Chatterton, Thomas | Louise J. Kaplan (essay date 1987)
Louise J. Kaplan (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Family Romance of Imposter-Poet Thomas Chatterton, Macmillan-Atheneum, 1987, pp. 1-11.
[In the following essay, Kaplan provides a psychoanalytic portrait of Chatterton, describing him as a “typical, if extreme,” adolescent who was also haunted by the absence of a father who died before he was born. Chatterton, the critic notes, spent his short life searching for his father in the form of the medieval personages that he fabricated.]
Thomas Chatterton was in many ways a typical adolescent. During the seventeen years of his life, he was an exuberant player in the artistic, intellectual, religious, political, and sexual adventures we have come to expect of not-quite-adults. Even his suicide marked him as a typical, if extreme, example of the Sturm und Drang image of adolescence. But he was not merely an ordinary adolescent. He was an impostor, and indeed he...
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