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The Case Reopened

‘For had I never known the antique lore I ne’er had ventur’d from my peaceful shore, To be the wreck of promises and hopes, A Boy of Learning, and a Bard of Tropes …’

CHATTERTON

‘Oh thou, or what remaines of thee, Ælla, the darlynge of futurity, Lett this mie songe bolde as thy courage be, As everlastynge to posteritie.’

ROWLEY

1 ‘The brazen slippers alone remain’

IN THE HIGH SUMMER of 1770, while most of genteel and literary London was refreshing itself at continental spas, picnicking on country house lawns or promenading at the seaside resorts, in an angular third-floor attic above a Holborn side-street, in a locked room littered with minutely shredded pieces of manuscript, Thomas Chatterton died in acute pain from arsenic poisoning. He did not appear to have eaten for several days, but there were traces of opium in his mouth and between his teeth. He was not yet eighteen.

In his short lifetime Chatterton had written some six hundred pages of verse, one finished and one unfinished tragedy, a burletta, and so much freelance satirical journalism that it was still being published by London editors a year after his death. His name became the centre of the most fashionable literary controversy of the decade, in which many eminent scholars, writers and littérateurs fought tempestuously to establish that Chatterton was either a prodigy of poetical genius or a cheap, adolescent forger with the habits of a delinquent. When the immediate heat of this discussion had died down, it emerged that Chatterton’s achievement had been compared by many critics as second only to Shakespeare’s. Coleridge drafted a long Monody to him at the age of sixteen, and spent another thirty years of his life adding to it and making corrections. The Victorians went on to dedicate wildly partisan poetry and criticism on both sides of his reputation. David Masson published a warm melodramatic novel based on his life in 1874, and Rossetti became deeply obsessed with the figure of Chatterton in the closing years of his old age. The young Meredith posed as the model of Chatterton in puce silk pantaloons for the famous painting by Henry Wallis and while the work was being executed in Chatterton’s original attic room (later destroyed by fire) Meredith took the opportunity to open an affair with the painter’s wife. In France Alfred de Vigny produced a High Romantic play; and this in turn became a bad Italian opera by Leoncavallo. Chatterton’s works were translated into French and German, while new English editions followed each other steadily: in 1803, 1810, 1842, 1871, 1885, 1906 and 1911.

Then suddenly after the First World War the flow stopped. There have been no new editions; and with the exception of one faithful scholar, E. H. Meyerstein, there has been, until very recently indeed, almost no further critical interest. Even the Penguin Book of English Verse does not now acknowledge the existence of Chatterton, Thomas, in its index. Perhaps only a few lines of his remain current, with their curious haunting bitterness and their unstable dying rhythms:

Come, with acorne-cuppe and thorne

Drain my hertes blood away;

Lyfe and all its good I scorn

Daunce by night, or feast by day.

My love is dead

Gone to his death-bed

All under the wyllow-tree

In all this, in the mixture of strange, contradictory, challenging and sometimes oddly depressing circumstances, Chatterton is the great example of the prodigy-figure in English poetry. Prodigy has as its root meaning something out of the run of natural affairs and occurrences, something directly counter to natural processes themselves – a wonder, an exhilaration of the spirit. There is something particularly valuable about such a figure. He is like a precedent. He is like a guarantee for the wildest human hopes, and at the same time a talisman against failure or limitation or the pressures of mediocrity. He is an outpost of the imagination. With Chatterton, it has always tended to be the completed gesture of life which produced the writing, and not the writing alone, that has exercised the deepest fascination and influence on others. Only one generation after Chatterton’s death, this was already clear to William Hazlitt who gave his opinion in a long aside during his public lectures at the Surrey Institute on ‘The English Poets’ (1818).

‘As to those who are really capable of admiring Chatterton’s genius,’ said Hazlitt, who knew very well that Keats was in his audience, ‘I would only say that I never heard anyone speak of any of his works as if it were an old well-known favourite, and had become a faith and a religion in his mind. It is his name, his youth, and what he might have lived to have done, that excite our wonder and admiration. He has the same sort of posthumous fame that an actor of the last age has – an abstracted reputation which is independent of anything we know of his works’ (Lecture VII). The comparison with the actor is good, although with fifty years of film behind us now it loses some of its force. It is also rather an intriguing comparison. Hazlitt had no illusions about the true nature of Chatterton’s ‘forgeries’, but he still appears to have thought, unconsciously at least, in terms of the young prodigy playing out someone else’s part. In a literary and in a psychological sense this has a deep relevance to the life that Chatterton lived, and perhaps also to the death that he is reputed to have died.

Keats, incidentally, was disappointed with Hazlitt’s views, although it was almost certainly a previous lecture which kindled some real resentment against Hazlitt’s treatment of the poet to whom Keats had dedicated Endymion. The passage was probably this one, the closing peroration from Lecture VI; it is an important attitude and seems to express an element of jealousy, that essential but honest jealousy of the critic for the poet:

I cannot find in Chatterton’s works anything so extraordinary as the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a man of twenty. He did not show extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better, had he lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves; for their mind to them also ‘a kingdom is’. With an unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and with the youthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders, and was willing to set a seal on his reputation by a tragic catastrophe. He had done his best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into Aetna, to ensure immortality. The brazen slippers alone remain!

It is curious how the flourish, the joy with which Hazlitt the great Romantic critic flings off that last magnificent image to his Surrey Institute audience, effectively undermines his own case. He is responding, in spite of himself, in spite of his rational and deliberated critical strictures, to the quality of magnificence, of exhilaration, achieved by Chatterton’s life and work as a complete entity.

But by Lecture VII Hazlitt had altered his position, or at least his tone. ‘I am sorry that what I said in conclusion of the last Lecture respecting Chatterton, should have given dissatisfaction to some persons, with whom I would willingly agree on all such matters. What I meant was less to call in question Chatterton’s genius, than to object to the common mode of estimating its magnitude by prematureness.’ He then delicately delivers one of those republican bombshells that delighted Keats. ‘Had Chatterton really done more, we should have thought less of him … who knows but he might have lived to be poet-laureate?’ Yet overall his attitude remains the same, and his judgement on the prodigy-figure has a lasting and representative force, many times repeated, and especially sympathetic to the more sceptical and technical quality of appreciation almost universal today.

There is an anecdote retold in the diaries of the poet W. S. Blunt which may help to suggest the pitch, the emotional frequency, which the phenomenon of the youthful prodigy, in this case of Chatterton, is capable of reaching in the minds and imaginations of other men, and especially writers, irrespective of the lapse of time or the fluctuations of critical assessment. It concerns the Victorian lyric poet Francis Thompson. Blunt had the story in 1907 from Wilfred Meynell, who had become a close friend and mentor of Thompson’s before his death in the November of that year. ‘He – Thompson – used, before I knew him, to sleep at night under the Arches of Covent Garden where every quarter of an hour he was liable to be kicked awake by the police and told to move on. It was in an empty space of ground behind the Market where the gardeners threw their rubbish, that, just before, he had resolved on suicide. He then spent all his remaining pence on laudanum, one large dose, and he went there one night to take it. He had swallowed half when he felt an arm laid on his wrist, and looking up he saw Chatterton standing over him and forbidding him to drink the other half. I asked him when he had told me of it how he had known that it was Chatterton. He said “I recognised him from the pictures of him – besides, I knew that it was he before I saw him” – and I remembered at once the story of the money which arrived for Chatterton the day after his suicide’ (My Diaries, Vol. 2, p. 191).

An illusion. A drug-induced hallucination. After all, no authentic picture of Chatterton was ever made. Yes, but it is an interesting and powerful kind of illusion, that prevents a man from taking his own life; and incidentally correctly forecasts the arrival of help – Meynell’s letter to Thompson reached him the next day. Chatterton is one of those very few artistic figures – there are many more in religion and politics – who seem at times to have taken command of certain areas of the psychic landscape. Their image has been conjured up, and their presence has produced a palpable effect. It can only be described delicately, tentatively. One is not talking about ghosts, although Chatterton with his marvellous instinct for the Gothic would undoubtedly have provided a classic specimen. Shelley, in his long poem Adonais on the death of Keats, wrote this:

When lofty thought

Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair

And love and life contend in it, for what

Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there

And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

It is informative to read this without preconceptions about High Romantic eulogizing, but as a straight description in slightly old-fashioned language of an unusual condition of mind. The dead live there and move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. (Shelley’s quality of verbal helium, the absolute clarity with which it renders and uplifts mental processes, has long required calm reassessment.)

The point is important for two reasons. First, because it suggests how the subject of Chatterton has always appealed to responses and judgements far deeper than mere literary taste. We encounter this again and again. To put it more sharply, it appeals to the recurrent need to idealize the image of others, and to interpret historical events and artistic achievements as the expression of something, by definition inexplicable, called ‘genius’. It appeals to our need to reassure ourselves with the past, and to see our own desires, and perhaps even our own faces, somehow magically canonized in the pale indistinct features of the wonderfully – but safely – dead. One has to be aware of that from the outset.

Second, it is – like Hazlitt’s actor comparison – suggestive of something that happened most powerfully and dramatically in Chatterton’s own mind.

2 ‘To the Garret quick he flies’

Chatterton was born in Bristol in November 1752 and he never seems to have got over it. He was never reconciled to his circumstances: always he was looking for some alternative place, or alternative age. Latterly, as for Rimbaud in Charleville, the capital city began to exercise an hypnotic attraction and he staked everything on getting there and taking it by storm.

But bred in Bristol’s mercenary cell

Condemned with want and penury to dwell,

What generous passion can refine my line?

Chatterton’s home was the small schoolhouse in Pyle Street, directly opposite the marvellous looming Gothic buttresses and tracery of St Mary Redcliff church. St Mary Redcliff dominated Pyle Street with its massive shadowy presence; morning and evening St Mary Redcliff bells would fill the rooms of the house. Chatterton’s father had been the schoolmaster of the Pyle Street free-school and also sexton of St Mary Redcliff. The schoolhouse and the church were both his territory, and they both became Chatterton’s. The father was by all accounts a curious man. He was a singer, and had sung officially in the Bristol Cathedral choir; but he also sang unofficially to himself on the long walks that he was noted for taking, and talked to himself as well. He was a collector and something of an antiquarian. He collected old coins and books and manuscripts, and when he became sexton of St Mary Redcliff he found a rich source of material in the hitherto neglected Muniment Room, with its many boxes and chests of papers, whose long slit window looked out over the top of the North Porch. Many of these ancient papers were transferred from the Muniment Room to the schoolhouse, and in the course of time to the attic room which was Chatterton’s. These papers were the only direct link that Chatterton had with his father, who died in the summer before he was born. Chatterton also had an elder sister, who had been born out of wedlock.

