Sexy and Seventeen — and Dead!: Thomas Chatterton and the Thomas Rowley Hoax

As dawn’s weak white light leaked into the attic apartment in Brooke Street, a pale form took shape in the gloom like a figure developing in a photograph. A man, or more accurately, a boy, lay on a trestle bed, splayed to one side, a grimace on his face and dried vomit on his lips. As the light brightened in that particular August way a London sky has, threatening heat, the cheap, threadbare environment of the inhabitant’s life came into focus.

Carts began to creak and wagons rattle on the cobble in the High Holborn as the Saturday world rose, punctuated by cries and greetings. The boy was in full light now, surrounded by a steep-pitched little room made of exposed timber, a small writing table heaped with books and broken quills, a cushionless seat, a rag pile of clothing, and everywhere, small pieces of paper, hundreds, torn to the size of coins, lay over all like a hot, dry snow.

Just shy of his 18th birthday, the poet Thomas Chatterton, satirist and hoax poet, had killed himself with arsenic.

Once safely dead the orgy of adulation could begin, starting with the same hometown Bristol worthies who pimped him during his life and reaching its flower forty years later with the deeply unpleasant quasi-erotic eructations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Rosetti. Short, brutish and unpleasant while lived, Chatterton’s life became exquisite, symbolic and tinged with a sado-masochistic, St. Sebastian quality when it ended.

***

During his short life Chatterton alienated most of those he met. Working people found his pretension to erudition irritating and contemptible. Bristol’s ruling merchant class found his free-thinking objectionable and the upper classes and nobility found his manners execrable. Everyone condemned his arrogance and pushiness, which clashed with his appearance, which was described as round and apple-toned in the face, with curly blond hair and piercing blue eyes carried in a thin, wiry and energetic build. A veritable seraph for the coming iconography.

Bristol of the mid-18th century was a kind of charmless, Protestant Sevilla, the hub of finance, transportation and trading for the far-flung British empire. Here in England’s second largest city in 1752, Chatterton was born, two months after the death of his father, also named Thomas. The elder Thomas served as schoolmaster at St. Mary’s Redcliffe, a moody Gothic pile in whose shadows the family had lived and where ancestors had found centuries of employment as sextons. In his early years young Thomas was a surly and sullen creature, prone to bile and willfulness. His first attempt at schooling ended the day it began with a pronouncement by the head master that poor Tommy was a half-wit.

The story of his eventual embrace of letters is deeply intertwined with his love of antiquities and the beginnings of his relationship with the manufactured identity of his hoax poet.

One day Thomas’s mother was stripping pages out of a large folio music book that had once belonged to his father. She was engaged in the ordinary creation of the apparently extraordinary needlework with which she fed her fatherless family. She used the old manuscript pages for their threads. As she opened the folio, Thomas caught site of a large red illuminated capital at the head of the manuscript and stopped her. His imagination was fired by this meeting of visual beauty and meaning. He became an assiduous collector of such books from around the house until such time as he was able to make sense of the letters themselves.

In addition to his father’s collection of folio books, he was also in possession of a great chest of church documents. For several hundred years after the founding of St. Mary’s Redcliffe by a Bristol merchant named Robert Canning the church documents were kept in a series of chests in the “muniment’s room” of the cathedral. Once a year they were drawn out and shuffled about, added to and generally referenced. By the time of Chatterton’s father, this custom lay in abeyance for over a century. The church elders, in pursuit of some suddenly-needed document, decided to bust open the chests and extract anything of value, such as cartularies, accounts and wills. The rest of the paperwork – parchment, vellum, and various other manuscripts and folios – was given to whomever could haul it away. Having an affection for antique things, being a lover of books within his modest means, and knowing of his young wife’s fondness for and talent in embroidery, Thomas the elder took “Canynge’s cofre” home, where it resided in the attic.

