Background
Thomas Chatterton was born on November 20, 1752, in Bristol, United Kingdom; son of a sexton of St. Mary Redcliffe Church.
(Including introductions to Chatterton's life, technique, ...)
Including introductions to Chatterton's life, technique, and reputation, this selection shows the historical significance and unexpected range of his poetry, which spans the genres of satire, elegy, lyric, narrative verse, and poetic drama.
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Thomas Chatterton was born on November 20, 1752, in Bristol, United Kingdom; son of a sexton of St. Mary Redcliffe Church.
He attended school at Colston's Hospital and there, influenced by a teacher, Thomas Phillips, he began to write poetry.
He learned his first letters from the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio, and learned to read out of a black-letter Bible.
From his earliest years he was liable to fits of abstraction, sitting for hours in seeming stupor, or yielding after a time to tears, for which he would assign no reason.
But his delight was to lock himself in a little attic which he had appropriated as his study; and there, with books, cherished parchments, saved from the loot of the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe, and drawing materials, the child lived in thought with his 15th-century heroes and heroines.
Three of Chatterton's companions are named as youths whom Phillips's taste for poetry stimulated to rivalry; but Chatterton held aloof from these contests, and made at that time no confidant of his own more daring literary adventures.
His little pocket-money was spent in borrowing books from a circulating library; and he early ingratiated himself with book collectors, by whose aid he found access to Weever, Dugdale and Collins, as well as to Speght's edition of Chaucer, Spenser and other books. His "Rowleian" jargon appears to have been chiefly the result of the study of John Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Bri- tannicum, and Prof. W. W. Skeat seems to think his knowledge of even Chaucer was very slight.
Canynge is represented as an enlightened patron of literature, and Rowley's dramatic interludes were written for performance at his house.
In " The Storie of William Canynge, " one of the shorter pieces of his ingenious romance, his early history is recorded.
This beautiful picture of the childhood of the ideal patron of Rowley is in reality that of the poet himself-" the fate-marked babe, " with his wondrous child-genius, and all his romantic dreams realized.
Catcott was one of the most zealous believers in Rowley, and continued to collect his reputed writings long after the death of their real author.
The de Bergham quartering, blazoned on a piece of parchment doubtless recovered from the Redcliffe muniment chest, was itself supposed to have lain for centuries in that ancient depository.
The pedigree was professedly collected by Chatterton from original records, including " The Rowley MSS. "
There he was left much alone; and after fulfilling the routine duties devolving on him, he found leisure for his own favourite pursuits.
An ancient stone bridge on the Avon, built in the reign of Henry II, and altered by many later additions into a singularly picturesque but inconvenient thoroughfare, had been displaced by a structure better adapted to modern requirements.
In September 1768, when Chatterton was in the second year of his apprenticeship, the new bridge was partially opened for traffic.
taken by the elder Chatterton from a coffer in the muniment room of Redcliffe church, and transcribed, and so rescued from oblivion, by his son.
Unfortunately for him, his ingenious romance had either to be acknowledged as his own creation, and so in all probability be treated with contempt, or it had to be sustained by the manufacture of spurious antiques.
To this accordingly Chatterton resorted, and found no difficulty in gulling the most learned of his credulous dupes with his parchments. The literary labours of the boy, though diligently pursued at his desk, were not allowed to interfere with the duties of Mr Lambert's office.
Nevertheless the Bristol attorney used to search his apprentice's drawer, and tear up any poems or other manuscripts that he could lay his hands upon; so that it was only during the absences of Mr Lambert from Bristol that he was able to expend his unemployed time in his favourite pursuits.
But repeated allusions, both by Chatterton and others, seem to indicate that such intervals of freedom were of frequent occurrence.
Towards Lambert his feelings were of too keen a nature to find relief in such sarcasm. In December 1768 in his seventeenth year, he wrote to Dodsley, the London publisher, offering to procure for him " copies of several ancient poems, and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a priest in Bristol, who lived in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV. "
To this letter he appended the initials of his favourite pseudonym, Dunelmus Bristoliensis, but directed the answer to be sent to the care of Thomas Chatterton, Redcliffe Hill, Bristol.
To this, as well as to another letter enclosing an extract from the tragedy, there was no answer appears to have been returned.
He wrote to him offering him a document entitled " The Ryse of Peyncteyne yn Englande, wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge, " accompanied by notes which included specimens of Rowley's poetry.
To this Walpole replied with courteous acknowledgments.
Chatterton replied, enclosing additional specimens of antique verse, and telling Walpole that he was the son of a poor widow, and clerk to an attorney, but had a taste for more refined studies; and he hinted a wish that he might help him to some more congenial occupation.
Walpole's manner underwent an abrupt change.
The specimens of verse had been submitted to his friends Gray and Mason, the poets, and pronounced modern.
They did not thereby forfeit the wonderful harmony and spirit which Walpole had already professed to recognize in them.
Chatterton had to write three times before he recovered his MSS.
He now turned his attention to periodical literature and politics, and exchanged Felix Farley's Bristol Journal for the Town and County Magazine and other London periodicals.
