Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) is the most beguiling and complex of poets. The controversy surrounding his work lasted for over a decade and he became an icon for the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, culminating in Henry Wallis’s celebrated depiction of him lying dead on his bed – perhaps the most famous painting of a poet in the western world. And yet while continuing to inspire writers, artists, and composers, until very recently his poetry has been little read and he has received negligible critical attention.
The principal reason for this academic diffidence is that Chatterton resists categorization. ‘The marvellous boy’ (as Wordsworth dubbed him) was extraordinarily precocious. He tried his hand at a remarkable variety of eighteenth-century literary genres: mock-heroic satire, love lyrics and songs, devotional verse, epistles, scientific verse, eclogues, elegies, graveyard poetry, primitivist ‘translations’, short prose narratives, political satires and letters, and musical drama, over fifty examples of which were published in his lifetime.
But he is best known for the ‘Rowley’ papers: an immense collection of poetry, drama, letters, memoirs, memoranda, sketches, maps, and heraldic genealogies. He took no personal credit for this body of work, attributing it instead to Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk, and his circle of collaborators. In other words, Chatterton forged the entire Rowley corpus of medieval literature, claiming to have discovered the archive of documents in a chest in the church of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol.
For these forgeries Chatterton developed his own dialect of medieval language and spelling, and produced several written out on ancient parchment in archaic handwriting. The controversy provoked by the Rowley works on their eventual publication was one of the fiercest and most protracted of the eighteenth-century literary world.
All this is remarkable enough, but it was also produced in an incredibly short and intense writing career: Chatterton died when he was just seventeen. It is perhaps no surprise that contemporaries – and indeed critics today – found his achievement simply unbelievable and were at a loss how to analyze it. When in 1782, a dozen years after Chatterton’s death, the ‘Rowley Controversy’ on the authenticity of the supposedly medieval prose and verse began to wane and he was generally recognized as the author of a bewilderingly prodigious volume of work, Chatterton was classed as a ‘genius’.
This was convenient: it defined his brilliance as being incomprehensible, effectively ‘othering’ him. Moreover, the classification of most of his work as ‘forgery’ meant critics could avoid engaging with it: was it really literature if it had been forged? And if some of his writing was fraudulent, didn’t that cast doubt over the authenticity of his entire output, written as it was under a range pseudonyms? (Chatterton himself didn’t help things with the rather postmodern declaration, ‘A character is now unnecessary; an author carries his character in his pen’ and the admission that ‘he is a poor author, who cannot write on both [political] sides’.) These questions were only ever discussed by mavericks such as Thomas De Quincey and Oscar Wilde and the vast majority of readers have not troubled themselves to read Thomas Chatterton; instead, they read about him.
The story of Chatterton’s life is certainly compelling and is almost as unbelievable as his work, inspiring countless poems, plays, novels, pictures, monuments, and even operas. It also constitutes an important context for his work, hence the consideration of it here, as the life has been progressively reinvented and mythologized in order to accommodate the implications of his forgery. Chatterton was born in Bristol on 20 November 1752, the posthumous son of Mr Thomas Chatterton, writing master of St Mary Redcliffe Pile Street School, who had died over three months earlier.
The lad was raised by his doting mother and sister, and possibly grandmother as well, in the sort of overly maternal upbringing that provides rich sources for psychoanalytic accounts of his life and work, but he was dismissed from his father’s old school for being ‘a dull boy, and incapable of improvement’. His sister Mary later recalled, ‘My brother was dull at learning, not knowing many letters at four years old, and always objected to read in a small book. He learnt the Alphabet from an old Folio music book of father’s my mother was then tearing up for wast paper, the capitals at the beginning of the verses.’ His mother taught him from this old book: ‘he fell in love, as she expressed herself, with the illuminated capitals’.
Aged seven, he was then sent to Colston’s, Bristol’s ‘Blue Coat’ or charity school, where in preparation for an apprenticeship he was trained in reading, writing, the church catechism, and arithmetic (accounts). Chatterton had, however, what his sister described as a ‘thurst for prehemince’.
