the date of his first poetical attempt, until the final period of his departure from Bristol, he never wrote any piece, however trifling in its nature, and even unworthy of himself, but he first committed it to every acquaintance he met, indiscriminately, as wishing to derive applause from productions which I am assured, were he now living, he would be heartily ashamed of …’ (Letter from Mr Thistlethwaite to Dr Milles). There is a good deal of personal sourness and pique in this statement, and as to Chatterton communicating all his poems it is simply incorrect. But as a description of Chatterton’s impression on friends and everyday acquaintances, the touchiness, the arrogance, the self-importance, the ‘eagerness of applause even to an extreme’, it has the ring of truth.
Perhaps the most convincing and also the most amusing evidence comes from a distant relative of Chatterton’s, a certain Mrs Ballance, who was lodged in the same house as Chatterton when he first came to London. As a relation, she obviously tried to be neighbourly. She recalled with exasperation, ‘he was as proud as Lucifer. He very soon quarrelled with her for calling him “Cousin Tommy”, and asked her if she had ever heard of a poet’s being called Tommy. But she assured him she knew nothing of poets and only wished he would not set up for a Gentleman.’ Mrs Ballance added a pathetic and very human note: ‘He frequently said he should settle the nation before he had done; but how could she think her poor cousin Tommy was so great a man as she now finds he was? His mother should have written word of his greatness, and then, to be sure, she would have humoured the gentleman accordingly.’
But if Chatterton’s character was manifest from the start, his capabilities were not. The first important moment seems to have been when he began to read. The way any primary skill is first exercised – swimming, riding, reading – often has a decisive effect on its subsequent development. Chatterton began to read only very gradually, and then in a curious and highly significant fashion. Mrs Newton, his sister, again recalled: ‘He was dull in learning, not knowing many letters at four years old, and always objected to read in a small book. He learnt the alphabet from an old Folio music-book of my father’s, my mother was then tearing up for waste paper: the capitals at the beginning of the verses, I assisted in teaching him.’ The importance of this earliest reading material has never been fully realized.
From the very start, literature and the medieval legacy of the St Mary Redcliff papers were identified in Chatterton’s mind. And not only at an intellectual level. For Chatterton’s contact with this special past, so inextricably involved with both his dead father and the earlier inhabitants, writers and artists of St Mary Redcliff, had from the beginning a solid material presence of vellum and parchment scraps which filled the little schoolhouse with their dust and oily odour and resilient crackling touch. They were a vivid familiar presence, totally uninvested with the sacred and scholarly aura which museums, glass cases, and academic pincenez normally impart to such things. The Chatterton family were at times almost literally ankle-deep in the medieval past. We know that the mother quite casually used them for knitting patterns, or for ‘waste paper’ torn up presumably for fires or cleaning; and that many of the schoolhouse books were actually covered by these papers in the form of makeshift dust jackets. It was the large illuminated capitals on some of these sheets which first caught the young Chatterton’s eye. Gothic and medieval scripts were his earliest acquaintance. He read the tomb inscriptions and brasses as another child reads specially edited fairy tales. His first solid piece of reading was the bristling Germanic-Gothic pages of the family’s Black Letter Bible. In short, Chatterton came to literary consciousness in another world. It was Bristol, but it was late-medieval Bristol. It was the Bristol of the men like William Canynges who helped to rebuild and restore St Mary Redcliff, and of the late-medieval scholar-poets whom great men such as Canynges befriended and patronized, acting almost as a father might have done. It was above all (as it turned out), the Bristol of a brilliant poet-monk whose first name was oddly enough the same as Chatterton’s; an admirer of Chaucer, an admirer of St Mary Redcliff, an intimate friend of the fatherly William Canynges, the brilliant star of the whole company of talented poets. This poet-monk’s name was Thomas Rowley. But Thomas Rowley never existed. Only in Thomas Chatterton’s head. From a single inscription on a tomb, Chatterton was to create this man’s life, his letters, his poems, his ballades, his Tragedies, his most intimate concerns with the problems of living and literature. Thomas Rowley was everything that Thomas Chatterton desired to be. And in the most real and most disturbing sense, Thomas Rowley was Thomas Chatterton.
At the age of seventeen, just before he left Bristol for London, Chatterton was to write one of his most outlandish and ambivalent documents, a Will. In it, he addressed his stupid and ungenerous patrons of reality, and to one of them wrote this:
Thy friendship never could be dear to me;
Since all I am is opposite to thee. If ever obligated to thy purse Rowley discharges all; my first chief curse! For had I never known the antique lore I ne’er had ventur’d from my peaceful shore, To be the wreck of promises and hopes, A Boy of Learning, and a Bard of Tropes; But happy in my humble sphere had mov’d Untroubled, unsuspected, unbelov’d.
Of course, it asserts nothing except Rowley’s primary importance and responsibility. The whole piece is shot through with a bitter ironic flare characteristic of Chatterton. Those last three epithets are much more curious than they seem at first sight; and the idea that Chatterton would ever conceivably have been ‘happy in his humble sphere’ is laughable. Chatterton must have laughed as he wrote it. But if so, the laughter must have sounded harsh.
The creation of Rowley is one of the most extraordinary events in English literature. It is not easily accounted for. A body of scholars stood out against it for some thirty years after Chatterton’s death. Chatterton’s own acquaintances – who invariably and incorrectly thought that they were his intimates, a notable point – were adamant almost to a man. One Mr T. Cary writing in 1776: ‘Not having any taste for ancient poetry, I do not recollect his ever having shewn them to me; but that he often mentioned them, at an age, when (great as his capacity was) I am convinced he was incapable of writing them himself, I am very clear in, and confess it to be astonishing, how any person, knowing these circumstances, can entertain even a shadow of a doubt of their being the works of Rowley.’ (Interestingly, Cary then adds a sentence which reveals in a flash his deep but unconscious sense of the ambiguity of identity in Chatterton: ‘Of this I am very certain, that if they are not Rowley’s, they are not Chatterton’s.’) Even in this present age, when every sixth-former is drilled with Ezra Pound’s idea of the poetic persona and T. S. Eliot’s concept of impersonality and the ‘objective correlative’, the Rowley–Chatterton relationship remains as extraordinary and mysterious as ever. Though W. P. Ker in The Cambridge History of English Literature has a perceptive observation: ‘Nothing in Chatterton’s life is more wonderful than his impersonality; he does not make poetry out of his pains or sorrows, and when he is composing verse, he seems to have escaped from himself.’ That last phrase can be taken more literally than Ker meant.
The crucial fact about the creation of Rowley is that Rowley grew as Chatterton grew. In 1760, when Chatterton was eight, he was sent to board at Colston Hall, a local charity school, and he remained there until he was fifteen. Colston served bad food and bad education. Its curriculum ran to the Three Rs only, with nothing remotely scientific or classical. It is said that owing to the combination of too much free time and too little free space, the pupils usually slept for ten or twelve hours a day, and this generally with two or three of them to a single bed. It makes one speculate on what strange world of half-waking companionship this unusual situation fostered. The single most suggestive fact, however, concerns a tiny detail of the Colston Hall uniform which went unnoticed for almost a century. The Colston Hall charity boys were required to wear a blue gowned overall belted at the waist, and to have their hair cut short and tonsured, like so many little novices in a monastery. The adolescent Chatterton must indeed have felt a curiously vivid and physical identity with his poet-monk Thomas Rowley: a presence as yet unnamed, but nevertheless swiftly growing now from its childhood origins in the Muniment Room with its high slit windows above the North Porch of St Mary Redcliff.
One
