wonderful but also sinister gestation. It was written in 1763 when he was eleven. It is not a so-called Rowley poem, but his first excursion into the snappy, efficient, satirical style currently fashionable: all couplets and nudges. From the start, Chatterton could turn this out effortlessly. The poem is called ‘Sly Dick’. It purports to tell of someone who receives a visitation from the Devil during the night, which informs him how he may make his fortune – dishonestly of course. How conscious Chatterton was of the underlying drama of this little piece of doggerel – particularly in its terms of night-visitation, temptation, hidden location of fortune, and secretive manner of exploitation – the reader may judge for himself.
Sharp was the frost, the wind was high
And sparkling Stars bedeckt the Sky, Sly Dick in arts of cunning skill’d, Whose Rapine all his pockets fill’d, Had laid him down to take his rest And soothe with sleep his anxious breast. ‘Twas thus a dark infernal sprite A native of the blackest Night, Portending mischief to devise Upon Sly Dick he cast his eyes; Then strait descends the infernal sprite, And in his chamber does alight: In vision he before him stands, And his attention he commands.
Thus spake the sprite – Hearken my friend,
And to my counsels now attend. Within the Garret’s spacious dome There lies a well stor’d wealthy room. Well stor’d with cloth and stockings too, Which I suppose will do for you …
When in the morn with thoughts erect
Sly Dick did on his dream reflect,
Why faith, thinks he, ‘tis something too,
It might – perhaps – it might – be true I’ll go and see – away he hies, And to the Garret quick he flies, Enters the room, cuts up the clothes And after that reeves up the hose: Then of the cloth he purses made, Purses to hold his filching trade.
The true identity of the ‘Garret’s spacious dome’, and the store of cloth which he ‘cuts up’ to make his fortune, flash up at one instantly. They are of course the Muniment Room and the ancient papers within it. Without leaning on this little piece too much, it seems likely that the eleven-year-old Chatterton at some level or other was powerfully aware of the peculiar forces now gathering in and around him ready for his disposal. They had not yet taken the shape of Rowley. But already he was deeply divided as to whether it would be for the best or for the worst. His second early poem, ‘Apostate Will’, about a Methodist preacher who turns High Anglican when a convenient place is offered, contains a similar sense of a ‘filching trade’, and also that characteristic feeling of ambivalent identity which is so marked in Chatterton and the nature of his creative gift. (Both poems also have strong elements of childish plagiarism, relating to fables by John Gay.)
Strictly speaking, this is to anticipate. The first piece of ‘medieval’ writing was not actually made public by Chatterton until he was fifteen and had left school; and then, in answer to inquiries, he was to say – defending his ‘originals’ from first to last – that he had only recently discovered such great treasures in his mother’s house. But it seems unquestionable that Rowley and the world of Rowley’s fifteenth-century Bristol had been maturing long and steadily in Chatterton’s mind and imagination. Colston Hall, built on the site of the medieval Priory of St Augustine’s Back, was always remembered favourably by him in this connection. In his ‘Will’ he adopts the satiric medieval practice, used notably by François Villon, of bequeathing his better qualities (such as Modesty) to the various public figures who are most in need of them. His ‘disinterestedness’ is bequeathed as follows, in a wry passage which connects Rowley and Colston Hall: ‘Item … To Bristol all my spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on her quay since the days of Canning and Rowley! ‘Tis true a charitable Gentleman, one Mr Colston, smuggled a considerable quantity of it, but it being proved that he was Papist, the Worshipful Society of Aldermen endeavoured to throttle him with the Oath of Allegiance.’ Chatterton rarely had anything good to say for a modern institution of Bristol, and when he does, it is remarkable.
Colston served him in two ways. First by providing an embryo group of friends, or at least acquaintances, in whom he could begin to satisfy his need for notice and applause. And second, in failing to weigh his mind down with any academic material of the depressing kind which such establishments are formally designed to provide, but rather allowing him freedom to pursue his own private and increasingly idiosyncratic reading and research. His sister, Mrs Newton: ‘About his tenth year he began (with the trifle my mother allowed him for pocket-money) to hire books from the circulating library … Between his eleventh and twelfth year, he wrote a catalogue of the books he had read, to the number of seventy: History and Divinity were the chief subjects. At twelve he was confirmed by the Bishop … Soon after this, in the week he was door-keeper (at Colston), he made some verses on the last day, I think about eighteen lines; paraphrased the ninth chapter of Job; and not long after, some chapters in Isaiah. He had been gloomy from the time he began to learn, but we remarked he was more cheerful after he began to write poetry. Some satirical pieces we saw soon after.’ Now he was started.
Chatterton left Colston some time in the winter of 1766, or the spring of 1767; at any rate when he had turned fourteen. Before that time had come, a number of events occurred whose significance was great but indirect. He formed a close friendship with a boy somewhat older than himself, Thomas Phillips. The relationship was to be tragically short, but Phillips was one of those invaluable personalities, a catalyst. A school-friend gave this typically portentous picture: ‘The poetical attempts of Phillips had excited a kind of literary emulation amongst the elder classes of the scholars; the love of fame animated their bosoms, and a variety of competitors appeared to dispute the laurel with him.’ This helped; it was the first materialization of Chatterton’s company of poets. Related to it, the death of the brilliant contemporary satirist, Charles Churchill, who had gone to visit Wilkes (exiled in Boulogne on account of the notorious No. 45 of the North Briton), served to give the young writers both a literary and political martyr. Churchill died in 1764. In the following year there was a notable publishing event, the appearance in three duodecimo volumes of Percy’s celebrated Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. These certainly came into Chatterton’s hands, one of the primary texts of the Romantic revival. So the hidden medieval world was nourished as well.
When Chatterton left Colston, he was extremely lucky to be apprenticed to a Bristol attorney, John Lambert Esq. He took up the job in July 1767. It was a remarkable success for an ex-Colston boy; but in practice it involved mere clerical copying and drudgery, and Chatterton did not find himself occupied fully for more than two or three hours a day. He continued to haunt the circulating libraries; he took to walking certain young ladies on the green; and most important of all, he began to take old St Mary Redcliff papers and parchments with him to work. Friends referred to vague ‘copying’ and ‘transcribing’ processes. He covered many parchment scraps with his own version of medieval script. He became fascinated by architecture and heraldry and the business of family trees. These subjects also fascinated Thomas Rowley. For Rowley now existed.
After such a long gestation, things moved quickly. The main external events were as follows. In July 1768, the old bridge across the river Avon was replaced by a new one, and Chatterton, making his first of many bids for fame, sent a fictitious account of the opening of the original bridge, purporting to have been drawn from a medieval manuscript, to Felix Farley’s Journal. The Journal was the local Bristol magazine and gossip column, and the publication of his contribution soon brought two Bristol littérateurs, George Catcott and William Barrett, snuffling on to the young man’s trail. Catcott and Barrett are two wholly comic figures, part fools and part villains, who stumble through this period of Chatterton’s career as if Laurel and Hardy had tried to organize the Fourth Act of Hamlet. For the next eighteen months they pose as Chatterton’s patrons, lending him books and showing him off to their friends at numerous little soirées, while encouraging him to bring forth a stream of letters, ballads, elegies and dramatic poetry, all also purporting to be medieval: notably the work of
