[In the following excerpt, Taylor draws a distinction between the documents Chatterton created to establish the medieval world in which the fictional Rowley supposedly lived and the pieces that the ancient poet was purported to have written; further, Taylor argues that Chatterton should not be regarded as a forger because he himself believed in validity of the world that he created.]

In autumn 1768, after the four-and-one-half-year gap in the evidence, we are faced with documents indicating that the Rowley experiment is in full career. The literary works will be the subject of the next chapter, but those works presuppose a larger idea—Chatterton's imagined world of ancient Bristol—an idea not in itself literature and never fully recorded. That imagined world and the documents written to authenticate it will be the concerns of this chapter. The reality of that world for Chatterton is poignantly shown in a reminiscence of his friend William Smith:

He was always very fond of walking in the fields, and particularly in Redcliffe meadows; and of talking about these manuscripts and reading them there. Come, he would say, you and I will take a walk in the meadow. I have got the cleverest thing for you, that ever was. It is worth half a crown merely to have a sight of it; and to hear me read it to you. When we were arrived at the place proposed, he would produce his parchment; shew it, and read it to me. There was one spot in particular, full in view of the church, in which he always seemed to take a peculiar delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church; and seem as if he were in a kind of extasy [sic] or trance. Then on a sudden and abruptly, he would tell me, that steeple was burnt down by lightning: that was the place where they formerly acted plays. …¹

Our detailed knowledge of the existence, nature, and gradual development of this imagined world must be largely inferential. Other authors have imagined subsuming, engendering ideas of this geographical-historical sort. Even if we take their literary works to be something like interim reports or partial representations, we find the larger ideas difficult to deal with, for they seem to grow and change with each work. Hardy's Wessex, Joyce's Dublin, Faulkner's Mississippi, Sinclair Lewis's Middle West, Blake's England, Georges Simenon's Paris are other countries of the mind. In them, the imagining of physical detail is intense and rich. When such ideas are pronouncedly historical, they seem to stand in many relations to the author's imaginative present—producing it, making it comprehensible, judging it, giving it significance and moment.

The obviously inferential nature of our knowledge of such imagined worlds tends to make us prefer the study of particular works, which seem to lie quite fully before us, available in their entirety. Yet our knowledge of particular works is also largely inferential. Without the active work of our imaginations and the knowledge we so lightly carry, no work can be more than marks on paper, teasing hints of a meaning we know must exist. Our techniques of literary history and criticism, the tools of our imaginations, are inferring tools. To study the larger ideas we must add to these traditional tools of the literary student something akin to that constructive imagination that enables the historian to build lucid pictures of events not now present and not, when they happened, recorded—of such events, say, as the English settlements of Britain—from a diverse body of written, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. In the case of Chatterton the pressure to study the subsuming Rowley idea is particularly strong, since the idea involved, first, inventing a language, second, imagining in detail a physical city through over a millennium of history, and, third, composing authenticating documents. These documents considerably outnumber the Rowleyan literary works.

Here I must pause to explain my own distinction between Rowleyan works and Rowleyan documents. A Rowleyan document is a composition whose major intended effect is the authentication of the Rowley world—either for Chatterton or for some presumed audience—rather than the achieving of literary expression. The literary works have, to be sure, something of this authentication in them, but it is never central. Insofar as the documents contribute to the imaginative structure of the Rowley world and so express Chatterton's feelings about that world, they are also to that extent artistic; but this is not their major intent. They too have their forms, which can be elucidated, but their forms aim at authentication rather than at literary effect. It is the difference between a child's exactly describing an imaginary playmate's clothing and his telling a story about that playmate. Put another way, the works grow from the larger idea, whereas the documents buttress its authenticity.

Since they are not centrally literary, it will not be relevant to this literary history to consider each of the sixty-odd documents. (Since there are documents within documents and groupings of related documents, this number is somewhat arbitrary.) I shall try to suggest their various functions, and I shall treat some of them in detail because of their demonstrable importance to the literary history. They are frequently our best evidence for the idea out of which the works grew, and some of them exist in a kind of shadow ground between literature and imaginary history. In a psychological study they would probably be as important as the literary works, and for those who wish to consider them more fully than the purposes of this study would justify, they are all available.²

The difference between Chatterton's Rowley world and such subsuming geographical-historical ideas in other authors is that Chatterton will have no truck with the convention of the willing suspension of disbelief. Not only the documents, but also the Rowleyan language and the imagined physical Bristol from pre-Roman times through the fifteenth century keep insisting to us, contrary to everything we know, that this city, these men and women actually existed. The traditional explanation—that Chatterton was a forger, a hoaxer given over to an elaborate lie—allows us to dismiss his insistence on actuality but explains nothing. This evasion has the double disadvantage of not advancing our understanding of Chatterton and not corresponding to the evidence. It is about as helpful as saying that cave paintings show a belief in magic. More fruitful ways of thinking about Chatterton's insistence on the authenticity of his imagined world are available to us.

