There are many, many, many corners of Badbookistan populated by individuals who never once should have picked up a pen, and no, I do not mean “they should have stuck to something that wasn’t writing.” An awful lot of terrible authors began as intelligence analysts or farm wives or lawyers or academics before they started writing, and if the quality of their work is any guide, they should have stuck to their barns, ivy-covered halls, bunkers, or high rise office buildings. By background, education, and training, they never should have done more than dabbled, let alone gotten their work into print
Not so tonight’s author. Thomas Chatterton, born the posthumous son of an amateur poet, numismatist, and musician in 1752 in Bristol, was a charity student at a school geared to giving young boys just enough education to be good apprentices, not the life of the mind. This did not stop him from reading everything he could get his hands on, from books he borrowed through a circulating library to the crumbling parchments and records of the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, where a relative was a sexton. He taught himself the alphabet by reading old illuminated manuscripts and black letter Bibles, and was introverted to the point that his teachers thought him little better than an idiot.
Needless to say, they were wrong. In particular, they missed the impact that all that self-directed reading had on a sensitive, somewhat dreamy, and decidedly precocious child.
Fortunately for him, Chatterton’s mother realized that her son was something special. She encouraged him to read and write, and by the time he was, my hand to God, eleven years old, he was contributing to a local newspaper. Less than a year later he was so angered by vandalism at his beloved St. Mary Redcliffe that he wrote a scathing poem satirizing the event, also for the newspapers.
It was around this time that he started to write the “medieval poems” that brought him fame, no fortune, and an early death.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a boy who’d taught himself to read by perusing manuscripts from the Wars of the Roses would write medieval pastiche; teenagers today do pretty much the same thing when they fire up their laptops and start work on an epic 120,000 word Avengers/My Little Pony crossover romance slashing Rainbow Dash with Captain Marvel. If he were alive today, Thomas Chatterton would probably be a Big Name Fan in Amadis de Gaula fandom, with 20,000 followers on his Tumblr, hundreds of kudos on Ao3, and an original manuscript ready for submission to Tor, Baen, or another big publisher by the time he was twenty, tops.
Alas for Chatterton, there was no Internet, no Tumblr, and no acceptance of pastiche/fanfiction as a means for a young writer to learn the craft. There was a sympathetic staffer member at his school, to whom he showed his first fanfic pastiche, Elinoure and Juga, but that wasn’t really enough. Only Chatterton’s own uncle encouraged him and his fellow pupils to write rather than focus on vocational training, and so hesitant was the young genius to reveal his own talent that he told the friendly usher that Elinoure and Juga had been written by a Dead Medieval Poet who just happened to have left his manuscripts stuffed into the dusty records and rent-rolls and chronicles at St. Mary Redcliffe.
The usher believed him.
Thus it was that Chatterton, who dreamed of making it big as a poet and rescuing his widowed mother from poverty, conceived of the nom de plume he would use to accomplish this worthy goal: Thomas Rowley, monk and poet of the reign of Edward IV, who was employed by Bristol merchant William Canynges to laud his good works and provide entertainment when needed. He studied the works of lexicographer John Kersey to familiarize himself with medieval language, a poetry anthology edited by Elizabeth Cooper to get ideas on proper subjects and verse forms, stole a bunch of old parchments from the archives of St. Mary Redcliffe, and started to write what became his chief claim to fame.
That he was only fourteen years old, was apprenticed to an attorney who thought he was wasting his time on fripperies and folly, and had neither patron nor the connections to obtain one, did not really register. Chatterton was bright, talented, and determined, plus had the blind optimism of youth. He was going to succeed, he just knew it, and so what if his employer tore up his manuscripts? He’d simply create more.
The Rowley Poems, which Chatterton wrote in between his shifts as a scrivener for John Lambert, the less than sympathetic attorney, were his first effort to raise himself and his mother out of poverty...and they failed. Oh, Elinoure and Juga actually got published in Town and Country (no relation to the modern publication), a London magazine owned by one Alexander Hamilton (no relation to the American politician and current Broadway sensation), but the rest? Not so much.
