William Henry Gladstone - "The Hawarden Visitors' Hand Book"

Henry Beam Piper - "A Slave is a Slave"

Various - "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445"

E. Hermitte and G. Bodenbender - "Catalogo Instructivo de las Colecciones Mineralogicas"

Editorial
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2




Meantime, what was the first thing to be done? Manifestly, to see Agnes:
her account of the affair might suggest the steps to be taken. Prudence,
therefore, at any rate, prescribed this course; and my heart would not have
tolerated any other. I applied, therefore, at once, for information as to
the proper mode of effecting this purpose without delay. What was my horror
at learning that, by a recent regulation of all the police offices, under
the direction of the public minister who presided over that department of
the national administration, no person could be admitted to an interview
with any accused party during the progress of the official examinations--or,
in fact, until the final committal of the prisoner for trial. This rule was
supposed to be attended by great public advantages, and had rarely been
relaxed--never, indeed, without a special interposition of the police
minister authorising its suspension. But was the exclusion absolute and
universal? Might not, at least, a female servant, simply as the bearer of
such articles as were indispensable to female delicacy and comfort, have
access to her mistress? No; the exclusion was total and unconditional. To
argue the point was manifestly idle; the subordinate officers had no
discretion in the matter; nor, in fact, had any other official person,
whatever were his rank, except the supreme one; and to him I neither had any
obvious means of introduction, nor (in case of obtaining such an
introduction) any chance of success; for the spirit of the rule, I foresaw
it would be answered, applied with especial force to cases like the present.

Mere human feelings of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation,
superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery that
was now opening its artillery upon me--for misery has a privilege, and
everywhere is felt to be a holy thing--had combined to procure for me some
attention and some indulgence hitherto. Answers had been given with
precision, explanations made at length, and anxiety shown to satisfy my
inquiries. But this could not last; the inexorable necessities of public
business coming back in a torrent upon the official people after this
momentary interruption, forbade them to indulge any further consideration
for an individual case, and I saw that I must not stay any longer. I was
rapidly coming to be regarded as a hindrance to the movement of public
affairs; and the recollection that I might again have occasion for some
appeal to these men in their official characters, admonished me not to abuse
my privilege of the moment. After returning thanks, therefore, for the
disposition shown to oblige me, I retired.

Slowly did I and Hannah retrace our steps. Hannah sustained, in the tone of
her spirits, by the extremity of her anger, a mood of feeling which I did
not share. Indignation was to her in the stead of consolation and hope. I,
for my part, could not seek even a momentary shelter from my tempestuous
affliction in that temper of mind. The man who could accuse my Agnes, and
accuse her of such a crime, I felt to be a monster; and in my thoughts he
was already doomed to a bloody atonement (atonement! alas! what atonement!)
whenever the time arrived that _her_ cause would not be prejudiced, or the
current of public feeling made to turn in his favour by investing him with
the semblance of an injured or suffering person. So much was settled in my
thoughts with the stern serenity of a decree issuing from a judgment-seat.
But that gave no relief, no shadow of relief, to the misery which was now
consuming me. Here was an end, in one hour, to the happiness of a life. In
one hour it had given way, root and branch--had melted like so much
frost-work, or a pageant of vapoury exhalations. In a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, and yet for ever and ever, I comprehended the total
ruin of my situation. The case, as others might think, was yet in suspense;
and there was room enough for very rational hopes, especially where there
was an absolute certainty of innocence. Total freedom from all doubt on that
point seemed to justify almost more than hopes. This might be said, and most
people would have been more or less consoled by it. I was not. I felt as
certain, as irredeemably, as hopelessly certain of the final results as
though I had seen the record in the books of heaven. 'Hope nothing,' I said
to myself; 'think not of hope in this world, but think only how best to walk
steadily, and not to reel like a creature wanting discourse of reason, or
incapable of religious hopes under the burden which it has pleased God to
impose, and which in this life cannot be shaken off. The countenance of man
is made to look upward and to the skies. Thither also point henceforwards
your heart and your thoughts. Never again let your thoughts travel
earthwards. Settle them on the heavens, to which your Agnes is already
summoned. The call is clear, and not to be mistaken. Little in _her_ fate
now depends upon you, or upon anything that man can do. Look, therefore, to
yourself; see that you make not shipwreck of your heavenly freight because
your earthly freight is lost; and miss not, by any acts of wild and
presumptuous despair, that final reunion with your Agnes, which can only be
descried through vistas that open through the heavens.'