R. G. Collingwood has compared novelists and historians in a way that can illuminate these special problems.

Each aims at making his picture a coherent whole. … Both the novel and the history are self-explanatory, self-justifying, the product of an autonomous or self-authorizing activity; and in both cases this activity is the a priori imagination.

As works of imagination, the historian's work and the novelist's do not differ. Where they do differ is that the historian's picture is meant to be true. The novelist has a single task only: to construct a coherent picture, one that makes sense. The historian has a double task: he has both to do this, and to construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really happened. This further necessity imposes upon him obedience to three rules of method, from which the novelist or artist in general is free.

First, his picture must be localized in space and time. The artist's need not; essentially, things that he imagines are imagined as happening at no place and at no date. … it was a sure instinct that led [Hardy] to replace Oxford by Christminster, Wantage by Alfredston, and Fawley by Marychurch, recoiling against the discord of topographical fact in what should be a purely imaginary world.

Secondly, all history must be consistent with itself. …

Thirdly, and most important, the historian's picture stands in a peculiar relation to something called evidence.³

This instructive comparison begs a question that is relevant to our inquiry. Why did Hardy make it almost incumbent upon us to see Oxford in Christchurch, Wantage in Alfredston, and so on? He would appear to have felt the topographical and historical ties as strengthening in some way the impact of his novels. Still, however, the difference between Hardy's Wessex and Chatterton's Bristol is crucial, for Chatterton took his fictional Rowley world as historically and topographically true, and he meant it to be so taken by others. By creating the evidence and working to make it consistent, he is following in some special way of his own Collingwood's three rules of method. Chatterton must, therefore, be studied both as artist and as some kind of historian. His knowledge of Bristol history and of fifteenth-century English, quite inadequate by modern standards, was very rich by the standards of other Englishmen of his day, even educated Bristolians. It can have taken little more than a dangerous prevalence of imagination to convince him that both that world and its language had historic validity. His letter to Walpole of 14 April 1769 argues quite sincerely, I believe, that what he had imagined was the sort of thing at least that the existing evidence obliged one to believe.

Again, although we know the Rowley world to be unhistoric, it is, for another reason, quite unproductive to study it as in essence a hoax. Though Chatterton deceived many, deception was not his ultimate goal, and the sort of knowledge we wish to gain about him argues for our studying him as artist rather than as forger. Take, for example, the central figure in his imagined world—Thomas Rowley, his author. Would it not be as delicate a task to draw a precise line of demarcation between Chatterton's Rowley and Sterne's Tristram as between Sterne's Tristram and the narrator of The History of Tom Jones? We would not willingly limit ourselves to studying either Tristram or the narrating “Fielding” as exercises in deception. With Chatterton, as with Fielding and Sterne, we must address ourselves to the function of the imagined narrator, to the quality of the imagined world, and to the special language with which he brings that world to life in our minds. Yet we must also remember that, presumably unlike Fielding and Sterne, Chatterton was quite unwilling to view his imagined author as a fiction.

He went about authenticating his Rowley world in three major ways—inventing its special language, imagining the ancient physical city, and writing the Rowleyan documents. All three ways share a common factor—density of imagining, something akin to what literary criticism calls verisimilitude. When we wish to persuade ourselves of the reality of imagined worlds, of fantasies, or dreams, we thicken the imagining, persuading ourselves, as it were, by sheer weight of detail. The Rowleyan language is perhaps the most striking instance of this authenticating density. It is also, in a strange way, the most authentic aspect of the world. Chatterton invented a special language of approximately 1800 words. Contrary to what has been hitherto assumed, this vocabulary is never, apparently, free fantasy. It is thoroughly true to what Chatterton knew of pre-eighteenth-century English, being collected entirely from what were to him authentic sources. The glossary in Works cites probable or possible sources for all but fifteen of these 1800 words, which suggests that sources will eventually be found for all. The language, then, was as authentic as Chatterton's detailed, though unsophisticated researches could make it.

Chatterton took the essence of fifteenth-century spelling, syntax, and word forms to be lawlessness. All of his language sources taken together as being equally “old” English—the dictionaries, the glossaries, Gibson's Camden, Leland, Percy, and the others (see Works, II, 1178-1179)—would certainly convey such an impression to any imaginative person not expert in language study. Consequently he can expand his basic 1800-word vocabulary simply by embodying this lawlessness in the spelling and inflections of words from standard eighteenth-century English. His proficiency with this invented language grew steadily and rapidly throughout the Rowley year; to see this one need only compare “Bristowe Tragedie” with any of the later Rowley poems—say the Eclogues. The invented language grows, then, with the imagined world.