He read voraciously in libraries and bookshops: ‘One day he might be found busily employed in the study of Heraldry and English Antiquities, ... the next, discovered him deeply engaged, confounded, and perplexed, amidst the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition, or lost and bewildered in the abstruse labyrinth of mathematical researches.’ He was, perhaps in consequence, a moody, gloomy, introverted, supercilious loner, although aged about twelve began to write and, as his sister remembered, ‘He had been gloomy from the time he began to learn, but we remark’d he was more chearfull after he began to write poetry.’
At fourteen years of age, Chatterton was apprenticed to a legal scrivener, supposedly working a twelve-hour day – although in reality he had very little to do, and consequently exercised his pen in other ways. Some years before he was born his father had received a quantity of ancient waste paper from St Mary Redcliffe with which to cover his pupils’ books, and inspired by the ancient leaves he began collecting stray fragments of medieval parchment from the corners of the church, hoarding them in two wooden boxes. Eventually, his son chanced upon the collection: ‘he had found a treasure, and was so glad nothing could be like it’.
According to his mother, ‘he was perpetually rummaging and ransacking every corner of the house for more parchments, and from time to time carried away those he had already found by the pocketsful.’ These vestiges of medieval life fired his imagination, and became the foundation of the Rowley works, which he could claim had been discovered by his father in the church muniment room. Thomas Rowley (c. 1400-70; the name is pronounced to rhyme with ‘slowly’) was variously a priest, poet, antiquarian, connoisseur, and the literary agent, biographer, and confidante of William Canynge, five-times mayor of Bristol and an actual historical figure; Thomas Rowley, however, only ever existed in the mind of Thomas Chatterton.
On 1 October 1768 (shortly before his sixteenth birthday), Chatterton saw the first fruits of his imaginative labour published in a local journal: a supposedly thirteenth-century account of the opening of a new bridge in Bristol. The ‘Bridge Narrative’ caught the eye of Bristol antiquarians George Catcott and William Barrett, who within a week had received about twenty pieces from Chatterton. Catcott recalled that ‘he generally visited us twice or thrice a week, and I never recollect his coming without bringing some of Rowley’s Pieces either in Prose or Verse’.
Chatterton did not receive payment for this work from Catcott and Barrett. He did, however, take on a commission to produce a fake pedigree for another local antiquarian, Henry Burgum, and approached the London publisher James Dodsley for a guinea to transcribe the 1,400-line Rowley play ‘Ælla’. He also famously wrote to Horace Walpole, author of arguably the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), with a Rowleyan essay on the history of English painting. Walpole was delighted and offered to publish Rowley’s poetry, of which Chatterton forwarded several examples. Walpole then exhibited the manuscripts to Thomas Gray and William Mason, who condemned them as forgeries. The correspondence was broken off after a short, bitter exchange.
Other projects advanced more profitably, however, and he found publishers for, for example, light eulogies, Ossianic imitations, pseudo-antiquarian prose, scientific verse, and, most significantly, his political writings in verse and prose and the ‘African Eclogues’. Within a year of Walpole’s rebuff, Chatterton had published over thirty titles in seven different journals, five of which were London publications.
This degree of success led Chatterton to break his apprenticeship and journey to London to seek his fortune as a writer. He did so in a typically impetuous way: by threatening to commit suicide. Despite the parodic edge to the suicide notes and the will he left lying around, his employer released him and Chatterton left Bristol – and all but left Rowley. In London, he concentrated on long anti-government political satires inspired by Charles Churchill, and profitable essays considering the Patriot politics of the popular radical John Wilkes (whom he met), writing to his sister that ‘Essay writing has this advantage, you are sure of constant pay’. He also secured a book contract to revise a history of London, and made five guineas on a musical drama, ‘The Revenge’ – possibly performed in Marylebone.
Although very little Rowley was published, he was certainly making a living from his pen. Yet the popular conception of Chatterton’s move to Bristol is that it was disastrous: he fell into dire poverty, his genius went unrecognized, he was too proud to beg, he went mad – and on the night of 24 August 1770, the seventeen-year-old committed suicide. Much as the categorization of forgery denies his literary output any aesthetic value, so Chatterton’s mad suicide defines his life, and redefines his written work as a series of psychological symptoms prefiguring the fatal act. It suited friends, family, and later the Romantics to have Chatterton mad: it explained not only his forgeries, but also his extravagant sexual claims, his vegetarianism, even his flamboyant style of dress.