Part of this may have been that Chatterton, who was only a teenager, truly thought that all his financial woes could be solved if he could only find a patron. A wealthy man who would pay him to write would be a dream come true, and since many of “Rowley’s” works concerned the fair city of Bristol, Chatterton first sent transcripts of “Rowley’s” poems to local merchants and scholars. One of them was so impressed that he used the poems as primary source material for a history of medieval Bristol (which failed to find a market, alas alack and well-a-day), but none of them paid enough to support Chatterton in the style to which he hoped to become accustomed. What to do?
The answer was simple: send the poems to the Master of Strawberry Jam Hill House, the greatest antiquarian in all the land, the man who’d sparked the fashion for all things Gothick, medieval, monkish, and dramatic in England: Horace Walpole.
Walpole, Earl of Orford, MP, publisher, author, pundit, and collector of medieval and allegedly medieval bric-a-brac, was surprisingly familiar with pre-modern forgeries. His most famous literary work, The Castle of Otranto, was allegedly a translation from the original 16th century Italian, and for a brief time it fooled the public even though it was about as close to what was actually being written in Italy in the 16th century as it was to the Perez Hilton website. This may be why he quickly realized that “Rowley’s” poems were less than authentic, especially after he learned that the supposed discoverer was a sixteen year old apprentice scrivener from a less than well heeled background.
Chatterton was shocked by the rejection from Walpole — surely the great man would recognize the quality of “Rowley’s” work? Surely he would print these relics of the (imagined) past? Surely he would moved by lines like these, from “An Excellent Balade of Charitie, as wroten ie the gode Prieste THOMAS ROWLEY, 1464”:
Beneathe an holme, faste by a pathwaie side,
Which dide unto Seyncte Godwine's covent] lede,
A hapless pilgrim moneynge did abide,
Pore in his viewe, ungentle in his weede,
Longe bretful of the miseries of neede,
Where from the hail-stone coulde the almer flie
He had no housen theere, ne anie covent nie.
Look in his glommed face, his sprighte there scanne;
Howe woe-be-gone, how withered, forwynd, deade!
Haste to thie church-glebe-house[20], asshrewed manne!
Haste to thie kiste thie onlie dortoure bedde. Cale, as the claie whiche will gre on thie hedde,
Is Charitie and Love aminge highe elves;
Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves.
Or “Goddwyn, a Tragedie,” a play wherein the chorus declaims these cheerful sentiments, never mind that drama as the 18th century understood it did not exist during “Rowley’s” lifetime:
Whan Freedom, dreste yn blodde-steyned veste,
To everie knyghte her warre-songe sunge, 185
Uponne her hedde wylde wedes were spredde;
A gorie anlace bye her honge.
She daunced onne the heathe;
he hearde the voice of deathe;
Or these opening lines from “AElla, a Tragical Interlude,” as declaimed by that immortal character, the Fyrste Mynstrelle:
The boddynge flourettes bloshes atte the lyghte;
The mees be sprenged wyth the yellowe hue;
Ynn daiseyd mantels ys the mountayne dyghte;
The nesh yonge coweslepe bendethe wyth the dewe;
The trees enlefed, yntoe Heavenne straughte.
Whenn gentle wyndes doe blowe, to whestlyng dynne ys broughte.
The evenynge commes, and brynges the dewe alonge;
The roddie welkynne sheeneth to the eyne;
Arounde the alestake Mynstrells synge the songe;
Yonge ivie rounde the doore poste do entwyne;
I laie mee onn the grasse; yette, to mie wylle,
Albeytte alle ys fayre, there lackethe somethynge stylle.
Of Elinoure’s plaintive address to her lover in the poem he’d shown to the friendly usher at school:
O gentle Juga! heare mie dernie plainte,
To fyghte for Yorke mie love ys dyghte in stele;
O maie ne sanguen steine the whyte rose peyncte,
Maie good Seyncte Cuthberte watche Syrre Roberte wele.
Moke moe thanne deathe in phantasie I feele;
See! see! upon the grounde he bleedynge lies;
Inhild some joice of lyfe or else mie deare love dies.