Such were the thoughts, thoughts often made audible, which came
spontaneously like oracles from afar, as I strode homewards with Hannah
by my side. Her, meantime, I seemed to hear; for at times I seemed and I
intended to answer her. But answer her I did not; for not ten words of
all that she said did I really and consciously hear. How I went through
that night is more entirely a blank in my memory, more entirely a
chapter of chaos and the confusion of chaos, than any other passage the
most impressive in my life. If I even slumbered for a moment, as at
intervals I did sometimes, though never sitting down, but standing or
pacing about throughout the night, and if in this way I attained a
momentary respite from self-consciousness, no sooner had I reached this
enviable state of oblivion, than some internal sting of irritation as
rapidly dispersed the whole fickle fabric of sleep; and as if the
momentary trance--this fugitive beguilement of my wo--had been conceded
by a demon's subtle malice only with the purpose of barbing the pang, by
thus forcing it into a stronger relief through the insidious peace
preceding it. It is a well-known and most familiar experience to all the
sons and daughters of affliction, that under no circumstances is the
piercing, lancinating torment of a recent calamity felt so keenly as in
the first moments of awaking in the morning from the night's slumbers.
Just at the very instant when the clouds of sleep, and the whole
fantastic illusions of dreaminess are dispersing, just as the realities
of life are re-assuming their steadfast forms--re-shaping
themselves--and settling anew into those fixed relations which they are
to preserve throughout the waking hours; in that particular crisis of
transition from the unreal to the real, the wo which besieges the brain
and the life-springs at the heart rushes in afresh amongst the other
crowd of realities, and has at the moment of restoration literally the
force and liveliness of a new birth--the very same pang, and no whit
feebler, as that which belonged to it when it was first made known.
From the total hush of oblivion which had buried it and sealed it up, as
it were, during the sleeping hours, it starts into sudden life on our
first awaking, and is to all intents and purposes a new and not an old
affliction--one which brings with it the old original shock which
attended its first annunciation.

