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De Quincey's Cessio Bonorum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
If De Quincey has more than once proclaimed his mastery of the pure theory of political economy, he has also admitted, as in the Confessions, his occasional incapacity for systematic “domestic economy.” The extent of that incapacity is indicated, however, less in what he wrote for publication than in his anxious letters to the publishers who were the sources of his earned income; and Professor Eaton's faithful and judiciously proportioned new biography amply attests the reality of the financial tribulations which perplex that correspondence. But, while Professor Eaton's account of individual actions for debt—protested bills of exchange, homings, arrests, flights into and out of sanctuary—is impressive, if not appalling, the official records of De Quincey's cessio bonorum in 1833, which seem to have been overlooked hitherto, provide a general summation of his desperate financial plight in one of his most difficult years. The story of that action, as I may now piece it together with the assistance of Mr. W. M. Parker of Edinburgh, will show that in 1832 De Quincey actually suffered imprisonment for debt, though very briefly; that, in taking the benefit of a kind of personal bankruptcy procedure peculiar to Scots law, he acknowledged in 1833 a total indebtedness of £617 16s. to some fifty-one creditors; and that in his desperation he was driven to list among the debts due him the “gift” of £300 made to Coleridge in 1807.
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References
1 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (London, 1822), p. 154.—Specific mention of “bills paid or to be paid” is cancelled in the revision of 1856; see The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London, 1896–97), iii, 433; cited Works hereafter.
2 Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House ... (New York 1897), i, 435 ff.; Horace Ainsworth Eaton, Thomas De Quincey: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 292–301, 335 ff.
3 Especially pp. 334–394; 519–524.
4 To whom, upon the introduction of Mr. Henry W. Meikle, Librarian of the National Library of Scotland, I am indebted for transcripts of the documents below quoted and cited from official records in the Register House, the Chambers of the City of Edinburgh, and the Signet Library, as well as for citations from Bell's Commentaries and the Edinburgh Post Office Directory.
5 David M. Moir, “Delta” in Blackwood's, whose account of the early De Quinceys in Scotland is referred to in a long note to the revised Confessions; see Works, iii, 457 f.
6 Froude, James Anthony, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life (New York, 1882), ii, 277.—In a letter of 1859, De Quincey's daughter Emily, on an occasion which perhaps called for feminine exaggeration, said that he had no sense of smell; see Willard Hallam Bonner, De Quincey at Work (Buffalo: Airport Publishers, [1936]), p. 41. But very likely he preferred his game “high”; for he complained that the British, especially Scots, insisted upon meat too fresh to be digestible, and for a delicate stomach he recommended a breakfast of “beef and a little bread (at least sixty hours old), or game” [italics his]; see Works, xiv, 268 f., 271.Google Scholar
7 Moore, E. Hamilton, “Some Unpublished Letters of Thomas De Quincey,” RES, ix (1933), 177, 184 f.Google Scholar
8 Parsons, Coleman O., “The Woes of Thomas De Quincey,” RES, x (1934), 197.Google Scholar
9 Act of Sederunt 1688 cited in James Dunlop vs. The Royal Bank of Scotland and James Christie, Esq., 11 July 1799, No. 9 in William Maxwell Morison, The Decisions of the Court of Session ... in the Form of a Dictionary (Edinburgh, 1801, etc.), i, 7 ff.; John Smith vs. Creditors, 9 March 1798, No. 114, Ibid., xiv, 11799: “An action of cessio bonorum is incompetent, where the creditor has consented to the liberation of the debtor before he has been a month in prison”; cf. Hutchison vs. Creditors, 6 July 1827, in Sydney S. Bell, Dictionary of the Decisions of the Court of Session ... (Edinburgh, 1841), i, 307.—The Act 6 & 7 Will. IV, c.56,s.2 (1836) extended the benefit of the cessio to debtors against whom a warrant for imprisonment for a civil debt had been issued. This act was repealed in part by 54 & 55 Vict., c.67 (1891), and altogether by 3 & 4 Geo. V, c.20, s.191, sched. I (1913).
