24 August: Boreham on Thomas Chatterton

A Meteoric Minstrel
Does the history of any nation contain a more amazing story than that of the boy who, after carving a place in our annals from which he can never be removed, perished at his own hand at the age of 17. Such a prodigy was Thomas Chatterton, the anniversary of whose tragic death recurs today. His father, a pedantic but drunken little schoolmaster, with a passion for antiquity, was so enamoured of bygone ages that he thought his own beneath his notice and passed out of life before his son came into it. It therefore fell to the lot of the mother to rear and educate the future poet, and, by applying herself sometimes to teaching and sometimes to dressmaking, the good woman seems to have discharged her onerous duty remarkably well, succeeding eventually in securing his admission to Colston's School, a charity establishment at Bristol.

For nearly 200 years his ancestors were sextons of the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and some of the hypochondriacal vapours that enveloped the church-yard appear to have clung to him from infancy. He loved nothing better than to lie in the long grass among the tombs surveying in a kind of ecstasy the stately proportions of the sacred edifice. This suggested his first fantastic literary venture. He imagined himself a monk of the Fifteenth Century, Thomas Rowley by name, and littered his room with such poems as a friar of that remote period might have written. Pleased with these effusions, he had the effrontery to send them to Horace Walpole, assuring the great man that they were copies of hoary manuscripts that he had accidentally discovered in the muniment chest of St. Mary Redcliffe.

The Fatal Lure Of The Lights Of London
He practised other clever frauds, equally audacious. It is easy to smile now at these literary pranks, but when it is remembered that the contents of these documents were pure inventions, that their style was so true to Fifteenth Century models that some of the most erudite of academicians were hoodwinked, it will be recognised that the work revealed a familiarity with antiquity and a daring of imagination seldom, if ever, found in one so young. The boy decided to put his genius to the test. He would go to London and be either crowned or crucified! He went, and his tireless industry was matched only by his astounding versatility. Wherever there was a demand, he endeavoured to meet it. He wrote colourful descriptions of current events, political squibs and pamphlets, venomous satires on public personages, screaming farces and ludicrous burlesques, epics, songs and elegies, and the masterpieces that have made his name immortal. In a word, he turned his hand to every species of literary composition and, generally speaking, he did everything well.

But it was a life for which he was neither physically nor emotionally fitted. He needed somebody to care for him. He had no regular meals; indeed, he went for days with scarcely any food at all. If he had work to do, it did not occur to him that his system needed sleep. Never robust, he dissipated his energies in a feverish cycle of ceaseless activity, with the result that he swiftly reached the end of his tether. His brain staggered, his nerves were shattered, his entire frame was exhausted. He fell into a mood of chronic despondency. In a frenzy of desperation he sought a position as surgeon on a ship—a post for which he was totally unqualified—and, failing to obtain it, perpetrated by means of poison, the tragedy that the world has never ceased to deplore.

A Child In Years But A Sage In Wisdom
On the morning of August 25, 1770, his body was discovered in his garret, a verdict of felo-de-se was returned and, in a parish shell, his remains were ignominiously interred in the burying-ground of Shoe Lane workhouse. Did they remain there? Nobody knows. His mother used to whisper to her friends that the body was afterwards exhumed, smuggled in a waggon to St. Mary Redcliffe and secretly buried at dead of night at the spot on which, as a child, he loved to sprawl, the spot on which his monument now stands. That monument bears the epitaph he himself composed: "To the memory of Thomas Chatterton. Reader, judge not! If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a Supreme Power! To that Power only is he now answerable!"

To scan the poems of Chatterton is to be bewildered by their variety and dazzled by their brilliance. As Prof. Masson has said, Chatterton was not only a true English poet but, with all his immaturity, he was solitary among our most notable singers in the possession of the loftiest poetic gift. "He had," Prof. Masson adds, "a specific fire and force of imagination lacking in Pope, Thompson, and Goldsmith. With Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats we look on his brief existence with a kind of awe, as on the track of a heaven-shot meteor hurtling earthwards through a night of gloom." The magnitude of his tragedy, Mr. J. W. Cousin points out, is only realised when it is considered, not only that the work he left is of a high order of originality and inspiration, but that it was produced at an age at which our greatest poets, had they died, would have remained unknown. So there stands Chatterton! In some respects the most pathetic figure in our literary pantheon, he must, for all time, occupy in those galleries a niche peculiarly and distinctively his own.

F W Boreham

Image: Young Thomas Chatterton