For a prodigy he was a solitary child and a slow one. At seven he was still unable to read. He dawdled about the schoolhouse, and about the aisles and tombs of St Mary Redcliff.

Thys is the manne of menne, the vision spoke,

Then belle for Evensonge my senses woke.

But there was already another side to his character. His sister, later Mrs Newton, recalled eight years after his death: ‘My brother very early discovered a thirst for pre-eminence. I remember, before he was five years old, he would always preside over his playmates as their master, and they his hired servants.’ The Victorian biographers tell the most winsome of the childhood anecdotes to illustrate that same ‘thirst for pre-eminence’. At the age of five he was apparently offered a Delft cup as a present to be decorated with ‘a lyon rampant’. But instead Chatterton asked that the picture should represent an angel with a trumpet. When asked why, he replied airily – ‘to blow his name about’. The story is nice, but may be apocryphal; the temperament it illustrates is certainly authentic. In a fatherless household, one is not surprised. A Bristol friend remembered him at a later stage, as a schoolboy and legal apprentice: ‘That vanity, and an inordinate thirst after praise, eminently distinguished Chatterton, all who knew him will readily admit. From a long and intimate acquaintance with him, I venture to assert, that from the date of his first poetical attempt, until the final period of his departure from Bristol, he never wrote any piece, however trifling in its nature, and even unworthy of himself, but he first committed it to every acquaintance he met, indiscriminately, as wishing to derive applause from productions which I am assured, were he now living, he would be heartily ashamed of …’ (Letter from Mr Thistlethwaite to Dr Milles). There is a good deal of personal sourness and pique in this statement, and as to Chatterton communicating all his poems it is simply incorrect. But as a description of Chatterton’s impression on friends and everyday acquaintances, the touchiness, the arrogance, the self-importance, the ‘eagerness of applause even to an extreme’, it has the ring of truth.

Perhaps the most convincing and also the most amusing evidence comes from a distant relative of Chatterton’s, a certain Mrs Ballance, who was lodged in the same house as Chatterton when he first came to London. As a relation, she obviously tried to be neighbourly. She recalled with exasperation, ‘he was as proud as Lucifer. He very soon quarrelled with her for calling him “Cousin Tommy”, and asked her if she had ever heard of a poet’s being called Tommy. But she assured him she knew nothing of poets and only wished he would not set up for a Gentleman.’ Mrs Ballance added a pathetic and very human note: ‘He frequently said he should settle the nation before he had done; but how could she think her poor cousin Tommy was so great a man as she now finds he was? His mother should have written word of his greatness, and then, to be sure, she would have humoured the gentleman accordingly.’

But if Chatterton’s character was manifest from the start, his capabilities were not. The first important moment seems to have been when he began to read. The way any primary skill is first exercised – swimming, riding, reading – often has a decisive effect on its subsequent development. Chatterton began to read only very gradually, and then in a curious and highly significant fashion. Mrs Newton, his sister, again recalled: ‘He was dull in 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 my father’s, my mother was then tearing up for waste paper: the capitals at the beginning of the verses, I assisted in teaching him.’ The importance of this earliest reading material has never been fully realized.

From the very start, literature and the medieval legacy of the St Mary Redcliff papers were identified in Chatterton’s mind. And not only at an intellectual level. For Chatterton’s contact with this special past, so inextricably involved with both his dead father and the earlier inhabitants, writers and artists of St Mary Redcliff, had from the beginning a solid material presence of vellum and parchment scraps which filled the little schoolhouse with their dust and oily odour and resilient crackling touch. They were a vivid familiar presence, totally uninvested with the sacred and scholarly aura which museums, glass cases, and academic pincenez normally impart to such things. The Chatterton family were at times almost literally ankle-deep in the medieval past. We know that the mother quite casually used them for knitting patterns, or for ‘waste paper’ torn up presumably for fires or cleaning; and that many of the schoolhouse books were actually covered by these papers in the form of makeshift dust jackets. It was the large illuminated capitals on some of these sheets which first caught the young Chatterton’s eye. Gothic and medieval scripts were his earliest acquaintance. He read the tomb inscriptions and brasses as another child reads specially edited fairy tales. His first solid piece of reading was the bristling Germanic-Gothic pages of the family’s Black Letter Bible. In short, Chatterton came to literary consciousness in another world. It was Bristol, but it was late-medieval Bristol. It was the Bristol of the men like William Canynges who helped to rebuild and restore St Mary Redcliff, and of the late-medieval scholar-poets whom great men such as Canynges befriended and patronized, acting almost as a father might have done. It was above all (as it turned out), the Bristol of a brilliant poet-monk whose first name was oddly enough the same as Chatterton’s; an admirer of Chaucer, an admirer of St Mary Redcliff, an intimate friend of the fatherly William Canynges, the brilliant star of the whole company of talented poets. This poet-monk’s name was Thomas Rowley. But Thomas Rowley never existed. Only in Thomas Chatterton’s head. From a single inscription on a tomb, Chatterton was to create this man’s life, his letters, his poems, his ballades, his Tragedies, his most intimate concerns with the problems of living and literature. Thomas Rowley was everything that Thomas Chatterton desired to be. And in the most real and most disturbing sense, Thomas Rowley was Thomas Chatterton.

At the age of seventeen, just before he left Bristol for London, Chatterton was to write one of his most outlandish and ambivalent documents, a Will. In it, he addressed his stupid and ungenerous patrons of reality, and to one of them wrote this:

Thy friendship never could be dear to me;

Since all I am is opposite to thee.

If ever obligated to thy purse

Rowley discharges all; my first chief curse!

For had I never known the antique lore

I ne’er had ventur’d from my peaceful shore,

To be the wreck of promises and hopes,

A Boy of Learning, and a Bard of Tropes;

But happy in my humble sphere had mov’d

Untroubled, unsuspected, unbelov’d.

Of course, it asserts nothing except Rowley’s primary importance and responsibility. The whole piece is shot through with a bitter ironic flare characteristic of Chatterton. Those last three epithets are much more curious than they seem at first sight; and the idea that Chatterton would ever conceivably have been ‘happy in his humble sphere’ is laughable. Chatterton must have laughed as he wrote it. But if so, the laughter must have sounded harsh.

The creation of Rowley is one of the most extraordinary events in English literature. It is not easily accounted for. A body of scholars stood out against it for some thirty years after Chatterton’s death. Chatterton’s own acquaintances – who invariably and incorrectly thought that they were his intimates, a notable point – were adamant almost to a man. One Mr T. Cary writing in 1776: ‘Not having any taste for ancient poetry, I do not recollect his ever having shewn them to me; but that he often mentioned them, at an age, when (great as his capacity was) I am convinced he was incapable of writing them himself, I am very clear in, and confess it to be astonishing, how any person, knowing these circumstances, can entertain even a shadow of a doubt of their being the works of Rowley.’ (Interestingly, Cary then adds a sentence which reveals in a flash his deep but unconscious sense of the ambiguity of identity in Chatterton: ‘Of this I am very certain, that if they are not Rowley’s, they are not Chatterton’s.’) Even in this present age, when every sixth-former is drilled with Ezra Pound’s idea of the poetic persona and T. S. Eliot’s concept of impersonality and the ‘objective correlative’, the Rowley–Chatterton relationship remains as extraordinary and mysterious as ever. Though W. P. Ker in The Cambridge History of English Literature has a perceptive observation: ‘Nothing in Chatterton’s life is more wonderful than his impersonality; he does not make poetry out of his pains or sorrows, and when he is composing verse, he seems to have escaped from himself.’ That last phrase can be taken more literally than Ker meant.

The crucial fact about the creation of Rowley is that Rowley grew as Chatterton grew. In 1760, when Chatterton was eight, he was sent to board at Colston Hall, a local charity school, and he remained there until he was fifteen. Colston served bad food and bad education. Its curriculum ran to the Three Rs only, with nothing remotely scientific or classical. It is said that owing to the combination of too much free time and too little free space, the pupils usually slept for ten or twelve hours a day, and this generally with two or three of them to a single bed. It makes one speculate on what strange world of half-waking companionship this unusual situation fostered. The single most suggestive fact, however, concerns a tiny detail of the Colston Hall uniform which went unnoticed for almost a century. The Colston Hall charity boys were required to wear a blue gowned overall belted at the waist, and to have their hair cut short and tonsured, like so many little novices in a monastery. The adolescent Chatterton must indeed have felt a curiously vivid and physical identity with his poet-monk Thomas Rowley: a presence as yet unnamed, but nevertheless swiftly growing now from its childhood origins in the Muniment Room with its high slit windows above the North Porch of St Mary Redcliff.

One of Chatterton’s earlier recorded poems has a striking bearing on the psychology of this long moment of wonderful but also sinister gestation. It was written in 1763 when he was eleven. It is not a so-called Rowley poem, but his first excursion into the snappy, efficient, satirical style currently fashionable: all couplets and nudges. From the start, Chatterton could turn this out effortlessly. The poem is called ‘Sly Dick’. It purports to tell of someone who receives a visitation from the Devil during the night, which informs him how he may make his fortune – dishonestly of course. How conscious Chatterton was of the underlying drama of this little piece of doggerel – particularly in its terms of night-visitation, temptation, hidden location of fortune, and secretive manner of exploitation – the reader may judge for himself.

Sharp was the frost, the wind was high

And sparkling Stars bedeckt the Sky,

Sly Dick in arts of cunning skill’d,

Whose Rapine all his pockets fill’d,

Had laid him down to take his rest

And soothe with sleep his anxious breast.

‘Twas thus a dark infernal sprite

A native of the blackest Night,

Portending mischief to devise

Upon Sly Dick he cast his eyes;

Then strait descends the infernal sprite,

And in his chamber does alight:

In vision he before him stands,

And his attention he commands.

Thus spake the sprite – Hearken my friend,

And to my counsels now attend.

Within the Garret’s spacious dome

There lies a well stor’d wealthy room.

Well stor’d with cloth and stockings too,

Which I suppose will do for you …

When in the morn with thoughts erect

Sly Dick did on his dream reflect,

Why faith, thinks he, ‘tis something too,

It might – perhaps – it might – be true

I’ll go and see – away he hies,

And to the Garret quick he flies,

Enters the room, cuts up the clothes

And after that reeves up the hose:

Then of the cloth he purses made,

Purses to hold his filching trade.

