Chatterton, THOMAS, was born at Bristol, 20th November 1752. His father, a sub-chanter in the cathedral, and master of a charity school, was a roosting fellow, yet a lover of books and coins, a dabbler in magic; he had died in the August before the poet was born. The mother, a poor schoolmistress and needlewoman, brought up her boy and his sister beneath the shadow of St Mary Redcliffe, that glorious church where their forefathers had been sextons since the days of Elizabeth. He seemed a dull, dreamy child till his seventh year; then he 'fell in love' with an old illuminated music folio, and, quickly learning to read from a black-letter Bible, began to devour every book that fell in his way. He was a scholar of Colston's bluecoat hospital from 1760 till 1767, and then he was bound apprentice to Lambert, an attorney. In December 1762 he wrote his first poem, On the Last Epiphany; in the summer of 1764, the first of his pseudo-antiques, Elinour and Jugga, which imposed on the junior usher of his school, and which he professed to have got from Canynge's Coffer in the muniment room of St Mary's. Next, early in 1767, for one Burgum, a pewterer, he concocted a pedigree of the De Bergam family (this brought him five shillings); and in 1768 he hoaxed the whole city with a description, 'from an old manuscript,' of the opening of Bristol Bridge in 1248.
His life at Lambert's was a sordid one; he slept with the footboy, and took his meals in the kitchen. Yet, his duties over—and he discharged them well—he had ample leisure for his darling studies, poetry, history, heraldry, music, antiquities. An attempt to draw Dodsley had failed, when, in March 1769, he sent Horace Walpole a 'transcript' of The Ryse of Peyncteynge, written by T. Rowlie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge. Walpole, quite taken in, wrote at once to his unknown correspondent, expressing a thousand thanks for the manuscript, deploring his ignorance of the 'Saxon language,' and half offering to usher the Rowley poems to the world. Back came a fresh batch of manuscript, and with it a sketch of Chatterton's own history. The poems, however, being shown to Mason and Gray, were pronounced by them to be forgeries; and Walpole's next letter was a letter of advice, to stick to his calling, that so, 'when he should have made a fortune, he might unbend himself with the studies consonant to his inclinations.' A curt request for the return of the MSS. lay six weeks unanswered during Walpole's absence in Paris. A second, still curter; and, 'snapping up poems and letters,' Walpole 'returned both to him, and thought no more of him or them'—until, two years after, Goldsmith told him of Chatterton's death.
Was it jest or grim earnest, a boyish freak or a suicide's farewell, that 'Last Will and Testament of Thomas Chatterton . . . executed in the presence of Omniscience this 14th of April 1770?' Anyhow, falling into his master's hands, it procured the hasty cancelling of his indentures; and ten days later the boy quitted Bristol for London. There he arrived with his poems, and perhaps five guineas in his pocket, and lodged first at one Walmsley's, a plasterer, in Shoreditch; next, from the middle of June, at Brooke Street, Holborn. Abstemious, sleepless, he fell to work as with a hundred hands, pouring forth satires, squibs, stories, political essays, burlettas, epistles in Junius' style (for 'Wilkes and liberty'), and the matchless Balade of Charitie. For a while his prospects seemed golden. The publishers spoke him fair; he obtained an interview with the Lord Mayor Beckford; in the first two months he earned eleven guineas (at the rate of from a farthing to twopence a line); and he sent home glowing letters, with a box of presents for his mother and sister. Then Beckford died; the 'patriotic' publishers took fright; the dead season set in; he had overstocked the market with unpaid wares; a last desperate application failed for the post of surgeon to a Bristol slaver. He was penniless, starving, yet too proud to accept the meal his landlord offered him, when, on 24th August 1770, he locked himself into his garret, tore up his papers, and was found the next morning dead—poisoned with arsenic. They buried him in the paupers' pit of the Shoe Lane Workhouse, a site usurped fifty-six years later by Farringdon Market.
For eighty years the Rowley controversy was waged with no less bitterness than ignorance, the Rowleyans including Jacob Bryant (1781), Dean Milles (1782), and Dr S. R. Maitland (1857); the anti-Rowleyans, Tyrwhitt (1777-82) and Warton (1778-82). The subject was once and for ever laid to rest by Professor Skeat in his edition of Chatterton's Poetical Works (2 vols. 1875). Vol. i. contains Chatterton's acknowledged poems, 78 in number; vol. ii. the 43 Rowley poems, with an essay thereon by the editor. Almost unconsciously the learned professor establishes Chatterton's wondrous originality. Theft from an unknown poet?—there is not 'the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. of early date.' Indebtedness to Chaucer?—he had 'read very little of this excellent author. . . . If he had really taken pains to read and study Chaucer, or Lydgate, or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley Poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some resemblance to the language of the 15th century, whereas they are rather less like the literature of that period than of any other. . . . The metres are mostly wrong, the rhymes are sometimes faulty; the words [taken mostly from Kersey's Dictionary, and 93 per cent. of them misused] are wrongly coined, or have the wrong number of syllables; and the phrases often involve anachronisms, or, occasionally, plagiarisms.' These last from such recent poets as Dryden and Gray—from the former of whom he boldly stole the line, 'And tears began to flow;' from the latter adapted the conception, 'closed his eyes in endless (everlasting) night.'
'An owl mangling a poor dead nightingale,' said Coleridge of Dean Milles; the words apply to many more critics of Chatterton. There are those among them whose patronising praise and commonplace censure enable us to feel how Chatterton was worsted in life's battle, why he blew up the ship sooner than strike his colours. Others there are—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Rossetti—whose precious tributes attest the boy-poet's divinity. No man can tell what Chatterton might have done; what he did do is patent to every one. Had Shakespeare died, or Milton, in his eighteenth year, or even Keats, the world had never heard of their existence. But he, a lad, with chances infinitely less than theirs, had written his name by then so high in Fame's temple, that purblind pilgrims must accept his achievement on hearsay. If he had lived to be famous, the fraud of the 'poet-priest Rowley' would not, belike, have been more hardly blamed than that of 'Jedediah Cleishbotham.' As it is, the conscientious critics have found it less difficult to dilate on Chatterton's pride and scepticism, his vices and deceit, nay, on the meteorology of 1770, than to master the difficult Rowleyan dialect, and to gauge the genius of this nursing of medievalism, this harbinger of the Renaissance of Wonder, to use Mr T. Watts-Dunton's definition of the neo-Romantic movement. For him it was reserved to point out Chatterton's metrical inventiveness, and his 'undeniable influence, both as to spirit and as to form, upon the revival in the 19th century of the romantic temper—that temper, without which English poetry can scarcely perhaps hold a place at all when challenged in a court of universal criticism. . . . As a youthful poet showing that power of artistic self-effacement which is generally found to be incompatible with the eager energies of poetic youth—as a producer, that is to say, of work purely artistic and in its highest reaches unadulterated by lyric egotism—the author of the Rowley Poems (if we leave out of consideration the acknowledged poems), however inferior to Keats in point of sheer beauty, stands alongside him in our literature, and stands with him alone.'
See Mr Watts-Dunton's essay in vol. iii. of Ward's English Poets (1880); Sir Herbert Croft's Love and Madness (1780); and Lives of Chatterton by Dix (1837), Sir D. Wilson (1869), and Prof. Masson (1874; new ed. 1900).