[In the following review of Chatterton, Neve commends Ackroyd's commitment to “the limitless power of the imagination,” though he finds fault in the novel's historical skepticism.]

The novels of Peter Ackroyd pose interesting questions for readers of history, and for those trying to write works of historical imagination: in asking the question ‘what is history?’, Ackroyd answers in what might be called the modern way; it is the resurrection of the dead. That is to say, in thinking about Oscar Wilde, or Nicholas Hawksmoor, or Thomas Chatterton, Ackroyd as novelist unashamedly commits himself to bringing these figures to life, or at least to bring them back to die at his own hands. The most influential authority here—one whose life Ackroyd represented to considerable critical acclaim—is (or was) T. S. Eliot. Ever since writing about Eliot, Ackroyd has inhabited the layered, indeed the multi-layered world of the living dead, a world exemplified by historical London, and what London can seem to be. The historian’s question must be—is this excusable (on the grounds of pure imagination) or is Ackroyd’s refusal to represent, as against invent, one of the grounds for being uneasy with his work, not least this latest piece, a life, or idea of a life, of Chatterton, the marvellous boy poet?

In this book Charles Wychwood, a poet down on his luck, acquires by chance a portrait of Chatterton, but not of the Chatterton. Rather, it is a Chatterton who didn’t commit suicide at seventeen, but who survived into his fifties. The reason that Chatterton did this, as Wychwood comes to learn, is that he was himself tired of the forgeries that made him a failure (the medieval Rowley poems); it was time for Chatterton to take up other kinds of forgery, in a different genre. Ackroyd thus begins to plot one of his central concerns, that individuals die (and come to life) as they cross genres, as they become, not so much transsexuals, as transgenristes. And of course as the history of fakery (including the idea that historical writing is a kind of fake) becomes rampant. This picture of Chatterton is a mystery but then, so Ackroyd suggests, is all historical representation. History is a loving fake, and the historian is no longer the loyal servant of empirical evaluation, but just another faker.

Much of Chatterton, as with Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, is littered with stories of plagiarism, of fake taking fake to re-fake it; of coincidence; of cross-dressing; of the possible saving of beautiful dead boys. Ackroyd makes brilliant use of the fact (and it’s important that it is a fact) that the person who sat for Henry Wallis’s Tate Gallery picture ‘The Death of Chatterton’ was the novelist George Meredith. So, the historical idea of the dying youth that many of us may feel we know is in fact an idea passed on to us that we haven’t examined, because we haven’t understood history’s twists, history’s fakes. Ackroyd mixes his account with rich and strange tones—part Dickensian, part Eliot—to produce a drunken world of accident and accidental readings. Some of these confusions seem powerful and make connections. Others, such as the brain tumour that hits Charles, seem cruel (and implausible) additions to the heated plot.

Charles Wychwood has a friend, Philip Slack, who plays an important part in the story because he is concerned with the history of Chatterton and with George Meredith’s concerns with Chatterton but does not share in the resurrection of Chatterton that comes at the end of Ackroyd’s novel. He is, as it were, the dull historian, someone who may find his own voice one day, outside the world of Charles and the world of the living dead. The trouble is, Ackroyd himself is so intensely caught up in the baroque world of representation and misrepresentation that it is hard to take Philip as a serious character: he is the dutiful heterosexual in the twilight world of exotic homosexualism that is Ackroyd’s main theme.

Chatterton is a bold novel in so far as it commits itself to the aesthetic belief in the limitless power of imagination, of the inevitable presence of fake in historical recapture, and the undeniable powers that its creator possessed: powers to see history as full of echoes, of sinister footfalls, as packed with the dead who yet live on. And yet, as many readers of History Today might have reason to feel, it won’t altogether do. It won’t do because as soon as the possibility arises that there was a real Thomas Chatterton, whose life was devotedly studied by an army of historical scholars (Meyerstein et al,) then the status of Ackroyd’s inventiveness begins to pall. In that moment of doubt, the ordinary historian comes to feel that Chatterton is ill-served by being metamorphosed into some character close to Peter Ackroyd.

If this seems harsh, Ackroyd’s novel appears at a time when the founding father of aesthetic modernism, Oscar Wilde, receives his biography: Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde. This superb book, worthy of the biographer’s earlier life of James Joyce, can of course be seen as operating in a different genre—that of what might be called straight biography. Wilde, as seen by Ellmann, makes history into a pose, a kind of lie, in order that this lie be exposed. He is the reverse of the novelist as aesthete: he is the historian manqué, the dandy who invents an artificial series of poses in order that they be overthrown by social criticism, even social action. At the end of Chatterton, there is a scene that has this quality, which delivers someone called ‘Chatterton’ into immortality. But how different, and to the historian how infinitely more mysterious, will be the way that Ellmann secures this grandeur for Oscar Wilde whose life he sees without the refusal of historical realities that both makes, and breaks, Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton.