Most sinisterly, downstairs in the kitchen, three-month-old Timothy Marr, junior, was found dead. ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,’ wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.10 Williams took Blake at his word. He crushed the skulls and cut the throats of all four victims. Twelve days later—again around midnight, again in the same East London area—Williams struck again, this time at the household of a publican named John Williamson. ‘A man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson,’ observed G. K. Chesterton; ‘it sounds like a sort of infanticide.’11 Williams’s attack on this second occasion was not as successful, but his savagery was equally chilling. Williamson himself was found dead in the cellar. He had apparently been thrown down the stairs. His throat was cut. His wife Elizabeth and the maid Anna Bridget Harrington were discovered on the main floor, their skulls battered and their throats slit. A lodger named John Turner, however, managed to escape by climbing out of a third-floor window and calling for help. An angry crowd gathered, but by the time they entered the house Williams had fled. Kitty Stillwell, the 14-year-old granddaughter of the Williamsons, had been asleep upstairs the entire time. She was unharmed. Several suspects were arrested in connection with the atrocities, including Williams, who was detained on 22 December and who was founded hanged in his prison cell four days later, an apparent suicide. The court chose to hear the evidence against him, but the circumstances of his death were widely interpreted as a confession of guilt. On New Year’s Eve Williams’s body was publicly exhibited in a procession through the Ratcliffe Highway and then driven to the nearest crossroads, where it was forced into a narrow hole and a stake driven through the heart. In response to these horrors, Leigh Hunt wrote of ‘Watchmen’ and the dangers of ‘such ferocious fellows as Williams’, while Robert Southey told a friend that ‘no circumstances which did not concern myself ever disturbed me so much. I … never had so mingled a feeling of horror, and indignation, and astonishment, with a sense of insecurity too’.12 Not everyone, however, adopted this solemn tone. When Charles Lamb asked his friend George Dyer ‘what he thought of the terrible Williams, the Ratcliffe Highway murderer’, there was a ‘pause for consideration’ and then ‘the answer came: “I should think, Mr Lamb, he must have been rather an eccentric character”’.13

De Quincey’s reaction to Williams and the Ratcliffe murders ranged from impassioned solemnity to black humour, and the essays and fictions of the present volume are all haunted by his presence, sometimes directly, sometimes only in outline. De Quincey published ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ in the London Magazine in 1823, just two years after he had launched himself to notoriety in the same magazine with the publication of his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. ‘On the Knocking’ is his most celebrated piece of literary criticism, and brings the murderer and the writer into the same orbit, for both are interested in pleasure and power, and both seek freedom by outstripping or subverting the social institutions they feel thwart or confine them. Shakespeare and Williams are both creators of bloody dramas, great artists who perform upon the stage of London, and awe their audiences with supreme moments of self-assertion and violence. ‘Murder is negative creation’, writes W. H. Auden, ‘and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent.’14 In ‘On the Knocking’, De Quincey characteristically approaches Williams from at least two different angles. On the one hand, he introduces the satiric aesthetic that enables him to see Williams’s performance ‘on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway’ as ‘making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied with any thing that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his’ (p. 4).