When Chatterton discovered his own love of letters, he recalled and claimed this chest. He spent long hours in the attic digging through and reading – and copying – the materials he found. Between his attachment to his missing father’s books, his investigation of his family’s ancient documents, as it were, and his long prowls through the shadowy interior of the old church, an atmosphere of antiquity soaked deep into his learning. Here, in the imagined past, fathers lived in noble service, bathed in the gold of light and enlightened merchant princes. Here was a place far removed from the dirty, crass, penniless, narrow-minded Bristol of daylight. Here was a kind of monastery. Here was a refuge from the grotesqueries of the present. And here “Thomas Rowleie, secolar prieste,” was born.

In 1760, almost eight and obviously bright and inspired, Chatterton was nominated to Colston’s Blue Coat School of Bristol by several acquaintances of his father who believed in the boy. Colston’s was Bristol in miniature. Screamingly orthodox, deeply suspicious of deviancy and imagination, it provided the city’s merchants with apprentices, inured to want and used to obedience. To Chatterton’s horror he discovered the school had no Latin or Greek masters. To an 18th century would-be ne’er-do-well, Latin and Greek were the passports to both the lands of imagination and the credentials of intellectual achievement. Instead he was fed a non-stop diet of reading, writing, arithmetic and High Church orthodoxy. About the only attraction Colston held for him was the school’s uniform: The blue cloak and monk’s tonsure each child was required to wear bespoke a noble and romantic medievalism at substantial variance with the school’s avowed goals.

Despite the deadly nature of what passed for his education, Chatterton flourished, sharpening his compositional skills and history in the school library and classics in translation through several of Bristol’s lending libraries. He was also exposed to Macpherson’s hoax poet, the artificial ancient Ossian, as well as various real Middle-English poets such as Langland, Gower, Chaucer and Barclay.

Several years into the seven he spent at Colston’s, he composed a poem entitled “On the Last Epiphany, or, Christ Coming to Judgment.” He slipped it through the door at Bristol’s Felix Farley’s Journal and was shocked to find it published on the eighth of January, 1763. At 10 years he had made his first publication. This spark was sufficient to raise a fire under him. Over the next several years, he produced both religious and secular verse, though a general tendency to react against the sterile, narrow orthodoxy of Colston’s can be seen even that early.

Inevitably, at Colston’s Chatterton came into contact with a number of people who affected his young life. In addition to fellow students – with whom he seemed to get along, though he never showed much openness to most of them – he made the acquaintance of Thomas Phillips, an assistant-master who was something of a poet himself and said to be talented, though he died not long before Chatterton. Phillips encouraged Chatterton’s versifying, a generosity he expressed thanks for several years later at Phillips’ death, revealing his affection for his old friend in an unusually personal elegy.

In the public restroom of the imagination it has been suggested that Chatterton and Phillips made sweet, hot monkey love in the shaded portico of their august institution. Certainly this would be in keeping with the dead-boy-as-erotic-object theme to develop with his sexy death. However, Chatterton’s emotional rigidity and hair-trigger wig-flipping, his sense of remove from humanity, his contempt, outrage and social ineptness would argue more for him as the kind of awkward, lonely robot you can find ploughing up the streets of any major American city today, desperate to hold the world at bay, cancerous with schemes and bristling with defenses.

It is difficult to ascertain exactly when Chatterton first gave birth to a fully formed Thomas Rowley. Certainly the character of Rowley had been fermenting in Chatterton since he first pulled a vellum out of the muniment’s box in the attic. But the first evidence of Rowley’s output came after Chatterton’s graduation in 1767 from Colston’s. He was placed as apprentice with John Lambert, a scrivener, a now-obsolete but then invaluable profession that combined the functions of copyist and notary.

Thomas Rowley was, in Chatterton’s fantasy past, a priest of Bristol who lived through the middle of the 15th century. He was a close friend to Robert Canning, the Bristol merchant who paid for the construction and maintenance of the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Canning, whose first wife had died, was ordered by King Edward to remarry. He refused and entered a monastery. Thomas Rowley, the name of a real sheriff of Bristol, became, to Chatterton, a fellow monk and a poet and Canning his patron. The mention of the real Canning and Rowley in his father’s church manuscripts gave him the building blocks for his honorable antique world and its major figures.

