Thomas Chatterton

 When Hume wrote, ‘the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster’, he was defining the attitude of his age: its admirable, new and, in a way, courageous tolerance of suicide as an act to which everyone had a right was counterbalanced by an innate distaste for dramatics and a habit of feeling, if not of mind, which made a gentleman of proper style and wit respond to despair with impatience. The only alternative was to break the mould entirely and be more or less disregarded: Christopher Smart wrote in a madhouse and was considered merely dotty; so was Blake who, although born into the period, was already part of an utterly different moment and style. For the rest, even the most exacerbated were unable to overcome the inhibitions of gentlemanly classicism and the tamed, limiting medium of late Augustan verse.

One of the many admiring ladies with whom Walpole exchanged his interminable letters remarked that in France the cause of suicide was nearly always bankruptcy, rarely love. In an eminently rational age money was the most acceptable and rational motive. Even Thomas Chatterton, the most famous of all literary suicides, poisoned himself not out of any excess of feeling but because he was unable to keep himself alive by writing. Later the Romantics transformed him into a symbol of the doomed poet. In fact, he was a victim of Grub Street and snobbery.

He came from the bottom of the social heap. His father’s family had for generations been sextons of the beautiful Gothic church of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol. His father had climbed a rung or two up the social ladder: he was a local schoolmaster, as well as an amateur musician and dabbler in magic. But he died three months before his son, Thomas, was born in 1752, and his widow was poverty-stricken all through the boy’s childhood. She started an infant school, took in needlework, drew indigo patterns on muslin for the local ladies to embroider. Just before he was eight, Chatterton was sent to a Bristol charity school, Colston’s Hospital; when he left seven years later, he was apprenticed to a Bristol scrivener. He had, in short, entered into the almost blind working-class alley where the best he could hope for was a weary scramble into the lower middle class by setting up, eventually, in a modest scrivening practice of his own. Yet within a couple of years, before he was seventeen, he had written the bulk of the Rowley poems – on parchment, in a convincing medieval script and style, complete with medieval spelling and vocabularly. It is the most astonishingly precocious performance before Rimbaud’s.

It got him more or less nowhere, Three Bristol elders took him up condescendingly. He gave them his exquisite Rowley manuscripts; they gave him, in return, their gracious company and a few shillings. He wrote to Dodsley, the London publisher and bookseller, sending him one of the best Rowley poems. But nothing came of it. Next he tried Horace Walpole who, in principle, seemed to be the ideal patron: not only was he rich, influential, well connected and fashionable, a leading spirit in the Gothic Revival, he was also a forger of sorts. His novel The Castle of Otranto was first put out as ‘a translation by William Marshall, from an Italian MS found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the North of England, and printed in Naples in the black letter in the year 1520’. He had also mentioned those pillars of the Rowley fabric, Redcliffe Church and ‘Maister Canynge’ in his Anecdotes of Painting. Chatterton accordingly sent a contribution to the Anecdotes: ‘The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wroten by T. Rowlie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge’. It was an elaborate piece of fake scholarship, stuffed with detail and research, in full Rowleian dialect. As a further sweetener, he added some verse fragments. Walpole was delighted: excited to be in on a discovery and flattered to be taken for an expert by, presumably, another expert. By return he wrote Chatterton an obsequious and effusive letter, as from one learned man to another, suggesting, among other things, that he might print some of the Rowley poems.

At this point, Chatterton made a major mistake: he assumed that Walpole admired the work for its own sake, not for the snobbish gratifications it offered him. So he sent more Rowley poems and, in his enthusiasm at being taken seriously by a literary lion, he also confessed that he was not a gentleman of leisure but a penniless sixteen-year-old apprentice in search of a patron. He could scarcely have known that Walpole’s meanness was as intense as his snobbery. Horrified as much at the thought of having demands made on him as at having been taken in, he dropped Chatterton flat. His own version, years later, was that he ‘wrote him a letter with as much kindness and tenderness as if I had been his guardian’. The drift of it was that Chatterton’s first duty was to support his widowed mother; poetry was a recreation for gentlemen. Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. First he should make his fortune, then there would be time enough for the arts. He added that the experts he had consulted had assured him that the manuscripts were bogus. In short, he put the upstart firmly, aristocratically in his place. But he kept the manuscripts for good measure; it took several outraged letters from Chatterton to make him return them. Walpole never forgave the boy his impertinence and for years after his death he promoted an image of him as an ambitious petty swindler.