10 Eaton, pp. 341 f.
11 Edinburgh Review, li (1830), 131; attributed to Lord Cockburn by D.N.B., s.n. Cockburn.
12 “This compassionate law,” says John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales ..., 4th ed. (London, 1792), p. 195. James Neild, in The Gentleman's Magazine, lxxiv (1804), i, 293, has appropriated Howard's language, as in other places in his series of letters “On Prisons,” which ran 1803–13.
13 Edinburgh Review, xxii (1814), 396; cf. George Joseph Bell, Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland ..., 5th ed. (Edinburgh, 1826), ii, 583, especially §2: The debtor “is entitled to this benefit without any mark of disgrace [such as the ‘dyvours habit’ formerly worn by bankrupts], if, proving his insolvency, he can satisfy the Court, in the face of his creditors, that this insolvency has arisen from innocent misfortune, and is willing to surrender all his property and effects to his creditors.”
14 Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, The Decisions of the Lords of Council & Session .. . (Edinburgh, 1683), i, 17 f., 732 f.; cf. Bell's Commentaries, ii, 549.
15 De Quincey Memorials, ed. A. H. Japp (London, 1891), ii, 117, 119; Eaton, p. 252.
16 W. E. A. Axon, “Thomas De Quincey,” The Bookman, xxxi (1907), 210 ff.; Eaton, p. 300.
17 Memorials, ii, 112 f., 115 f., 126 f.; [A. H. Japp] H. A. Page, Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings (New York, [1880]), i, 181.
18 £260 less £243 12s.; see Japp, i, 207.—This income may have been surrendered in 1818 to his mother to cover advances; see Memorials, ii, 123.
19 The account of Joseph Cottle, who acted as intermediary, leaves no doubt of De Quincey's intention to make the sum an outright gift; and Coleridge's receipt of 12 Nov. 1807 acknowledges £300 “presented” by an “unknown friend.” But in the preliminary correspondence Coleridge spoke of his willingness to receive an “unconditional loan”; see Cottle's Early Recollections ... (London, 1837), ii, 124–131; Memorials, i, 127–134. And in a letter of 1821, evidently in answer to a communication from De Quincey, he elaborately explained why he could not then repay the sum; see Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ..., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (London: Constable & Co., 1932), ii, 293–296; Memorials, i, 146 f.
20 i, 219.
21 Armitt, M. L., Rydal, ed. W. F. Rawnsley (Kendal, 1916), pp. 689–704.Google Scholar
22 Moore, pp. 177 f.; Eaton, pp. 322, 339, 344.—A deduction of £25 a quarter, not 25 per cent of the allowance, would be required to extinguish the debt within two years.
23 Eaton, p. 339; Memorials, ii, 129, 173.
24 Eaton, pp. 338 f., 344.
25 Feb.-June 1829 he had been living, with his wife and the two eldest children, at “Porteous's Lodgings, 18 Duncan Street”; see Armitt, p. 697; Eaton, pp. 312 f.; Memorials, ii, 168, 171.
26 Horning and Poinding, Porteous vs. De Quincey, General Register of Homings, Relaxations, &c. in the Boohs of Council and Session, Vol. 1175, 28 Aug. 1832–26 Sept. 1832, fol. ccxxxij f., Register House, Edinburgh.—The document is similar in form to the Letters of Horning printed by Eaton (pp. 522 ff.), which do not, however, specify that De Quincey was in the end denounced a rebel. The horning of 20 Sept. mentioned by Eaton on pp. 344, 519 is evidently this one at Porteous's behest; but the arrest of 29 Oct. must belong to a different case.
27 Eaton, p. 341.
28 “Imprisonment by caption cannot proceed without a decree or warrant from the Court of Session. The warrant may be of these three kinds:— ... 2. A decree interposed to a bill of exchange, regularly protested.... Upon these warrants, letters of horning are issued ... ”; see Bell's Commentaries, ii, 543.
29 Court of Session Extracted Processes No. 153, July 1833, Register House, Edinburgh. —De Quincey's luck in escaping imprisonment, remarked by Eaton, p. 340, was therefore less than absolute.
30 “Canongate Jail Record 1831,” p. 48, Archives of the City of Edinburgh.—The entries on this page attest the accuracy of the Certificate.