But Chatterton was neither starving, neglected, mad, nor suicidal: he died of an accidental overdose of arsenic mixed with opium, which he was taking as treatment for a sexually transmitted disease. Ironically, a matter of days after he died an Oxford don visited Bristol seeking information on Thomases Chatterton and Rowley, and the debate over the authenticity of the papers began. It raged for the next dozen years, fuelled in part by the untimely death of the central protagonist, like Hamlet without the prince.
The Rowley poems can claim to be among the most idiosyncratic – or indeed eccentric – poetry ever written. ‘Rowleyese’ characteristically substitutes ‘y’ for ‘i’ and ‘k’ for ‘c’, capriciously doubles letters, and adds redundant ‘e’s, and also deploys a specialized vocabulary of over 1,800 words. This makes the verse profoundly textual: it is perpetually drawing attention to itself as a physical entity in both the formation of the words on the page and the necessity of using footnotes and other textual apparatus in order to make sense of the language and references. This textuality is further borne out by the actual parchments that Chatterton sometimes produced: this was literature as a material object, as a relic.
The earlier Rowley verses do make sense without too much annotation. ‘The Storie of William Canynge’, for example:
Anent a brooklette as I laie reclynde,
Listeynge to heare the water glyde alonge,
Myndeynge how thorowe the grene mees yt twynd,
Awhilst the cavys respons’d yts mottring songe,
At dystaunt rysying Avonne too he sped,
Amenged wyth rysyng hylles dyd shewe yts head.
Evidently Canynge is meditating to the trickling sound of a stream, and the only gloss possibly required is of the local river Avon, visible through the hills. Later examples, however, are much more challenging. Chatterton himself footnoted Rowley’s ‘Eclogue the Third’, which begins
Wouldst thou kenn Nature in her better parte,
Goe, serche the Logges and Bordels of the Hynde;
Gyfe theye have anie itte ys roughemade arte,
Inne hem you see the blakied forme of kynde:
Haveth your minde, a lycheynge of a mynde,
Woulde it kenne everich thynge as it mote bee;
Woulde ytte here phrase of th’vulgar frō the Hynde,
Wythoute wiseegger wordes ande knowlache free,
Gyf soe, rede thys, whych Iche dysportynge pende,
Gif nete besyde; yttes rhyme maie ytte commende –
In this case, the footnotes are Chatterton’s own, This bizarre language has several effects. It is a memory or dream or perhaps a vision of the medieval, appearing to dissolve the centuries but in fact distracting the reader from the fact that it is a fabrication by the effort required to understand it, hinting that meaning is essential to language, if sometimes well disguised. It is uncanny, making familiar words unfamiliar, estranging the reader from the page and yet simultaneously hinting that meaning can be gleaned, even suggesting that the gradual revelation of meaning indicates that this (pseudo-)medieval dialect is somehow purer, closer to the real world, more concrete and active.
In this way, Chatterton appears to be evolving a peculiarly English dialect, and indeed John Keats wrote of the poet, ‘He is the purest writer in the English Language.... ’tis genuine English Idiom in English Words.’ Chatterton was writing at a time of emerging English cultural identity, when the country was assessing its indigenous heritage as opposed to adapting classical precepts – a movement fuelled by publications such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Samuel Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare (both 1765). Lastly, this is a form of nonsense verse – there is a playfulness to the game of language being played here, much as there is in Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’.
The Rowley works are therefore an intricate, interconnected body of work, cross-referenced, apparently multi-authored and multi-valent, making literature not simply out of medieval poetry and plays, but also out of business receipts, letters, antiquarian notes, and genealogical researches. It is all necessary text for the world of Rowley to spring into historical existence. It charmed the Bristol literati and the cognoscenti of the time, but it also poses fundamental questions about the definition of literature and the nature of authorship.
