The Rowley Poems, Thomas Chatterton [buy e reader txt] 📗

CONTENTS.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

 

CHATTERTON'S LIFE AND DEATH AND THE GENESIS OF THE ROWLEY POEMS

 

THE VALUE OF THE ROWLEY POEMS

 

  III. BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

NOTE ON THE TEXT

 

NOTES

 

APPENDIX ON THE ROWLEY CONTROVERSY

 

REPRINT OF THE EDITION OF 1778. (The Table of Contents follows the

1778 title-page.)

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION. (I. CHATTERTON'S LIFE AND DEATH AND THE GENESIS OF THE ROWLEY POEMS)

 

Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on the 20th of November 1752.

His father--also Thomas--dead three months before his son's birth, had

been a subchaunter in Bristol Cathedral and had held the mastership

in a local free school. We are told that he was fond of reading and

music; that he made a collection of Roman coins, and believed in magic

(or so he said), studying the black art in the pages of Cornelius

Agrippa. With all the self-acquired culture and learning that raised

him above his class (his father and grandfathers before him for

more than a hundred years had been sextons to the church of St. Mary

Redcliffe) he is described as a dissipated, 'rather brutal fellow'.

Lastly, he appears to have been 'very proud', self-confident, and

self-reliant.

 

Of Chatterton's mother little need be said. Gentle and rather foolish,

she was devoted to her two children Mary and, his sister's junior by

two years, Thomas the Poet. Of these Mary seems to have inherited the

colourless character of her mother; but Thomas must always have been

remarkable. We have the fullest accounts of his childhood, and the

details that might with another be set down as chronicles of the

nursery will be seen to have their importance in the case of this boy

who set himself consciously to be famous when he was eight, wrote

fine imaginative verse before he was thirteen, and killed himself aged

seventeen and nine months.

 

Thomas, then, was a moody baby, a dull small boy who knew few of his

letters at four; and was superannuated--such was his impenetrability

to learning--at the age of five from the school of which his father

had been master. He was moreover till the age of six and a half so

frequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently

causeless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for his

reason and thought him 'an absolute fool.' We are told also by his

sister--and there is no incongruity in the two accounts--that he

early displayed a taste for 'preheminence and would preside over his

playmates as their master and they his hired servants.' At seven and

a half he dissipated his mother's fear that she had borne a fool

by rapidly learning to read in a great black-letter Bible; for

characteristically 'he objected to read in a small book.' In a very

short time from this he appears to have devoured eagerly the contents

of every volume he could lay his hands on. He had a thirst for

knowledge at large--for any kind of information, and as the merest

child read with a careless voracity books of heraldry, history,

astronomy, theology, and such other subjects as would repel most

children, and perhaps one may say, most men. At the age of eight

we hear of him reading 'all day or as long as they would let him,'

confident that he was going to be famous, and promising his mother and

sister 'a great deal of finery' for their care of him when the day of

his fame arrived. Before he was nine he was nominated for Colston's

Hospital, a local school where the Bluecoat dress was worn and at

which the 'three Rs' were taught but very little else, so that the

boy, disappointed of the hope of knowledge, complained he could

work better at home. To this period we should probably assign the

delightful story of Chatterton and a friendly potter who promised to

give him an earthenware bowl with what inscription he pleased upon

it--such writing presumably intended to be 'Tommy his bowl' or 'Tommy

Chatterton'. 'Paint me,' said the small boy to the friendly potter,

'an Angel with Wings and a Trumpet to trumpet my Name over the World.'

 

At ten he was making progress in arithmetic, and it should be

mentioned that he 'occupied himself with mechanical pursuits so that

if anything was out of order in the house he was set to mend it.' At

school he read during play hours and made few friends, but those

were 'solid fellows,' his sister tells us; while at home he had

appropriated to himself a small attic where he would read, write

and draw pictures--a number of which are preserved in the British

Museum--of knights and churches, and heraldic designs in red and

yellow ochre, charcoal, and black-lead. In this attic too he had

stored--though at what date is uncertain--a number of writings on

parchment which had a rather singular history. In the muniment room

of St. Mary Redcliffe, the church in which Chatterton's ancestors had

served as sextons, there were six or seven great oak chests, of which

one, greater than the others and secured by no fewer than six locks,

was traditionally called 'Canynges Cofre' after William Canynge the

younger, with whose name the erection and completion of St. Mary's

were especially associated. These had contained deeds and papers

dealing with parochial matters and the affairs of the Church, but some

years before Chatterton's birth the Vestry had determined to examine

these documents, some of which may have been as old as the building

itself. The keys had in the course of time been lost, and the

vestrymen accordingly broke open the chests and removed to another

place what they thought of value, leaving Canynge's Coffer and its

fellows gutted and open but by no means void of all their ancient

contents. Such parchments as remained Chatterton's father carried

away, whole armfuls at a time, using some to cover his scholars' books

and giving others to his wife, who made them into thread-papers and

dress patterns.