31 Extracted Processes No. 153, as above.
32 “Held, that where a certificate, that the pursuer has been liberated on a sick bill, is ex facie regular, the Court will hold that the fact is correctly stated”; see Moffatt vs. Creditors, 26 Jan. 1833, No. 147 in J. W. Dickson et al., The Scottish Jurist, v (1833), 199; cf. John Ross vs. Creditors, 5 July 1816, No. 64 in Peter Halkerston, A Compendium ... of the Faculty Collection of Decisions ... (Edinburgh, 1819), p. 359.
33 Eaton, pp. 335, n. 2; 347.
34 xxxii, 541–612; 786–802; 949–955; xxxiii, 43–60. Cf. Works, v, 352; vi, 225, where Masson's note misdates the second chapter of The Casars.
35 A debtor whose certificate did not specify that he was under the jurisdiction of the magistrates while he was free on a sick bill might have his decree of cessio held up to rectify that omission; see Mungo Ponton vs. Creditors, 29 June 1833, No. 400, and Gow, Pursuer, 11 July 1833, No. 443, Scottish Jurist, v, 485, 554.
36 Cf. Andrew Moffatt vs. Creditors, 16 Feb. 1833, No. 199 in Scottish Jurist, v, 249 —This strikingly parallel reported case proves that the rules of the cessio action suffered no extraordinary relaxation for De Quincey's benefit. Imprisoned for a debt of £2 in the Canongate Tolbooth 22 Oct. 1832, Moffatt was freed two hours later on a sick bill. He voluntarily returned to prison 21 Dec. 1832 but after one hour was released with the consent of the incarcerating creditor. This was a “friendly creditor,” said other creditors; and they also objected that Moffatt had gone daily abroad on his regular business of buying fish in the open Edinburgh market, returning only occasionally within the jurisdiction of the Canongate magistrates. But, his certificate being regular, the First Division of the Court of Session, before whom De Quincey was also pursuing his process, found Moffatt entitled to proceed.
37 28Aug. 1833, Moore, p. 185.—His creditors resident in England were entitled to induciœ of 60 days after summons; see Edinburgh Law Journal, ii (this no. before the Act of 1836), 301.
38 26 Aug., Moore, pp. 180–183.—This Duguid, solicitor, of 22 Gayfield Square, is not the teacher of pianoforte, Henry Gibson Duguid, 23 Dundas Street, whose later suit against De Quincey is recorded by Eaton, pp. 345, 519; see The Edinburgh Post Office Annual Directory for 1832–33 (Edinburgh, 1832), p. 55.
39 Solicitor, 21 Gayfield Square, later 1 Mound Place; see Post Office Directory for 1832–33 and 1833–34, pp. 49, 23 respectively.
40 Thus De Quincey was in effect lending his credit to Pearson; cf. entry in Branch iv, below. But Pearson is named among the creditors in the Disposition Omnium Bonorum.
41 This is at least an intelligible explanation of the large house in Great King Street in 1831. The idea may have been inspired by John Wilson's scheme, never carried out, for taking “two or three young gentlemen” into the house he was building in 1825; see letter of 2 March in Mrs. [Mary Wilson] Gordon, “Christopher North”: A Memoir of John Wilson, ed. R. Shelton Mackenzie (New York, 1866), p. 278. But De Quincey does not mention this explanation in writing of his too-prosperous address to J. G. Lockhart in 1831; see Eaton, p. 339.
42 Emily, the eighth child, was born 27 Feb. 1833, two days after the date of this document; see Eaton, p. 346.
43 De Quincey's fresh recollection of this ostensible delivery of Coleridge to the bailiffs may in part explain the vagueness of his references to the “particular service” of 1807 in Works, ii, 163, first published in 1834, just after the poet's death. His addition of £15 to the original amount may have been due to a confused recollection that, to make the gift, £318 4s. 2d. had been withdrawn from his funds, or to an uncertainty about the date of the various “small sums” which he “advanced,” according to Japp, in 1808–09; see Memorials, i, 132, 146. Or he may have remembered 300 guineas instead of £300.
