‘Let no man expect to frighten me, by a few hard words, into embarking … upon desperate adventures of morality,’ he declares. Earlier, he confesses it, ‘as a besetting infirmity of mine, that … I hanker too much after a state of happiness…. I cannot face misery’.28 But De Quincey cannot escape misery either, and is repeatedly staggered by his own suffocating sense of humiliation and paralysis. ‘I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it’, he writes; ‘and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.’29 As hedonism collides with shame, De Quincey often half admits the very sin he is bent on denying: ‘Guilt … I do not acknowledge: and, if I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the present act of confession.’30 A similar dynamic is at work within ‘On Murder’. De Quincey wants the liberation and fun that comes from a temporary release from social values, and he achieves this through a blandly outrageous misappropriation of language, and a prolonged series of ironic deflations, substitutions, and inversions that enable him to keep morbidity at bay and graze the brink between comedy and horror. His remark that ‘every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it’ initiates a hilarious survey, often tinged with fact, in which he observes that René Descartes was almost murdered by ‘professional men’, Thomas Hobbes ‘was not murdered’ but ‘was three times very near being murdered’, Nicolas Malebranche was in fact murdered by George Berkeley, and Immanuel Kant ‘had a narrower escape from a murderer than any man we read of, except Des Cartes’ (pp. 16, 20, 23). In a discussion of artistic preconception, De Quincey bemoans the fact that ‘people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist, in our line, is generally embarrassed by too much animation’ (p. 26). Such outrageously poker-faced lamentations run riot throughout the essay but, as in Confessions, De Quincey in ‘On Murder’ only stays or upends ethical judgement: he does not escape it. As editor of the Westmorland Gazette, he justifies including dozens of assize reports of murders and rapes because they teach ‘the more uneducated classes’ their ‘social duties’, and ‘present the best indications of the moral condition of society’.31 In ‘On Murder’, De Quincey insists that the victim ‘ought to be a good man’, and ‘severe good taste’ demands that ‘the subject chosen ought also to have a family of young children wholly dependent on his exertions’. The better the person, the more aesthetically satisfying the murder: ‘how can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?’ (pp. 31–3). The murderous narrator in Philip Kerr’s thriller A Philosophical Investigation (1992) writes that in ‘On Murder’ the ‘moral issue is neatly disposed of by De Quincey’.32 But ‘you can never draw the line between aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism,’ T. S. Eliot observed; ‘however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into something else sooner or later.’ In ‘On Murder’ the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral is ‘one of ironic connection rather than of mutual exclusion’, as Angela Leighton puts it. ‘Text and context, style and reference, are dialogically related, so that the one frets against the other…. Aesthetic pleasure is challenged by ideological guilt.’33

De Quincey extended his 1827 thoughts ‘On Murder’ a year later in a manuscript essay that was apparently designed to introduce another manuscript fragment that he seems to have written around 1825, and that concerned the German murderer Peter Anthony Fonk. De Quincey’s source for his account of Fonk is the Conversations-Lexicon, published in Leipzig in 1824, and the relatively straightforward and reportorial tone of the essay suggests that it was written before he developed the extravagant conceit of the 1827 Blackwood’s essay. The 1828 manuscript, however, is directed ‘To the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine’ and builds on the ironies and inversions of the published essay, as when the narrator who is ‘most decidedly for goodness and morality’ warns a servant of a dreadful downward slide from ‘Murder … to highway robbery; and from highway robbery … to petty larceny. And when once you are got to that, there comes in sad progression sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and late hours; until the awful climax terminates in neglect of dress, non-punctuality, and general waspishness’ (p. 157). Both papers are of considerable interest but William Blackwood was apparently unimpressed and declined to publish either of them, perhaps fearing too much of a good thing. De Quincey, however, remained keenly interested in the satiric treatment of murder, and in 1839 he offered Robert and Alexander Blackwood (managers of the magazine since the death of their father in 1834) a ‘Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, which exploited the same satiric topsy-turviness of the 1827 essay, and which duly appeared in Blackwood’s in the November issue. The essay centres on a dinner for murder connoisseurs who celebrate the achievements of practitioners from the Jewish Sicarii and the Old Man of the Mountain to more recent adepts such as the Edinburgh killers William Burke and William Hare. It features the curmudgeonly Toad-in-the-hole, who is given new life when he learns of John Williams’s sensationally murderous career in the Ratcliffe Highway, for ‘“this is the real thing—this is genuine—this is what you can approve, can recommend to a friend”’ (p. 86). De Quincey’s 1844 manuscript, ‘A New Paper on Murder’, is yet another spirited turn on this familiar pattern. William Burke, De Quincey reliably informs us, was ‘a man of fine sensibility’, but his partner William Hare was ‘a man of principle, a man that you could depend upon—order a corpse for Friday, and on Friday you had it’ (p. 164).

De Quincey’s obsession with murder and mystery, however, did not always involve extravagance, deflation, and satire.