Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet who committed suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Although fatherless and raised in poverty, Chatterton was a studious child, publishing work by the age of 11. He was able to pass off his work as that of a fictional 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, though he was denounced by Horace Walpole.
At 17, he sought outlets for his political writings in London, having impressed the Lord Mayor, William Beckford, and the leader John Wilkes, but his earnings were not enough to keep him, and he poisoned himself. His life and death attracted much interest among romantic poets, and Alfred de Vigny wrote a play about him. The oil painting The Death of Chatterton by Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis was inspired by him.
Chatterton was born in Bristol to Sarah Chatterton, his father also named Thomas having died three months previous. His sister Mary was three years older and her married name was Newton. In Bristol, the office of the sexton of St Mary Redcliffe had long been held by the Chatterton family. Chatterton's father was a musician, a poet, and a numismatist. He had been a sub-chanter at Bristol Cathedral and master of the Pyle Street free school.
After Chatterton's birth, his mother established a girls' school and took in sewing and ornamental needlework. From his earliest years, he was liable to fits of abstraction. Chatterton was admitted to Edward Colston's Charity, a Bristol charity school, in which the curriculum was limited to reading, writing, arithmetic and the catechism.
Chatterton learned his first letters from the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio, which his mother said 'he fell in love with' and he learned to read out of a black-letter Bible or was taught by her. His sister said he did not like reading out of small books. Wayward from his earliest years, and uninterested in the games of other children, he was thought to be educationally backward.
By the age of 11, he had become a contributor to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. Elsewhere this is recorded as in 1768 when he was 16. The article was "Description of Frryars passing over the Old Bridge, taken from an ancient manuscript".
His confirmation inspired him to write some religious poems published in that paper. In 1763, a cross which had adorned the churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe for upwards of three centuries was destroyed by a churchwarden, so he sent to the local journal on 7 January 1764 a satire on the parish vandal.
The first of his literary mysteries was the dialogue of "Elinoure and Juga," which he showed to Thomas Phillips, the usher at Colston's Hospital, where he was a pupil, pretending it was the work of a 15th-century poet. Chatterton remained a boarder at Colston's Hospital for more than six years, and it was only his uncle who encouraged the pupils to write. Three of Chatterton's companions are named as youths whom Phillips's taste for poetry stimulated to rivalry; but Chatterton told no one about his own more daring literary adventures. His pocket-money was spent on borrowing books from a circulating library; and he ingratiated himself with book collectors, in order to obtain access to John Weever, William Dugdale and Arthur Collins, as well as to Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer, Spenser and other books. At some point he came across Elizabeth Cooper's anthology of verse, which is said to have been a major source for his inventions.
Chatterton's "Rowleian" jargon appears to have been chiefly the result of the study of John Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, and it seems his knowledge even of Chaucer was very slight. His holidays were mostly spent at his mother's house, and much of them in the retreat of his attic study there. He lived for the most part in an ideal world of his own, in the reign of Edward IV, during the mid-15th century, when the great Bristol merchant William II Canynges (died 1474), five times mayor of Bristol, patron and rebuilder of St Mary Redcliffe "still ruled in Bristol's civic chair." Canynges was familiar to him from his recumbent effigy in Redcliffe church, and is represented by Chatterton as an enlightened patron of art and literature.
Adopts persona of Thomas Rowley
Chatterton soon conceived the romance of Thomas Rowley, a fictional monk from the 15th century, and adopted for himself the pseudonym Thomas Rowley for poetry and history. Psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan suggested that Chatterton being fatherless played a great role in his imposturous creation of Rowley. In this interpretation, the development of his masculine identity was held back by the fact that he was raised by two women: his mother Sarah and his sister Mary. Therefore, "to reconstitute the lost father in fantasy," he unconsciously created "two interweaving family romances [fantasies], each with its own scenario." The first of these was the romance of Rowley for whom he created a fatherlike, wealthy patron, William Canynge, while the second was as Kaplan named it his romance of "Jack and the Beanstalk." He imagined he would become a famous poet who by his talents would be able to rescue his mother from poverty.
Chatterton's search for a patron
Chatterton started to look for a patron, at first he was trying to do so in Bristol where he became acquainted with William Barrett, George Catcott and Henry Burgum. He assisted them by providing Rowley transcripts for their work. The antiquary William Barrett relied exclusively on these fake transcripts when writing his History and Antiquities of Bristol (1789) which became a failure. But since his patrons were not willing to pay him enough, he turned to Horace Walpole. In 1769, Chatterton sent "The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englade" to Walpole, along with specimens of pseudo-medieval poetry he attributed to Rowley and others. Walpole professed himself "singularly obliged," calling the letter "valuable and full of information" and the poems "wonderful for their harmony and spirit," and offering to print them "if they have never been printed." Later, however, after Chatterton confessed his age and situation, Walpole consulted his friends Thomas Gray and William Mason about the veracity of the writings, and Gray "at once pronounced them forgeries."
Walpole's pride was injured at having been duped by Chatterton, and he cut off correspondence with the poet. Many later commentators have reproached Walpole for this, especially in light of Walpole's having passed off his own Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto as a translation from a medieval Italian manuscript. Walpole's comment that Chatterton's "ingenuity in counterfeiting styles, and, I believe, hands, might easily have led him to those more facile imitations of prose, promissory notes" led Samuel Taylor Coleridge to remark: "Oh! ye who honor the name of man, rejoice that Walpole is called a lord." Some writers have speculated that, had Walpole reacted differently, "a slight effort, at this time, ... might have saved from destruction Thomas Chatterton."
Badly hurt by Walpole's snub, Chatterton wrote very little for a summer. Then, after the end of the summer, he turned his attention to periodical literature and politics, and exchanged Farley's Bristol Journal for the Town and Country Magazine and other London periodicals. Imitating the style of the pseudonymous letter writer Junius, then in the full blaze of his triumph, he turned his pen against the Duke of Grafton, the Earl of Bute and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (the then Princess of Wales).
He had just dispatched one of his political diatribes to the Middlesex Journal when he sat down on Easter Eve, 17 April 1770, and penned his "Last Will and Testament," a satirical compound of jest and earnest, in which he intimated his intention of ending his life the following evening. Among his satirical bequests, such as his "humility" to the Rev. Mr Camplin, his "religion" to Dean Barton, and his "modesty" along with his "prosody and grammar" to Mr Burgum, he leaves "to Bristol all his spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on its quay since the days of Canynge and Rowley." In more genuine earnestness, he recalls the name of Michael Clayfield, a friend to whom he owed intelligent sympathy. The will was possibly prepared in order to frighten his master into letting him go. If so, it had the desired effect. John Lambert, the attorney to whom he was apprenticed, cancelled his indentures; his friends and acquaintances having donated money, Chatterton went to London.