Chatterton, Thomas

Chatterton, Thomas (1752–70), left school aged 14 and was apprenticed to an attorney. In 1768 he published in Felix Farley's Bristol Journey a passage of pseudo-archaic prose, of which he claimed to have discovered the original in a chest in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. This attracted the attention of local antiquaries, for whom he provided fake documents, pedigrees, deeds, etc. He had by this time already written some of his ‘Rowley’ poems, including his ‘Bristowe Tragedie’; these purported to be the work of an imaginary 15th-cent. Bristol poet, Thomas Rowley, a monk and friend of William Canynge, a historical Bristol merchant. He offered some of the poems (without success) to Dodsley in Dec. 1768. In March 1769 Chatterton sent to Horace Walpole a short treatise on painting ‘bie T. Rowleie’, which Walpole temporarily accepted as authentic. In the same month he published in the Town and Country Magazine the first of seven Ossianic pieces in poetic prose, ‘Ethelgar. A Saxon poem’, though he took care in this and similar pieces to avoid using the Scottish background of Macpherson. The only Rowleian piece published in Chatterton's life was ‘Elinoure and Juga’, which appeared in the same periodical in May 1769. In April 1770 he went to London, but within four months he committed suicide by taking arsenic, apparently reduced to despair by poverty. In these last months he wrote a burletta, The Revenge; the satirical ‘Kew Gardens’, modelled on the satires of Charles Churchill; and one of his finest Rowleian pieces, ‘An Excelente Balade of Charitie’. The Rowley poems were first published in 1777 by Thomas Tyrwhitt, and a year later Thomas Warton publicly raised doubts of their authenticity; the controversy raged for decades, and Rowley continued to find champions until Skeat's edition of 1871.

Chatterton's life, work, and tragic death had a powerful effect on the romantic imagination; Wordsworth wrote of him as ‘the marvellous Boy, | The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride’, and Keats, who dedicated Endymion to his memory, described him in a letter as ‘the purest writer in the English Language…’ In his Rowley poems Chatterton employs a variety of verse forms, including Spenserian stanzas, rhyme-royal, and the ballad; notable among them are his Pindaric ode ‘Songe to Ella’ in which Ella (or, as often, Ælla) makes his first appearance, and ‘Ælla’ itself, ‘a tragycal enterlude’.