restless. He chafed at Lambert’s office. He flung out extended satires with titles like ‘The Whore of Babylon’ and shocked many Bristol worthies by his bitter and scurrilous attacks. He took to producing execrable love-poetry, elephantine in its sub-Miltonic ornament, for his friends – his cap acquaintances – to give to their current amours. One can imagine how choicely it amused him. Possibly he had an affair himself. There was a certain Miss Ramsey. But time seemed to be running out. In the late summer of 1769, two of his intimates died. The first was Thomas Phillips, the extent of whose contribution and support we shall never know. Chatterton wrote a long elegy to him, but the pain was too close, and for the most part it is numb. There is one place, however, where a moment of intense atmospheric and visual sharpness breaks through, presaging Chatterton’s final achievement in the amazing ‘African Eclogues’ he was to write in the last weeks in London. The passage describes the shuffling figure of Winter who carries the frozen landscape about his shoulders like a cloak; perhaps also it describes a final vision of Phillips; or even of that other, inward Thomas, Thomas Rowley who was so blasted by the chill reception of a modern and indifferent Bristol:
Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew; His eyes, a dusky light congeal’d and dead, His robe, a tinge of bright etherial blue.
His train a motley’d sanguine sable cloud,
He limps along the russet dreary moor, Whilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen and loud, Roll the white surges to the sounding shore.
The other friend was Peter Smith. He committed suicide.
Chatterton sat out the winter of 1769–70. Now he was seventeen. In April he made his bid for London, propelled by a moment of crisis which seems to have been partly stage-managed and partly genuine. As ever, the ambivalent mixture. ‘Between 11 and 2 o’clock’ on the evening of Saturday April the 14th, ‘in the utmost distress of mind’ Chatterton dashed off his ‘Will’ containing both verse and prose, with the clear indication that he intended to commit suicide: ‘If after my death which will happen tomorrow night before eight o’clock, being the Feast of the Resurrection, the Coroner and Jury bring it in Lunacy, I will and direct that Paul Farr Esq and Mr John Flower, at their joint expense, cause my body to be interred in the Tomb of my Father’s …’ This document was discovered by John Lambert on his clerk’s desk, and Chatterton was hastily hunted out, appeased, and released from his articles with the attorney, thus freeing him from all obligations in Bristol. Neither Lambert nor anyone else appears to have picked up the element of angry satire and pure youthful outrage which so clearly motivated Chatterton’s writing: ‘This is the last Will and Testament of me Thomas Chatterton, of the city of Bristol; being sound in body, or it is the fault of my last Surgeon; the soundness of my mind, the Coroner and Jury are to be judges of, desiring them to take notice, that the most perfect Masters of Human Nature in Bristol distinguish me by the title of the Mad Genius; therefore, if I do a mad action, it is conformable to every action of my life, which savour’d of insanity.’ Chatterton unfurls the idea of insanity like a battle flag: he shakes it under the nose of his elders, slyly mocking their own provincial limitations, their own humdrum eighteenth-century commercial notions of ‘Human Nature’. One recognizes a quality of icily controlled desperation. ‘Insanity’ was also his flag of freedom. Released from Lambert’s drudgery, his copy of ‘Æella’ sold to the obliging Catcott for a few paltry guineas, leave taken of his many cap acquaintances and firm promises of success made to his mother and sister, Chatterton caught the Bristol stage and journeyed up to the capital in a snow-storm.
The last four months of Chatterton’s life, those spent in London between the end of April and the end of August 1770, are the most closely documented of all, with some dozen extant letters of his to Bristol, and the material accumulated by Herbert Croft and published in Love and Madness (1780), from interviews with Chatterton’s landladies and fellow lodgers. The many essays and quirky ‘character’ tales which he contributed at this time to London journals also throw a vivid though oblique light on his changing fortunes. His two extraordinary ‘African Eclogues’, with their unique sense of tropical sweltering claustrophobia and almost hallucinogenic visions of tribal violence, are dated in May and June. And the last and greatest Rowley poem, ‘The Excelente Balade of Charitie’, belongs with certainty to the very end. The picture forms a coherent dramatic whole, though with a number of poignant and tragic omissions. It is the eye of the myth inherited, and then misinterpreted, by the Romantics.
The remaining chronology is simple. Chatterton first stays near relations in Shoreditch (the helpful Mrs Ballance); later, in June, he moves to seedier lodgings in Brooke Street, Holborn. He sells a Burletta to the Marylebone Gardens for five guineas, but it is not performed. He catches a ‘cold’, then apparently gets better. He writes songs, more journalism, works all night but earns nothing. His landlady offers him meals. He writes to Barrett that he wants to become a ship’s surgeon. He has conversations with Mr Cross, the corner chemist. He appears hungry; people see him less frequently. On the 25th of August 1770 his door is broken open and, in the words of the Coroner, he is found ‘to have swallowed arsenic in water, on the 24th of August, and died in consequence thereof, the next day’. Barrett’s account is as follows: ‘He took a large dose of opium, some of which was picked out from between his teeth after death, and he was found the next morning, a most horrid spectacle, with limbs and features distorted as after convulsions, a frightful and ghastly corpse. Such was the horrible catastrophe of T. Chatterton, the producer of Rowley and his poems to the world.’ At the end he even confused the surgeons.
3 ‘The Muses have no Credit here’
Yet that was nothing as compared with the confusion of the London literati. The first of ‘Rowley’s Poems’ appeared in an anonymous pirated edition of 1772, price half-a-crown; and five years later in 1777 the first major and authoritative collection appeared with over 300 pages of poems and a scholarly Introduction by Mr Tyrwhitt: ‘Poems, Supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley’. Thereafter a steady flow of new editions, new Commentaries, new Appendices and Remarks and Observations set up something like a Chatterton Industry. (He even became voguish – ‘Chatterton handkerchiefs’ were sold in the street as ladies’ favours.) The confusion arose initially because the literary detection and polemics on the ‘Rowley or Chatterton’ issue rapidly became the prime aspect of the Chatterton affair. Very few writers attempted to make any estimate of the value of the poems themselves; almost no one considered the impact of Chatterton’s mixture of Gothic and simplistic styles and material on the hard, intricate, neo-classic sheen of contemporary verse; and no one at all realized the immense symbolic potential such a prodigy-poet, such a miracle of youth and ‘inspiration’ and inward, hidden creativity, would give to the later poets and theorists of the Romantic revolution. They were limited to their urbane and London-centred concepts of poetry, and they did not see what had happened. They did not see that already in Chatterton the eighteenth-century ‘cool’ intellect had been disestablished in favour of remote landscapes and distant provincial tones – the West Country, and shortly Cumberland, the Lowlands of Scotland, Northamptonshire (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns, Clare), and ultimately Italy and Greece (Keats, Shelley, Byron, Landor, Browning). This was later to be summed up in the feeling that went about among the poets that London, which had received and nourished Dryden, Pope and Johnson, had rejected and murdered Chatterton. London had turned her face away. The poets never really trusted London again until the 1890s, when gangling and fragile men like Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson began to woo her once more in an effete but insistent manner, telling her that she was as beautiful and mysterious as Paris after all, and drinking themselves stupid in her dingier bars.
The greatest critics of the time were deeply perplexed. Chatterton had broken the rules. He was too young. He was dishonest. He was a provincial. Worst of all, he was ‘uneducated’, lower class, a charity-school boy and an attorney’s clerk. The matter was impossible. In their judgements of his work, they found they were having to take into account both his circumstances and his youth, and this galled