The true identity of the ‘Garret’s spacious dome’, and the store of cloth which he ‘cuts up’ to make his fortune, flash up at one instantly. They are of course the Muniment Room and the ancient papers within it. Without leaning on this little piece too much, it seems likely that the eleven-year-old Chatterton at some level or other was powerfully aware of the peculiar forces now gathering in and around him ready for his disposal. They had not yet taken the shape of Rowley. But already he was deeply divided as to whether it would be for the best or for the worst. His second early poem, ‘Apostate Will’, about a Methodist preacher who turns High Anglican when a convenient place is offered, contains a similar sense of a ‘filching trade’, and also that characteristic feeling of ambivalent identity which is so marked in Chatterton and the nature of his creative gift. (Both poems also have strong elements of childish plagiarism, relating to fables by John Gay.)

Strictly speaking, this is to anticipate. The first piece of ‘medieval’ writing was not actually made public by Chatterton until he was fifteen and had left school; and then, in answer to inquiries, he was to say – defending his ‘originals’ from first to last – that he had only recently discovered such great treasures in his mother’s house. But it seems unquestionable that Rowley and the world of Rowley’s fifteenth-century Bristol had been maturing long and steadily in Chatterton’s mind and imagination. Colston Hall, built on the site of the medieval Priory of St Augustine’s Back, was always remembered favourably by him in this connection. In his ‘Will’ he adopts the satiric medieval practice, used notably by François Villon, of bequeathing his better qualities (such as Modesty) to the various public figures who are most in need of them. His ‘disinterestedness’ is bequeathed as follows, in a wry passage which connects Rowley and Colston Hall: ‘Item … To Bristol all my spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on her quay since the days of Canning and Rowley! ‘Tis true a charitable Gentleman, one Mr Colston, smuggled a considerable quantity of it, but it being proved that he was Papist, the Worshipful Society of Aldermen endeavoured to throttle him with the Oath of Allegiance.’ Chatterton rarely had anything good to say for a modern institution of Bristol, and when he does, it is remarkable.

Colston served him in two ways. First by providing an embryo group of friends, or at least acquaintances, in whom he could begin to satisfy his need for notice and applause. And second, in failing to weigh his mind down with any academic material of the depressing kind which such establishments are formally designed to provide, but rather allowing him freedom to pursue his own private and increasingly idiosyncratic reading and research. His sister, Mrs Newton: ‘About his tenth year he began (with the trifle my mother allowed him for pocket-money) to hire books from the circulating library … Between his eleventh and twelfth year, he wrote a catalogue of the books he had read, to the number of seventy: History and Divinity were the chief subjects. At twelve he was confirmed by the Bishop … Soon after this, in the week he was door-keeper (at Colston), he made some verses on the last day, I think about eighteen lines; paraphrased the ninth chapter of Job; and not long after, some chapters in Isaiah. He had been gloomy from the time he began to learn, but we remarked he was more cheerful after he began to write poetry. Some satirical pieces we saw soon after.’ Now he was started.

Chatterton left Colston some time in the winter of 1766, or the spring of 1767; at any rate when he had turned fourteen. Before that time had come, a number of events occurred whose significance was great but indirect. He formed a close friendship with a boy somewhat older than himself, Thomas Phillips. The relationship was to be tragically short, but Phillips was one of those invaluable personalities, a catalyst. A school-friend gave this typically portentous picture: ‘The poetical attempts of Phillips had excited a kind of literary emulation amongst the elder classes of the scholars; the love of fame animated their bosoms, and a variety of competitors appeared to dispute the laurel with him.’ This helped; it was the first materialization of Chatterton’s company of poets. Related to it, the death of the brilliant contemporary satirist, Charles Churchill, who had gone to visit Wilkes (exiled in Boulogne on account of the notorious No. 45 of the North Briton), served to give the young writers both a literary and political martyr. Churchill died in 1764. In the following year there was a notable publishing event, the appearance in three duodecimo volumes of Percy’s celebrated Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. These certainly came into Chatterton’s hands, one of the primary texts of the Romantic revival. So the hidden medieval world was nourished as well.

When Chatterton left Colston, he was extremely lucky to be apprenticed to a Bristol attorney, John Lambert Esq. He took up the job in July 1767. It was a remarkable success for an ex-Colston boy; but in practice it involved mere clerical copying and drudgery, and Chatterton did not find himself occupied fully for more than two or three hours a day. He continued to haunt the circulating libraries; he took to walking certain young ladies on the green; and most important of all, he began to take old St Mary Redcliff papers and parchments with him to work. Friends referred to vague ‘copying’ and ‘transcribing’ processes. He covered many parchment scraps with his own version of medieval script. He became fascinated by architecture and heraldry and the business of family trees. These subjects also fascinated Thomas Rowley. For Rowley now existed.

After such a long gestation, things moved quickly. The main external events were as follows. In July 1768, the old bridge across the river Avon was replaced by a new one, and Chatterton, making his first of many bids for fame, sent a fictitious account of the opening of the original bridge, purporting to have been drawn from a medieval manuscript, to Felix Farley’s Journal. The Journal was the local Bristol magazine and gossip column, and the publication of his contribution soon brought two Bristol littérateurs, George Catcott and William Barrett, snuffling on to the young man’s trail. Catcott and Barrett are two wholly comic figures, part fools and part villains, who stumble through this period of Chatterton’s career as if Laurel and Hardy had tried to organize the Fourth Act of Hamlet. For the next eighteen months they pose as Chatterton’s patrons, lending him books and showing him off to their friends at numerous little soirées, while encouraging him to bring forth a stream of letters, ballads, elegies and dramatic poetry, all also purporting to be medieval: notably the work of the fifteenth-century writers who surrounded William Canynges in Bristol, and above all of the poet-monk and intimate of Canynges – Thomas Rowley. (Barrett was writing a History of Bristol, and for him Chatterton conveniently produced descriptions of medieval painting and architecture, grotesque family trees, and gorgeous examples of local heraldic devices – all spurious.)

One of the finest of the early Rowley productions was this fragment which praised St Mary Redcliff and its great restorer William Canynges. It is of particular interest in that it performs a strange transmutation of the ‘Sly Dick’ poem; it is a vision and a supernatural command, but this time the opposite of Satanic. Moreover, in using the same short four-stress line and rhyming couplets, it yet manages to produce a simplicity quite literally worlds away from ‘Sly Dick’s’ satiric jingle. ‘Onn Oure Ladies Chyrche’ by Thomas Rowley–

As on a hille one eve sittinge,

At oure Ladies Chyrche muche wonderinge,

The cunninge handieworke so fine

Han well nighe dazzeled mine eyne.

Quod I: some cunninge fairy hande

Yreer’d this chapelle in this lande;

Full well I wot, so fine a sighte

Was n’ere yreer’d of mortal wighte.

Quod Truth: thou lackest knowledgynge;

Thou forsooth ne wotteth of the thinge.

A Rev’rend Fadre, William Canynge hight [called]

Yreered up this chapelle bright;

And eke another in the Towne

Where glassie bubblinge Trymme doth roun.

Quod I: ne doubt for all he’s given

His soule will certes goe to heaven.

Yea, quod Truth, then go thou home

And see thou do as he hath done.

Quod I: I doubte, that can ne be,

I have ne gotten markes three.

Quod Truth: as thou hast got, give almes-deeds so:

Canynges and Gaunts could do ne moe.

This and many other small pieces, together with the brilliant narrative ballad ‘The Death of Sir Charles Bawdin’, the two poetic tragedies ‘Godwyn’ and especially ‘Æella’ (of which the famous and beautiful Minstrel’s Song is a mere chorus), and numerous Epistles, Prologues and Songs, were all accepted blandly and beamingly by Catcott and Barrett who never dreamed of looking a gift-horse let alone a prodigy in the mouth; they calmly accepted everything as genuine curios and antiquities pouring forth in a gratuitous flood at their feet, as if young Chatterton were the keeper of some magic casket of inexhaustible delights. It never seemed to cross their minds that beauty is the most terrible and merciless of masters. Mrs Newton: ‘He was introduced to Mr Barrett and Mr Catcott; his ambitions increased daily. His spirits were rather uneven, sometimes so gloom’d, that for many days together he would say but very little, and that by constraint. When in spirits, he would enjoy his rising fame; confident of advancements, he would promise my mother and me should be partakers of his success … About this time he wrote several satirical poems, one in the papers, on Mr Catcott’s putting the pewter plates in St Nicholas towers. He began to be universally known among the young men. He had many cap acquaintances, but I am confident few intimates.’ ‘Many cap acquaintances’ is apt. The role of the satirical poetry was now becoming obvious; it kept him on balance in a situation fluctuating violently between tragedy and farce which only an English provincial city with its mixture of greed, pomposity and eloquent mediocrity could ever have provided.

When occasionally Chatterton was asked to exhibit his ‘originals’, he either prevaricated successfully or else forged with excruciating crudeness (forty-two scraps still survive in the British Museum) practically illegible parchments which he then aged with ochre, candle-flame, glue, varnish, or plain floor-dirt. Catcott and Barrett, the redoubtable double, stored them away without a murmur. At the same time they judiciously criticized his public forays into the local exchange of satirical verses. And had their noses, or rather their ears, nearly bitten off for it–

No more, dear Smith, the hackney’d Tale renew:

I own their censure, I approve it too.

For how can Idiots, destitute of thought,

Conceive, or estimate, but as they’re taught?

Say, can the satirising Pen of Shears,

Exalt his name, or mutilate his ears?

None, but a Lawrence, can adorn his Lays,

Who in a quart of Claret drinks his praise.

This poisonous piece, which continues for some hundred lines and is one among many, is gently accompanied by the following: ‘Mr Catcott will be pleased to observe that I admire many things in his learned Remarks. This poem is an innocent effort of poetical vengeance, as Mr Catcott has done me the honour to criticise my Trifles.’

At the same time, Chatterton was also writing this, for his own private satisfaction:

Since we can die but once, what matters it,

If rope or garter, poison, pistol, sword,

Slow-wasting sickness or the sudden burst

Of valve arterial in the noble parts

Curtail the miseries of human life?

Tho’ varied is the Cause, the Effect’s the same:

All to one common Dissolution tends.

And yet, all the while, the tonsured figure of Thomas Rowley was walking through the streets of Bristol or brooding by the apprentice’s chair in the office of John Lambert. Through Rowley’s eyes the scorn and enmity of authority, and the imminent threat of death, were transmuted. They assumed a bold narrative line which gloried in the simplicity of the issues at stake, and, as in ‘The Death of Sir Charles Bawdin’, marched forward in that hypnotic pageantry of primal emotions which the medieval ballad traditionally invokes:

King Edward’s soule rush’d to his face,

He turned his hedde away,

And to his broder Gloucester

He thus did speke and say:

‘To him that so-much-dreaded Death

Ne ghastlie terrors bringe,

Behold the manne! He spake the truth

He’s greater thanne a Kinge!’