During Chatterton’s schooldays in 1761, the 12th century bridge over the Severn, which had filled with shops and residences to such a degree that dray passage was impossible, was torn down and a new bridge begun. This new bridge was finished in 1768, during the second year of Chatterton’s apprenticeship with Lambert. From his poetic environment of the fictional past, Chatterton drew forth a description, by a witness, of the ceremonies opening the original bridge to traffic. He sent this totally spurious account to Felix Farley’s Journal, whose publication five years previous of his first poem had given him such a lift. The publication of this piece would provide him the same, but to a much greater degree and would sound the fanfare to which Rowley strode onto the stage.

Being a person of some fascination, Chatterton always had some friends. He had kept in touch with some of his former classmates and made new friends among his fellow apprentices. His relationship with them, however, always seemed somewhat tentative. Some plants flourish in shallow soil. But in the aftermath of his publication in Felix Farley’s Journal, initially under a pseudonym, Chatterton was sought out by a number of the Bristol provincial big wigs and brought into their orbit. Chatterton had something they wanted – his magic box contained the past, and nothing tightens the trousers of backwater gentry like local history, especially if it can be made to serve their vanity.

His adult circle came to include the Reverend Alexander Catcott, Vicar of Temple Church; his brother, George Symes Catcott, a pewterer; George’s business partner Henry Burgum; and William Barrett, a conniving but credulous would-be historian and surgeon. Each of these men in some manner saw a way of exploiting Chatterton and his magic box and Chatterton, at least subconsciously, accommodated these men in the hopes of, in turn, exploiting them.

Barrett and George Catcott in particular became midwives to Rowley. Barrett’s “History of Bristol,” eventually published in 1789, was liberally streaked with Chatterton fakery. In the two years he associated with the Bristol worthies, he produced everything from fake histories, castle plans, deeds, edicts and the like all the way up to the poetry of Rowley, including “Epitaph on Robert Canynge,” “Songe to Aella,” The Parliament of Sprytes” and others.

In this period also appeared the apotheosis of Chatterton’s poetical hoaxing: An epic poem called “The Battle of Hastings” by a tenth century poet-monk and prior of Durham named Turgot. (I smell foul play, Sherman.) Turgot was supposedly translated by Chatterton’s first poet-monk, Thomas Rowley. This fictional monk’s fictional monk was also good enough to provide Barrett with a complete “History of Bristol.”

Somewhere underneath it all, most of those duped by Chatterton knew they were being duped. He indicated to Barret, for instance, that, as he had written “The Battle of Hastings” in his own hand, it was his creation. Previously he had told him the same about the bridge piece. But now, as then, Barrett pretended not to hear, continued to reward Chatterton with meager payments for the pieces, and after a suitable time had elapsed, asked him for the remainder of the epic.

This points up a truth about poetic hoaxes in general that should be evident to anyone who encounters more than one of them: They never fool anyone who does not deeply desire to be fooled. In the Bristol case, these hoax poems, along with the supporting materials, made the readers feel important—Chatterton created fake pedigrees for Burgum and Barrett that attached them to nobility—and on the inside of a great secret. These are feelings not unappealing to the rich, powerful but ignoble leaders of Bristol.

Among the many negative outcomes of his association with the Bristol worthies was the physical placement of Rowley’s works with them. Upon Chatterton’s death the whole of the group launched an impressive attempt to debunk any notion of Chatterton’s poetic capacity in order to retain the fiction of authenticity for the Rowley pieces. For most, and Catcott above all, did a brisk trade in Rowley manuscripts in the years after Chatterton’s death.

Chatterton’s first great failures with Rowley came in December of 1778 when he attempted to interest, by mail, the publisher James Dodsley, in the verse tragedy “Aella.” Dodsley’s house, started by his brother Robert, was one of the top publishers in London, bringing out work by Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray and Oliver Goldsmith. He never responded.