Can any scrap of writing by an author or poet be considered literature, and if not, where does ‘literature’ stop and become other forms of writing, such as letters and diaries and notes? In the case of Rowley, the definition of literature needs to be stretched to include the entire textual record. The context (the fabrication of fifteenth-century Bristol) is part of the text (the verses), and crucially determines its meaning: the entire meaning of the Rowley works shifts if one reads them as eighteenth-century productions rather than a fifteenth-century archive. But it is too easy to dismiss them as forgeries. The context has been skillfully fabricated – or created – so that it becomes the framework for the poetry and hence part of the literary achievement.
Of course, the acid-test of such a creative work is to see whether it actually works, and to do this one needs an oblivious audience. It is like removing the proscenium arch from over the stage and taking drama onto the street, or like a trompe l’oeil painting: for the work to work it has to be presented as if it is true, and Thomas Rowley had to be presented as having as much existence as Geoffrey Chaucer. The fallout from such an enterprise, however, is that once discovered literary forgery is dismissed from the canon, as the discipline of criticism reacts savagely against such experimental forms of fiction. Rather than ask whether forged poetry can still be poetry, it is instead condemned as a valueless fraud.
Despite the centrality of forgery to Chatterton’s literary reputation, it remains a posthumous assessment of his work, and so it is crucial to bear in mind the hundreds of lines he published during his lifetime. The most startling works are the sequence of ‘African Eclogues’, the last pair of which Chatterton described as ‘the only two Pieces I have the Vanity to Call Poetry’. Although they feature typically feverish Orientalist visions of ‘reeking tygers’ and ‘burning sands’, the poems also endeavour to comprehend the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the enslaved. The white men, ‘palid shadows’, are driven by a desire to make themselves materialize through the acquisition of wealth:
Where the pale children of the feeble sun,
In search of gold, thro’ every climate run:
From burning heat, to freezing torments go,
And live in all vicissitudes of woe.
They are entirely other to the Africans, who comprehend the enslavement of their race through an increasingly digressive and elaborate mythology of oppression and revenge. Chatterton’s ambition to reimagine the world from this radically humane and politically explosive perspective is startlingly original for the period, and hints at the direction his writing might have taken had he lived.
Had he lived... that is the unanswerable question; however, the legacy he did leave – all of it precocious juvenalia – indicates a growing mastery of the craft of eighteenth-century letters, an acute eye for register and genre, and a pragmatic acceptance of Samuel Johnson’s dictum that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’
From the strange ruins of medieval mystery framed by the Rowley works to headlong topical satires, Thomas Chatterton’s life and work will continue to challenge and defy easy categorization; less the prototypical Romantic, more the archetypal outsider.
© - Words Nick Groom/ ZANI
Works
The Execution of Sir Charles Bawdin, ed. Thomas Eagles (London, 1772).
Poems, Supposed to have been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt (London, 1777).
The ‘Rowley Poems’.Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, ed. John Broughton (London, 1778).
The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald Taylor, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Magisterial edition of poetry and prose.
Thomas Chatterton: Selected Poetry, ed. Nick Groom (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2003). Paperback selection.
Further Reading
Angelaki 1.2, ‘Narratives of Forgery’ (Winter, 1993). Includes essays on Chatterton and critical theory.
Baines, Paul, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
Chapter on Chatterton and the legality of literary forgery.
Groom, Nick, The Forger’s Shadow (London: Picador, 2002). Chapters on Chatterton and his influence in context of forgery and authenticity.
Groom, Nick (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (ed.) (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, 1999). Essays by scholars and critics such as Peter Ackroyd, David Fairer, Richard Holmes, Claude Rawson, Pat Rogers, and Michael Wood.
Haywood, Ian, The Making of History (London: Associated University Press, 1986). Chapters on Chatterton in relation to eighteenth-century theories of history and fiction.
Heys, Alistair (ed.), From Gothic to Romantic: Thomas Chatterton’s Bristol (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2005).
Essays on literature, art, and architecture.
Holmes, Richard, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Includes important revisionist biographical essay questioning Chatterton’s suicide.
