely, as to be angry if the originator claimed any part of it,” De Quincey asserted. In conversing with Wordsworth one day, a friend reported, De Quincey “made some remark which Wordsworth caught up & amplified & repeated, next day. De Quincey then observed, ‘I am glad you adopt that view of mine.’ ‘Yours!’ said Wordsworth. ‘Yes, mine’ said De Quincey. ‘No,’ cried Wordsworth, indignantly, ‘it is mine.’” Mick said the same thing about “Brown Sugar.”
The odd thing, though, is that, contrary to immediate American expectation, the hard-drugged-up, laudanum-head De Quincey was, as much as any man could be, the inventor of the tabloid-Tory sensibility—of the kind of popular conservatism that combines high-minded indignation at what the radicals are getting away with alongside low-minded exploitation of what the society the radicals are trying to change already lets people do. In 1818, De Quincey became the editor of a paper called the Gazette, which he seems to have turned into the first of its kind. He wrote, his biographer tells us, “as an anxious, sometimes semi-hysterical, High Tory, who stood staunchly behind a conservative agenda that was essentially imperialistic, defensive and intolerant….” He was against Catholic Emancipation, laid into Liberals, particularly Bentham and the socialist Robert Owen, and even defended the behavior of the Army in the so-called “Peterloo” massacre. At the same time, and in a way that was an innovation in the period, he added to his right-wing politics a tincture of sensationalism, with coverage of suicides, rapes, and above all, murders. He even invented the classic rationale for including such stories in a paper supposedly devoted to defending the moral high ground:
He even ran a creepy feature on electrical experiments with dead bodies, conceivably trying to cash in on the recent success of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”.
De Quincey also used the editorship to stick in articles of his own on Kant, Herder, and German philosophy generally, an element in the formula that has somehow been forgotten. All the while, Wordsworth was looking fussily over his shoulder, and presumably giving a hint that was an echo. Eventually, though, the opium got the upper hand on his editorship, and, trying to go cold turkey, De Quincey got strung out in a familiar struggle between “the collision of both evils—that from the laudanum and that from the want of laudanum,” and had to quit the job.
Still, there is something cheering in the thought that, when we pick up the New York Post (or the Sun in London) we are experiencing the long-term effects of a laudanum junkie trying to earn his next fix. It is perhaps no surprise that tabloid-Toryism would have so odd an origin: the greatest of all Conservative prime ministers, after all, was an over-dressed gay Jewish novelist. There is something pleasing in imagining these early predecessors leering spectrally over Mr. Cameron’s shoulder, like the owls in a Goya engraving.
In a time of more straitened and anxious conservatism, there is even something vaguely encouraging in De Quincey’s authorship: Toryism, it seems, at least need not be uptight. There are paths to a view of the world not always welcoming to central control and local variety, and moved by a fear of Utopianism that doesn’t depend on some model of personal virtue rooted in a panicky Puritanism. It is nice to know that, drilling down towards the Tory bedrock, what one may find at the bottom is a field of poppies.
Engraving by James Archer. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