His next unsuccessful attempt was to whack Horace Walpole in the side of the head with another Rowley flounder.

Walpole was a renowned writer, friend of writers, publisher and antiquarian as well as the Earl of Oxford, and Chatterton must have figured him a perfect fit. Walpole’s Gothic Castle of Otranto published in 1764, was initially hoaxical. It was presented as “translated by William Marshall, Gent., from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, canon of the church of St. Nicholas at Otranto,” and as having been published in 1520. Of course, Walpole, unlike Chatterton, managed to make people hear him when he eventually and unequivocally declared Marshall and Muralto to be his creations. Chatterton knew that in 1762 Walpole had also written and published a book called “Anecdotes of Painting in England.”

So, Chatterton must have figured, why not cobble together a piece that united Walpole’s two interests, Medieval English history and painting, and dress it in the wrapping paper Walpole himself had used: The hoax poet? He sent off a fictitious essay on painting entitled “The Ryse of Pencteynge yn Englande, wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469 for Mastre Canynge” and notes detailing the life and times of the author – Rowley, not Chatterton. Another Chatterton creation, the Abbot John, was represented by an enclosed stanza.

At first, Walpole encouraged Chatterton. “Give me leave,” he wrote the young, excited author, “to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be found. I should not be sorry to print them, or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.”

Chatterton, ignoring the smell-you-later closing note of the letter, chose to see it as a welcome home banner. He promptly packaged up a further excerpt from Rowley’s piece on painting, along with verses by two Saxon poet-monks of the sixth century, Ecca and Elmar, supposedly translated by Rowley (driving Chatterton’s Artificial Monk-Poet Tally up to an astounding five), some additional stanzas by the Abbot John and Rowley’s “Elinoure and Juga.” He enclosed a letter more personal in nature, outlining his own situation, that of the son of a widow from a poor family and laboring in an unwanted apprenticeship when he should be startling the world with his genius. He asked help from Walpole in finding a more suitable position.

Even in the shadow of Chatterton’s death, it was uncertain how Walpole had treated Chatterton and why – letters by each have had sections cut out or been lost altogether. Detractors have characterized Walpole as a man of little discernment, as an all-too-precious member of the nobility, immobilized by the notions of his time and his class. This may all be true. His villainization, subsequent to Chatterton’s suicide, does not, however, seem altogether fair.

According to Walpole, he consulted his friends, the poet Thomas Gray and the Reverend William Mason, both of whom advised him that the antique poems were modern fakeries. His letter to Chatterton, according to a later publication, advised him, that “in duty and gratitude to his mother, who had straitened herself to breed him up to a profession, he ought to labour in it” and “that when he should have made a fortune he might unbend himself with the studies consonant to his inclinations.”

Was Walpole’s reaction a function merely of the shaky provenance of Rowley? Was it solely a function of class? It isn’t much of stretch to presume they both underlined Walpole’s initial reaction, which must have been negative when faced by the spectre of a needy, blunt, strident boy sticking out his hand for help. In addition to being a rich, uptight creep, Walpole was also a rich, successful creep and it seems doubtful that Chatterton was the first young man to conceive of Walpole as a piñata. It doesn’t excuse Walpole’s apparent repugnance and unkind reaction, but it does make it slightly more comprehensible.

Chatterton’s subsequent attempts to get the manuscripts back were ignored. It must have baffled Walpole, as the writings were in Chatterton’s handwriting attached to his letter, and as he assured Walpole previously that he had access to the original, to be asked to return the copy, “as I have no other.” Chatterton finally effected their return with a terse, pointed letter that asserted “did you not know my circumstance, you would not dare to treat me thus.”

Chatterton was horrified by Walpole’s snub and used every subsequent opportunity to dun the man, who was notorious for his mortification at bad press. In the year that followed Chatterton published satires in the London magazines Middlesex Journal, Town & Country Magazine, and the ironically named The Polite Advertiser.

