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Laying the Machinery of Detection Bare: Thomas Chatterton
🕑 Added 2025-09-21 18:06:07 +0000 UTCThe name Chatterton comes from Welsh, Chadderton, for Hill/Fort. Recorded back to 1403. His family held the position of Sexton at St Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol for 150 years continuously. Sexton's lived on the Church grounds and conducted various repairs to the buildings. Many of Chatterton's ancestors were freemasons. His uncle, William, was the last to hold the position of Sexton, John Chatterton, in 1725.
Chatterton's father, also named Thomas, died August 7th 1752, shortly before he was born on November 20th 1752. The absence of his father was an important factor in his development, as he often sought out patrons and father figures to little success.
His father was master of a petty school, in 1738. He had musical abilities and copied musical manuscripts owned by Bristol Cathedral for people. He was a composer as well, a mildly successful one. And an antiquary, who on one occasion had been involved in the discovery of three urns of Roman coins. When he died he had 150 books, including a blackletter Agrippa. He believed in magic and passed down some of this Chatterton through his books, which Thomas Chatterton's mother didn't take good care of.
August 3rd, 1760 Thomas entered the same school his father had attended, the charity school of Colston's Hospital. Bristol was a commercially focused town, and the curriculum was largely devoted to book keeping. The students shaved their heads like monks (tonsure), and wore blue robes. The fact that the school building had been built in Elizabethan times over the site over a Carmelite Priory increased young Chatterton's sense of being himself like a poetic monk.
On July 1st, 1767, at the age of 15, Chatterton was apprenticed to John Lambert, a lawyer, for 7 years as a scrivener. There wasn't much work to do, and Chatterton had a lot of unsupervised time to possibly forge documents and poetry. He made friends with other office boys and apprentices in next door offices, and they formed a circle of would be poets, contributing pieces to the three Bristol newspapers, especially Felix Farley's Journal.
On October 1st, 1768 the first of the Rowley forgeries appeared in print. The so-called Bridge narrative. A bridge over the Avon in Bristol had existed since 1247, and in 1768 a new bridge was completed that still stands today. Chatterton composed some material for Felix Farley's Journal commemorating the new bridge by looking back on similar celebrations that had occurred when past bridges had been build on the site in the middle ages.
This was often Chatterton's MO, to imagine the fictious history of Bristol buildings and monuments, many of which were being torn down at that time as Bristol modernized. Chatterton was like a Werther or Anton Reiser type figure, as an impoverished charity student, and then as an indentured apprentice, he had little freedom, and relied on other people. Bristol had a prominent but fading medieval character, the second city to London, it possessed a thriving commerce, but very little literary culture. Chatterton and his young friends imagined themselves as changing that, by bringing a lot of witty poetry and satire to the city's periodicals in the style of Pope or Johnson's circle.
The bridge narrative attracted the attention of a circle of local Bristol antiquarians.
- George Catcott - A pewterer and businessman, he was the first person to cross the new Bristol bridge, as a bit of a publicity stunt. And he was always doing this kind of thing to self-promote. He wasn't much of an antiquarian, and suffered a long series of business troubles when he was ruined by his partner. He was a dupe and somewhat foolish, and Chatterton poked fun at him in some pieces which he was good natured enough to be flattered by rather than upset.
- Alexander Catcott - George's brother, was a clergyman, who had written a somewhat successful book on the Biblical flood. He was more critical than his brother, and never was taken in by the Rowley forgeries. But as a Biblical creationist Chatterton was often fascinated by him, and owned a copy of his work in which he wrote some of his poems. Alexander's influence is signifcant because in Chatteron's reactions to him you can see Chatteron's movement towards religious freethinking.
- William Barrett - Finally there was Barrett, who was a successful and altogether respected physician. He spent many years working on a local antiquarian history of Bristol, and it is in service to this project that the Rowley forgeries were first presented. Barrett was no pure dupe like Catcott, he should have, and indeed probably did know better than to take the Rowley material as authentic. He to some extent perhaps can be characterized as a collaborator, or enabler of Chatterton.
When the bridge narrative was published, Geroge Catcott and William Barrett sought out the author of the piece, and were lead to Chatterton, who gave several conflicting accounts of how the historical material came into his hands. At first he claimed they were manuscripts that belonged to a friend of his.
