The essays ‘On Murder’ that follow spring from the seedbed of this aesthetic. Yet on the other hand, the circumstances surrounding Williams’s extreme brutality reveal to De Quincey the emotional impact of a particular moment in Macbeth, and lead also to reflections on the psychology of murder and the representation of violence. ‘Murder in ordinary cases … is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror,’ he asserts; ‘and for this reason—that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life.’ Such an attitude is ill-suited to ‘the purposes of the poet’, and so Shakespeare throws ‘the interest on the murderer’, where ‘there must be raging some great storm of passion,—jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,—which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look’ (pp. 4–5). In an 1818 essay, William Hazlitt remarked that ‘at present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil…. The police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only tolerated in this country for the sake of the music.’15 De Quincey, however, dreamt often of midnight murder, and in his response to Hazlitt he reveals Macbeth as a play where the world of violence is ‘cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs’ (p. 6), and where the mind of murder is acutely and unnervingly revealed.

Within two years of publishing ‘On the Knocking’ De Quincey had left the London Magazine, and by 1826 he had returned to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, where he had begun his career as a magazinist in 1819. Blackwood’s, with its owner William Blackwood as editor and De Quincey’s closest friend John Wilson as lead writer, was the most exuberant, popular, and unpredictable magazine of the age. It prized erudition, outrage, irony, and extremity, combining urbanity and elitism with what De Quincey described as a ‘spirit of jovial and headlong gaiety’ that meant ‘an occasional use of street slang was not out of harmony’.16 The magazine is most frequently cited for its truculent Toryism and vitriolic assaults on the so-called ‘Cockney School of Poetry’, which included Leigh Hunt and John Keats, but it also published some remarkably insightful literary criticism, especially on William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, and it was famous for the concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm which shaped its tales of terror and guilt, many of which were written by distinguished authors, including Walter Scott, John Galt, James Hogg, and of course De Quincey himself.17 De Quincey reviewed Robert Gillies’s edition of German Stories in Blackwood’s for December 1826, and offered readers a characteristic blend of mirth, scholarship, wit, and colloquiality. Several of the tales in Gillies’s collection turned upon the ‘appalling interest of secret and mysterious murder’, but in other instances De Quincey could not avoid a more humorous tack: ‘Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn.’18 In 1828 Blackwood complained that he ‘always’ had ‘a superabundance of what may be called good articles’, but what he wanted were ‘articles which have some distinctive or superior cast about them’.19 In early 1827 he published De Quincey’s engaging assessments of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Immanuel Kant, but De Quincey’s next essay—‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’—revealed how fully he could exploit the Blackwood’s context of irony, subversion, and extravagance. In the words of Edgar Allan Poe, De Quincey knew ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’.20

‘On Murder’ seizes on the satiric and artistic approach to murder that De Quincey introduced in ‘On the Knocking’, pushing the logic of such a rationale in ways that are both disturbing and seductive, and submerging the ethical to the aesthetic. ‘Everything in this world has two handles,’ he argues with the deadpan aplomb that gives the essay such energy. ‘Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle … and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically… that is, in relation to good taste’ (pp. 10–11). De Quincey was not the first to employ such a breezy and ironized attitude toward violence and crime. In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Peachum notes that ‘Murder is as fashionable a Crime as a Man can be guilty of. How many fine Gentlemen have we in Newgate every Year, purely upon that Article!’21 Denis Diderot’s narrator in Rameau’s Nephew (written 1761–74) begins ‘to find irksome the presence of a man who discussed a horrible act, an execrable crime, like a connoisseur of painting or poetry’.22 The Marquis de Sade’s Juliette (1797) features ‘the Sodality of the Friends of Crime’, while in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), Mr Flosky asserts that ‘if a man knocks me down, and takes my purse and watch by main force, I turn him to account, and set him forth in a tragedy as a dashing young fellow’.23 De Quincey’s views on murder are also buttressed by a variety of philosophical sources, including Aristotle’s notion of catharsis: ‘the final purpose of murder, considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of Tragedy, in Aristotle’s account of it, viz. “to cleanse the heart by means of pity and terror”’ (p. 32). De Quincey also reworked and extended key eighteenth-century notions of the sublime. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes a theatre audience anxiously awaiting the performance of ‘the most sublime and affecting tragedy’ when it is ‘reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square’. The theatre of course empties in a moment, demonstrating ‘the comparative weakness of the imitative arts’ and proclaiming ‘the triumph of real sympathy’.24 Art and violence are again conjoined: Shakespeare is good, but the spectacle of public execution is better. In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant defines the sublime as that which does ‘violence to our imagination’, and acknowledges that dreadful natural calamities—‘volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind’—may evoke the sublime ‘as long as we find ourselves in safety’.25 De Quincey saw clearly the openings and opportunities that such positions allowed, and he moved quickly down a very slippery slope. For ‘once natural violence was considered as a possible source of aesthetic experience,’ Joel Black observes, ‘what was to prevent human violence, which inspired perhaps even greater terror, from making aesthetic claims as well?’26 De Quincey’s reply in ‘On Murder’ is ‘nothing’, and in the essay he launches himself and his readers into an exhilarating and disorientating world of irony and aesthetics. In 1829, two years after De Quincey’s first essay ‘On Murder’ appeared, Walter Scott was approached by ‘one David Paterson’, who had worked for the Edinburgh anatomist Dr Robert Knox, and who had been involved in buying bodies from the serial killers William Burke and William Hare. Paterson asked Scott if he was interested in writing about ‘the awfull tragedy of burke and hare’, and offered ‘sketches of one or two persons who I dair say will be promenent characters’. Scott declined with immediate and heartfelt disgust: ‘The scoundrel has been the companion and patron of such atrocious murderers and kidnappers and he has the impudence to write to any decent man.’27De Quincey felt no such inhibitions. When faced with similar opportunities to explore and exploit contemporary murders, he embraced notoriety and gleefully ignored the ‘decent man’ in favour of the aesthete.

Yet De Quincey’s subversion of morality is perhaps not as clean or complete as he would have us believe. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater he grappled with similar issues, dismissing morality and attempting to slip into the freedom of aesthetics.