SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Rowley Poems by Thomas Chatterton, Woodstock Books, 1990, n.p.

[In the following essay, the anonymous critic contends that Chatterton's popularity with later writers such as John Keats and William Wordsworth had more to do with the romance surrounding Chatterton's youth, his suicide, and his forged poetry than with the specific quality of his literary output.]

In September 1819, two days after composing To autumn—‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’—Keats remarks in a letter, ‘I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn’. To which he adds, apparently without connection:

He is the purest writer in the English Language. He has no French idiom, or particles like Chaucer—’tis English Idiom in English Words. I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it … English ought to be kept up.

The previous autumn Keats had spent nursing his dying younger brother, Tom. That he should ‘somehow associate’ the season with early death is not surprising, and Chatterton had taken arsenic at the age of seventeen. Chatterton, for Keats's generation, had the aura of myth that Keats himself was later to achieve, standing for promise, talent, genius, cut off before its time. One thing that he did not commonly stand for was purity of language. His poetry was after all a fake, allegedly ‘wroten bie the gode Prieste Thomas Rowley, 1464’.

It may be that Wordsworth would have understood Keats's train of thought. Worried by Coleridge's dejection and addiction, he had written in The leech gatherer of ‘fear that kills … And mighty poets in their misery dead’:

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul who perished in his pride,
Of him who walked in glory and in joy
Behind his plough upon the mountain-side …

That Wordsworth was indeed thinking about Chatterton is confirmed by his use of the archaic spenserian stanza of An excellent balade of charitie. Behind The leech gatherer lies Coleridge's Monody on the death of Chatterton (printed in this edition for the first time), where he too had brooded on the fates of earlier poets. As modern representatives, Chatterton and Burns are linked in Wordsworth's mind, partly because they both died young (Burns, not very), partly by primitivist assumptions about language, such as Keats is tacitly making. Though one wrote in Scots, the other in a bogus medieval English, they are united as working-class writers whose language expressed the feelings of the heart, and seemed a guarantee of Wordsworth's own position.

Apart from Wallace's dramatic painting of his suicide, The leech gatherer has proved the most lasting contribution to Chatterton's myth. The myth had been building, however, since 1770, the year of Wordsworth's birth. As with Macpherson's spurious ‘translations’ of Ossian, controversy had played a big part. Readers were intrigued to know whether the Balade and other poems did indeed belong to the fifteenth century. Could a Bristol charity-school boy, with no scholarly training, really have forged them? The fraud had been exposed by Tyrwhitt as early as 1777, in Poems supposed to have been written by Thomas Rowley; but Sharpe, in his Preface to the 1794 volume, has no wish to close off the discussion. As editor, his ‘sole design’

is to furnish the public with a neat Edition of these Poems, which, whether the Author of them may have been rowley, or chatterton, or some third person, (as has been ridiculously supposed) fully entitle him to be ranked in the fourth place among our British Poets.

Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Chatterton—there were some (as Hazlitt complains in his lecture of 1818) who went still further and talked as if Chatterton was the greatest genius since Shakespeare. Hazlitt is at his most incisive:

He did not show extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves.

It was scarcely charitable, but brings the discussion down to earth:

As to those who are really capable of admiring Chatterton's genius, or of feeling an interest in his fate, I would only say, that I never heard any one speak of any one of his works as if it were an old well-known favourite, and had become a faith and a religion in his mind. It is his name, his youth, and what he might have lived to have done, that excite our wonder and admiration.

‘I was very disappointed by his treatment of Chatterton’, was the comment of Keats, after the lecture; but to a large extent Hazlitt must be right. Even Wordsworth, whose admiration is genuine, is forced to emphasize Chatterton's precocity, and sounds a little general in his praise. ‘I asked Wordsworth this evening’, Crabb Robinson writes in 1842,

wherein Chatterton's excellence lay. He said his genius was universal; he excelled in every species of composition, so remarkable an instance of precocious talent being quite unexampled. His prose is excellent, and his powers of picturesque description and satire great.

Interestingly, Coleridge's view was that Chatterton's poems had never been popular. ‘The very circumstance’, he writes in 1797 (only three years after publishing the Monody), ‘which made them so much talked of—their ancientness—prevented them from being generally read’.

Chatterton's spelling is certainly a problem. Many are daunted by the Scottish poetry of Burns, and almost no one can now hear the Dorset cadences of Barnes and Hardy, the Lincolnshire of Tennyson. What looks difficult, or different, isn't read. But Chatterton is not dialect. He knows some middle English, and enjoys inventing more (‘slughorne’, for instance, famously picked up by Browning in Childe Roland), but, as Hazlitt astutely points out, the secret of his ‘imposture’ lies ‘in the repetition of a few obsolete words, and the mis-spelling of common ones’:

the whole controversy might have been settled … from this single circumstance, that the poems read as smooth as any modern poems, if you read them as modern compositions; and that you cannot read them, or make verse of them at all, if you pronounce or accent the words as they were spoken at the time when the poems were pretended to have been written.

We no more have to be frightened by Chatterton's ancientness than we are by that of The ancyent marinere (1798). His rhythms are strong and fluent, and as he carries us along we can enjoy the game that he is playing. The dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin (recollected by Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is an excellent example:

Howe oft ynne battaile have I stoode,
Whan thousands dy'd arounde;
Whan smokynge streemes of crimson bloode
Imbrew'd the fatten'd grounde:
Howe dydd I knowe thatt ev'ry darte,
That cutte the airie waie,
Myghte nott fynde passage toe my harte,
And close myne eyes for aie?

Equally accomplished, and equally accessible, is the Shakespearean Mynstrelles Songe from Aella:

See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie;
Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude;
Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie,
Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude;
Mie love ys dedde,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde,
Al under the wyllowe tree.

As Keats so memorably said, ‘Tis English Idiom in English Words.’

Chatterton seems to have had a collection of medieval documents, filched by his sexton father from a coffer in St Mary Redcliffe. His spellings (like Dickens's spellings of working-class speech) are there to create an atmosphere, without causing actual difficulty to the reader. Many are in fact perfectly possible in a fifteenth-century scribe. As well as being a distinguished poet and forger, Chatterton was obviously a fascinated linguist. Glossing his improbable coinage, ‘glommed’, he writes in a footnote to the Balade:

Clouded, dejected. A person of some note in the literary world is of opinion, that glum and glom are modern cant words; and from this circumstance doubts the authenticity of Rowley's Manuscripts. Glum-mong in the Saxon signifies twilight, a dark or dubious light; and the modern gloomy is derived from the Saxon glum.

It may not prove the authenticity of Rowley's manuscripts, but Chatterton's etymology is largely correct. Like Keats, he believed that ‘English ought to be kept up’.