‘So let him die!’ Duke Richard sayde;

‘And may echone our foes

Bend down they’re neckes to bloudie axe

And feede the carrion crowes.’

And now the horses gentlie drewe

Sir Charles up the highe hille;

The axe did glyster in the sunne,

His precious bloode to spille.

It was Coleridge, the great admirer of Chatterton, who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner some twenty years later.

Chatterton tried other outlets. He sent a copy of an ‘original’ piece of a medieval painting catalogue to Horace Walpole in London. After an exchange of correspondence, Walpole somewhat callously rebuffed the young poet on the grounds that his material seemed suspect. Walpole, who had recently achieved a succès de scandale with his faked Castle of Otranto, should have known better. He suffered for it later. Chatterton had more success with the London publisher Dodsley of Pall Mall; and in May of 1769 he even managed to place one of his ‘medieval’ Eclogues in the newly founded Town and Country magazine. It made him increasingly restless. He chafed at Lambert’s office. He flung out extended satires with titles like ‘The Whore of Babylon’ and shocked many Bristol worthies by his bitter and scurrilous attacks. He took to producing execrable love-poetry, elephantine in its sub-Miltonic ornament, for his friends – his cap acquaintances – to give to their current amours. One can imagine how choicely it amused him. Possibly he had an affair himself. There was a certain Miss Ramsey. But time seemed to be running out. In the late summer of 1769, two of his intimates died. The first was Thomas Phillips, the extent of whose contribution and support we shall never know. Chatterton wrote a long elegy to him, but the pain was too close, and for the most part it is numb. There is one place, however, where a moment of intense atmospheric and visual sharpness breaks through, presaging Chatterton’s final achievement in the amazing ‘African Eclogues’ he was to write in the last weeks in London. The passage describes the shuffling figure of Winter who carries the frozen landscape about his shoulders like a cloak; perhaps also it describes a final vision of Phillips; or even of that other, inward Thomas, Thomas Rowley who was so blasted by the chill reception of a modern and indifferent Bristol:

Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,

His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew;

His eyes, a dusky light congeal’d and dead,

His robe, a tinge of bright etherial blue.

His train a motley’d sanguine sable cloud,

He limps along the russet dreary moor,

Whilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen and loud,

Roll the white surges to the sounding shore.

The other friend was Peter Smith. He committed suicide.

Chatterton sat out the winter of 1769–70. Now he was seventeen. In April he made his bid for London, propelled by a moment of crisis which seems to have been partly stage-managed and partly genuine. As ever, the ambivalent mixture. ‘Between 11 and 2 o’clock’ on the evening of Saturday April the 14th, ‘in the utmost distress of mind’ Chatterton dashed off his ‘Will’ containing both verse and prose, with the clear indication that he intended to commit suicide: ‘If after my death which will happen tomorrow night before eight o’clock, being the Feast of the Resurrection, the Coroner and Jury bring it in Lunacy, I will and direct that Paul Farr Esq and Mr John Flower, at their joint expense, cause my body to be interred in the Tomb of my Father’s …’ This document was discovered by John Lambert on his clerk’s desk, and Chatterton was hastily hunted out, appeased, and released from his articles with the attorney, thus freeing him from all obligations in Bristol. Neither Lambert nor anyone else appears to have picked up the element of angry satire and pure youthful outrage which so clearly motivated Chatterton’s writing: ‘This is the last Will and Testament of me Thomas Chatterton, of the city of Bristol; being sound in body, or it is the fault of my last Surgeon; the soundness of my mind, the Coroner and Jury are to be judges of, desiring them to take notice, that the most perfect Masters of Human Nature in Bristol distinguish me by the title of the Mad Genius; therefore, if I do a mad action, it is conformable to every action of my life, which savour’d of insanity.’ Chatterton unfurls the idea of insanity like a battle flag: he shakes it under the nose of his elders, slyly mocking their own provincial limitations, their own humdrum eighteenth-century commercial notions of ‘Human Nature’. One recognizes a quality of icily controlled desperation. ‘Insanity’ was also his flag of freedom. Released from Lambert’s drudgery, his copy of ‘Æella’ sold to the obliging Catcott for a few paltry guineas, leave taken of his many cap acquaintances and firm promises of success made to his mother and sister, Chatterton caught the Bristol stage and journeyed up to the capital in a snow-storm.

The last four months of Chatterton’s life, those spent in London between the end of April and the end of August 1770, are the most closely documented of all, with some dozen extant letters of his to Bristol, and the material accumulated by Herbert Croft and published in Love and Madness (1780), from interviews with Chatterton’s landladies and fellow lodgers. The many essays and quirky ‘character’ tales which he contributed at this time to London journals also throw a vivid though oblique light on his changing fortunes. His two extraordinary ‘African Eclogues’, with their unique sense of tropical sweltering claustrophobia and almost hallucinogenic visions of tribal violence, are dated in May and June. And the last and greatest Rowley poem, ‘The Excelente Balade of Charitie’, belongs with certainty to the very end. The picture forms a coherent dramatic whole, though with a number of poignant and tragic omissions. It is the eye of the myth inherited, and then misinterpreted, by the Romantics.

The remaining chronology is simple. Chatterton first stays near relations in Shoreditch (the helpful Mrs Ballance); later, in June, he moves to seedier lodgings in Brooke Street, Holborn. He sells a Burletta to the Marylebone Gardens for five guineas, but it is not performed. He catches a ‘cold’, then apparently gets better. He writes songs, more journalism, works all night but earns nothing. His landlady offers him meals. He writes to Barrett that he wants to become a ship’s surgeon. He has conversations with Mr Cross, the corner chemist. He appears hungry; people see him less frequently. On the 25th of August 1770 his door is broken open and, in the words of the Coroner, he is found ‘to have swallowed arsenic in water, on the 24th of August, and died in consequence thereof, the next day’. Barrett’s account is as follows: ‘He took a large dose of opium, some of which was picked out from between his teeth after death, and he was found the next morning, a most horrid spectacle, with limbs and features distorted as after convulsions, a frightful and ghastly corpse. Such was the horrible catastrophe of T. Chatterton, the producer of Rowley and his poems to the world.’ At the end he even confused the surgeons.

3 ‘The Muses have no Credit here’

Yet that was nothing as compared with the confusion of the London literati. The first of ‘Rowley’s Poems’ appeared in an anonymous pirated edition of 1772, price half-a-crown; and five years later in 1777 the first major and authoritative collection appeared with over 300 pages of poems and a scholarly Introduction by Mr Tyrwhitt: ‘Poems, Supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley’. Thereafter a steady flow of new editions, new Commentaries, new Appendices and Remarks and Observations set up something like a Chatterton Industry. (He even became voguish – ‘Chatterton handkerchiefs’ were sold in the street as ladies’ favours.) The confusion arose initially because the literary detection and polemics on the ‘Rowley or Chatterton’ issue rapidly became the prime aspect of the Chatterton affair. Very few writers attempted to make any estimate of the value of the poems themselves; almost no one considered the impact of Chatterton’s mixture of Gothic and simplistic styles and material on the hard, intricate, neo-classic sheen of contemporary verse; and no one at all realized the immense symbolic potential such a prodigy-poet, such a miracle of youth and ‘inspiration’ and inward, hidden creativity, would give to the later poets and theorists of the Romantic revolution. They were limited to their urbane and London-centred concepts of poetry, and they did not see what had happened. They did not see that already in Chatterton the eighteenth-century ‘cool’ intellect had been disestablished in favour of remote landscapes and distant provincial tones – the West Country, and shortly Cumberland, the Lowlands of Scotland, Northamptonshire (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns, Clare), and ultimately Italy and Greece (Keats, Shelley, Byron, Landor, Browning). This was later to be summed up in the feeling that went about among the poets that London, which had received and nourished Dryden, Pope and Johnson, had rejected and murdered Chatterton. London had turned her face away. The poets never really trusted London again until the 1890s, when gangling and fragile men like Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson began to woo her once more in an effete but insistent manner, telling her that she was as beautiful and mysterious as Paris after all, and drinking themselves stupid in her dingier bars.

The greatest critics of the time were deeply perplexed. Chatterton had broken the rules. He was too young. He was dishonest. He was a provincial. Worst of all, he was ‘uneducated’, lower class, a charity-school boy and an attorney’s clerk. The matter was impossible. In their judgements of his work, they found they were having to take into account both his circumstances and his youth, and this galled them because it was highly irregular and had nothing to do with the accepted neo-classical standards of aesthetic achievement. Indeed, their position is curiously close to the exclusive aesthetic orthodoxy of criticism today.

Thus Dr Johnson is recorded in 1776 by Anna Seward in one of his inimitable peremptory outbursts: ‘Pho, child! Don’t talk to me of the powers of a vulgar uneducated stripling. He may be another Stephen Duck. It may be extraordinary to do such things as he did, with means so slender; – but what did Stephen Duck do, what could Chatterton do, which, abstracted from the recollection of his situation, can be worth the attention of Learning and Taste? Neither of them had opportunities of enlarging their stock of ideas. No man can coin guineas, but in proportion as he has gold.’ The last remark somehow makes one wince: it had a tragic and literal application to Chatterton’s case, and the droptic Doctor – who had himself started out as a local schoolmaster – should have had more feeling than to use it. The ideals of ‘Learning and Taste’ take on a sharply elitist and self-complacent quality in this context; though they are powerful enough elsewhere. Most important, however, is the underlying argument: that something called ‘genius’ cannot be produced out of a hat – it requires a special milieu and a special training in which the ‘stock of ideas’ can be enlarged. These Chatterton did not, in the Doctor’s opinion, have; and hence, gold could not be coined from air. Johnson did in fact visit Chatterton’s birthplace, and it would be fascinating to know just how large a range of ‘ideas’ he imagined could be absorbed there, and just what his impressions of the milieu were.

At any rate, worthy of the attention of Learning and Taste it emphatically was not. Johnson’s opinion is still a representative one.

The opinion of Thomas Warton, poet laureate and equally weighty judgement, also implicitly condemned Chatterton for his lack of maturity and of ‘correct’ training and situation. Nevertheless, Warton’s attitude in the second edition of his monumental History of English Poetry (1776) is strikingly different to Johnson’s in that he at least appreciated how remarkably Chatterton had broken the rules and dazzled normal expectation: ‘Chatterton’, he surmised, ‘will appear to have been a singular instance of prematurity of abilities: to have acquired a store of general information far exceeding his years, and to have possessed that comprehension of mind, and activity of understanding, which predominated over his situation in life and his opportunities of instruction.’ In fact this is a judgement of an altogether different calibre, for in that slightly nebulous phrase – ‘the comprehension of mind, and activity of understanding’ – Warton is genuinely trying to reach for some (ultimately Romantic) concept of innate imaginative ability by which Chatterton could have reached out beyond his immediate limitations. All the same, Warton was no Lakelander but had the moral bottom of his age. He disapproved. In his final summary, he says this: ‘He was an adventurer, a professed hireling in the trade of literature, full of projects and inventions, artful, enterprising, unprincipled, indigent, and compelled to subsist by expedients.’ This was the same Chatterton that Keats was to call a ‘flow’ret’, blasted by cruel winds.

