The Rowley Poems

by Thomas Chatterton

In July he changed his lodgings to the house of a Mrs. Angel, a sacque maker in Brook Street, Holborn; the dead season of August was coming on and probably he wanted to conceal his growing embarrassment from his aunt, who might have sent word of it to his mother at Bristol.

His opera was accepted—it is a spirited and well written piece—and for this he was paid five pounds, which enabled him to send a box of presents to his mother and sister bought with money he had earned. He had dreamed of this since he was eight. But his Balade of Charitie—the most finished of all the Rowley poems—was refused by the Town and Country Magazine about a month before the end; which came on August 24th. He was starving and still too proud to accept the invitations of his landlady and of a friendly chemist to take various meals with them. He was offended at the good landlady's suggestion that he should dine with her; for 'her expressions seemed to hint' (to hint) 'that he was in want'—no cloak for Thomas Chatterton! He could have borrowed money and gone back to Bristol, but there are many precedents for beaten generalissimos falling on their swords rather than return home defeated and disgraced. How could he return? He had set out so confidently; had boasted not a little of his powers, and had satirized all the good people in Bristol de haut en bas. Think of the jokes and commiserations of Burgum, Catcott, and the rest! 'Well, here you are again, boy; but of course we knew it would come to this!' He could not endure to hear that.

Accordingly on Friday the 24th August 1770 he tore up his manuscripts, locked his door, and poisoned himself with arsenic.

Southey, Byron, and others have supposed that Chatterton was mad; it has been suggested that he was the victim of a suicidal mania. All the evidence that there is goes to show that he was not. He was very far-sighted, shrewd, hard-working, and practical, for all his imaginative dreaming of a non-existent past; and this at least may be said, that Chatterton's suicide was the logical end to a very remarkably consistent life.

Chatterton's character has suffered a good deal from three accusations vehemently urged by Maitland and his eighteenth-century predecessors. The first is that the boy was a 'forger'; the second that he was a freethinker; the third that he was a free-liver.

To examine these in turn: the first admits of no denial as a question of fact, but justification may be pleaded which some will accept as a complete exculpation and others perhaps will hardly comprehend.

Chatterton could only produce poetry in his fifteenth-century vein; his imagination failed him in modern English. No one who has any appreciation of Rowley's poems will consider that the African Eclogues are for a moment comparable with them. If he was to write at all he must produce antiques, and, as it happened, interest had been aroused in ancient poetry, largely by the publication of Percy's Reliques and of the spurious Ossian. Appearing at this juncture, then, as ancient writings taken from an old chest, his poems would be read and their value appreciated; while no one would trouble to make out the professed imitations—not by any means easy reading—of an attorney's apprentice. Probably if an adequate audience had been secured in his lifetime, Chatterton would have revealed the secret when it had served its purpose—just as Walpole confessed to the authorship of Otranto only when that book had run into a second edition.

To the second count of the indictment no defence is urged. Chatterton was too honest and too intelligent to accept traditional dogmatics without examination.

Finally, he was no free-liver in the sense in which that objectionable expression is used. Rather he was an ascetic who studied and wrote poetry half through the night, who ate as little as he slept, and would make his dinner off 'a tart and a glass of water.' He was devoted to his mother and sister and to his poetry; and what spare time was not occupied with the latter he seems to have spent largely with the former. The attempt to represent him as a sort of provincial Don Juan—though in the precocious licence of a few of his acknowledged writings he has even given it some colour himself—cannot be reconciled with the recorded facts of his life.

Equally ill judged is that picture which is presented by Professor Masson and other writers less important—of a truant schoolboy, a pathetic figure, who had petulantly cast away from him the consolations of religion. Monsieur Callet, his French biographer, knew better than this: 'Il fallait l'admirer, lui, non le plaindre,' is the last word on Chatterton.