Ultimately the provenance of the Rowley forgeries is tied up with Chatterton's father and St Mary Redcliffe Church. In a tower of the church there was a room called the treasury filled with locked coffin like boxes. These had been forced open some years before and people took much of the manuscript contents of the chests away, including Chatterton's father, who did actually acquire some of the Church's muniments in this way. So the story became that the Rowley forgeries had been in this cache, and when Chatterton's father died, they sat around the house and his mother used the medieval documents for waste paper. This wasn't entirely untrue, as a couple of mundane manuscripts of this nature were used in this way in Chatterton's home, by his mother, who was a seamstress.
Nature of the Rowley Material
The Rowley forgeries center around a real, historical individual, William Cannings, (William II Canynges), from 15th century Bristol. He was a successful businessman, and five time mayor of the city, who donated sums to the completion of St Mary Redcliffe Church. The character of the poetic monk Thomas Rowley is less historical, and is based only on a name associated with Canynges in one document of the church. Chatterton invented a whole secret history of 15th century Bristol. Canynges was the patron of Rowley, and commissioned him to travel the country and collect even older manuscript poems, like a 15th century Percy. Rowley also wrote a number of biographical works and letters that expanded upon Canynges life and virtues, as not just a successful merchant, but someone who put that commercial success to the service of the arts and architecture. Canynges as a model of commercial virtue was likely constructed by Chatterton as a message to contemporary Bristol.
The Rowley documents include genealogies, letters, scholarly works written by Rowley, poetry and plays written by Rowley, copies of older poems by Anglo-Saxon poets that Rowley supposedly made. Etc.
Throughout the works Chatterton employs an elaborate, invented lexicon of some 1,800 medieval words. Among the documents are upwards of 3,000 verses of poetry. They provide an extensive, imaginative history of Bristol, and Rowley becomes the center of a community of noble poets and antiquarians living in the center. But this kind of Johnsonian community is an anachronism.
Chatterton may have began composing some of these forgeries going back to 1764, when he was still in school, as at least one piece was shown to a schoolmate of his around that time. But it's believed the majority if not all the Rowley pieces were written while he was an apprentice to John Lambert. Lambert had among his books works like Camden's Britannia, and Chatterton made extensive use of this in his invention of Bristol antiquities. He also used glossaries to editions of Chaucer and etymological dictionaries. The character of Rowley is contemporary with and perhaps somewhat modeled on John Lydgate.
Finding success in forging these documents for the Bristol antiquarians, Chatterton cast his net farther afield, and wrote letters with samples of the forgeries to several eminent men, among them Dodsley (Percy's publisher) and Horace Walpole.
Walpole at that time had been brining out a history of anecdotes on the development of English painting, and in the work he had requested correspondents to send in additional information on the introduction of oil painting into England, and Chatterton was all too happy to oblige. At first Walpole was excited and seemed taken in, and Chatterton was encouraged. But in his second letter Walpole reverses course, and seems to sense that someone was trying to dupe him. This was a great disappointment to Chatterton, and he left several angry letters in draft responding.
Rumors would spread after Chatterton died that it was the cold response of Walpole that lead Chatterton to kill himself, but this is not really true. Walpole was largely innocent of any bad behavior in the incident. Because Walpole had in the past been involved in incidents of forging letters to dupe Rousseau, he was afraid his, at first, enthusiastic interest in the forgeries was going to be used to make fun of him. This lead him to later deny writing several of the letters of his to Chatterton where he expressed his interest in the forgeries, and this denial has muddied the waters somewhat.
Chatterton in London
In order to break the terms of his indentured apprenticeship, which he badly wanted to do, Chatterton wrote a series of suicide notes and last wills that he left around the office for Lambert to discover. These documents have colored perceptions of his attitudes towards suicide, and a debate continues over whether Chatterton did in fact kill himself, and if he did, why. To some extent the suicide notes to Lambert were artifice, designed to provoke a dismissal by Lambert, but Chatterton certainly was capable of this gloomy morose streak.
By 1770 Chatterton had become a real free thinker, a libertine. With religious beliefs more in line with deism. Likely the strict terms of his apprenticeship and his long poverty influenced also his abolitionist sentiments. Politics becomes increasingly important to him in his trajectory once he leaves Bristol after being dismissed by Lambert. Chatterton moved to London, and first stayed with extended family members for several months.
During his stay in London, which lasted only eight months or so before he killed himself, Chatterton began to make inroads among the publishers. He published a large body of Non-Rowley material under many pseudonyms. These pieces tend towards political letters on current events, and satirical poems and stories.