But fundamentally these opinions lack any awareness of the extraordinary dual relationship that Chatterton developed and acted out with his surroundings and native city, Bristol. For Bristol, in the present, was the focus for all his outrage and contempt; while Bristol, in the late-medieval past, was the projection of everything he loved and desired and imagined.

Historically, Chatterton’s Bristol of the 1760s was the second city in the kingdom, renowned – as say Birmingham is today – for its raw mercantile spirit, seething with new commercial enterprises; it was a city dominated by the power of local trading interests, and famed for its street riots, its civic pageants, its rowdy bought elections. There was a continuous cycle of demolition and new building, and the population was around 45,000 and increasing. The first recorded lock-out in England occurred in Bristol in 1762; and guild festivals, burnings in effigy of politicians and prize-fighting were all popular pastimes. Many of the streets were still unnavigably narrow, and goods traffic was often restricted to the same horse-drawn sleds which pulled Sir Charles Bawdin to his execution; now, however, they moved at high and unceremonious pace. Many shop doors and windows were hung with offensive advertisement sheets and boards; and one visitor complained that every single shop-boy seemed to be wearing silk stockings. Pope described it distastefully as ‘if Wapping and Southwark were ten times as big, or all their people ran into London’. The poet Richard Savage – who died there in misery and penury – apotheosed it as a city of

Upstarts and mushrooms, proud relentless hearts,

Thou blank of Sciences, thou dearth of Arts!

Living in such a city, it seems even more remarkable that Chatterton should have spent his time engrossed in old documents, or mooning round the shadowy vaulted nave of St Mary Redcliff reading the brasses, or gazing vacantly at the then blunted spire from nearby Temple Meads. But that, we know, is what he did.

A particularly vivid account was taken by Dr Milles from William Smith, a Colston Hall friend, and brother of the Peter Smith who committed suicide. ‘Chatterton was very fond of walking in the fields,’ he recorded, ‘and particularly in Redcliffe meadows; of talking with (Smith) about these MSS and reading them to him: “You and I” (says he) “will take a walk in Redcliff meadow, I have got the cleverest thing for you that ever was: it is worth half a crown to have a sight of it only, and to hear me read it to you.” He would then produce and read the parchment. He used to fix his eyes in a kind of reverie on Redcliff church, and say “this steeple was once burnt by lightning; this was the place where they formerly acted plays” ‘ (Dr Milles, Rowley, 1782). Chatterton’s ability to bring to life and dramatize the inanimate remnants of the past, even to display them to his friends as something still magically active in the present, is an essential element in the imagination which dramatized itself as Thomas Rowley. In this, St Mary Redcliff is a central feature, a palpable proof of both historical and psychological continuity. In these last two stanzas of Rowley’s second poem ‘Onn Oure Ladies Chyrche’, one can see exactly how Chatterton brings the stone to life:

Thou seest this mastrie of a human hand,

The pride of Bristowe and the Westerne lande,

Yet is the Builders vertues much moe greate

Greater than can by Rowlies pen be scande.

Thou seest the saints and kinges in stonen state,

That seemd with breath and human soule dispande:

As pared to us enseem these men of slate,

Such is greate Conynge’s minde when pared to God elate.

[dispande – swelling, expanding

pared – compared]

and then, his anger at the cheap mercantile and mediocre ambitions of his contemporary Bristolians rises also to Rowley’s tongue and is there transformed:

Well mayest thou be astounde, but viewe it well;

Go not from hence before thou see thy fill

And learn the Builders vertues and his name;

Of this tall spire in every countye tell

And with thy tale the lazing rich men shame.

Showe how the glorious Canynge did excelle,

How he good man a friend for kinges became

And glorious paved at once the way to heaven and fame.

For this Chatterton has condensed a stanza from Spenser, but with a characteristic and brilliant addition of a final clarion alexandrine which gives a tone at once both proud and deeply nostalgic. It is interesting to note the word on which the last stress of the completed poem falls, and settles.

These qualities of pride, nostalgia and hard ambitious anger probably find their finest expression in Rowley’s ‘Ælla: A Tragycal Enterlude’ with its high chivalric story-line and firmly localized Bristol setting. In the ‘Song to Ælla’ which forms a Prologue, Chatterton suddenly creates a beautiful and haunting melodic cadence of differing line-lengths, surging outwards and falling softly back, which is so far from the automated verse-movements of the eighteenth century, and so completely and richly Romantic in its uncircumscribed flux of emotions, that one begins to see why Keats and Rossetti held him in such special reverence. The bold Gothic effect of coloured violence is uniquely Chatterton’s.

Oh thou, or what remaines of thee,

Ælla, the darlynge of futurity,

Lett this mie songe bolde as thy courage be

As everlastynge to posteritie.

When Dacia’s sons, whose haires of bloode redde hue

Like kinge-cuppes brastinge withe the morning dew

Arrang’d in dreare array

Upon the lethale day

Spred far and wide on Watchets shore;

Then dydst thou furiouse stande

And by thy valiante hande

Beesprengedd all the mees withe gore.

The best comment ever made on Rowley’s curious language and spelling is by the modernist Irish poet, Austin Clarke. How often only a poet understands how another poet has worked. Clarke said: ‘To Chatterton, these bristling consonants and double vowels were like the harness and martial gear of medieval days. Plain words, mailed in strange spellings, might move like knights in full armour amid the resounding panoply of war.’

But for Chatterton in the other mercantile Bristol, the war was bitterly direct, and the weaponry of style was brittle and contemporary. There he did not summon up the gentle imaginative influence of Spenser, but instead he turned to radical political figures like Robert Wilkes and to Wilkes’ comrade in letters, the coarse and fluent satirist, Charles Churchill. So it came about that the poet who could lie gazing in Redcliff meadows and produce the hymn to ‘Oure Ladies Chyrche’, could also within a few months produce ‘The Whore of Babylon’. This is perhaps the liveliest of his many satirical sorties, clubbing right and left with his blunt-ended couplets. The formal subject is an attack on the Bishop of Bristol, on Lord Bute, and a good selection of King George III’s more obnoxious ministers; it is packed with names and slanders and scurrilities, and lasts unflaggingly for 500 lines. Towards the end Chatterton makes a decisive attack on the attitudes he abhorred – (Rowley nodding appreciatively in the background):

The Muses have no Credit here, and Fame

Confines itself to the Mercantile Name;

Then clip Imagination’s wings, be wise,

And great in Wealth, to real Greatness rise.

Or if you must persist to sing and dream,

Let only Panegyric be your theme:

Make North a Chatham, cannonize his Grace,

And get a Pension or procure a Place.

Damn’d narrow Notions! tending to disgrace

The boasted Reason of the Human Race.

Bristol may keep her prudent Maxims still,

But know, my saving Friends, I never will.

The Composition of my Soul is made

Too great for servile avaricious Trade –

When raving in the Lunacy of Ink

I catch the pen and publish what I think.

The final couplet gives a memorable picture, although the scholar E. H. Meyerstein discovered in 1930 how extremely closely Chatterton sometimes imitated Churchill, and that the couplet in question is a rather neat summary of three lines from Churchill’s poem ‘Gotham’. Just such a scholarly point brings us back to Dr Johnson’s ‘uneducated stripling’. It demonstrates that Chatterton had always been enlarging his stock of ideas on his own. Colston Hall or Lambert’s attorney office did not really touch him. Instead, Chatterton performed his own intellectual odyssey in the circulating libraries of the town, and in the imaginative life of Thomas Rowley. ‘The dead live there and move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.’ His education was an intense and personal drama in which he entered as the major actor. Chatterton faced the idea of all passively received knowledge with gestures of derision that, from a sixteen-year-old, sting with a wholly modern arrogance:

O Education, ever in the wrong,

To thee the curses of mankind belong;

Thou first great author of our future state,

Chief source of our religion, passions, fate …

Priestcraft, thou universal blind of all,

Thou idol, at whose feet all nations fall,

Father of misery, origin of sin,

Whose first existence did with Fear begin …

That particular attack on priestcraft was probably picked up from the seventeenth-century radical political poet, Fulke Greville; another proof of Chatterton’s range, for he must have read Greville’s play Mustapha.

James Thistlethwaite, who has already had much to say on his school-friend’s ‘inordinate vanity’, had even more to say on the fantastic range of Chatterton’s obscure researches. (This was also to be an outstanding trait in Rimbaud, who turned to alchemy.)

In the course of the year 1768 and 1769 – Chatterton being between 15 and 16 years old – wherein I frequently saw and conversed with C., the eccentricity of his mind, and the versatility of his disposition, seem to have been singularly displayed. One day he might be found busily employed in the study of Heraldry and English Antiquities, both of which are numbered amongst the most favourite of his pursuits; the next, discovered him deeply engaged, confounded, and perplexed, amidst the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition, or lost bewildered in the abstruse labyrinth of mathematical researches; and these in an instant again neglected and thrown aside to make room for astronomy and music, of both which sciences his knowledge was entirely confined to theory. Even physics was not without a charm to allure his imagination, and he would talk of Galen, Hippocrates, and Paracelsus, with all the confidence and familiarity of a modern empirick.

Thistlethwaite, it should be pointed out, considered himself to be something of a bard at this time, and was renowned for striding around Bristol with a pair of pistol-butts sticking out of his pockets. But allowing for his love of flourish – perfectly displayed in the peacock struttings of these sentences – the picture of Chatterton in his jackdaw enthusiasm, his frantic and undaunted explorations into whatever caught his fancy and then perhaps his imagination, is tremendously compelling. It is also recognizably provincial and oddly unbalanced. It is not what Matthew Arnold, a hundred years later, would confidently describe as ‘of the centre’. It is peculiar. It contains the essential dissenting element, the waywardness, the impatience, the somehow attractive pigheadedness, of the radical innovator. It also contains the delinquent, the social outcast.

There would be something about the eyes; they would be over-bright, incalculable.

