Keeping Time with the Mail-Coach: Anachronism and De Quincey's "the English Mail-Coach" (Thomas De Quincey) (Critical Essay‪)‬

THOMAS DE QUINCEY STARTS OFF HIS FINAL MASTERPIECE BY PRAISING Mr. Palmer for inventing mail-coaches, [one of] the two capital points of speed and keeping time." (1) Curiously, De Quincey, whose "authentic voice ... is that of an anachronist," dedicates his final piece to the punctuality of the mail-coach. (2) Discourse regarding De Quincey's anachronism tends to cluster around the historical valence of the term: De Quincey is a late Romantic publishing with Victorian means and concerns, De Quincey is a Romantic writing gothic novels, De Quincey is the untimely being of Modernism, De Quincey earned his minor fame much later than his peers. In the end, De Quincey might have more to say about temporal anachronism than the historical kind, which will become evident after examining the culminating text of his career. A close reading of "The English Mail-Coach" shows how anachronism, through its unveiling of human temporal existence, underwrites autobiography, the event of national identity, and the interaction between the two. Autobiography, when written out of anachronism, proves to be the most forceful turn away from and against the leveling force of nationalism's vehicle. "The English Mail-Coach" first appeared anonymously in Blackwood's. The magazine printed the first two sections, "The Glory of Motion" and "Going Down with Victory," in its October 1849 issue without any indication of a sequel. That year's December issue circulated the other two sections, "Vision of Sudden Death" and "Dream-Fugue," with a note encouraging "the reader ... to understand this present paper ... as connected with a previous paper." (3) The essay remained anonymous until De Quincey collected his writings for Selections Grave and Gay several years later. De Quincey initially conceived "The English Mail-Coach" as a part of "Suspiria de Profundis," the sequel to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. However, in the end he clearly considered "The English Mail-Coach" a sequel to, rather than a part of, "Suspiria." The first of the four sections, "The Glory of Motion," sets the foundation for the following sections by figuring the mail-coach as "the national organ for publishing these mighty events [of British victories over France] ... a spiritualized and glorified object to an impassioned heart" (192). The most circuitous of the sections, it explains the social implications of the mail-coach's various seating options, describes De Quincey's courting of Miss Fanny of the Bath Road, and discusses the transformative nature of figurative language through the aperture of Miss Fanny and her crocodile-looking grandfather. The glory of the mail coach that haunts De Quincey's subsequent dreams comes from unprecedented speed, the sight of light and darkness along the road, the kinetic beauty of the horses, and, most importantly, "the conscious presence of a central intellect, that ... overruled all obstacles into one steady cooperation in a national result" (191). The following section, "Going Down with Victory," recounts "the grandest chapter of [De Quincey's] experience," a decade's worth of trips across the English countryside bearing news of victory over Napoleon (211). The section ends with an episode where De Quincey withholds the news of a soldier's death from that soldier's mother. The third section, The "Vision of Sudden Death," narrates a single trip from Manchester to Westmorland. However, this trip does not carry any reports of victory, and instead of instigating revelry, the vehicle, manned by a sleeping driver, strikes another coach. Fleeing the scene of the crash, the anxiety-ridden De Quincey cannot determine if the collision killed the woman inside the other coach. Catalyzed by the ghostly image of the female victim, the final section, "Dream-Fugue: On the Above Theme of Sudden Death," "attempt[s] to wrestle with the utmost efforts of music in dealing with a colossal form of impassioned horror" by tangling themes and images from all the previ