Chatterton was equally unforgiving but wholly ineffectual in his revenge. ‘I cannot reconcile your behaviour to me,’ he wrote to Walpole while still trying to recover his papers, ‘with the notions I once entertained of you. I think myself injured, sir: and, did you not know my circumstances, you would not dare to treat me thus.’20 Walpole called this ‘singularly impertinent’, but it was also singularly accurate. The overflowing talent, the facility, appetite and obsessed ingenuity which Chatterton demonstrated in every piece of writing he turned his hand to were not enough to absolve him from the original sin of having been born into the wrong class. His pride, which had always been as large as his talent, was already exacerbated by the boring, unpaid drudgery of his apprenticeship and by his menial position in the scrivener’s household, where he had to eat and live exclusively with the servants and share a bedroom with the footboy. Now it was rubbed raw by Walpole’s contemptuous treatment. Life among the dim, high-handed, penny-pinching Bristol elders began to seem insupportably narrow.

But it was also inescapable. As an apprentice, he was legally bound to his master, who provided only his keep, no wages. His mother gave him what she could, which was little, and the elders took his manuscripts and occasionally tipped him in return. Though his poems began to appear in magazines, he received no fees for them and, apparently, asked for none; publication was enough. Inevitably, he began to run up debts, small enough but, in his circumstances, impossible to repay.

Walpole finally returned his manuscripts in August 1769, after four months’ delay. In the same month Peter Smith, a Bristol poetaster and brother of Chatterton’s close school-friend William, committed suicide in a fit of pique with his family : he was twenty-one. Then, less than three months later, Thomas Phillips, who had been Chatterton’s tutor and mentor at school, died suddenly. Phillips, who was only a few years older than his protégé, was himself a poet and had encouraged the boy’s first efforts. It was a bad time. Chatterton began to quarrel with his pseudo-patrons and to lambast them, Walpole and anyone else who irritated him in satirical verse in the manner of the fashionable Charles Churchill. But that was, at best, a vicarious satisfaction and meanwhile his debts mounted.

By April 1770 he had reached the end of his tether. He wrote to a new friend, a distiller called Michael Clayfield, thanking him for his kindness and saying that by the time his letter arrived he would be dead. But like Freud’s early patient Dora, an eighteen-year-old hysteric who wrote a suicide note in order to get her way with her parents,21 he left the thing lying around and his master, Lambert, found it. In dismay, he passed it on to William Barrett, one of the elders with whom Chatterton had not yet quarrelled irrevocably. Barrett weighed in with advice and the following day Chatterton, who still didn’t know how Barrett had got wind of the letter, wrote explaining his motives :

It is my PRIDE, my damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19-20th of my Composition is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such; – or DIE – perplexing alternative!

The pride was natural enough in a boy who was not only unprecedentedly gifted but had also been, all his life, the only male in a doting family. It was also part of the nature of his talent, a quality inherent in the ease with which he deliberately created appalling medieval obstacles for his poetry and then effortlessly overcame them. It was part, too, of his intense personal attraction which everyone, particularly women, found so hard to resist: an unusual manliness, self-possession and independence; an aura, when roused, of being passionately present, alternating with sudden fits of utter abstraction; above all, his extraordinary grey eyes with, said Barrett, ‘fire rolling at the bottom of them’; ‘a kind of hawk’s eye’, said George Catcott, another of the elders, ‘you could see his soul through it’.

Given a character like this, his penury and social impotence, his place among servants he despised, the snubs and condescension he had to put up with from everyone, all created in him a sense of intolerable outrage. As a final petty injury Henry Burgum, the stupidest of the Bristol elders, had refused to lend Chatterton the small sum – ‘in the whole not five Pounds’ – which would have cleared his debts. His bluff had already been called humiliatingly when his first suicide note was found. Now his pride would allow no alternative but to try again. On Easter Saturday, with the office presumably to himself, he settled down to write his Last Will and Testament, prefacing it with a note announcing: ‘All this wrote bet 11 & 2 oclock Saturday in the utmost Distress of Mind.’ Yet his distress is a good deal less obvious than his anger. The Will begins with a long section of vitriolic couplets on the three elders. The tone of the prose that follows is equally contemptuous of the philistinism of Bristol and its merchants. But he was careful not to mention his master, Lambert, as though, even when contemplating suicide, he was not willing to antagonize the one person on whom his future well-being – if he were to have a being at all – would depend.