4 ‘This group of dirty-faced wits’

Chatterton was solitary in Bristol and in London, but he was never alone. In fact all his life he had the gift of striking up acquaintances; people were fascinated by him, although in the long run one gains the strong impression that most people were uneasy with him and disliked him. His letters from London to Bristol often include a positive confetti of greetings to old school-friends and ladies of the green. But they contain as well this telling aside: ‘My youthful acquaintances will not take it in dudgeon that I do not write oftener to them, than I believe I shall: but as I had the happy art of pleasing in conversation, my company was often liked, where I did not like: and to continue a correspondence under such circumstances would be ridiculous.’ What is telling is of course the way he says it.

Chatterton did not feel diffident about seeking help and interest from men of experience and influence either. When, in an ironic and somewhat posturing exchange of letters, Horace Walpole rebuffed him and his ‘antiquities’ in the spring of 1769, it seems clear that Walpole was considerably pinched by a sixteen-year-old addressing him as an equal, a presumption which he found ‘singularly impertinent’. Chatterton later recounted the affair to an adult relation – Mr Stephens of Salisbury – in the very coolest and most casual of manners: ‘Having some curious Anecdotes of Painting and Painters, I sent them to Mr Walpole, Author of “Anecdotes of Painting”, “Historic Doubts” and other pieces, well known in the learned world. His answer I make bold to send you. Hence I began a Literary correspondence, which ended as most such do. I differed with him in the age of a MS. He insists on his superior talents, which is no proof of that superiority. We possibly may engage in one of the periodical publications; though I know not who will give the onset …’ This was written when Chatterton was about sixteen and a half. What is quite breathtaking is the discipline and absolute outward control in retelling what had actually been his first major rejection by the London cognoscenti, a bitter blow. Most aspiring adolescents would have fallen into passionate recriminations. But Chatterton: ‘which ended as most such do.’

This control, this inner hardness, is certainly paramount in his relations with his two redoubtable patrons, Catcott and Barrett; and he seems to have exercised it generally in his choice of friends and his maintenance of a deliberate distance between them and himself. A list of these friends, published in Robert Southey’s edition of 1803, is particularly fascinating in that it shows their jobs and professions, giving a striking proof of Chatterton’s intellectual isolation. Part of the list reads as follows: ‘T. Skone, a surgeon; Thomas Cary, pipe maker; H. Kator, sugar baker; W. Smith, a player; M. Mease, vintner; Mr Clayfield, distiller; Mr William Barrett, surgeon; Mr George Catcott & Mr Burgum, pewterers and partners; The Rev. Alexander Catcott, antiquarian; John Rudhall, apothecary; Carty, woollen-draper; Hanmer, grocer; Capel, jeweller; James Thistlethwaite, stationer.’ Altogether there are twenty-seven names. Further, it will be remembered that in their letters of reminiscences collected by Herbert Croft and Robert Southey, none of them – Thistlethwaite, Thomas Cary, Smith, John Rudhall – felt there was the least chance that Rowley and Chatterton could possibly have been the same.

Neither did Catcott and Barrett. But their position is a good deal more ambiguous.

To Barrett next, he has my thanks sincere

For all the little knowledge I had here.

But what was knowledge? Could it here succeed?

When scarcely twenty in the town can read.

With one exception (the Eclogue published in The Town and Country in May 1769), all the Rowley poems were first obtained direct from Chatterton by either Catcott or Barrett. (About the forgery aspect: only two of the forty-two ‘original parchments’ had by the British Museum after Barrett’s death turned out to contain poetry; the rest were prose pieces, catalogues, heraldic designs and drawings. All the other poetry exists only in Chatterton’s undisguised ‘copies’.) The character and motives of these two men are intriguing. Barrett is faintly sinister. A retired surgeon living in a comfortable house on the banks of the Avon, he was immersed in local antiquarian studies for his proposed ‘History of Bristol’. He thus had considerable personal interest in Chatterton’s MSS, and published them in his ‘History’ several years after the poet’s death as bona fide documents, although by then their validity was clearly very doubtful. It is ironic that Chatterton, and not he, should be called dishonest. There is something cold about the man, and one does not like to think of them together. ‘Mr Barrett adds, that he often used to send for him from the Charity-School (which is close to his house) and differ from him on purpose to make him earnest, and to see how wonderfully his eye would strike fire, kindle, and blaze up …’ There is also that curious reference in Chatterton’s Will: ‘Being sound in body, or it is the fault of my last Surgeon’. There is no proof whatsoever that this was a disguised reference to Barrett; but once it has been noticed, one cannot help wondering if it might have been. The significance is both comic and unpleasant.

Barrett’s friend, George Catcott the pewterer – the only person in Bristol who ever paid Chatterton for his work – was altogether different. Chatterton called him ‘Catgut’. He stammered and liked loud poetical recitation; he was impetuous and eccentric, partially humpbacked, totally unabashed. In his shop he once spat in the eye of a customer, ‘because he had a propensity’. He had a mania for ‘pre-eminence’ and getting in the news that must have delighted Chatterton. He once transported himself across the skeleton of the new Bristol Bridge on a donkey because he desired to be recorded as the first man ever to cross over it. He also dragged himself up by a rope to the top of the new spire of St Nicholas, in order to have the honour of placing one of his pewter plates (commemorating the deed) in the unfinished stonework at the 200-foot summit. The story goes that when this had been achieved, the workmen removed the rope – ‘the bargain being for going up only’. All these and many other glorious deeds, Chatterton recorded in a lively satiric poem entitled ‘Happiness’. Catgut wore fistfuls of ostentatious rings, the largest being a carnelian representing the profile of Charles I. What grotesquely distorted reflections were he and Barrett of Rowley’s fatherly, distinguished and beloved patron William Canynges:

Catcott is very fond of talk and fame;

His wish a perpetuity of name …

Incomparable Catcott, still pursue

The seeming Happiness thou hast in view;

Unfinish’d chimnies, gaping spires complete,

External fame on oval dishes beat;

Ride four-inch bridges, clouded turrets climb,

And bravely die – to live in after-time.

Horrid idea! if on rolls of fame

The twentieth century only find thy name … On matrimonial pewter set thy hand, Hammer with evr’y power thou canst command, Stamp thy whole self, original as ‘tis To propagate thy whimsies, name and phyz – Then, when the tottering spires or chimnies fall A Catcott shall remain admir’d by all.

This sort of comic and occasional verse gives a clue to the sump of literary sub-life in which posturing poetasters like the stationer Thistlethwaite wallowed, and which Chatterton seems both to have arrogantly disdained and to have frequently utilized for his own purposes. In the June 1771 edition of The Town and Country, an anonymous correspondent – possibly Cary – gives a lively description of this local Bristol scene which was already coming into some national prominence as a result of Chatterton’s death. (This was one of E. H. Meyerstein’s most notable discoveries.) It is from this that Chatterton had made his bid to escape:

Nor are we altogether without literary improvements, a fondness for which seems to be infused even in the lower classes of society; amongst other refinements, there is started up a set of geniuses, who call themselves a Spouting Club … These disciples of Melpomene choose to keep their scheme as private as the nature of the undertaking will admit, as many of the principal performers are still in their non-age, and servants by covenant for a certain term; but like lads of spirit, detest control, scorn the drudgery of dirty mechanics, and pant for fame in the more glorious fields of literature … In this group of dirty-faced wits, are three or four Authors and Poets, who have already composed, or at least transposed, more verses than Dryden or Pope ever wrote, and with much more elegance and fire, as these prodigies of erudition, their fellow members, very confidently assert. The effusions of their brains are eclogues, elegies, epigrams, epitaphs, odes and satires, with the last of which they keep their neighbours in awe; for if a man by any transaction has rendered himself ridiculous, these wits immediately published his folly in a lampoon, by setting his name at the top of a halfpenny publication called A New Copy of Verses, to the great diversion of themselves and the public …

This is in many ways a locus classicus: a phenomenon like Chatterton is never isolated; however exceptional, he is the product of a definite social ambience. In the Spouting Club of 1771 one recognizes many of his characteristics continuing to exist in less extraordinary form. Moreover, it is fascinating to see that in another twenty years’ time the situation in Bristol had been almost revolutionized from a literary point of view. For this became the city where Coleridge and Robert Southey planned the Panti-socratic society on the banks of the Susquehanna; and from where Southey wrote back to his London publishers – ‘Bristol deserves panegyric instead of satire. I know of no mercantile place so literary.’ It is bitterly ironic that Chatterton should be so largely responsible for Bristol’s salvation in the eyes of the metropolis. He himself had written from London in May 1770: ‘Bristol’s mercenary walls were never destined to hold me – there, I was out of my element. Now I am in it – London! Good God! How superior is London to that despicable place Bristol – here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities, which disgrace that miserable hamlet.’

Alone among Chatterton’s Bristolians, perhaps one man perceived any of the poet’s true qualities. We know little enough about him except that Chatterton thought him an irredeemable bigot. He was Catgut’s elder brother, the Rev. Alexander Catcott. When the scholar-investigator, Michael Lort, first began to comb Bristol for evidence in the 1770s, the Rev. Catcott alone suspected the true authorship of Rowley. His penetrating comment is recorded by Lort: ‘A. Catcott told me that, his suspicions being awakened, Chatterton was aware of this, and much on his guard; he had a large full grey eye, the most penetrating Mr (sic) Catcott had ever seen, and the eye of his understanding seemed no less penetrating. He would catch hints and intelligence from short conversations, which he would afterwards work up, and improve, and cover up in such a manner that an attentive and suspicious person only could trace them back to the source from whence he derived them.’

Later, Keats would call a process, very similar to this one, Negative Capability. The anvil and smithy of his brain.

5 ‘The pale children of the feeble sun’

In the only fragment of his last letter from London in August 1770 that has survived, Chatterton said: ‘I am about to quit my ungrateful country. I shall exchange it for the deserts of Africa, where tigers are a thousand times more merciful than man’ (quoted by Winslow, The Anatomy of Suicide, 1840). One thinks of Rimbaud.

Yet in these last four months, it becomes increasingly difficult to take any of Chatterton’s own words literally. His letters home are full of successes that never materialized. The sweltering heat of the narrow streets in summer along which he plodded, from editor to editor, seems to have filled his head with strange delusions and tropical visions. Africa, its heat and violence and beauty, is a continual theme with him, and produces the two magnificent ‘African Eclogues’:

On Tiber’s banks where scarlet jasmines bloom

And purple aloes shed a rich perfume;

Where, when the sun is melting in his heat

The reeking tygers find a cool retreat,

Bask in the sedges, lose the sultry beam

And wanton with their shadows in the stream.