Meyerstein, E.H.W., A Life of Thomas Chatterton (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1930). Unsurpassed as the standard biography.
Taylor, Donald S., Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Comprehensive analysis of Chatterton’s literary achievement.
The principal reason for this academic diffidence is that Chatterton resists categorization. ‘The marvellous boy’ (as Wordsworth dubbed him) was extraordinarily precocious. He tried his hand at a remarkable variety of eighteenth-century literary genres: mock-heroic satire, love lyrics and songs, devotional verse, epistles, scientific verse, eclogues, elegies, graveyard poetry, primitivist ‘translations’, short prose narratives, political satires and letters, and musical drama, over fifty examples of which were published in his lifetime.
But he is best known for the ‘Rowley’ papers: an immense collection of poetry, drama, letters, memoirs, memoranda, sketches, maps, and heraldic genealogies. He took no personal credit for this body of work, attributing it instead to Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk, and his circle of collaborators. In other words, Chatterton forged the entire Rowley corpus of medieval literature, claiming to have discovered the archive of documents in a chest in the church of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol.
For these forgeries Chatterton developed his own dialect of medieval language and spelling, and produced several written out on ancient parchment in archaic handwriting. The controversy provoked by the Rowley works on their eventual publication was one of the fiercest and most protracted of the eighteenth-century literary world.
All this is remarkable enough, but it was also produced in an incredibly short and intense writing career: Chatterton died when he was just seventeen. It is perhaps no surprise that contemporaries – and indeed critics today – found his achievement simply unbelievable and were at a loss how to analyze it. When in 1782, a dozen years after Chatterton’s death, the ‘Rowley Controversy’ on the authenticity of the supposedly medieval prose and verse began to wane and he was generally recognized as the author of a bewilderingly prodigious volume of work, Chatterton was classed as a ‘genius’.
This was convenient: it defined his brilliance as being incomprehensible, effectively ‘othering’ him. Moreover, the classification of most of his work as ‘forgery’ meant critics could avoid engaging with it: was it really literature if it had been forged? And if some of his writing was fraudulent, didn’t that cast doubt over the authenticity of his entire output, written as it was under a range pseudonyms? (Chatterton himself didn’t help things with the rather postmodern declaration, ‘A character is now unnecessary; an author carries his character in his pen’ and the admission that ‘he is a poor author, who cannot write on both [political] sides’.) These questions were only ever discussed by mavericks such as Thomas De Quincey and Oscar Wilde and the vast majority of readers have not troubled themselves to read Thomas Chatterton; instead, they read about him.
The story of Chatterton’s life is certainly compelling and is almost as unbelievable as his work, inspiring countless poems, plays, novels, pictures, monuments, and even operas. It also constitutes an important context for his work, hence the consideration of it here, as the life has been progressively reinvented and mythologized in order to accommodate the implications of his forgery. Chatterton was born in Bristol on 20 November 1752, the posthumous son of Mr Thomas Chatterton, writing master of St Mary Redcliffe Pile Street School, who had died over three months earlier.
The lad was raised by his doting mother and sister, and possibly grandmother as well, in the sort of overly maternal upbringing that provides rich sources for psychoanalytic accounts of his life and work, but he was dismissed from his father’s old school for being ‘a dull boy, and incapable of improvement’. His sister Mary later recalled, ‘My brother was dull at learning, not knowing many letters at four years old, and always objected to read in a small book. He learnt the Alphabet from an old Folio music book of father’s my mother was then tearing up for wast paper, the capitals at the beginning of the verses.’ His mother taught him from this old book: ‘he fell in love, as she expressed herself, with the illuminated capitals’.
Aged seven, he was then sent to Colston’s, Bristol’s ‘Blue Coat’ or charity school, where in preparation for an apprenticeship he was trained in reading, writing, the church catechism, and arithmetic (accounts). Chatterton had, however, what his sister described as a ‘thurst for prehemince’.