That night--that first night of separation from my wife--_how_ it
passed, I know not; I know only _that_ it passed, I being in our common
bedchamber, that holiest of all temples that are consecrated to human
attachments whenever the heart is pure of man and woman and the love is
strong--I being in that bedchamber, once the temple now the sepulchre of
our happiness,--I there, and my wife--my innocent wife--in a dungeon. As
the morning light began to break, somebody knocked at the door; it was
Hannah; she took my hand--misery levels all feeble distinctions of
station, sex, age--she noticed my excessive feverishness, and gravely
remonstrated with me upon the necessity there was that I should maintain
as much health as possible for the sake of 'others,' if not for myself.
She then brought me some tea, which refreshed me greatly; for I had
tasted nothing at all beyond a little water since the preceding
morning's breakfast. This refreshment seemed to relax and thaw the stiff
frozen state of cheerless, rayless despair in which I had passed the
night; I became susceptible of consolation--that consolation which lies
involved in kindness and gentleness of manner--if not susceptible more
than before of any positive hope. I sat down; and, having no witnesses
to my weakness but this kind and faithful woman, I wept, and I found a
relief in tears; and she, with the ready sympathy of woman, wept along
with me. All at once she ventured upon the circumstances (so far as she
had been able to collect them from the reports of those who had been
present at the examination) of our calamity. There was little indeed
either to excite or to gratify any interest or curiosity separate from
the _personal_ interest inevitably connected with a case to which there
were two such parties as a brutal, sensual, degraded ruffian, on one
side in character of accuser, and on the other as defendant, a meek
angel of a woman, timid and fainting from the horrors of her situation,
and under the licentious gaze of the crowd--yet, at the same time, bold
in conscious innocence, and in the very teeth of the suspicions which
beset her, winning the good opinion, as well as the good wishes of all
who saw her. There had been at this first examination little for her to
say beyond the assigning her name, age, and place of abode; and here it
was fortunate that her own excellent good sense concurred with her
perfect integrity and intuitive hatred of all indirect or crooked
courses in prompting her to an undisguised statement of the simple
truth, without a momentary hesitation or attempt either at evasion or
suppression. With equally good intentions in similar situations many a
woman has seriously injured her cause by slight evasions of the entire
truth, where nevertheless her only purpose has been the natural and
ingenuous one of seeking to save the reputation untainted of a name
which she felt to have been confided to her keeping. The purpose was an
honourable one, but erroneously pursued. Agnes fell into no such error.
She answered calmly, simply, and truly, to every question put by the
magistrates; and beyond _that_ there was little opportunity for her to
speak; the whole business of this preliminary examination being confined
to the deposition of the accuser as to the circumstances under which he
alleged the act of felonious appropriation to have taken place. These
circumstances were perfectly uninteresting, considered in themselves;
but amongst them was one which to us had the most shocking interest,
from the absolute proof thus furnished of a deep-laid plot against
Agnes. But for this one circumstance there would have been a possibility
that the whole had originated in error--error growing out of and acting
upon a nature originally suspicious, and confirmed perhaps by an
unfortunate experience. And in proportion as that was possible, the
chances increased that the accuser might, as the examinations advanced,
and the winning character of the accused party began to develop itself,
begin to see his error, and to retract his own over-hasty suspicions.
But now we saw at a glance that for this hope there was no countenance
whatever, since one solitary circumstance sufficed to establish a
conspiracy. The deposition bore--that the lace had been secreted and
afterwards detected in a muff; now it was a fact as well-known to both
of us as the fact of Agnes having gone out at all--that she had laid
aside her winter's dress for the first time on this genial sunny day.
Muff she had not at the time, nor could have had appropriately from the
style of her costume in other respects. What was the effect upon us of
this remarkable discovery! Of course there died at once the hope of any
abandonment by the prosecutor of his purpose; because here was proof of
a predetermined plot. This hope died at once; but then, as it was one
which never had presented itself to my mind, I lost nothing by which I
had ever been solaced. On the other hand, it will be obvious that a new
hope at the same time arose to take its place, viz., the reasonable one
that by this single detection, if once established, we might raise a
strong presumption of conspiracy, and moreover that, as a leading fact
or clue, it might serve to guide us in detecting others. Hannah was
sanguine in this expectation; and for a moment her hopes were
contagiously exciting to mine. But the hideous despondency which in my
mind had settled upon the whole affair from the very first, the
superstitious presentiment I had of a total blight brooding over the
entire harvest of my life and its promises (tracing itself originally, I
am almost ashamed to own, up to that prediction of the Hungarian
woman)--denied me steady light, anything--all in short but a wandering
ray of hope. It was right, of course, nay, indispensable, that the
circumstance of the muff should be strongly insisted upon at the next
examination, pressed against the prosecutor, and sifted to the
uttermost. An able lawyer would turn this to a triumphant account; and
it would be admirable as a means of pre-engaging the good opinion as
well as the sympathies of the public in behalf of the prisoner. But, for
its final effect--my conviction remained, not to be shaken, that all
would be useless; that our doom had gone forth, and was irrevocable.

Let me not linger too much over those sad times. Morning came on as
usual; for it is strange, but true, that to the very wretched it seems
wonderful that times and seasons should keep their appointed courses in
the midst of such mighty overthrows and such interruption to the courses
of their own wonted happiness and their habitual expectations. Why
should morning and night, why should all movements in the natural world
be so regular, whilst in the moral world all is so irregular and
anomalous? Yet the sun and the moon rise and set as usual upon the
mightiest revolutions of empire and of worldly fortune that this planet
ever beholds; and it is sometimes even a comfort to know that this will
be the case. A great criminal, sentenced to an agonising punishment, has
derived a fortitude and a consolation from recollecting that the day
would run its inevitable course--that a day after all was _but_ a
day--that the mighty wheel of alternate light and darkness must and
would revolve--and that the evening star would rise as usual, and shine
with its untroubled lustre upon the dust and ashes of what _had_ indeed
suffered, and so recently, the most bitter pangs, but would then have
ceased to suffer. 'La Journee,' said Damien,

'La journee sera dure, mais elle se passera.'

'----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my day also,
my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will have an end;
that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so long as I thought at
all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching when thinking in any shape
would for some time be at an end for me.

