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Bohemian & Libertine · Grasmere / Rydal, Cumbria (Westmorland)

De Quincey's Opium Marriage at Dove Cottage

The Opium-Eater moved into Wordsworth's old cottage, got a farmer's daughter pregnant, married her — and the Wordsworths never forgave the 'beneath him' match.

StatusDocumented history
Date1809–1820s
The peopleThomas De Quincey (1785–1859), Margaret Simpson, William & Dorothy Wordsworth
The siteDove Cottage, Grasmere (De Quincey's tenancy) and Nab Cottage, Rydal (his wife's family home)
Coordinates54.45500, -3.01670 (confidence 4/5)

Evidence note. Documented literary biography: De Quincey and Margaret had a son in 1816, married 1817; the Wordsworths' snobbish disapproval and his opium life are well attested.

The story

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) is remembered for the opium and deserves to be remembered for the honesty. As a starving runaway of seventeen in 1802, he was kept alive on the London streets by a teenage prostitute he calls only Ann — about sixteen, who spent her own money on hot wine to revive him when he fainted from hunger. He wrote of her with rare tenderness in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and searched Oxford Street for her, in vain, for years. His opium habit began in 1804 as a remedy for facial neuralgia; laudanum was legal and sold over the counter. It became a lifelong addiction, measured in drops and later in wineglasses — up to ten a day by around 1813. In 1809 he took over the tenancy of Dove Cottage in Grasmere, the house the Wordsworths had just left, and lived there until 1820. He courted Margaret Simpson, a farmer's daughter from the Nab near Rydal; their son William was born in November 1816, and they married in February 1817. The Wordsworths disapproved on grounds of class — Dorothy Wordsworth recorded the courtship with icy wit — but the marriage was happy, and Margaret nursed him through his worst opium years. The Confessions, first serialised in 1821, was the first modern drug memoir. He died, debt-ridden, in Edinburgh in 1859.

More stories at this spot

The fan who lost his nerve

De Quincey idolised Wordsworth so intensely that on two early trips to the Lakes, in 1805 and 1806, he got within sight of Dove Cottage, stood on the ridge staring at its white walls, and fled without knocking. He finally managed an introduction in 1807 — by first befriending Coleridge and giving him £300.

The garden that ended a friendship

When De Quincey took over Dove Cottage he altered the garden the Wordsworths had lovingly planted, ordering shrubbery torn out. The poet's family took it as a violation of trust. Between that and their snobbery about his marriage, the worship curdled into a lasting estrangement.

A hero who slept on a grave

When Wordsworth's little daughter Catharine died in 1812, De Quincey — who had adored the child — was so undone by grief that he lay for weeks on her grave in Grasmere churchyard. His deepening opium use in these years was, in part, an attempt to blunt that loss.

Sources

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