On Tiber’s banks, by sacred priests rever’d

Where in the days of old a god appear’d –

‘Twas in the dead of night, at Chalma’s feast

The tribe of Alta slept around the priest …

(‘The Death of Nicou’, June 1770)

Here, with phrases like ‘reeking tygers’ he reaches a new, exotic precision; one is tempted to call it a hallucinogenic power. It is probable that Chatterton began taking opium at this time, at first as an antidote to his ‘Cold’, and later perhaps as an antidote to reality. One of his last friends was Mr Cross, the chemist on the corner of Brooke Street; he once shared a barrel of oysters with him. Cross supplied him with a number of medicaments, and almost certainly opium. This is not in itself surprising. In the eighteenth century, and indeed well on into the nineteenth century, opium was used as a regular adult pain-killer and stimulant, usually taken in solution as laudanum. Toothaches, head-colds, stomach diseases, gout, rheumatism all yielded to the poppy; it was the exact equivalent of the modern barbiturate. Nevertheless, it seems as if Chatterton was in the end taking opium doses in direct powder or stick form – and that is hardly medicinal. A deep stain running through nineteen leaves of Chatterton’s London notebook was finally analysed in 1947. Dr Walls of South-Western Forensic Laboratory reported conclusive evidence: ‘I cut a piece out of the stain on the back page and tested this. It gives a positive reaction for opium alkaloid (i.e. morphine etc.).’

The relationship between drugs and artistic creativity is still obscure and has always been in dispute; the argument ranges from ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The English Stage Coach’ (De Quincey) to The Naked Lunch and Kerouac’s peyote poems. In the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, a classic Romantic text in this respect, Keats classes drugs – ‘the dull opiates’ – with alcohol – ‘Bacchus and his pards’ – and Poesy as one of the three primary mediums of fantasy. While Rimbaud, making a fierce literal reading of Baudelaire, classes drugs with alcohol and sexual experience (preferably perverse, or at least exotic) as one of the primary means of the poet’s systematic and prolonged derangement of the senses. This is, however, literary and theoretical. In practice, drugs with their expense, their destruction of social relationships, their attendant physical diseases, and their inherent tendency to expand, distort and dissipate the senses into passivity of outlook (whereas all artistic effort requires concentration, sensual intensity and tremendous activity) – drugs make at best only a short-term partnership with creativity. Moreover they occupy the passive, or female, side of that partnership, providing relief rather than direct stimulus, providing the unconscious pool of images rather than the conscious netting and binding of images into actual artistic forms. (Some of these issues are discussed in Alethea Hayter’s book, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, 1968.)

All the same, in poetry the drug-supported and drug-fed imagination does produce quite characteristic and brilliant effects. Most notably, there is a combination of very bright, very minute, highdefinition images with a completely contrasting sense of entirely vague sweeping movements, undefined expanses and landscapes, and massive blurred shiftings of light and shade. In Chatterton’s earliest ‘African Eclogue’, which is dated Shoreditch May 2nd 1770, about a week or ten days after he had arrived in London, these characteristics are already recognizable. The poem is called ‘Narva and Mored’, the names of two young African lovers. The central passage begins:

Three times the virgin, swimming on the breeze,

Danc’d in the shadow of the mystic trees:

When, like a dark cloud spreading to the view

The first-born sons of War and Blood pursue.

Swift as the elk they pour along the plain

Swift as the flying clouds distilling rain

Swift as the boundings of the youthful roe

They course around and lengthen as they go.

Like the long chain of rocks, whose summits rise

Far in the sacred regions of the skies

Upon whose top the black’ning tempest lours,

Whilst down its side the gushing torrent pours,

Like the long cliffy mountains which extend

From Lorbar’s cave, to where the nations end,

Which sink in darkness, thick’ning and obscure

Impenetrable, mystic, and impure,

The flying terrors of the war advance

And round the sacred oak, repeat the dance.

The most extraordinary thing is the almost total dissolution of the formal eighteenth-century couplets into a rushing, shapeless, undirected torrent of images which gives free expression to the wildness and passion of the African tribal dance, as Chatterton understood and imagined it. The dance is both a dance of war by the tribesmen, and a dance of ecstatic sexual expectancy by the young virgin Mored (‘Black was her face, as Togla’s hidden cell, / Soft as the moss where hissing adders dwell’). It is so typical of Chatterton that Lorbar’s cave is impenetrable, mystic and impure. The love of Narva and Mored ends in simultaneous union and destruction: ‘Lock’d in each other’s arms, from Hyga’s cave, / They plunged relentless to a wat’ry grave’. If the passage reminds one of something else, it will turn out to be the opening section of Coleridge’s opium dream-poem ‘Kubla Khan’, written some thirty years later.

In these ‘African Eclogues’, as in the journalistic prose tales and articles Chatterton dashed off for money, and indeed in everything else he wrote during these last four months, one is continually coming across lines or whole passages which recall the reader – with a sudden frisson of horror and pity – to the situation Chatterton himself was in. The most terrible moment in ‘Narva and Mored’ is a single image which bubbles up in the seething flow of description for four lines, and then vanishes again without trace or explanation:

… Where the pale children of the feeble sun

In search of gold through every climate run,

From burning heat to freezing torments go

And live in all vicissitudes of woe …

But it is only in the last of the Rowley poems, ‘The Excelente Balade of Charitie’, that Chatterton seems to have produced a total equivalent of his condition, a complete symbolic enactment of his hopes and terrors. There is a superb equity in the fact that it was only Thomas Rowley, his double, his other self across three centuries, who could provide him with the material, the stance, and the final distancing to accomplish this most measured and beautiful and poignant of his works. The measuredness is particularly important. None of Chatterton’s subsequent critics or biographers seems to have realized just how unbalanced, how thoroughly peculiar Chatterton became in those first few weeks alone. The first two letters home are amusingly carried off, and reveal exactly the pride and rather disarming boastfulness one might have expected from him. The note is aptly struck in: ‘I get four guineas a month by one Magazine: shall engage to write a History of England, and other pieces, which will more than double that sum … I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-House, and know all the geniuses there. A character is now unnecessary; an author carries his character in his pen.’ (That last remark is an interesting side-light on his use of personae at Bristol.)

But by the letter of May 14th, a kind of glittering wildness is coming over him: ‘Miss Rumsey, if she comes to London, would do well as an old acquaintance, to send me her address. – London is not Bristol. – We may patrole the town for a day, without raising one whisper, or nod of scandal. – If she refuses, the curse of all antiquated virgins light on her: may she be refused when she shall request! Miss Rumsey will tell Miss Baker, and Miss Baker will tell Miss Porter, that Miss Porter’s favoured humble, though but a young man, is a very old lover; and in the eight-and-fiftieth year of his age: but that, as Lappet says, is the flower of a man’s days; and when a lady can’t get a young husband, she must put up with an old bedfellow. I left Miss Singer, I am sorry to say it, in a very bad way; that is, in a way to be married. – But mum – Ask Miss Suky Webb the rest; if she knows, she’ll tell ye. – I beg her pardon for revealing the secret; but when the knot is fastened, she shall know how I came by it – Miss Thatcher may depend upon it, that, if I am not in love with her, I am in love with nobody else …’ And so on for another page or so, with Miss Love, Miss Cotton, Miss Broughton and Miss Watkins. It is still amusing stuff, but his imagination seems over-stimulated, the jokes and innuendoes and declarations spin out with a sort of exalted panic. It is also clear that he is very lonely, and he desperately hopes that Miss Rumsey will be coming to the city. A paragraph in the next letter, to his sister dated May 30th, ends with: ‘Humbly thanking Miss Rumsey for her complimentary expression, I cannot think it satisfactory. Does she, or does she not, intend coming to London? Mrs O’Coffin has not yet got a place; but there is not the least doubt but she will in a little time.’ The letter finished with a scrawled PS: ‘I am at this moment pierced through the heart by the black eye of a young lady, driving along in a hackney-coach – I am quite in love: If my love lasts ‘till that time, you shall hear of it in my next.’ It is throw-away, but rather revealing.

In these letters there is only one reference to Rowley (though several to St Mary Redcliff). It is an odd one. It shows that Rowley was on his mind, but it appears to be bidding him farewell as a companion. ‘As to Mr Barrett, Mr Catcott, Mr Burgum, &c., they rate literary lumber so low, that I believe an author, in their estimation, must be poor indeed! But here matters are otherwise; had Rowley been a Londoner, instead of Bristowyan, I could have lived by copying his works.’ In his characteristically ambiguous manner, Chatterton appears to be wondering if Rowley could in fact be turned into a Londoner: whether Rowley could survive outside the environment of medieval Bristol which created him, and could perhaps expand into more universal themes that would move far beyond the old localized settings. This is exactly what ‘The Balade of Charitie’ did do: there is no other Rowley poem with a more timeless setting and theme, and no other Rowley poem which has so finely absorbed the humane and observant style of Chaucer. The idea was to mature until July; a powerful island of calm amid Chatterton’s turmoil and uncertainty and distress.

Some time in June Chatterton left Shoreditch, and moved to the cheaper and seedier area of Holborn. He took an attic room in the second house along Brooke Street from the High Holborn end. It was an area of disrepute. Labourers from Ireland, criminals and prostitutes lived there. It was the home of the Cato Street conspiracy. Clergymen when they visited their flock in these streets were accompanied by bodyguards. Chatterton’s landlady was a Mrs Angel, a dressmaker. Dressmaking in that area was often synonymous with brothel keeping. Round the corner in Fox Court was where Richard Savage was born. Mr Cross kept his chemist shop on the corner. Even nowadays, with the pink neo-gothic edifice of the Prudential Insurance Building looming respectably along the right-hand side of the road, it is not a comforting street to be in. You cannot see enough sky.

In June the letters quickly began to get shorter. The one to his sister, dated June 19th, begins with a sudden sharpness. ‘Dear Sister, I have a horrid cold. – The relation of the manner of my catching it may give you more pleasure than the circumstance itself.’ His story tells of hanging out of his window in the middle of the night to listen to a drunken woman singing bawdy songs in the street below. It ends with a conclusion that seems, in the context, to have a fairly obvious double meaning. ‘However, my entertainment, though sweet enough in itself, has a dish of sour sauce served up in it; for I have a most horrible wheezing in the throat; but I don’t repent that I have this cold; for there are so many nostrums here, that ‘tis worth a man’s while to get a distemper, he can be cured so cheap.’ The man’s distemper referred to here is almost certainly some form of venereal disease.