That day, as the morning advanced, I went again, accompanied by Hannah,
to the police court and to the prison--a vast, ancient, in parts
ruinous, and most gloomy pile of building. In those days the
administration of justice was, if not more corrupt, certainly in its
inferior departments by far more careless than it is at present, and
liable to thousands of interruptions and mal-practices, supporting
themselves upon old traditionary usages which required at least half a
century, and the shattering everywhere given to old systems by the
French Revolution, together with the universal energy of mind applied to
those subjects over the whole length and breadth of Christendom, to
approach with any effectual reforms. Knowing this, and having myself had
direct personal cognizance of various cases in which bribery had been
applied with success, I was not without considerable hope that perhaps
Hannah and myself might avail ourselves of this irregular passport
through the gates of the prison. And, had the new regulation been of
somewhat longer standing, there is little doubt that I should have been
found right; unfortunately, as yet it had all the freshness of new-born
vigour, and kept itself in remembrance by the singular irritation it
excited. Besides this, it was a pet novelty of one particular minister
new to the possession of power, anxious to distinguish himself, proud of
his creative functions within the range of his office, and very
sensitively jealous on the point of opposition to his mandates. Vain,
therefore, on this day were all my efforts to corrupt the jailers; and,
in fact, anticipating a time when I might have occasion to corrupt some
of them for a more important purpose and on a larger scale, I did not
think it prudent to proclaim my character beforehand as one who tampered
with such means, and thus to arm against myself those jealousies in
official people which it was so peculiarly important that I should keep
asleep.

All that day, however, I lingered about the avenues and vast courts in
the precincts of the prison, and near one particular wing of the
building, which had been pointed out to me by a jailer as the section
allotted to those who were in the situation of Agnes; that is, waiting
their final commitment for trial. The building generally he could
indicate with certainty, but he professed himself unable to indicate the
particular part of it which 'the young woman brought in on the day
previous' would be likely to occupy; consequently he could not point out
the window from which her cell (her '_cell!_' what a word!) would be
lighted. 'But, master,' he went on to say, 'I would advise nobody to try
that game.' He looked with an air so significant, and at the same time
used a gesture so indicative of private understanding, that I at once
apprehended his meaning, and assured him that he had altogether
misconstrued my drift; that, as to attempts at escape, or at any mode of
communicating with the prisoner from the outside, I trusted all _that_
was perfectly needless; and that at any rate in my eyes it was perfectly
hopeless. 'Well, master,' he replied, 'that's neither here nor there.
You've come down handsomely, that I _will_ say; and where a gentleman
acts like a gentleman, and behaves himself as such, I'm not the man to
go and split upon him for a word. To be sure it's quite nat'ral that a
gentleman--put case that a young woman is his fancy woman--it's nothing
but nat'ral that he should want to get her out of such an old rat-hole
as this, where many's the fine-timbered creature, both he and she, that
has lain to rot, and has never got out of the old trap at all, first or
last'----'How so?' I interrupted him; 'surely they don't detain the
corpses of prisoners?' 'Ay, but mind you--put case that he or that she
should die in this rat-trap before sentence is past, why then the prison
counts them as its own children, and buries them in its own chapel--that
old stack of pigeon-holes that you see up yonder to the right hand.' So,
then, after all, thought I, if my poor Agnes should, in her desolation
and solitary confinement to these wretched walls, find her frail
strength give way--should the moral horrors of her situation work their
natural effect upon her health, and she should chance to die within this
dungeon, here within this same dungeon will she lie to the resurrection,
and in that case her prison-doors have already closed upon her for ever.
The man, who perhaps had some rough kindness in his nature, though
tainted by the mercenary feelings too inevitably belonging to his
situation, seemed to guess at the character of my ruminations by the
change in my countenance, for he expressed some pity for my being 'in so
much trouble'; and it seemed to increase his respect for me that this
trouble should be directed to the case of a woman, for he appeared to
have a manly sense of the peculiar appeal made to the honour and
gallantry of man, by the mere general fact of the feebleness and the
dependence of woman. I looked at him more attentively in consequence of
the feeling tone in which he now spoke, and was surprised that I had not
more particularly noticed him before; he was a fine-looking, youngish
man, with a bold Robin-hood style of figure and appearance; and, morally
speaking, he was absolutely transfigured to my eyes by the effect worked
upon him for the moment, through the simple calling up of his better
nature. However, he recurred to his cautions about the peril in a legal
sense of tampering with the windows, bolts, and bars of the old decaying
prison; which, in fact, precisely according to the degree in which its
absolute power over its prisoners was annually growing less and less,
grew more and more jealous of its own reputation, and punished the
attempts to break loose with the more severity, in exact proportion as
they were the more tempting by the chances of success. I persisted in
disowning any schemes of the sort, and especially upon the ground of
their hopelessness. But this, on the other hand, was a ground that in
his inner thoughts he treated with scorn; and I could easily see that,
with a little skilful management of opportunity, I might, upon occasion,
draw from him all the secrets he knew as to the special points of
infirmity in this old ruinous building. For the present, and until it
should certainly appear that there was some use to be derived from this
species of knowledge, I forbore to raise superfluous suspicions by
availing myself further of his communicative disposition. Taking,
however, the precaution of securing his name, together with his
particular office and designation in the prison, I parted from him as if
to go home, but in fact to resume my sad roamings up and down the
precincts of the jail.

