Both also insist on the strange and aesthetic allure of a clean and catastrophic fell swoop. It is one of Maximilian’s trademarks, for he is behind ‘ten cases of total extermination, applied to separate households’, while Williams seeks Mary because, ‘if caught and murdered’, she ‘perfected and rounded the desolation of the house…. The whole covey of victims was thus netted; the household ruin was thus full and orbicular’ (pp. 36, 111). The ‘Postscript’ concludes with De Quincey’s account of the M‘Kean brothers’ botched attempt to rob an isolated inn just outside Manchester, and includes the gruesome description of a servant who is stabbed but not killed: ‘Solemnly, and in ghostly silence, uprose in her dying delirium the murdered girl; she stood upright, she walked steadily for a moment or two, she bent her steps towards the door’ (p. 139). In its coherence, intensity, and detail, the ‘Postscript’ is De Quincey’s most lurid exploration of violence.

Yet for all his fixation with murder, De Quincey approached the subject from a remarkably varied series of perspectives and sympathies. De Quincey undoubtedly identified with the destructive power of the murderer. Wilson observed tellingly that De Quincey’s was ‘a nature of dreadful passions subdued by reason’, and De Quincey himself often gave vent to feelings of profound hostility, as when he acknowledged himself ‘to have been long alienated from Wordsworth; sometimes even I feel a rising emotion of hostility—nay, something, I fear, too nearly akin to vindictive hatred’.35 De Quincey worried often that he might be responsible for someone’s death, such as the mysterious Malay in Confessions, or the young woman in the gig in ‘The English Mail-Coach’. He joked uneasily that if he had ‘a doppelganger, who went about personating me … philosopher as I am, I might … be so far carried away by jealousy as to attempt the crime of murder upon his carcass’.36 De Quincey projected a work entitled Confessions of a Murderer, and he exulted in the thought of retaliation: ‘revenge’, he wrote, ‘is a luxury … so inebriating that possibly a man would be equally liable to madness, from the perfect gratification of his vindictive hatred or its perfect defeat’.37 John Williams was a brutal psychopath who left large clues at the scenes of his murders, and who was not able to escape detection for more than two weeks. But De Quincey often entertained sublime and strange fantasies of vengeance, and in his mind Williams came to symbolize an agency and energy that he himself found absent in his own meek will. Maximilian is a brutal and unrepentant mass murderer, but he accesses that ‘tremendous power which is laid open in a moment to any man who can reconcile himself to the abjuration of all conscientious restraints’ (p. 99). De Quincey, so often powerless and paralysed by addiction and guilt, glories in the transgressions of the criminal, and embodies what Michel Foucault calls ‘the desire to know and narrate how men have been able to rise against power, traverse the law, and expose themselves to death through death’.38

Yet De Quincey also sympathized with the victim, and while in ‘On the Knocking’ he instructed the poet not to look into the hearts of those cowering for fear of their own lives, in his first paper ‘On Murder’ he contradicts this directive by declaring that the ‘tendency in murder’ is ‘to excite and irritate the subject’ (p. 26). In ‘interesting illustration of this fact’, De Quincey offers the case of the ‘pursy, unwieldy, half cataleptic’ Mannheim baker who mustered the strength to go twenty-six rounds with an English boxer and assassin, demonstrating ‘what an astonishing stimulus to latent talent is contained in any reasonable prospect of being murdered’ (pp. 26, 29). Less risible examples occur in ‘The Avenger’. As terror descends upon the town, ‘some, alas for the dignity of Man! drooped into helpless imbecility’, but ‘some started up into heroes under the excitement’ (p. 51). One hero is Louisa, a 13-year-old student who hears footsteps on the stairs and later spies the murderer’s leg in the closet, but manages to save both herself and her sister through a display not of hysteria or abjection but ‘blind inspiration’ and a ‘matchless … presence of mind’ (pp. 57, 56). Similarly, in the ‘Postscript’ the young boy finds himself trapped between the two M‘Kean brothers. ‘On the landing at the head of the stairs was one murderer, at the foot of the stairs was the other: who could believe that the boy had the shadow of a chance for escaping?’ And yet he does escape, for in his ‘horror, he laid his left hand on the balustrade, and took a flying leap over it, which landed him at the bottom of the stairs, without having touched a single stair’. It was a jump from ‘a height, such as he will never clear again to his dying day’ (pp. 139, 26). De Quincey often highlighted the clarity and courage of those who found themselves face to face with murderous violence.

De Quincey, however, did not stop at the murderer and the victim, for he was also fascinated by the position and anxieties of the witness. Given the insights of ‘On the Knocking’, the clear expectation in the ‘Postscript’ is that the focus will be on the psychology of the murderer Williams. But it is not. Once Williams is inside the Marr household, De Quincey makes a striking decision: ‘Let us leave the murderer alone with his victims’ and ‘in vision, attach ourselves’ to Mary, who has been sent to fetch oysters for dinner (p.