Nineteenth-century scholarship has been prudishly silent on this point. As it was silent on Keats dosing himself with mercury for the same complaint. Not until Meyerstein’s book of 1930 was there any consideration of the likelihood that Chatterton might have caught venereal disease; although it was a very common and rather unremarkable fact of a young man’s life in the London of the time. Indeed, in the London of any young man’s time since Shakespeare. The matter would be quite insignificant if it were not for the entirely different light that it throws on the development of Chatterton’s drug-taking, and most important of all, in the actual circumstances of his death. There is only one authentic reference in this matter. It comes from Michael Lort, that shrewd scholar-investigator who had extracted a particularly interesting statement from the Reverend Catcott (see supra, p. 38), and whose manners were, according to Fanny Burney, ‘somewhat blunt and odd’. Michael Lort’s evidence is simply this: that he had cross-questioned the chemist Mr Cross, and ‘Mr Cross says he (Chatterton) had the Foul Disease which he would cure himself and had calomel and vitriol of Cross for that purpose. Who cautioned him against the too free use of these.’ It is tremendously significant. Chatterton ‘would cure himself’ – of course, that is in character. We know that Chatterton was fascinated by medical matters and had in the past borrowed many books on surgery from Barrett. He would look after himself; his pride, his hardness would demand it. Yet suppose things did not go quite according to plan? Suppose the disease, whatever its form, at first seemed merely to get worse; or suppose it disappeared and then recurred – which is often the case? Vitriol could be a long and very painful treatment, especially for someone of Chatterton’s age and in his difficult circumstances.

The crucial fact is, then, this: arsenic, in small regulated doses, could also be used as a more drastic cure for venereal disease; and opium could – rashly but understandably – be used as a pain-killer. Arsenic and opium simultaneously. The Coroner reported arsenic poisoning; Barrett the surgeon recorded evidence of opium, he assumed an overdose. If all these facts are true, then an entirely different picture begins to emerge. One is led to ask, is the tradition of 200 years quite wrong? Is this a case of suicide at all? Why, come to think of it, should Chatterton have left no suicide note, no Villonesque Last Will and Testament? (The only extant ‘Will’, as we have seen, was made four months previously, a device for escaping from Lambert’s.) Is it not possible, is it not really rather likely, that what happened on the night of the 24th of August was a tragic mistake, a terrible miscalculation? In fact did Chatterton ever surrender to his circumstances, to himself, to the soft Romantic gesture of Wallis’s painting? Did his angry courage ever break at all? These are difficult questions to answer. We may never have the evidence to answer them satisfactorily. The ambivalence may have gone with him into oblivion. But I think his death was a mistake.

If the inner life is doubtful to the end, Herbert Croft, the author of Love and Madness, discovered some vivid external impressions from his interviews with Chatterton’s last neighbours. The house where Chatterton lodged in Shoreditch was run by a plasterer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Walmsley. With them were two young relatives, a niece and a nephew. Also Mrs Ballance, whose acquaintance we have already made. After Mrs Ballance’s faux pas over ‘Tommy’, little seems to have passed between them. But Mrs Ballance had something to say about that silence too. ‘He would often look steadfastly in a person’s face, without speaking, or seeming to see the person, for a quarter of an hour or more, till it was quite frightful; during all this time (she supposes, from what she has since heard), his thoughts were gone about something else.’

The master of the household, Mr Walmsley, was less forthcoming. Yet a perfectly ordinary artisan’s opinion of a young poet who was to become the darling of the Romantics is not without what one might call sociological interest. ‘Mr Walmsley saw nothing of him, but that there was something manly and pleasing about him, and that he did not dislike the wenches.’ Chatterton would probably have been rather pleased with that description.

Mrs Walmsley, like all London landladies that ever were and ever will be, looked out for the more domestic virtues in her lodger; but was not without a streak of romance sweetly disguised in the depth of a doubtless ample bosom. She liked her young literary gentleman to have a bit of style. ‘Mrs Walmsley’s account is, that she never saw any harm of him – that he never mislisted her [“misled” her perhaps; or perhaps “mistressed” her?]; but was always very civil, whenever they met in the house by accident – that he would never suffer the room, in which he used to read and write, to be swept, because, he said, poets hated brooms.’ That seems rather to have tickled Mrs Walmsley, but she was certainly not going to admit it: ‘she told him she did not know any thing that poet folks were good for, but to sit in a dirty cap and gown in a garret, and at last to be starved.’ Secretly she may have even approved. ‘During the nine weeks he was at her house, he never stayed out after the family hours, except once, when he didn’t come home all night and had been, she heard, poeting a song about the streets.’ At which point Mrs Ballance rushes back into the breach to cover up for poor Tommy. ‘This night, Mrs Ballance says, she knows he lodged at a relation’s, because Mr W’s house was shut up when he came home.’

But that is only what the adults saw. Mrs Walmsley’s niece kept her eyes much wider open, and took something of a fancy to him; but she was puzzled by him, even slightly alarmed: ‘For her part, she always took him more for a mad boy than anything else, he would have such flights and vagaries – that, but for his face and her knowledge of his age, she should never have thought him a boy, he was so manly, and so much himself – that no women came after him, nor did she know of any connexion; but still, that he was a sad rake, and terribly fond of women, and would sometimes be saucy to her.’ His eating arrangements were peculiar too: ‘he ate what he chose to have with his relation (Mrs B) who lodged in the same house, but he never touched meat, and drank only water, and seemed to live on air.’ To that the nephew added: ‘he lived chiefly on a bit of bread, or a tart, and some water.’

The nephew, whose name Herbert Croft does not record, was probably the youngest in the house, younger even than Chatterton. For the first six weeks of Chatterton’s stay he shared a bedroom with him. ‘He used to sit up almost all the night, reading and writing … he (the nephew) was afraid to lie with him; for to be sure, he was a spirit, and never slept … he never came to bed till very late, sometimes three or four o’clock, and was always awake when he (the nephew) waked; and got up at the same time, about five or six – that almost every morning the floor was covered with pieces of paper not so big as sixpences, into which he had torn what he had been writing before he came to bed.’

The detail of the torn paper is interesting. It harks back to the Pyle Street schoolhouse where papers and parchments were scattered on tables and floors; it carries forward to the final scene in Brooke Street where the shredded papers were wrongly taken as evidence of a fit of despair. And it suggests so strongly and simply the immense inwardness and privacy which the act of composition, divided between himself and Rowley, had always contained for Chatterton: something so secretive it made him cover his tracks instinctively.

He gave no reason for quitting Shoreditch. ‘They found the floor of his rooms covered with little pieces of paper, the remains of his poetings, as they term it.’

In Brooke Street the track does run out. Croft never managed to trace Mrs Angel, his dress-making landlady. A certain Mrs Wolfe, a barber’s wife, who lived a few doors down, remembered one detail. ‘Mrs Angel told her, after his death, that, as she knew he had not eaten anything for two or three days, she begged he would take some dinner with her on the 24th of August; but he was offended at her expressions, which seemed to hint he was in want, and assured her he was not hungry.’ Somehow it rings true – one imagines how he would take offence. The other stories sound a bit like ingenious apocrypha. He was seen in a tavern drinking Shakespeare’s health in bad wine; he was seen in St Pancras churchyard reading the epitaphs; he was seen at the Brooke Street’s bakers being refused bread on tick.

Yet there is a grim and miraculous concordance between these final marginalia of his outward life, and the last and loveliest of Rowley’s visitations, ‘The Excelente Balade of Charitie’. In thirteen vivid and melodic stanzas, it tells of a poor ‘hapless pilgrim’ who has fallen on bad times and is now sick, poverty-stricken and destitute, his clothes threadbare and his body ravaged. He stands alone in a wide unlocated landscape, with a dark ponderous storm moving over the horizon towards him. ‘He had no housen theere, ne any convent nie.’ He shelters under a holm-oak. The storm breaks.

Liste! now the thunder’s rattling clymmynge sound

Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs

Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown’d,

Still on the gallard eare of terrour hanges;

The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges,

Agayn the levynne and the thunder poures,

And the full clouds are braste attenes in stonen showers.

By using the Rowley dialect and spelling with a wild freedom he had never before achieved, Chatterton here brings off one of the finest pieces of onomatopoeic poetry in the whole of English verse. It is quite unnecessary to know semantically what ‘clymmynge’ or ‘swangen’ mean; the sound, even the very look of the words tell you exactly what is happening, the power and terror of the storm.

The portrait of the pilgrim as he huddles under the oak is superb. It glows with a kind of transcendental pity for all men who are outcast or broken. It is almost as if Rowley were describing Chatterton in a vision of his own; as if the roles had been reversed:

Look in his glommed face: his sprighte there scanne;

Howe woe-be-gone, howe withered, forwynd, deade!

Haste to thy church-glebe-house, ashrewd manne!

Haste to thy kiste, thy only dortoure bedde.

Cold, as the clay which will gre on thy hedde,

Is Charitie and Love among high elves:

Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves.

[A few words are difficult here, but not very: ‘forwynd’ means sapless; ‘ashrewd’ means cursed by fortune; ‘kiste’ is a coffin; and ‘dortoure’ is obviously a dormitory or bedroom.]

A figure now appears through the blasting storm, ‘spurreynge his palfry oer the watery plain’. It is an Abbott, and he is described with Chaucerian accuracy and judgement: ‘His cope was all of Lincoln clothe so fine, with a gold button fastened neere his chynne’, and his horse’s head has been plaited with roses. The pilgrim begs for aid, the Abbott – with the solemn inevitability of the medieval ballad – rudely refuses him. (‘Varlet, replied the Abbatte, cease your dinne; This is no season almes and prayers to give; My porter never lets a faitour [tramp] in.’) And he spurs away.

The storm breaks out with renewed ferocity. But through the downpour ‘faste reyneynge oer the plain a priest was seen’. This man is a poor friar, ‘Ne dighte full proude, ne buttoned up in golde; His cope and jape [gown] were gray, and eke were clene’. The pilgrim begs for alms; the friar immediately produces a silver groat from his pouch. ‘The mister pilgrim did for halline [joy] shake.’ Then with a marvellous unexpected gesture of generosity, the friar gives his cloak to the pilgrim. ‘Here take my semicope, thou arte bare I see; Tis thyne, the Seynctes will give me my reward.’ He disappears into the rain.

It is difficult to get out of one’s head the impression that Chatterton is in some primary symbolic sense that ‘unhailie pilgrim’; and the friar in grey who appears out of the storm and so freely gives aid is Thomas Rowley. Perhaps it makes no sense. But in this last known work, maybe precisely because it is the last known work, the figures move through the simple heraldic ritual of charity with a power much greater than their own individual humanity. The storm against them is all storms; it is the storm of circumstance, the storm of the mind, the storm of the body; it is the storm of passion, of creativity, of ambition, of loneliness. But there is no final despair; help comes, life is made out. There is no despair at Pyle Street, or at Colston Hall, or at Lambert’s drudging office; there is no despair at Shoreditch, or at Brooke Street in the attic.

Above all, the poet did not despair in the attic.