He read voraciously in libraries and bookshops: ‘One day he might be found busily employed in the study of Heraldry and English Antiquities, ... the next, discovered him deeply engaged, confounded, and perplexed, amidst the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition, or lost and bewildered in the abstruse labyrinth of mathematical researches.’ He was, perhaps in consequence, a moody, gloomy, introverted, supercilious loner, although aged about twelve began to write and, as his sister remembered, ‘He had been gloomy from the time he began to learn, but we remark’d he was more chearfull after he began to write poetry.’
At fourteen years of age, Chatterton was apprenticed to a legal scrivener, supposedly working a twelve-hour day – although in reality he had very little to do, and consequently exercised his pen in other ways. Some years before he was born his father had received a quantity of ancient waste paper from St Mary Redcliffe with which to cover his pupils’ books, and inspired by the ancient leaves he began collecting stray fragments of medieval parchment from the corners of the church, hoarding them in two wooden boxes. Eventually, his son chanced upon the collection: ‘he had found a treasure, and was so glad nothing could be like it’.
According to his mother, ‘he was perpetually rummaging and ransacking every corner of the house for more parchments, and from time to time carried away those he had already found by the pocketsful.’ These vestiges of medieval life fired his imagination, and became the foundation of the Rowley works, which he could claim had been discovered by his father in the church muniment room. Thomas Rowley (c. 1400-70; the name is pronounced to rhyme with ‘slowly’) was variously a priest, poet, antiquarian, connoisseur, and the literary agent, biographer, and confidante of William Canynge, five-times mayor of Bristol and an actual historical figure; Thomas Rowley, however, only ever existed in the mind of Thomas Chatterton.
On 1 October 1768 (shortly before his sixteenth birthday), Chatterton saw the first fruits of his imaginative labour published in a local journal: a supposedly thirteenth-century account of the opening of a new bridge in Bristol. The ‘Bridge Narrative’ caught the eye of Bristol antiquarians George Catcott and William Barrett, who within a week had received about twenty pieces from Chatterton. Catcott recalled that ‘he generally visited us twice or thrice a week, and I never recollect his coming without bringing some of Rowley’s Pieces either in Prose or Verse’.
Chatterton did not receive payment for this work from Catcott and Barrett. He did, however, take on a commission to produce a fake pedigree for another local antiquarian, Henry Burgum, and approached the London publisher James Dodsley for a guinea to transcribe the 1,400-line Rowley play ‘Ælla’. He also famously wrote to Horace Walpole, author of arguably the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), with a Rowleyan essay on the history of English painting. Walpole was delighted and offered to publish Rowley’s poetry, of which Chatterton forwarded several examples. Walpole then exhibited the manuscripts to Thomas Gray and William Mason, who condemned them as forgeries. The correspondence was broken off after a short, bitter exchange.
Other projects advanced more profitably, however, and he found publishers for, for example, light eulogies, Ossianic imitations, pseudo-antiquarian prose, scientific verse, and, most significantly, his political writings in verse and prose and the ‘African Eclogues’. Within a year of Walpole’s rebuff, Chatterton had published over thirty titles in seven different journals, five of which were London publications.
This degree of success led Chatterton to break his apprenticeship and journey to London to seek his fortune as a writer. He did so in a typically impetuous way: by threatening to commit suicide. Despite the parodic edge to the suicide notes and the will he left lying around, his employer released him and Chatterton left Bristol – and all but left Rowley. In London, he concentrated on long anti-government political satires inspired by Charles Churchill, and profitable essays considering the Patriot politics of the popular radical John Wilkes (whom he met), writing to his sister that ‘Essay writing has this advantage, you are sure of constant pay’. He also secured a book contract to revise a history of London, and made five guineas on a musical drama, ‘The Revenge’ – possibly performed in Marylebone.
Although very little Rowley was published, he was certainly making a living from his pen. Yet the popular conception of Chatterton’s move to Bristol is that it was disastrous: he fell into dire poverty, his genius went unrecognized, he was too proud to beg, he went mad – and on the night of 24 August 1770, the seventeen-year-old committed suicide. Much as the categorization of forgery denies his literary output any aesthetic value, so Chatterton’s mad suicide defines his life, and redefines his written work as a series of psychological symptoms prefiguring the fatal act. It suited friends, family, and later the Romantics to have Chatterton mad: it explained not only his forgeries, but also his extravagant sexual claims, his vegetarianism, even his flamboyant style of dress.