44 Parker, Peregrine, son of the Rev. John (not M.) Parker, rector of St. Mary's and vicar of St. Helen's in the city of York, entered the Manchester Grammar School 27 June 1798 and matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford, 18 May 1801 at the age of 18. He was thus partly contemporary with De Quincey at both school (admitted 9 Nov. 1800) and college (matriculated 17 Dec. 1803). Peregrine's brothers Horace and Marcus Aurelius preceded De Quincey at school and the university, where both held exhibitions such as De Quincey, by decamping from school, failed to win; and another brother, Wentworth, also overlapped De Quincey at the Grammar School. See The Admission Register of the Manchester School, ed. Jeremiah Finch Smith (“Remains ... Connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester,” lxxiii, Manchester: Chetham Society, 1868), ii, 206, 215, 221, 224, 268; Alumni Oxonienses ... 1715–1886, ed. Joseph Foster (Oxford and London, 1888), iii, 1067 f., 1168. De Quincey apparently confused the father, who died 1815, with the brother, the Rev. Marcus Aurelius, who died 23 May 1830 at Wanborough, Wilts, leaving “a widow and family quite destitute”; see Gentleman's Magazine, c (1830), i, 649. But he is evidently referring to these “three or four brothers, belonging to a clergyman's family at York,” in the Confessions account of the Grammar School; see Works, iii, 259.Google Scholar
45 Apparently De Quincey's “daily sales of books at the rate of about 30s. for 1s.” to buy the “daily necessities” for a household of “12 persons” occurred in 1832, not 1833 as Eaton reports, p. 344. Various actions by Carfrae against De Quincey in 1831, 1833, 1834 are listed by Eaton, pp. 340, 344 f., 519.
46 This seems to have been the house in which he had expected to keep boarders.
47 The payment which so heavily reduced the allowance from his mother; see n. 22, above.—Duckworth had been Mrs. Quincey's legal agent; see Memorials, ii, 130.
48 Extracted Processes No. 153.
49 23 Aug. 1833 in Moore, p. 177; 6 Jan. 1836 in Eaton, p. 367, n. 31; Memorials, ii, 129, 173.
50 28 Aug. 1833 in Moore, p. 185.
51 Mackay vs. Creditors, 25 Jan. 1794, No. 111 in Morison's Dictionary, xiv, 11794; Mrs. Jane Hope or Dick vs. James Hogg, 26 Feb. 1833, No. 221 in Scottish Jurist, v, 272.
52 Moore, loc. cit.
53 At first he may have made some payments for medical care and advice; see Alexander W. Gillman, The Gillmans of Highgate ... (London, [1895]), pp. 15 f. Reference to this work I owe to Prof. T. M. Raysor.
54 Daniel Stuart to the Earl of Munster, 19 July 1831, in Letters from the Lake Poets .. . to Daniel Stuart (London: p. p., 1889), pp. 319 f. On 15 June 1836 Joseph Cottle quoted to Thomas Poole from “one of the periodicals,” recently seen, a letter of Coleridge “written a year or two before his death,” saying, “If I should be arrested for Eight Pounds, I could not pay it without selling my Books”; see Warren E. Gibbs, “Unpublished Letters Concerning Cottle's Coleridge,” PMLA, xlix (1934), 223.
54a Mrs. Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 18 Oct. 1832, in Minnow Among Tritons, ed. Stephen Potter (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1934), p. 172.
55 Campbell, James Dykes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of His Life (London, 1894), pp. 273, 279, and the works there cited.Google Scholar
56 The Law Chronicle; or Journal of Jurisprudence and Legislation, i (1829), viii; ii (1830), 218.
57 Eaton, p. 344.
58 General Minute-Booh of the Court of Session, First and Second Divisions, for the Year from 13th November 1832 to 12th November 1833, lii (Edinburgh: 1832–33), 508.
59 Report of Oath on Commission In Process of Cessio Bonorum Thomas De Quincey v His Creditors, Extracted Processes No. 153.
60 26 Aug. 1833, in Moore, pp. 181 f.—The First Division of the Court actually rose 11 July; see Neal Cassidy vs. Creditors, 11 July 1833, No. 459 in Scottish Jurist, v, 569.
61 General Minute-Book, lii, 558.—S.F. is the office mark of W. Carmichael, assistant clerk of court.
62 Memorials, ii, 116; Eaton, p. 221.
63 See Condescendence, and notes 24, 41, 46, above.
64 This entry and the second one above, as well as the record of a music teacher's suit several months later in Eaton, pp. 345, 519, indicate that De Quincey, at the outset of their Edinburgh residence at least, had not so totally neglected his children's education as had been reported to his mother; see Memorials, ii, 174 f.; Eaton, pp. 366 f.
