HIS GHASTLY FACE

De Quincey's first sight of Wordsworth is the premature culmination of his Lake Reminiscences, a series of essays spun out from the early days and weeks of a years-long acquaintance. The episode is framed by a meditation on the double significance of his audacious attempt to “form personal ties which would forever connect” him to the poet. For years he had looked forward to this climactic day, picturing himself “as a phantom-self – a second identity projected from my own consciousness, and already living amongst” the Wordsworths (R 120). Before even meeting his idol, De Quincey predicated the doublets of autobiography upon physical proximity to the poet's body. Yet the imagined “connexion” does not disguise an equally powerful contradiction, implied by De Quincey's long delay of the encounter. The conversion narrative that follows may be understood as an attempt to figure and refigure two mutually cancelling versions of this scenario: the biographical subject with his recording shadow, and the specular alignment of “face to face” (R 127) that consummates first-person narration. De Quincey's first sight of Wordsworth is staged as a confrontation between the demands of biographical recognition and the structure of the autobiographical “sketches” in which the encounter is embedded. Just as the apparition of phantom-selfhood tropes autobiographical reflection, De Quincey's attempt to see the face of Wordsworth prefigures the necessity and the impossibility of biography, conceived as the portrait of a living author.