But Chatterton was neither starving, neglected, mad, nor suicidal: he died of an accidental overdose of arsenic mixed with opium, which he was taking as treatment for a sexually transmitted disease. Ironically, a matter of days after he died an Oxford don visited Bristol seeking information on Thomases Chatterton and Rowley, and the debate over the authenticity of the papers began. It raged for the next dozen years, fuelled in part by the untimely death of the central protagonist, like Hamlet without the prince.
The Rowley poems can claim to be among the most idiosyncratic – or indeed eccentric – poetry ever written. ‘Rowleyese’ characteristically substitutes ‘y’ for ‘i’ and ‘k’ for ‘c’, capriciously doubles letters, and adds redundant ‘e’s, and also deploys a specialized vocabulary of over 1,800 words. This makes the verse profoundly textual: it is perpetually drawing attention to itself as a physical entity in both the formation of the words on the page and the necessity of using footnotes and other textual apparatus in order to make sense of the language and references. This textuality is further borne out by the actual parchments that Chatterton sometimes produced: this was literature as a material object, as a relic.
The earlier Rowley verses do make sense without too much annotation. ‘The Storie of William Canynge’, for example:
Anent a brooklette as I laie reclynde,
Listeynge to heare the water glyde alonge,
Myndeynge how thorowe the grene mees yt twynd,
Awhilst the cavys respons’d yts mottring songe,
At dystaunt rysying Avonne too he sped,
Amenged wyth rysyng hylles dyd shewe yts head.
Evidently Canynge is meditating to the trickling sound of a stream, and the only gloss possibly required is of the local river Avon, visible through the hills. Later examples, however, are much more challenging. Chatterton himself footnoted Rowley’s ‘Eclogue the Third’, which begins
Wouldst thou kenn Nature in her better parte,
Goe, serche the Logges and Bordels of the Hynde;
Gyfe theye have anie itte ys roughemade arte,
Inne hem you see the blakied forme of kynde:
Haveth your minde, a lycheynge of a mynde,
Woulde it kenne everich thynge as it mote bee;
Woulde ytte here phrase of th’vulgar frō the Hynde,
Wythoute wiseegger wordes ande knowlache free,
Gyf soe, rede thys, whych Iche dysportynge pende,
Gif nete besyde; yttes rhyme maie ytte commende –
In this case, the footnotes are Chatterton’s own, This bizarre language has several effects. It is a memory or dream or perhaps a vision of the medieval, appearing to dissolve the centuries but in fact distracting the reader from the fact that it is a fabrication by the effort required to understand it, hinting that meaning is essential to language, if sometimes well disguised. It is uncanny, making familiar words unfamiliar, estranging the reader from the page and yet simultaneously hinting that meaning can be gleaned, even suggesting that the gradual revelation of meaning indicates that this (pseudo-)medieval dialect is somehow purer, closer to the real world, more concrete and active.
In this way, Chatterton appears to be evolving a peculiarly English dialect, and indeed John Keats wrote of the poet, ‘He is the purest writer in the English Language.... ’tis genuine English Idiom in English Words.’ Chatterton was writing at a time of emerging English cultural identity, when the country was assessing its indigenous heritage as opposed to adapting classical precepts – a movement fuelled by publications such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Samuel Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare (both 1765). Lastly, this is a form of nonsense verse – there is a playfulness to the game of language being played here, much as there is in Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’.
The Rowley works are therefore an intricate, interconnected body of work, cross-referenced, apparently multi-authored and multi-valent, making literature not simply out of medieval poetry and plays, but also out of business receipts, letters, antiquarian notes, and genealogical researches. It is all necessary text for the world of Rowley to spring into historical existence. It charmed the Bristol literati and the cognoscenti of the time, but it also poses fundamental questions about the definition of literature and the nature of authorship.