A second sort of authentication by density will be found in the Rowleyan drawings. All are boyish in their lack of skill and, frequently, in their ferocious intensity of detail. There are nearly three hundred of them extant (depending again on what one counts as a distinct drawing); eighty of them are printed in Works. The subjects suggest important aspects of the Rowley world. Nearly half are heraldic; the rest are drawings of objects from that world—coins, inscriptions, ruins, churches, gates, windows, statues—historian's objects we might call them. Five are maps of Bristol, Redcliff, and Bristol Castle and environs. It would be my guess that in these drawings and maps something analogous to the development of the Rowleyan language took place. Architectural and monumental Bristol—Redcliff Church and Canynge's tomb therein, to begin with—were as much catalysts and sources for the Rowley world as were old books and dictionaries. I would assume that something in a building, an exposed wall or foundation, the lay of a particular piece of land suggested to Chatterton most of his architectural fantasies. We know that he copied coins, statues, inscriptions from the engraved plates in his antiquarian sourcebooks. His drawings of Bristol Castle are particularly rich and detailed, and there were enigmatic and tantalizing fragments of that fabric still to be seen in his day. The map on page 62 is particularly eloquent: hardly a street of Redcliff fails to receive its heavy quota of buildings and monuments, each eloquent physical testimony to a glorious, actual past.

The more important Rowley documents will be taken up in the next section in their order of composition so as to give some notion of the gradual development of the Rowley world. Here, however, I should like to survey briefly the kinds of documents Chatterton composed—another instance of authenticating by density of imagining. A smaller group of documents can be called for convenience of classification “primary,” since they purport to be remains rather than discussion and interpretation by Rowley and others (the “secondary” documents). There are four letters from Rowley, fifteen (nearly all of them dated) from his patron Canynge, as well as brief extracts from others. These letters show the shared interests of Canynge and Rowley at different stages of their lives—first youthful high jinks and women; then politics, architecture, art, literature, and history; and finally religion and snug retreat from the world. They also surround some of Rowley's major literary works with documentation of the occasions for writing and of the reception given them.⁴ The other “primary” documents are an inscription on the cover of a mass book, a fragment of a sermon by Rowley on the Holy Spirit in which he quotes from Latin and Greek fathers, nine legal documents (wills clearing Canynge from the Bristol legend that he was tightfisted with his sons, deeds of endowment of ancient chapels, proclamations by Canynge and Rowley in their roles as judicious, patient preservers of orthodoxy and public order), and an itemized bill to Canynge for various paintings and heraldic decorations he had ordered.⁵

The “secondary” documents are an even more varied assortment. There are two very lengthy genealogies; two long lists of artists, one with heraldic notes; historical sketches of English coining, painting, and Christmas games; and two catalogues raisonnés of Canynge's collections of antiquities.⁶ There are lengthy historical-topographical-architectural treatises on Bristol, Redcliff, and St. Bartholomew's Priory.⁷ There are forty-odd (depending again on how such things are counted) historical notes of various length, mostly by Rowley, on coins, inscriptions, buildings, ancient Bristolians, monuments, churches, and heraldry.⁸ There are lists of Bristol and Redcliff officials starting in Norman times, two chronicles, and two biographical sketches.⁹ Nearly all seem to borrow their forms from historical and antiquarian writers closely familiar to Chatterton. Each piece has its distinct purpose, but taken together the Rowleyan documents work richly toward the authentication of the imaginary world, the idea that engendered the poetry. Once again we are turned, I feel, toward Collingwood's comparison of the novelist and the historian.

Notes

1. Jacob Bryant, Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley (London, 1781), p. 350, as quoted in E. W. H. Meyerstein, Life of Thomas Chatterton (New York and London, 1930), p. 164.

2. In E. W. H. Meyerstein, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton: A Bicentenary Edition (Oxford, 1971), usually with suggestions about literary, biographical or psychological significance.

3. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, 1956), pp. 245-246.

4. “Four Letters on Warwyke,” “Abstracts from Letters,” “Three Rowley Letters,” “Lyfe of W: Canynge.”

5. “Mass Book Inscription,” “Fragment of a Sermon,” “Nine Deeds and Proclamations,” “Painter's Bill to Canynge.”

6. “Extracts from Craishes Herauldry,” “Account of the Family of the De Berghams”; “Rowley's Heraldic Account,” “Historie of Peyncters yn Englande”; “Of the Auntiaunt Forme of Monies,” “The Ryse of Peyncteynge,” “The Antiquity of Christmas Games”; “Englandes Glorye Revyved,” “Explayneals of the Yellowe Rolle.”

7. “A Discourse on Brystowe,” the third of “Three Rowley Letters,” “The Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie.”

8. “Rowley's Printing Press,” “Towre Gate,” “Hardinge,” “Rowley's Collections for Canynge,” “Bristol Castle,” “Seyncte Maries Chyrche of the Porte,” “Knightes Templaries Chyrche,” “The Chyrche Oratorie of the Calendaryes,” “Three Tombs,” “Note to Map of Bristol,” “Saxon Tinctures,” “Elle's Coffin,” “Churches of Bristol,” “Fragments of Anticquitie,” “The Court-Mantle,” “Saxon Achievements,” “Anecdote of Chaucer.”

9. Appendix to third of “Three Rowley Letters”; chronicle in third of “Three Rowley Letters,” “Chronical 1340-1374”; “Byrtonne,” “Lyfe of W: Canynge.”