Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet who committed suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Although fatherless and raised in poverty, Chatterton was a studious child, publishing work by the age of 11. He was able to pass off his work as that of a fictional 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, though he was denounced by Horace Walpole.
At 17, he sought outlets for his political writings in London, having impressed the Lord Mayor, William Beckford, and the leader John Wilkes, but his earnings were not enough to keep him, and he poisoned himself. His life and death attracted much interest among romantic poets, and Alfred de Vigny wrote a play about him. The oil painting The Death of Chatterton by Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis was inspired by him.
Childhood
Chatterton was born in Bristol to Sarah Chatterton, his father also named Thomas having died three months previous. His sister Mary was three years older and her married name was Newton. In Bristol, the office of the sexton of St Mary Redcliffe had long been held by the Chatterton family.Basil Cottle, Thomas Chatterton (Bristol Historical Association pamphlets, no. 6, 1963), pp. 1–2 Chatterton's father was a musician, a poet, and a numismatist. He had been a sub-chanter at Bristol Cathedral and master of the Pyle Street free school.
After Chatterton's birth, his mother established a girls' school and took in sewing and ornamental needlework. From his earliest years, he was liable to fits of abstraction. Chatterton was admitted to Edward Colston's Charity, a Bristol charity schoolThe Monthly Visitor January 1797, note in BL copy. C.39.f.12, in which the curriculum was limited to reading, writing, arithmetic and the catechism.
Chatterton learned his first letters from the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio,The Monthly Visitor, January 1797. British Library. C.39.f.12 which his mother said 'he fell in love with' and he learned to read out of a black-letter Bible or was taught by herThe Monthly Visitor January 1797. British Library, C.39.f.12. His sister said he did not like reading out of small books. Wayward from his earliest years, and uninterested in the games of other children, he was thought to be educationally backward.
By the age of 11, he had become a contributor to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. Elsewhere this is recorded as in 1768 when he was 16. The article was "Description of Frryars passing over the Old Bridge, taken from an ancient manuscript".The Monthly Visitor, January 1797 p.6
His confirmation inspired him to write some religious poems published in that paper. In 1763, a cross which had adorned the churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe for upwards of three centuries was destroyed by a churchwarden, so he sent to the local journal on 7 January 1764 a satire on the parish vandal.
First "medieval" works The first of his literary mysteries was the dialogue of "Elinoure and Juga," which he showed to Thomas Phillips, the usher at Colston's Hospital, where he was a pupil, pretending it was the work of a 15th-century poet. Chatterton remained a boarder at Colston's Hospital for more than six years, and it was only his uncle who encouraged the pupils to write. Three of Chatterton's companions are named as youths whom Phillips's taste for poetry stimulated to rivalry; but Chatterton told no one about his own more daring literary adventures. His pocket-money was spent on borrowing books from a circulating library; and he ingratiated himself with book collectors, in order to obtain access to John Weever, William Dugdale and Arthur Collins, as well as to Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer, Spenser and other books. At some point he came across Elizabeth Cooper's anthology of verse, which is said to have been a major source for his inventions.Yvonne Noble, "Cooper, Elizabeth (b. in or before 1698, d. 1761?)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 11 Nov 2014
Chatterton's "Rowleian" jargon appears to have been chiefly the result of the study of John Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, and it seems his knowledge even of Chaucer was very slight. His holidays were mostly spent at his mother's house, and much of them in the favourite retreat of his attic study there. He lived for the most part in an ideal world of his own, in the reign of Edward IV, during the mid-15th century, when the great Bristol merchant William II Canynges (died 1474), five times mayor of Bristol, patron and rebuilder of St Mary Redcliffe "still ruled in Bristol's civic chair." Canynges was familiar to him from his recumbent effigy in Redcliffe church, and is represented by Chatterton as an enlightened patron of art and literature.
Adopts persona of Thomas Rowley Chatterton soon conceived the romance of Thomas Rowley, a fictional monk from the 15th century, and adopted for himself the pseudonym Thomas Rowley for poetry and history. Psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan suggested that Chatterton being fatherless played a great role in his imposturous creation of Rowley.Kaplan 21 In this interpretation, the development of his masculine identity was held back by the fact that he was raised by two women: his mother Sarah and his sister Mary. Therefore, "to reconstitute the lost father in fantasy,"Kaplan 100 he unconsciously created "two interweaving family romances [fantasies], each with its own scenario."Kaplan 25 The first of these was the romance of Rowley for whom he created a fatherlike, wealthy patron, William Canynge, while the second was as Kaplan named it his romance of "Jack and the Beanstalk." He imagined he would become a famous poet who by his talents would be able to rescue his mother from poverty.Kaplan 23
Chatterton's search for a patron To bring his hopes to life, Chatterton started to look for a patron. At first, he was trying to do so in Bristol where he became acquainted with William Barrett, George Catcott and Henry Burgum. He assisted them by providing Rowley transcripts for their work. The antiquary William Barrett relied exclusively on these fake transcripts when writing his History and Antiquities of Bristol (1789) which became an enormous failure.Kaplan 247 But since his Bristol patrons were not willing to pay him enough, he turned to the wealthier Horace Walpole.Kaplan 90 In 1769, Chatterton sent "The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englade" to Walpole, along with specimens of pseudo-medieval poetry he attributed to Rowley and others.Meyerstein 254–55 Walpole professed himself "singularly obliged," calling the letter "valuable and full of information" and the poems "wonderful for their harmony and spirit," and offering to print them "if they have never been printed."Walpole's letter to Chatterton dated 28 March 1769 quoted in Meyerstein, 256–57 Later, however, after Chatterton confessed his age and situation, Walpole consulted his friends Thomas Gray and William Mason about the veracity of the writings, and Gray "at once pronounced them forgeries."Dix 87
Walpole's pride was injured at having been duped by Chatterton, and he scornfully cut off correspondence with the poet.Meyerstein 262 Many later commentators have reproached Walpole for this, especially in light of Walpole's having passed off his own Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto as a translation from a medieval Italian manuscript. Walpole's comment that Chatterton's "ingenuity in counterfeiting styles, and, I believe, hands, might easily have led him to those more facile imitations of prose, promissory notes" led Samuel Taylor Coleridge to remark: "Oh! ye who honor the name of man, rejoice that Walpole is called a lord." Dix 90 Some writers have speculated that, had Walpole reacted differently, "a slight effort, at this time, ... might have saved from destruction Thomas Chatterton."Dix 91
Political writings Badly hurt by Walpole's snub, Chatterton wrote very little for a summer. Then, after the end of the summer, he turned his attention to periodical literature and politics, and exchanged Farley's Bristol Journal for the Town and Country Magazine and other London periodicals. Imitating the style of the pseudonymous letter writer Junius, then in the full blaze of his triumph, he turned his pen against the Duke of Grafton, the Earl of Bute and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (the then Princess of Wales).
Leaving Bristol He had just dispatched one of his political diatribes to the Middlesex Journal when he sat down on Easter Eve, 17 April 1770, and penned his "Last Will and Testament," a satirical compound of jest and earnest, in which he intimated his intention of ending his life the following evening. 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."Chatterton's Last Will and Testament quoted in Meyerstein 342 In more genuine earnestness, he recalls the name of Michael Clayfield, a friend to whom he owed intelligent sympathy. The will was possibly prepared in order to frighten his master into letting him go. If so, it had the desired effect. John Lambert, the attorney to whom he was apprenticed, cancelled his indentures; his friends and acquaintances having donated money, Chatterton went to London.
Chatterton submitted Oddities of Lord U_____ b___e. to the Town & Country Magazine from Uxbridge, 20 January 1770Town and Country Magazine January 1770. signed A Hunter of Oddities.
London
Chatterton already was known to the readers of the Middlesex Journal as a rival of Junius under the nom de plume of Decimus. He also had been a contributor to Hamilton's Town and Country Magazine, and speedily found access to the Freeholder's Magazine, another political miscellany supportive of John Wilkes and liberty. His contributions were accepted, but the editors paid little or nothing for them.
He wrote hopefully to his mother and sister, and spent his first earnings in buying gifts for them. Wilkes had noted his trenchant style "and expressed a desire to know the author";Chatterton's letter to his mother dated 6 May 1770 quoted in Meyerstein 360 and Lord Mayor William Beckford graciously acknowledged a political address of his, and greeted him "as politely as a citizen could."Chatterton's letter to his sister dated 30 May 1770 quoted in Meyerstein 372
Chatterton was abstemious and extraordinarily diligent. He could assume the style of Junius or Tobias Smollett, reproduce the satiric bitterness of Charles Churchill, parody James Macpherson's Ossian, or write in the manner of Alexander Pope or with the polished grace of Thomas Gray and William Collins.
He wrote political letters, eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, both in prose and verse. In June 1770, after nine weeks in London, he moved from Shoreditch, where he had lodged with a relative, to an attic in Brook Street, Holborn (now beneath Alfred Waterhouse's Holborn Bars building). He was still short of money; and now, state prosecutions of the press rendered letters in the Junius vein no longer admissible. This threw him back on the lighter resources of his pen. In Shoreditch, he had 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 throughout the night. The romance of his earlier years re-emerged, and he transcribed from an imaginary parchment of the old priest Rowley his "Excelente Balade of Charitie." This poem, disguised in archaic language, he sent to the editor of the Town and Country Magazine, where it was rejected.Kaplan 173