Among his satirical bequests, such as his " humility " to the Rev. Mr Camplin, his " religion " to Dean Barton, and his "modesty" along with his "prosody and grammar " to Mr Burgum, he leaves "to Bristol all his spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on its quay since the days of Canynge and Rowley. "
The will was probably purposely prepared in order to frighten his master into letting him go.
If so, it had the desired effect.
Lambert cancelled his indentures; his friends and acquaintance made him up a purse; and on the 25th or 26th of the month he arrived in London. Chatterton was already known to the readers of the Middlesex Journal as a rival of Junius, under the nom de plume of Decimus.
He had also been a contributor to Hamilton's Town and County Magazine, and speedily found access to the Freeholder's Magazine, another political miscellany strong for Wilkes and liberty.
His contributions were freely accepted; but the editors paid little or nothing for them.
He wrote in the most hopeful terms to his mother and sister, and spent his first earnings in buying gifts for them.
His pride and ambition were amply gratified by the promises and interested flattery of editors and political adventurers; Wilkes himself had noted Jiis trenchant style, " and expressed a desire to know the author'"; and Lord Mayor Beckford graciously acknowledged a political address of his, and greeted him " as politely as a citizen could. "
But of actual money he received but little.
He was extremely abstemious, his diligence was great, and his versatility wonderful.
He could assume the style of Junius or Smollett, reproduce the satiric bitterness of Churchill, parody Macpherson's Ossian, or write in the manner of Pope, or with the polished grace of Gray and Collins.
He wrote political letters, eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, both in prose and verse.
In June 17 70-after Chatterton had been some nine weeks in London-he removed from Shoreditch, where he had hitherto lodged with a relative, to an attic in Brook Street, Holborn.
In Shoreditch, as in his lodging at the Bristol attorney's, he had only shared a room; but now, for the first time, he enjoyed uninterrupted solitude.
His bed-fellow at Mr Walmsley's, Shoreditch, noted that much of the night was spent by him in writing; and now he could write all night.
The romance of his earlier years revived, and he transcribed from an imaginary parchment of the old priest Rowley his " Excelente Balade of Charitie. "
He had not yet completed his second month in London, and already failure and starvation stared him in the face.
Mr Cross, a neighbouring apothecary, repeatedly invited him to join him at dinner or supper; but he refused.
His landlady also, suspecting his necessity, pressed him to share her dinner, but in vain.
But he was offended at her urgency, and assured her that he was not hungry.
He appealed also to Mr Catcott to forward his plan, but in vain.
On the 24th of August 1770, he retired for the last time to his attic in Brook Street, carrying with him the arsenic which he there drank, after tearing into fragments whatever literary remains were at hand. He was only seventeen years and nine months old; but the best of his numerous productions, both in prose and verse, require no allowance to be made for the immature years of their author, when comparing him with the ablest of his contemporaries.
He pictures Lydgate, the monk of Bury St Edmunds, challenging Rowley to a trial at versemaking, and under cover of this fiction, produces his " Songe of riilla, " a piece of rare lyrical beauty, worthy of comparison with any antique or modern production of its class.
Again, in his " Tragedy of Goddwyn, " of which only a fragment has been preserved, the " Ode to Liberty, " with which it abruptly closes, may claim a place among the finest martial lyrics in the language.
The collection of poems in which such specimens occur furnishes by far the most remarkable example of intellectual precocity in the whole history of letters.
Collins, Burns, Keats, Shelley and Byron all awaken sorrow over the premature arrestment of their genius; but the youngest of them survived to his twenty-fifth year, while Chatterton was not eighteen when he perished in his miserable garret.
He was interred in a burying-ground attached to Shoe Lane Workhouse, in the parish of St Andrew's, Holborn, which has since been converted into a site for Farringdon Market.
There a monument has since been erected to his memory, with the appropriate inscription, borrowed from his " Will, " and so supplied by the poet's own pen- " To the memory of Thomas Chatterton.
(Including introductions to Chatterton's life, technique, ...)
Quotations:
He characterized the verses as " wonderful for their harmony and spirit, " and added, " Give me leave to ask you where Rowley's poems are to be had?
I should not be sorry to print them; or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed. "
His sister relates that on being asked what device he would like painted on a bowl that was to be his, he replied, " Paint me an angel, with wings, and a trumpet, to trumpet my name over the world.
He was ambitious of distinction.
Quotes from others about the person
Walpole has been loaded with more than his just share of responsibility for the fate of the unhappy poet, of whom he admitted when too late, " I do not believe there ever existed so masterly a genius. "
His landlady knew, " as she afterwards said, " that he had not eaten anything for two or three days. "
According to Chatterton's sister, "he was more cheerful after he began to write poetry, " when he was about 10 years old.
The poet's father, Thomas Chatterton, was a musical genius, somewhat of a poet, a numismatist, and a dabbler in occult arts.
The hereditary race of sextons had come to regard the church of St Mary Redcliffe as their own peculiar domain; and, under the guidance of his uncle, the child found there his favourite haunt.
He did not like, his sister said, reading out of small books.
Wayward, as it seems, almost from his earliest years, and manifesting no sympathy with the ordinary pastimes of children, he was regarded for a time as deficient in intellect.
His holidays were mostly spent at his mother's house;