Writers 1

Learn about three famous writers linked to St John’s Church in Chester.

The east side of St John’s Church with a bricked-up window. Was this part of the Priory House?

Strolling around the perimeter of St John’s, the oldest church in Chester, history runs deep under your feet – the stones and bones haven’t shared all their secrets. This area is a nexus for writers and those who love books.

The Victorians rebuilt St John’s Church. 200 years ago, it was a mass of mouldering sandstone twined with ivy. Nestled by the ruins sat the Priory House which was demolished in 1871.

It was this house that Thomas De Quincey’s mother snapped up in 1801 for £500 (£30,000 in today’s money) when the family moved from Everton. Young Thomas’s imagination was fired by the gothic scene and because the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton (1571 – 1631) had lived here when in Chester.

After Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries, important books and documents were being poorly kept. Sir Robert Cotton – also an MP – found and preserved the only known copies of Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as the priceless Lindisfarne Gospels. Sir Robert’s grandson bequeathed the Cotton Library to Great Britain, and it became the basis of the British Library.

In 1618 Ben Jonson walked from London to Scotland. In 2009 the researcher James Loxley stumbled upon papers at the Chester record office which turned out to be a detailed eyewitness account of that journey. At a different time, Ben Jonson is supposed to have visited Sir Robert Cotton in Chester.

In 1802 a luggage trunk toppled down the stairs of Manchester Grammar as De Quincey embarked on a chapter as teenage runaway and a lifetime adventure in poverty. His goal was to see his hero William Wordsworth, but he bottled it and decided to see his sister first, so he went to his mother’s house in Chester before going on the run in North Wales living on berries and kindness.

Today De Quincey is known mainly for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater which William Burroughs called the first and best addiction memoir. But he wrote so much else besides: he stoked our interest in murder, he penned the best Shakespeare essay of his century. He also wrote on astronomy, psychology, politics, and economics.

Some writers that acknowledge a debt to De Quincey: Baudelaire, Poe, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Dickens, Joyce, Borges, Burroughs. Dr John Cooper Clarke did a nice episode on Confessions that you can catch on BBC iPlayer.

De Quincey was born in Manchester and is perhaps that city’s greatest writer. His father owned Quincey and Duck Linen Drapers, and when he wasn’t at home in Manchester lived in Portugal and the Caribbean in the hope of staving off the deterioration of his lungs (he died when Thomas was seven). De Quincey’s father owned shares in Chester’s Linen Hall which opened in 1788 and was like of smaller version of Halifax’s Piece Hall.

By our standards De Quincey’s life was one slow car crash – he spent most of his adult years ducking and diving from his creditors, addicted to opium, dressed shabbily. When his daughter visited him in Edinburgh, she found his hair on fire as sparks leapt from the hearth.

In De Quincey’s time opium in its liquid form laudanum was widely prescribed for headaches, toothache and even for helping babies to sleep (!).  Opium has been used by humans for 7,000 years.

According to Frances Wilson’s wonderful biography Guilty Thing, De Quincey and family could have lived a life debt-free if he’d just sold his collection of eight rare books by Giordano Bruno. De Quincey had a library of 5,000 books: Wordsworth less than 300. Just imagine how packed Dove Cottage must have been when the De Quinceys moved in.

De Quincey lived to the age of 74. Whatever opium had done to him it didn’t seem to have harmed his mental faculties. An original, weird, entertaining writer, whose best work is a revelation, his influence lives on, somewhat hidden from view.

Just some of the writers influenced by Thomas De Quincey whose mother lived for a while in Chester and whose father had shares in the Linen Hall.