The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rowley Poems, by Thomas Chatterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Rowley Poems

Author: Thomas Chatterton

Release Date: July 28, 2004 [EBook #13037]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROWLEY POEMS ***

Produced by Leah Moser and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE

ROWLEY POEMS

BY

THOMAS CHATTERTON

REPRINTED FROM TYRWHITT'S THIRD EDITION

EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY MAURICE EVAN HARE

MCMXI

CONTENTS.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

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

II. THE VALUE OF THE ROWLEY POEMS

III. BIBLIOGRAPHY

IV. NOTE ON THE TEXT

V. NOTES

VI. 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,