Walpole’s rejection was to catalyze Chatterton’s nasty side. In addition to the hoax poems, Chatterton was to become known primarily for his satire. The development of his elegant and lacerating style can be traced to this moment.

“Walpole! I thought not I should ever see

So mean a Heart as thine has proved to be;

Thou, who, in Luxury nurs’d behold’st with Scorn

The Boy, who Friendless, Penniless, Forlorn,

Asks they high Favour, – though mayst call me Cheat -

Say, didst thou ne’er indulge in such Deceit?

Who wrote Otranto? But I will not chide,

Scorn I will repay with Scorn, and Pride with Pride.”

From this point on, the Spring of 1769 through his death, he wrote only a few more poems for Rowley. The shock of such a rejection, and the shame of being in fact guilty of the accused fraudulence, along with a growing unwillingness to provide the useless Bristol worthies with any further products of his wit, drove Chatterton to write, with few exceptions, in his own voice. You can imagine his resolve to cram a handful of “real” poems, whose provenance is beyond discussion, straight down Walpole’s fat yack-hole.

Also in these months Chatterton, who, thanks to Colston’s and his own belligerence, was never very orthodox in religion, was knocked further out of the orbit of the church. Peter Smith, his friend William’s brother, committed suicide and there were mutterings – perhaps by Lambert’s mother – that it was due to the bad influence of poetry, Peter having had some commerce with it. Poetry, as anyone of sound mind knows, is as bad as dancing for the inflammation of the pantaloons. Additionally, Chatterton’s friend and former assistant master from Colston’s, Phillips, died of illness.

At the same time as Chatterton’s life was rocked by the same cold mortalities that claimed his father before he’d had a chance to know him, one of the Bristol worthies, Rev. Catcott, made the mistake of criticizing his latest poems. In response, Chatterton wrote another savage satire, the “Epistle to the Reverend Mr. Catcott” which contained the following fool-proof deal-breaker.

“Could Catcott from his better Sense be drawn

To bow the knee to Baal’s sacred Lawn?

A mitred Rascal, to his long-ear’d Flocks

Gives Ill Example, to his Whores, the Pox

Yet we must reverence Sacerdotal black

And saddle all his Faults on Nature’s back

But hold. There’ Solid Reason to revere

His Lordship has Six thousand Pounds a Year.”

At this time, through the death of Phillips, Chatterton made the acquaintance of Michael Clayfield, a distiller, a friend of Phillips and notorious free-thinker. His association with Clayfield, his virulent satires and his increasingly erratic behavior converged to break the bonds that held him to Bristol.

In the first months of 1770, Chatterton advertised his new non-conformist beliefs and declared his intent to commit suicide in a letter to Clayfield that was intercepted by Lambert’s mother. The old lady had always found him highly suspect. He also wrote his will. This will, a baroque circular combining pathos, verse and no small amount of satire, said, among other things, “I leave to the Reverend Mr. Catcott some little of My freethinking that he may put on the Spectacles of Reason and see how vilely he is duped in believing the Scripture literally.”

These things finally so exasperated Lambert that he officially freed Chatterton early from his apprenticeship. Chatterton, overjoyed, resolved to go to London, where he was already being published in Town & Country, Middlesex Journal, and Freeholder’s Magazine. Although he was earning very little money from his writing, he figured it was making him known, forcing some chinks in London that his presence could open wide.

Chatterton left Bristol for London on April 17, first staying with relatives in Shoreditch. He strengthened his relationship to the publishers of the London magazines he already knew and extended his circle to include the Lord Mayor of London, William Beckford. Chatterton’s populist bent helped him to produce a series of letters in praise of the Mayor’s support of member of the House of Commons removed unlawfully by the King. Beckford was very pleased with the writing and indicated a willingness to act as patron. However, he died in June and Chatterton’s latest hope for ease was dashed.