65 A tax on rent to support the Edinburgh ministers; see W. Hunter & W. Wilson vs. Peter Hill, 11 July 1833, in Cases Decided in the Court of Session ..., reported by Patrick Shaw, Alexander Dunlop, J. M. Bell, xi (1833), 989 ff.
66 Owner of 1 Forres Street, who had sued both De Quincey and his wife for unpaid rent; see Eaton, pp. 344, 519.
67 See Condescendence and n. 45, above.
68 Doubtless the purveyor of the “spoiled” game mentioned in Carlyle's letter; see n. 6, above. Muirhead was the name of a game dealer well known in Edinburgh in the 'Thirties; see James Bertram, Some Memories of Books Authors and Events (Westminster, 1893), pp. 200 f. A suit by one Muirhead in Small Debt Court is recorded by Eaton in either 1833 (p. 344) or 1832 (p. 519).
69 A John and a William were among the orphans of George and Sarah Green, lost in the snow in 1808; see George & Sarah Green: A Narrative by Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 25 f., 32 f.; Works, xiii, 125–158.
70 One of the Wilson family who had done carpenter work for De Quincey in 1809 in preparation for his settlement in Dove Cottage; see Alfred E. Richards, “The Day Book and Ledger of Wordsworth's Carpenter,” PQ, vi (1927), 78 f.; cf. Armitt, p. 676.
71 See Condescendence and n. 40, above.
72 Two schoolmates, who died in 1909 and 1910, are said to have remembered attending school with two of De Quincey's sons at Rydal under a schoolmaster John Sproat; see Armitt, p. 698.—Several discrepancies occur in the account of De Quincey's affairs in this useful but posthumously published volume.
73 The Wordsworths were frequent visitors at his house in Kendal; see The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), i, 24, 332 f., etc.
74 Author of The Annals of Kendal... (Kendal, 1835), which went into a second edition in 1861; and one of the publishers of the fifth edition of Wordsworth's A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England ... (Kendal and London, 1835); see Cornelius Howard Patton, The Amherst Wordsworth Collection: A Descriptive Bibliography (Amherst College, 1936), p. 16.
75 Probably an old account; but De Quincey had been in London in 1832. His wife wrote, 9 Jan., to the agents of the Nab's mortgagee, that he was in the South of England after money; see Armitt, pp. 699 f. He himself, in an article published in Blackwood's in 1840 (xlviii, 9), speaks of having been in London “eight years ago”; see Works, x, 150.
76 De Quincey was entered here 12 June 1812; as late as 1815 he was still “eating his terms.” But he seems to have quit the Middle Temple as informally as he did Worcester College in 1810. See Eaton, pp. 177, n. 15; 199; Wordsworth Letters: Middle Years, ii, 628, 654 f.—The Disposition Omnium Bonorum Thomas De Quincey in favor of His Creditors 1833, from which this list and the immediately foregoing quotations are derived, is filed in Extracted Processes No. 153.
77 Memorials, ii, 30–34, 40–42, 46 f.
78 Eaton, pp. 341; 368, n. 31; 422 f., n. 23.
79 Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc. ..., ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester, London, etc., 1922), pp. 67 f.; Eaton, p. 294, n. 3.
80 Eaton, p. 355; Oliphant, i, 429, 436 f.
81 23 Aug. 1833, in Moore, p. 177.
82 Pp. 519 f.
83 Masson's notes in Works, xiv, 2; 69, n.; 94 ff.
84 21 Dec. 1838, in Eaton, p. 380.
85 Armitt, p. 704.
86 Eaton, p. 345.
87 E.g., Works, iii, 58 (1838); vi, 51 f. (1841); xiii, 251–259 (1848).
88 Works, ii, 252–293 (1839).
89 Works, vi, 184 (1842).
90 Works, vi, 45 (1841, date from p. 69).
91 Works, x, 333.
92 Works, xii, 234–285, 157–233.—Of thiselement, and others, in “The Household Wreck” I hope to say something on another occasion.