Can any scrap of writing by an author or poet be considered literature, and if not, where does ‘literature’ stop and become other forms of writing, such as letters and diaries and notes? In the case of Rowley, the definition of literature needs to be stretched to include the entire textual record. The context (the fabrication of fifteenth-century Bristol) is part of the text (the verses), and crucially determines its meaning: the entire meaning of the Rowley works shifts if one reads them as eighteenth-century productions rather than a fifteenth-century archive. But it is too easy to dismiss them as forgeries. The context has been skillfully fabricated – or created – so that it becomes the framework for the poetry and hence part of the literary achievement.
Of course, the acid-test of such a creative work is to see whether it actually works, and to do this one needs an oblivious audience. It is like removing the proscenium arch from over the stage and taking drama onto the street, or like a trompe l’oeil painting: for the work to work it has to be presented as if it is true, and Thomas Rowley had to be presented as having as much existence as Geoffrey Chaucer. The fallout from such an enterprise, however, is that once discovered literary forgery is dismissed from the canon, as the discipline of criticism reacts savagely against such experimental forms of fiction. Rather than ask whether forged poetry can still be poetry, it is instead condemned as a valueless fraud.
Despite the centrality of forgery to Chatterton’s literary reputation, it remains a posthumous assessment of his work, and so it is crucial to bear in mind the hundreds of lines he published during his lifetime. The most startling works are the sequence of ‘African Eclogues’, the last pair of which Chatterton described as ‘the only two Pieces I have the Vanity to Call Poetry’. Although they feature typically feverish Orientalist visions of ‘reeking tygers’ and ‘burning sands’, the poems also endeavour to comprehend the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the enslaved. The white men, ‘palid shadows’, are driven by a desire to make themselves materialize through the acquisition of wealth:
Where the pale children of the feeble sun,
In search of gold, thro’ every climate run:
From burning heat, to freezing torments go,
And live in all vicissitudes of woe.
They are entirely other to the Africans, who comprehend the enslavement of their race through an increasingly digressive and elaborate mythology of oppression and revenge. Chatterton’s ambition to reimagine the world from this radically humane and politically explosive perspective is startlingly original for the period, and hints at the direction his writing might have taken had he lived.
Had he lived... that is the unanswerable question; however, the legacy he did leave – all of it precocious juvenalia – indicates a growing mastery of the craft of eighteenth-century letters, an acute eye for register and genre, and a pragmatic acceptance of Samuel Johnson’s dictum that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’
From the strange ruins of medieval mystery framed by the Rowley works to headlong topical satires, Thomas Chatterton’s life and work will continue to challenge and defy easy categorization; less the prototypical Romantic, more the archetypal outsider.
© - Words Nick Groom/ ZANI
Works
The Execution of Sir Charles Bawdin, ed. Thomas Eagles (London, 1772).
Poems, Supposed to have been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt (London, 1777).
The ‘Rowley Poems’.Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, ed. John Broughton (London, 1778).
The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald Taylor, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Magisterial edition of poetry and prose.
Thomas Chatterton: Selected Poetry, ed. Nick Groom (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2003). Paperback selection.
Further Reading
Angelaki 1.2, ‘Narratives of Forgery’ (Winter, 1993). Includes essays on Chatterton and critical theory.
Baines, Paul, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
Chapter on Chatterton and the legality of literary forgery.
Groom, Nick, The Forger’s Shadow (London: Picador, 2002). Chapters on Chatterton and his influence in context of forgery and authenticity.
Groom, Nick (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (ed.) (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, 1999). Essays by scholars and critics such as Peter Ackroyd, David Fairer, Richard Holmes, Claude Rawson, Pat Rogers, and Michael Wood.
Haywood, Ian, The Making of History (London: Associated University Press, 1986). Chapters on Chatterton in relation to eighteenth-century theories of history and fiction.
Heys, Alistair (ed.), From Gothic to Romantic: Thomas Chatterton’s Bristol (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2005).
Essays on literature, art, and architecture.
Holmes, Richard, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Includes important revisionist biographical essay questioning Chatterton’s suicide.
Meyerstein, E.H.W., A Life of Thomas Chatterton (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1930). Unsurpassed as the standard biography.
Taylor, Donald S., Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Comprehensive analysis of Chatterton’s literary achievement.