During these first months in London the poet wrote “Kew Gardens,” a satire on a national scale which, nonetheless, pilloried some of the Bristol worthies for good measure. He also continued to publish, adding London Magazine and The Court and the City Magazine to his list. He also composed the exotic “The Death of Nicou, an African Eclogue.” Chatterton was proving himself less of a case study and more of a poet, rivaling his later admirers Coleridge and Keats with lines like these, from “An African Song.”

Now the eastern curtain draws;

Now the red’ning splendor gleams;

Now the purple plum’d macaws,

Skim along the silver streams.

Now the fragrant-scented thorn,

Trembles with the gummy dew;

Now the pleasures of the morn,

Swell upon the eager view.

At about the time of the Lord Mayor’s death, Chatterton moved into his own lodgings, a room in the attic of Mrs. Angel’s house in Brooke Street, right off the High Holborn. Here he wrote one of the few remaining Rowley poems, “The Excelente Balade of Charitie.”

Excited but chastened by the big city, Chatterton’s prospects rolled to a stop. Town & Country and the other magazines that published him had all of his material they could handle and no new publications were interested in him. He had no hope of a patron, his landlady increased his rent by almost half of what he was already paying and he had no day job. He even went so far, in his acutely practical fashion, of inquiring after the position of ship’s surgeon! Why not? He had already been the mother of a 15th century monk and the grandmother of his four Saxon children.

As a young man who had always had some fascination with suicide Chatterton was obviously not as repelled by the notion as most of his fellows. A little philosophy goes a long ways for those with proclivities to justify and his still-new “free thinking” severed what few social and religious barriers that may have stood between his hot-headed resolve and the act itself.

In our blackest moments it sometimes seems that Life, when bleak, can only get bleaker and when dark, only darker. To a man not yet fully in control of his heart and given to great fits of pique, it must have seemed a permanent darkness. So, with a little help from the neighborhood apothecary, a little opium and a little arsenic, he followed what little philosophy he had to its logical conclusion and died, another victim of terminal petulance.

* * *

The most astonishing part of the Chatterton phenomenon was not his preciousness nor his poetic output, unfortunately, nor even his suicide. It was the exhibition made after his death. The Bristol worthies busied themselves with first laying hands on all the Rowley manuscripts they did not already have, then profiting from their sales. Catcott and Barrett attempted to convince the suddenly interested public that Chatterton could not have written Rowley’s verse, that it was, instead “genuine.”

Book after book of his verse, Rowley’s verse and every miscellaneous paper Chatterton had doodled on, got published. The kind of man that the living Chatterton gave a case of the willies to, now believed him to be an “overlooked poet.” Thomas Tyrwhitt’s collection of the Rowley poems first appeared seven years after Chatterton’s death in 1777. Shortly thereafter came Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, then, in 1780 Herbert Croft published his letters. Then came the monographs, letters, essays and book-length explorations of Chatterton’s and Rowley’s works, life, and table manners.

Soon enough there was a word for it – Roweleiomania. And it was debated. One side decried Chatterton as too young and stupid to have invented Rowley. The other side declared him a Christ-like genius squashed by the narrow provincialism of Bristol and the bigotry of turds like Walpole. Still others believed him to be Rowley’s creator but also to be a morally deficient cretin for perpetrating such a fraud. Finally, with the advent of the Romantics and later the Pre-Raphaelites, Chatterton was fashioned into that obscure object of desire, a sexy dead boy and exquisite victim, an image that endured until Chatterton fell into complete obscurity early in the last century, slowly joining his imaginary friends in the distant perfect past.

***

How the so-called “Rowley Controversy” got as big as it did in the late 18th century is hard to fathom. Besides the glaring factual problems such as 10th century monks writing about 11th century history, aside from the plain, though admittedly infrequent outright admissions by Chatterton and putting to the side for now the relative lack of sophistication in textual studies, an even modest portion of poetical common sense should have been enough to recognize Chatterton’s Rowley poems as fake. Take as an example, this stanza from “Elinoure and Juga.”