 

In the house to which Mrs. Chatterton had moved upon her husband's

death there was still a sufficient number of these old manuscripts to

make a considerable trove for the boy who, then nine or ten years old,

had first learnt to read in black-letter and was in a few years to

produce poetry which should pass for fifteenth century with many

well-reputed antiquaries. It was no doubt on blank pieces of these

parchments that he inscribed the matter of the few Rowley documents

which he ever showed for originals. We have the account of a certain

Thistlethwaite, one of the 'solid lads' with whom Chatterton had made

friends at school, that his friend Thomas in the summer of 1764

told him 'he was in possession of some old MSS. which had been found

deposited in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that he had lent some or

one of them to Thomas Phillips'--an usher at Colston's, an earnest

and thoughtful man fond of poetry, and a great friend of Chatterton's.

'Within a day or two after this,' (Thistlethwaite wrote to Dean

Milles,) 'I saw Phillips ... who produced a MS. on parchment or vellum

which I am confident was "Elenoure and Juga"[1] a kind of pastoral

eclogue afterwards published in the _Town and Country Magazine_ for

May 1769. The parchment or vellum appeared to have been closely pared

round the margin for what purpose or by what accident I know not ...

The writing was yellow and pale manifestly as I conceive occasioned by

age.'

 

This was the beginning of the Rowley fiction--which might be

metaphorically described as a motley edifice, half castle and half

cathedral, to which Chatterton all his life was continually adding

columns and buttresses, domes and spires, pediments and minarets,

in the shape of more poems by Thomas Rowley (a secular priest of St.

John's, Bristol); or by his patron the munificent William Canynge

(many times Mayor of the same city); or by Sir Thibbot Gorges, a

knight of ancient family with literary tastes; or by good Bishop

Carpenter (of Worcester) or John à Iscam (a Canon of St. Augustine's

Abbey, also in Bristol); together with plays or portions of

plays which they wrote--a Saxon epic translated--accounts of

Architecture--songs and eclogues--and friendly letters in rhyme or

prose. In short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before he

was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter of

one kind or another that his fictitious circle of men of taste and

learning (living in the dark and unenlightened age of Lydgate and the

other tedious post-Chaucerians) may with study become extraordinarily

familiar and near to us, and was certainly to Chatterton himself quite

as real and vivid as the dull actualities of Colston's Hospital and

the Bristol of his proper century.

 

Chatterton's own circle of acquaintance was far less brilliant. His

principal patrons were Henry Burgum and George Catcott, a pair of

pewterers, the former vulgar and uneducated but very ambitious to be

thought a man of good birth and education, the latter a credulous,

selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be antiquary, of

whom there is the most delightfully absurd description in Boswell's

_Johnson_. The biographer relates that in the year 1776 Johnson and

he were on a visit to Bristol and were induced by Catcott to climb the

steep flight of stairs which led to the muniment room in order to

see the famous 'Rowley's Cofre'. Whereupon, when the ascent had been

accomplished, Catcott 'called out with a triumphant air of lively

simplicity "I'll make Dr. Johnson a convert" (to the view then still

largely obtaining that Rowley's poems were written in the fifteenth

century) and he pointed to the "Wondrous chest".' '"_There_" said

he 'with a bouncing confident credulity "_There is the very chest

itself_"!' After which 'ocular demonstration', Boswell remarks, 'there

was no more to be said.' It was to such men as these that Chatterton

read his 'Rouleie's' poems. Another of his audience was Mr. Barrett, a

surgeon, who collected materials for a history of Bristol, which,

when published after the boy-poet's death, was found to contain

contributions (supplied by Chatterton) in the unmistakable and unique

'Rowleian' language--valuable evidence about old Bristol miraculously

preserved in Rowley's chest.

 

We hear also of Michael Clayfield, a distiller, one of the very few

men in Bristol whom Chatterton admired and respected; of Baker, the

poet's bedfellow at Colston's, for whom Chatterton wrote love poems,

as Cyrano de Bergerac did for Christian de Neuvillette, to the address

of a certain Miss Hoyland--thin, conventional silly stuff, but Roxane

was probably not very critical; of Catcott's brother, the Rev. A.

Catcott, who had a fine library and was the author of a treatise on

the Deluge; of Smith, a schoolfellow; of Palmer an engraver, and a

number of others--mere names for the most part. Baker, Thistlethwaite

and a few more were contemporaries of the poet, but the rest of the

circle consisted mainly of men who had reached middle age--dullards,

perhaps, who condescended to clever adolescence, whom Chatterton

certainly mocked bitterly enough in satires which he wrote apparently

for his own private satisfaction, but whom he nevertheless took

considerable pains to conciliate as being men of substance who could

lend books and now and then reward the Muse with five shillings.

For Burgum the poet invented, and pretended to derive from numerous

authorities (some of which are wholly imaginary), a magnificent

pedigree showing him descended from a Simon de Seyncte Lyse _alias_

Senliz Earl of Northampton who had come over with the Conqueror. To

this he appended a portion of a poem not included in this edition,

entitled the 'Romaunte of the Cnyghte', composed by John de Bergham

about A.D. 1320. It was some years before Mr. Burgum applied to the

College of Heralds to have his pedigree ratified, but when he did so

he was informed that there had never been a de Bergham entitled to

bear arms.

 

With a second instalment of the genealogical table were copies of

the poems called _The Tournament_ and _The Gouler's_ (i.e. Usurer's)

_Requiem_, which are printed in this volume. Mr. Burgum was completely

taken in, and, exulting in his new-found dignity,