What made these precincts much larger than otherwise they would have
been, was the circumstance that, by a usage derived from older days,
both criminal prisoners and those who were prisoners for debt, equally
fell under the custody of this huge caravanserai for the indifferent
reception of crime, of misdemeanour, and of misfortune. And those who
came under the two first titles were lodged here through all stages of
their connection with public justice; alike when mere objects of vague
suspicion to the police, when under examination upon a specific charge,
when fully committed for trial, when convicted and under sentence,
awaiting the execution of that sentence, and, in a large proportion of
cases, even through their final stage of punishment, when it happened to
be of any nature compatible with indoor confinement. Hence it arose that
the number of those who haunted the prison gates with or without a title
to admission was enormous; all the relatives, or more properly the
acquaintances and connections of the criminal population within the
prison, being swelled by all the families of needy debtors who came
daily either to offer the consolation of their society, or to diminish
their common expenditure by uniting their slender establishments. One of
the rules applied to the management of this vast multitude that were
every day candidates for admission was, that to save the endless trouble
as well as risk, perhaps, of opening and shutting the main gates to
every successive arrival, periodic intervals were fixed for the
admission by wholesale: and as these periods came round every two hours,
it would happen at many parts of the day that vast crowds accumulated
waiting for the next opening of the gate. These crowds were assembled in
two or three large outer courts, in which also were many stalls and
booths, kept there upon some local privilege of ancient inheritance, or
upon some other plea made good by gifts or bribes--some by Jews and
others by Christians, perhaps equally Jewish. Superadded to these
stationary elements of this miscellaneous population, were others, drawn
thither by pure motives of curiosity, so that altogether an almost
permanent mob was gathered together in these courts; and amid this mob
it was,--from I know not what definite motive, partly because I thought
it probable that amongst these people I should hear the case of Agnes
peculiarly the subject of conversation; and so, in fact, it did really
happen,--but partly, and even more, I believe, because I now awfully
began to shrink from solitude. Tumult I must have, and distraction of
thought. Amid this mob, I say, it was that I passed two days. Feverish I
had been from the first,--and from bad to worse, in such a case, was, at
any rate, a natural progress; but, perhaps, also amongst this crowd of
the poor, the abjectly wretched, the ill-fed, the desponding, and the
dissolute, there might be very naturally a larger body of contagion
lurking than accorded to their mere numerical expectations. There was at
that season a very extensive depopulation going on in some quarters of
this great metropolis, and in other cities of the same empire, by means
of a very malignant typhus. This fever is supposed to be the peculiar
product of jails; and though it had not as yet been felt as a scourge
and devastator of this particular jail, or at least the consequent
mortality had been hitherto kept down to a moderate amount, yet it was
highly probable that a certain quantity of contagion, much beyond the
proportion of other popular assemblages less uniformly wretched in their
composition, was here to be found all day long; and doubtless my excited
state, and irritable habit of body, had offered a peculiar
predisposition that favoured the rapid development of this contagion.
However this might be, the result was, that on the evening of the second
day which I spent in haunting the purlieus of the prison (consequently
the night preceding the second public examination of Agnes), I was
attacked by ardent fever in such unmitigated fury, that before morning I
had lost all command of my intellectual faculties. For some weeks I
became a pitiable maniac, and in every sense the wreck of my former
self; and seven entire weeks, together with the better half of an eighth
week, had passed over my head whilst I lay unconscious of time and its
dreadful freight of events, excepting in so far as my disordered brain,
by its fantastic coinages, created endless mimicries and mockeries of
these events--less substantial, but oftentimes less afflicting, or less
agitating. It would have been well for me had my destiny decided that I
was not to be recalled to this world of wo. But I had no such happiness
in store. I recovered, and through twenty and eight years my groans
have recorded the sorrow I feel that I did.

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