I would especially like to thank the staffs of the Joseph S. Stauffer Library and the W. D. Jordan Special Collections, Douglas Library, Queen’s University. My research on this edition was greatly facilitated by generous grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Advisory Research Committee of Queen’s University.

My greatest debt, comme toujours, is to Carole, Zachary, and Alastair.

INTRODUCTION

‘MAY I quote Thomas De Quincey?’ asks the murderer politely in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. ‘In the pages of his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” I first learned of the Ratcliffe Highway deaths, and ever since that time his work has been a source of perpetual delight and astonishment to me.’1 De Quincey burst onto the literary scene in 1821 with his best-known publication, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and in the decades that followed he produced works of fiction, biography, and various modes of autobiography, as well as essays on a remarkably diverse range of topics, from literary theory, science, and political economics to philology, geography, philosophy, and history. Perhaps De Quincey’s most thoroughgoing preoccupation, however, was violence. He wrote often of murderers, exploiting sources from Roman biographies to contemporary newspapers, but at the centre of his fascination stands John Williams, the presumed killer in 1811 of seven people in two different incidents separated by only twelve days and a few city streets in London’s East End. De Quincey’s response to Williams’s attacks were written over the course of more than thirty years, and ranged from penetrating literary and aesthetic criticism to disturbing fictive transpositions, brilliantly funny satiric high jinks, and gruesomely vivid reportage. The works collected in this volume brought De Quincey great contemporary notoriety, and inspired a long line of writers on crime, detection, aesthetics, and violence. They also hold a peculiar appeal to the modern reader, for they presage academic and popular assaults on conventional morality, the highly diverse commodification of violence, and the world-weariness that regards the spectacle of murder with both cynicism and fascination.

De Quincey’s keen interest in violence and crime is part of a broad and longstanding tradition in Britain and well beyond. ‘If all novels and dramas turning upon startling crimes were to be expunged from our literature, we should have to make a surprisingly clean sweep,’ remarked Leslie Stephen in ‘The Decay of Murder’ (1869). ‘Hamlet and Othello and King Lear would have to go at once.’2 In the seventeenth century highly popular broadsheets, pamphlets, and squibs describing gruesome murders and execution scenes were typically framed by a piously insistent morality which made clear that bad guys finish last. Providential fictions such as John Reynolds’s Triumph of God’s Revenge (1621–35) featured a wrathful God who smote sinners, and combined ‘impassioned Moralizing’ with a ‘heart & soul … swallowed up in the notion of “Murder”’, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed.3 By the eighteenth century notorious thieves such as John Sheppard and Dick Turpin had become favourite figures in ballads, plays, romances, and burlesques, while the first Newgate Calendar (1773), running to five volumes and dealing with the violent excesses of dozens of major criminals, fed a voracious public appetite and spawned many imitations. John Villette’s Annals of Newgate (1776) extended the pattern of blending violence and morality ‘to expose … the infamy and punishments naturally attending those who deviate from the paths of virtue’.4 At the same time, the novel was evolving in close connection with criminality and transgression. Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) is a tale of thievery which ends in murder and remorse, while Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743) is a fictionalized version of the life of the infamous criminal executed in 1725. The maudlin extremes of the novel of sentiment culminated in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), where the eponymous hero, ravaged by hopeless passion and half in love with death, put a bullet through his head and touched off a suicide epidemic across Europe. The gothicism of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1805) employed the paraphernalia of dungeons, castles, subterranean passageways, virtuous maidens, and tormented villains, but had at their heart a preoccupation with emotional extremity, brutal usurpation, and murderous vengeance. The noble criminal at war with society dominated works from Friedrich Schiller’s Robbers (1781) to Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830), while English writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley produced re-evaluations of mythic rebels like Prometheus and Cain. In the early 1830s Newgate novels by Edward Bulwer Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth featured compassionate or glamorized portraits of actual eighteenth-century thieves and murderers, and provoked responses such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–8) and William Thackeray’s Catherine (1839–40), both of which presented a harshly realistic view of criminal life.

De Quincey’s interest in violence, and especially murder, played a key role in the evolution of crime literature, and was persistent, various, and wide-ranging. He surveyed the distant past for striking examples of murder, and highlighted in particular the Roman Emperors Caligula and Nero, the Judaean King Herod the Great, and the Thugs of India, a confederacy of professional assassins that ‘gave rise to endless speculation’ in De Quincey, as his publisher James Hogg put it. ‘The far-reaching power of this mysterious brotherhood, the swiftness and certainty of its operations, the strange gradations of official rank, and the curious disguises adopted—all these exercised an influence on his mind which seemed never to wane.’5 De Quincey had an extensive knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gallows writing, including cases such as ‘the old Parisian jeweller Cardillac, in Louis XIV.’s time, who was stung with a perpetual lust for murdering the possessors of fine diamonds’.6 As a young man, De Quincey was an enthusiastic reader of the Newgate Calendar, and a great admirer of the gothic fantasies of Schiller, Lewis, and especially Radcliffe, whom he described as ‘the great enchantress’ of a generation.7 As a writer, he frequently examined literary texts through the lens of crime, as when he observed that ‘the archangel Satan’ in Milton’s Paradise Lost must contend with an ‘angelic … constable or an inspector of police’8 stationed at the gates of Paradise. During his editorship of the Westmorland Gazette (1818–19) De Quincey filled the columns of the newspaper with assize reports and lurid murder stories, and over the next forty years paid close attention to the trials and circumstances of several notorious murderers, including William Burke and William Hare, William Palmer, Madeleine Smith, and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who dined with De Quincey in London in 1821 and later revealed himself as ‘a murderer of a freezing class; cool, calculating, wholesale in his operations, and moving all along under the advantages of unsuspecting domestic confidence and domestic opportunities’.9

No killer, however, captured De Quincey’s imagination like John Williams, the man thought responsible for two horrendous acts of carnage in late 1811. Near midnight on Saturday, 7 December, Williams entered Timothy Marr’s lace and pelisse warehouse at 29 Ratcliffe Highway. Once inside he locked the door, and within a matter of minutes ruthlessly dispatched all four inhabitants. The servant girl, Margaret Jewell (called ‘Mary’ by De Quincey), had been sent out to fetch dinner, and when she returned to find the door locked she raised the alarm. A neighbour gained entry at the back of the house and the front door was quickly opened. Eyewitnesses saw Marr’s wife Celia sprawled lifelessly headlong. Marr himself was dead behind the store counter. The apprentice James Gowen was stretched out in the back near a door that led to a staircase.