At that time, in 1770, the radical politician John Wilkes had been several times elected to parliament, but each time parliament voted to void the results of the election, due to Wilkes radical republicanism. This developed into a very heated crisis, and when the King sided with Parliament, the lord mayor of London, William Beckford publicly remonstrated the King. Chatterton enthusiastically attempted to throw himself into this controversy, siding strongly with the radicals, and he visited Beckford and impressed him with his published political pieces. Unfortunately for Chatterton Beckford died at the height of the controversy from the stress, which brought about a paroxysm or stroke.
Chatterton was not completely unsuccessful in London, and he did get published consistently, but payment for his writing was not slow. He moved out of his aunt's house, and took up lodgings in a seedier part of London in the last weeks of his life. At least one piece of his, a theatrical burlesque, showed signs of wider popularity not long before his suicide.
For these reasons it is not entirely clear why Chatterton killed himself. By temperament Chatterton did not eat much. He stayed up very late every night composing poetry and slept little. The day before his suicide he allegedly tried to get a loaf of bread on credit from a local baker, but was denied. And so the story goes that he, racked by hunger, locked himself up in his room and killed himself. But there is also evidence that he had successfully written to borrow money that evening, but that sum was stolen or never arrived. Exactly what was going on inside Chatterton's mind is a question for discussion.
There is also the possibility of ghonnerah. Chatterton wrote love letters to girls for his friends, and that was one of his earliest poetic occupations. It seems there were a number of girls he took an interest in, and a number of his poems give evidence to this. Still it is not clear to what extent Chatterton had had sex or been experienced with women. A lot of testimony stresses that Chatterton was not really the type to live a lifestyle going around drinking and sleeping around. He apparently boozed very little. But still the part of London he lived in had a lot of prostitutes and this has lead to a lot of speculation that Chatterton was sexually experienced, especially as he had come to self-identify as a libertine. He may have been suffering intense physical pain from ghonnerah he contracted, and this may also have been a motivating factor in his suicide. Some have speculated that the arsenic he poisoned himself with was given to him accidently when he tried to buy medicine for his ghonnerah.
Critical Legacy
It was within a year or two of Chatterton's death that the Rowley poems began gaining more attention from prominent men of letters. Just because Chatterton had given up the forgeries in 1770 and gone to London doesn't mean they stopped circulating. Percy had gotten wind of them, and some of the top antiquarians in the country began privately discussing the question of their authenticity.
In 1778 Thomas Tyrwhitt brought out an edition collecting some of the Rowley poems. In 1779 an edition of Chatterton's own poetic non-Rowley works came out as well. Thomas Warton devoted a chapter in his History of English Literature to their authenticity. Edmond Malone brought out a pamphlet about the issue. It was widely discussed in the press during the early 1780s. Tyrwhitt (who edited Chaucer), Percy, Warton, Malone, Walpole, all agreed that the Rowley poems were forgeries, but the poems had some defenders like Jeremiah Milles president of the Society of Antiquaries and Dean of Exeter.
Interest around Chatterton's death and the Rowley forgery controversy lead a whole market for Chattertonia, that Bristol antiquaries Geroge Catacott and William Barrett provided. In 1780 a novel came out by Herbert Croft called Love and Madness, that included letters and manuscript material that Croft had stolen from Chatterton's sister and used without her consent.
In later years, Chatterton became an iconic legend to the Romantics, to Wordsworth, Coleridege, Keats. They not only were attracted to the suicidal figure of Chatterton, but also were directly inspired by his poetry, and his language, and a number of Rowley words became common currency among the Romantics.
As Chatterton died at only 17, there is much question about whether he would have developed into a legitimate poet with a literary legacy that stands on its own. His work shows incredible genius. and for that reason has had many defenders.
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Selected Bibliography:
Cook, Daniel. Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Croft, Herbert. Love and Madness. London, 1780.
Davis, Bertram H. Thomas Percy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
de Grazia, Margreta. “Shakespeare Verbatim”: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Haywood, Ian. The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.
Jarvis, Simon. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Masson, David. Chatterton: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 1856.
Meyerstein, Edward H. W. A Life of Thomas Chatterton. London: Ingpen and Grant, 1930.
Sherbo, Arthur. Richard Farmer, 1735–1797. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991.
Solomon, Harry M. The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.
Taylor, Donald S., ed. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Taylor, Donald S. Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
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