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The Death of Chatterton (1856), by Henry Wallis

Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, was born on November 20, 1752 and produced all his work by the age of only 17, when he committed suicide (August 24, 1770).

Chatterton’s father had died before the poet’s birth at Bristol, England. Also named Thomas Chatterton, he was a musical genius, a poet, a numismatist, a dabbler in the occult, a sub-chanter at Bristol Cathedral and master of the Pyle Street free school.

After the elder Chatterton’s death, young Thomas’s mother became a seamstress, and established a small day-school. At first he was thought to be mentally deficient, but he learned to read and write from the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio and the text of a black-letter Bible from the church of St Mary Redcliffe, where he played. By eight years of age he was an insatiable reader. It was his habit to lock himself away in an attic which he had made his study; and there, with books, cherished parchments, borrowed from the church, and drawing materials, young Thomas escaped with his 15^th-Century heroes and heroines. An eccentric child, by 1763 he was already publishing verse. Before long, he was paid five shillings to write a genealogical record of a Mr Bergum; in it he included a verse called The Romaunte of the Cnyghte, using the name of a poet, John de Bergham, ostensibly an ancestor of the man.

Rejection and poverty

Chatterton became apprenticed to an attorney, and continued to study and write poetry. He produced more ‘ancient’ poems, some of which he sent to the famous author Horace Walpole. The inventor of the word ‘serendipity’ and author of The Castle of Otranto at first accepted the poems, supposedly written by a 15^th-Century monk named Thomas Rowley from the time of King Edward IV of England, but later rejected and returned them with indignation.

In 1770, Chatterton was dismissed by the lawyer who had employed him, for writing a suicide letter. Thomas went to London and wrote more poetry, though this part of his history is obscure. He did gain some fame in the great city and was received by the Lord Mayor. His publishers paid him poorly, and he began to starve and became very  ill, and the 17-year-old genius was found dead on August 25, 1770, surrounded by his torn-up manuscripts in small pieces, and with arsenic in his mouth.

A monument was erected to his memory at St Mary Redcliffe’s, with the following inscription, borrowed from a piece he wrote himself: “To the memory of Thomas Chatterton. Reader! judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power. To that Power only is he now answerable.”

It was only after Chatterton's death that the controversy over his work began. Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777) was edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt, a Chaucerian scholar who believed them to be genuine medieval works. However, the appendix to the following year's edition recognises that they were probably Chatterton's own work.

Great poets laud the forger

The boy poet/forger was not without his supporters. Shelley commemorated Chatterton’s genius in Adonais, and Wordsworth in Resolution and Independence. Coleridge wrote A Monody on the Death of Chatterton, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti lauded him in Five English Poets. John Keats inscribed Endymion “to the memory of Thomas Chatterton”. Alfred de Vigny's drama of Chatterton invented a fictitious account of the poet.

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