O gentle Juga! hear mie dernie plainte,

To fyghte for Yorke mie love is dyght in stele;

O mai ne sanguen steine the white rose peyncte;

Mai good Seyncte Cuthberte watch Syree Robynne wele.

Moke moe thane deathe in phantasie I feele;

See! see! upon the grounde he bleedynge lies!

Inhild some joice of life, or else my dear love dies.

Scan this poem as you would Middle English verse, pronouncing each syllable (no silent e, for example). It does not have any discernable rhythm. Scan it as a strangely spelled modern English poem, however, and it scans quite regular.

Rowley’s poems are, in essence, Modern English verse, studded with obsolete, and sometimes unreal, words and respelled with such a ferocious weirdness that one gets a serious case of the optical puzzlers just looking at it. The beautiful maid turns to an ugly witch and back into a maid until your eyes rebel in your head.

Thomas Chatterton did all of his writing between the ages of 10 and 18. He combined the snot-nosed energy and quick judgments of youth with a wit fed by an environment infinitely more conditioned by the word, spoken and written, than our own. The energy that today might be spent by a boy of 17 on programming, music, or tagging was channeled, along with its anger, ferocity and razor-sharpness, frustration and wish-fulfillment, into satiric verse and medieval fantasy.

The individual motivations behind the perpetuation of poetic hoaxes are varied. But a frequent feature is a desire to pants contemporary public opinion, to, “epater le bourgeois” or, in Ben Shahn’s version, “epater l’avante garde.” Bynner objected to the mania for “schools” in art, a mania that walked hand-in-hand with modernist desire to explain an increasingly complex world in scientific terms. Johnson’s Yasusada indicted the craze for ethnicity as authenticity. But Chatterton’s hoax had a very different complexion.

Rowley was not an instrument of satire. (For that, Chatterton had, well, satire.) Through his manufactured identity, Rowley, Chatterton could retreat from what so nakedly was to what so obviously should be, or at least should have been. But even in this fantasy the function remains critical. Seen from the uncompromising position of a young man who had not found accommodation with the world, contemporary life was cancerous with careerists, led by terrible old men with cold, slimy groins and a sublimate rage at the vitality and optimism of the young. Rowley was the triumph of the imagination over the practical, of the fire of creation over the dust of literature’s clerks. Rowley was Chatterton’s prosecutorial instrument as surely as Emanuel Morgan was Witter Bynner’s. Chatterton’s Rowley, like Macpherson’s Ossian, was a positive critique of what should be, versus what was. Grandness, profundity, and spiritual and poetic beauty as a corrective to the opportunistic bureaucracies of contemporary art, and, by association, the rest of life.

* * *

As the morning of August 25, 1770 grew into day, Mrs. Angel began to worry. She’d always thought her lodger peculiar but now something felt plainly wrong. He often slept late, but not this late, not even when he strode about on the ceiling keeping others awake as he had the previous night. He had missed breakfast and was in danger of missing lunch.

With the help of another young lodger, an apprentice at a counting house, the door to Chatterton’s room was forced. She would make him pay for its repair. The apprentice and the landlady stopped short. The room was sweltering and the still air carried the metallic taint of stale sweat and poison. The boy’s body was spread out across the low bed, onto the floor. The room was a wreck.

Afterward, when they had taken the body away by cart, Mrs. Angel packed the boy’s few belongings into a crate to send back to his poor mother. The last item she put in was a piece of paper that looked important, though she didn’t know for sure, as she had never learned to read. She dropped it in on top of the books and clothing. It was a poem.

AN EXCELENTE BALADE OF CHARITIE:

AS WROTEN BIE THE GODE PRIESTE THOMAS ROWLEY, 1464

In Virgynë the sweltrie sun gan sheene,

And hotte upon the mees did caste his raie;

The apple rodded from its palie greene,

And the mole peare did bende the leafy spraie;

The peede chelandri sunge the livelong daie;

‘Twas nowe the pride, the manhode of the yeare,

And eke the grounde was dighte in its moste defte aumere.

