A Visit to Dove Cottage September 2010

In September 2010, I visited the Lakes for a short break. During the trip, I took the opportunity to explore some of the places Malcolm Lowry visited on his last holiday before his death in 1957. I intended to eventually write up my visit on my Malcolm Lowry blog.



During the break, I went to Dove Cottage in Grasmere now a museum dedicated to William Wordsworth. Lowry had visited the cottage as part of his holiday. During our tour of the cottage, I discovered that Thomas De Quincey had visited Wordsworth there and subsequently lived there and kept the property for 25 years. This fascinated me and I thought it ironic that so much emphasis is put on Wordsworth short tenure! This also struck Lowry as I discovered when I read one of his letters when I got home:

..on top of which it's called Wordsworth's, albeit de Quincey lived in it for 20 years to W's 5 - Malcolm Lowry The Collected Letters Volume Two 1946-57 P. 905



This re-awakened my interest in De Quincey and on my return home I dived into the biographies to find out more. I started with Grevel Lindop's The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (1981) and Robert Morrison's The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey (2009. I discovered that De Quincey had kept a diary during his 1803 stay in Everton, which had only been published in 1927.

I managed to obtain a 1927 copy of the Diary with an introduction and notes by Horace A. Eaton. What is fascinating about this edition is that it contains both a facsimile copy of De Quincey’s handwritten diary and a transcription of the diary.

The diary's entries gave me greater stimulus to research De Quincey's time in Everton. My reading of the diary coincided with Cathy Butterworth's Sketches From Britain project which I mentioned in a previous post. The visit to Dove Cottage was also the catalyst I needed to explore De Quincey's time in Liverpool sparked by David Jacques's Por Convención Ferrer.

De Quincey as Urban Wanderer

I discovered De Quincey’s Confessions at around the age of 16. The book had a profound effect on me. Confessions became a guidebook to the art of wandering and the power of reverie and dream.



At 16, I had no notion of psychogeography. Since then, I have realised, as have others, that De Quincey was one of the first explorers of the urban landscape.



Unlike Defoe and Blake, who stand as symbolic representations of a retrospective psychogeographic tradition, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) may be described as psychogeography's first actual practitioner. As Phil Baker has commented, 'Classic urban psychogeography could almost be said to begin - retrospectively, from a Situationist influenced perspective - with Thomas De Quincey'.

The drug-fuelled journeys through the London of De Quincey's youth seem to capture exactly that state of aimless drift and detached observation which were to become the hallmarks of the situationist derive some 150 years later.
Merlin Coverley Psychogeography (2006)



It was this notion of De Quincey as an "urban wanderer" that I brought to Cathy Butterworth's Sketches of Britain.

‘I plead, not for originality, but for the truth of the character; and though it may not be very pleasing, it may be useful to delineate these mixtures of levity and vice’

George Crabbe, Preface to The Borough, a Poem in 24 Letters

‘They say that memories live longer than dreams, but my dreams, those dreams of long ago, they still give me some kind of hope and faith in my class…’

George Malone, Boys From The Blackstuff

Drawing on an unwieldy collection of themes and references, ‘Sketches For Britain’(made for Squaremile, an exhibition at The Bridewell Gallery) presents 24 performative works, awkwardly shoehorned into the questionable rationale of mapping George Crabbe’s series of poems ‘The Borough’ onto a square mile of Liverpool. To complicate matters further it uses Alan Bleasdale’s ‘Boys From The Blackstuff’ as a methodological framework, as well as drawing together the smattering of information that the artist has about the history of the local area. Cathy Butterworth Sketches For Britain

Cathy Butterworth invited me to talk about mapping De Quincey's wanderings across the "Square Mile", around the The Bridewell Gallery in Liverpool, based on his 1803 Diary.



The talk took place on 13th November 2010 at the Bridewell Gallery. The talk consisted of a brief introduction to De Quincey's life and writings; an explanation of my interest in De Quincey; when and why De Quincey first visited Everton?; what was the attraction of Everton?; De Quincey In Everton 1803; the 1803 Diary; the touchstones of autobiography and psychogeography in the diary and finishing with an illustrated journey in the footsteps of De Quincey around places/locations mentioned in 1803 diary.

Welcome to De Quincey in Everton

This blog has been set up to compliment a recent talk I gave on ‘De Quincey In Everton’ as part of Cathy Butterworth’s project Sketches In Britain.

The purpose of the blog is three fold:

Firstly, the blog will act as a vehicle for my on-going research into De Quincey’s time in Everton. My aim is to supplement the existing biographical information by placing his visits in time and space especially to explore the topography of his 1803 Diary, which he wrote during one of his visits to Everton.

Secondly, I will be documenting my psychogeographical wanderings around Liverpool in search of De Quincey’s spirit.