Clearly there was something wrong with Walpole, to think that these were forgeries! After all, hadn’t Chatterton used authentic medieval parchment? Studied authentic medieval spellinges ande pounctuationes? Read authentic medieval illuminated manuscripts till his eyeballs almost fell out? Didn’t he include enough footnotes? Enough plausible explanations for the anachronisms, the mistakes, the borrowings from Elizabeth Cooper to overcome all doubts?
What had gone wrong?
Needless to say, Chatterton was heartbroken by Walpole’s rejection. He was only sixteen, after all. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he spent the rest of the summer brooding, or that most of his subsequent writing was modern political satire. Nor should it surprise anyone that in 1770, when he was but seventeen years old, he decided to chuck it all, leave his scrivener’s bench in Bristol, and hie him off to London to seek his fortune.
That deep down, he wasn’t nearly as confident of success as he claimed should be obvious from the title of the last piece he wrote before setting out for the great metropolis: a “Last Will and Testament” that combined silly bequests of his humility to one churchman, his religion to another, and to the city of his birth “all his spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on its quay since the days of Canynge and Rowley.”
He also claimed that he planned to kill himself the day after penning this odd little document.
The suicide threat was enough for his employer to free him from his indenture and send him on his way. John Lambert, Esquire, might not have been much of a literary critic but he had no wish to be blamed for the death of a teenager. He thus graciously stood aside as his former scrivener accepted the good wishes and spare cash of friends, family, and acquaintances, boarded the coach, and headed south.
What he thought he’d find in London isn’t clear — his political writings, under the name “Decimus,” had definitely won him a following among those who had no idea of his actual age — but after an early splash, he found himself out of work, down on his luck, and so short of cash he had to move to a cramped little attic in Holborn. There he brooded, wrote, and unsuccessfully sought payment for his published work. Food was scarce, money scarcer, and in desperation this brilliant, disappointed, and increasingly depressed young man sought a position as a surgeon’s assistant on a merchant ship bound for exotic Africa. That he knew nothing of medicine, Africa, or life at sea didn’t matter; his landlady noted that he went without eating for days at a time, and he was desperate for money and a way a to avoid heading back to Bristol in defeat.
I think you can guess what happened next.
One fine night in August of 1770 Chatterton somehow obtained a paper of arsenic. He went back to his little attic, wrote a final fragment for “AElla,” and took the poison. He died almost immediately, not even eighteen years old. His passing was noted, if at all, as the loss of a mere transcriber of the works of a far superior medieval poet, since only Horace Walpole had figured out that “Thomas Rowley” was a fake.
There the matter (and Chatterton) might have rested...except that somehow, some way, it dawned on literary Britain that for all their peculiar spellings and borrowings and unbelievable back story, the Rowley poems were actually pretty good. They weren’t perfect — he was only a child when he wrote them, how could they — but the author had genuine talent that might have blossomed into something very special. It was clear that the youth who quickly became known as “The Wonderful Boy,” flawed though he was, had died far too young thanks to poverty, the unbending British class system, and greedy publishers who refused to pay him enough to live.
In short, Britain, and the world, had lost far, far more than a forger when Thomas Chatterton went to his grave.
Needless to say, the saga of the Brilliant, Doomed, Dead Boy Poet quickly went from fact to legend. Literary giants like Keats and Shelley praised him, melancholy young romantics swooned over the tragedy of his life, and less than a century after his death Chatterton was the object of a cult remarkably similar to those surrounding contemporary figures such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis actually tracked down the very attic where Chatterton ended his life so as to get the setting right, and future literary star George Meredith was happy to pose as the Brilliant Young Dead Man in the somewhat lurid results.
Today Thomas Chatterton is acknowledged as a genuine talent who had the potential for greatness. That this did not happen in time to save the Wonderful Boy from a tragically early end is an indictment of 18th century Britain, where the class system and what passed for a publishing establishment took a genuinely talented boy, used him, and then abandoned him when he needed them most.
Alas, indeed.
%%%%%
Have you ever heard of Chatterton? Seen Wallis’s art? Heard of Thomas Rowley? It’s a bright Sunday morning, so come to the firepit and share….
%%%%%