The sun was glemeing in the midde of daie,

Deadde still the aire, and eke the welken blue,

When from the sea arist in drear arraie

A hepe of cloudes of sable sullen hue,

The which full fast unto the woodlande drewe,

Hiltring attenes the sunnis fetive face,

And the blacke tempeste swolne and gatherd up apace.

Beneathe an holme, faste by a pathwaie side,

Which dide unto Seyncte Godwine’s covent lede,

A hapless pilgrim moneynge did abide.

Pore in his newe, ungentle in his weede,

Longe bretful of the miseries of neede,

Where from the hail-stone coulde the almer flie?

He had no housen theere, ne anie covent nie.

Look in his glommed face, his sprighte there scanne;

Howe woe-be-gone, how withered, forwynd, deade!

Haste to thie church-glebe-house, asshrewed manne!

Haste to thie kiste, thie onlie dortoure bedde.

Cale, as the claie whiche will gre on thie hedde,

Is Charitie and Love aminge highe elves;

Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves.

The gatherd storme is rype; the bigge drops falle;

The forswat meadowes smethe, and drenche the raine;

The comyng ghastness do the cattle pall,

And the full flockes are drivynge ore the plaine;

Dashde from the cloudes the waters flott againe;

The welkin opes; the yellow levynne flies;

And the hot fierie smothe in the wide lowings dies.

Liste! now the thunder’s rattling clymmynge sound

Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs,

Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown’d,

Still on the gallard eare of terroure hanges;

The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges;

Again the levynne and the thunder poures,

And the full cloudes are braste attenes in stonen showers.

Spurreynge his palfrie oere the watrie plaine,

The Abbote of Seyncte Godwynes convente came;

His chapournette was drented with the reine,

And his pencte gyrdle met with mickle shame;

He aynewarde tolde his bederoll at the same;

The storme encreasen, and he drew aside,

With the mist almes craver neere to the holme to bide.

His cope was all of Lyncolne clothe so fyne,

With a gold button fasten’d neere his chynne;

His autremete was edged with golden twynne,

And his shoone pyke a loverds mighte have binne;

Full well it shewn he thoughten coste no sinne:

The trammels of the palfrye pleasde his sighte,

For the horse-millanare his head with roses dighte.

“An almes, sir prieste!” the droppynge pilgrim saide,

“O! let me waite within your covente dore,

Till the sunne sheneth hie above our heade,

And the loude tempeste of the aire is oer;

Helpless and ould am I alas! and poor;

No house, ne friend, ne moneie in my pouche;

All yatte I call my owne is this my silver crouche.”

“Varlet,” replyd the Abbatte, “cease your dinne;

This is no season almes and prayers to give;

Mie porter never lets a faitour in;

None touch mie rynge who not in honour live.”

And now the sonne with the blacke cloudes did stryve,

And shettynge on the grounde his glairie raie,

The Abbatte spurrde his steede, and eftsoones roadde awaie.

Once moe the skie was blacke, the thunder rolde;

Faste reyneynge oer the plaine a prieste was seen;

Ne dighte full proude, ne buttoned up in golde;

His cope and jape were graie, and eke were clene;

A Limitoure he was of order seene;

And from the pathwaie side then turned hee,

Where the pore almer laie binethe the holmen tree.

“An almes, sir priest!” the droppynge pilgrim sayde,

“For sweete Seyncte Marie and your order sake.”

The Limitoure then loosen’d his pouche threade,

And did thereoute a groate of silver take;

The mister pilgrim dyd for halline shake.

“Here take this silver, it maie eathe thie care;

We are Goddes stewards all, nete of oure owne we bare.

“But ah! unhailie pilgrim, lerne of me,

Scathe anie give a rentrolle to their Lorde.

Here take my semecope, thou arte bare I see;

Tis thyne; the Seynctes will give me mie rewarde.”

He left the pilgrim, and his waie aborde.

Virgynne and hallie Seyncte, who sitte yn gloure,

Or give the mittee will, or give the gode man power