For a suicide note it is a curiously exuberant performance; it reads as though he were enjoying himself. His own death, which he forecast for the following evening, seems far less important than his need to show everyone how sharply and unforgivingly he had seen through their pretensions. Once again he left the papers lying prominently around, once again they were promptly found. Lambert and his wife were horrified at the prospect of a suicide on their respectable premises and released Chatterton on the spot from his indentures. It was as though his most childishly omnipotent fantasies of a revenge suicide had come true. The threat of taking his own life had given him something which, before, only genuine suicide seemed to make possible: his freedom.

About a week later he left for London, confident that he would make his fortune as a writer. He had every reason to believe in his chances, since he had already published widely in metropolitan magazines whose editors had encouraged him and made vague, expansive promises. He visited them all as soon as he arrived in town and seems to have impressed them, as he impressed everybody, with his strangely impassioned, intense presence. They accepted his manuscripts and made even larger promises than before. The rich imagination which had invented Rowley transformed these hints into the visions of grandeur and success which he outlined enthusiastically in his letters to his mother and sister. For their benefit he also spun fantasies in which doors flew open at his touch and celebrities clamoured for his company.

In reality, he was living with a distant cousin of his mother’s in a Shoreditch slum and, as always, was sharing his bedroom. This time his room-mate was the son of the house, who was greatly put out by Chatterton’s habit of writing most of the night and then, before going to bed, strewing the floor with tiny fragments of the poems he had destroyed. Although he was publishing everywhere, churning out satiric verse, political essays and pamphlets with startling facility, he was also being systematically exploited. The editors grossly underpaid him, when they paid him at all. All his labours for the month of May brought him in only £4 15s. 9d., and even by the middle of that month, less than four weeks since his arrival in London, his luck was already running out. Two of the editors who encouraged him most were imprisoned for political reasons. The others read this, rightly, as an omen of a Government clamp-down on the Opposition press; they became proportionately cautious. Chatterton’s tiny sources of income began to dry up.

Yet within another month his luck seemed to have turned again. He had written a letter championing William Beckford, the Lord Mayor of London and one of the political heroes of the day. Beckford approved of the work and consented to have another, similar letter addressed to him. Chatterton, using all his energy and charm, persuaded William Bingley to publish it in the North Briton, the most distinguished of all the current weeklies. Bingley was so impressed by the boy that he agreed to devote a whole issue of the paper to Chatterton’s piece. Then, when the article was already set up in print, Beckford caught a cold which turned into rheumatic fever; on 21 June he died. Chatterton’s great chance was gone. According to his Shoreditch relative, Mrs Ballance, ‘He was perfectly frantic, out of his mind, and declared he was ruined.’

He had one final stroke of luck: a chance acquaintance in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre had introduced him to a musician, Dr Samuel Arnold. At Arnold’s suggestion, Chatterton revamped an operetta he had written in Bristol a year before and sold it, early in July, to the owner of the pleasure-gardens at Marylebone. He was paid five guineas for the work, the largest fee he ever received, and probably the last.

Elated, he sent off presents to his mother and sister, but the accompanying letter made none of the usual golden predictions for the future. It was enough that he could finally make them the grand gesture he had been promising since he arrived in London three months before. The money also enabled him to make another gesture he had probably been promising himself for far longer: he rented a room of his own, a garret in Brooke Street, Holborn. It was the only room he ever had to himself.

At that point his meagre sources of income dried up entirely. Lord North’s Government cracked down once more on the press, imprisoning more editors and wholly eliminating the market for Chatterton’s political satires and pamphlets. Then, as the summer lengthened and the fashionable ‘world’ moved out of London to the country and the seaside, there was no more market for anything. He wrote one of his last and best poems, ‘An Excelente Balade of Charitie’. Appropriately enough, it was the parable of the Good Samaritan updated into Rowleyese. He sent it to the one editor who had previously published a Rowley poem, but it was rejected. In Chatterton’s case, neither Samaritan nor patron nor even Grub Street came to his rescue.

His Shoreditch cousin had shared the house with the family of a plasterer called Walmsley. After Chatterton died, Walmsley’s niece said of him, ‘He never touched meat, and drank only water, and seemed to live on the air.’ Her younger brother added, ‘He lived chiefly on a bit of bread, or a tart, and some water.’ By August even bread was almost beyond his means.

There was one vague hope: while he was in Bristol Chatterton, with the appetite and ease which marked his whole intellectual development, had picked up the elements of medicine from Barrett, who was a surgeon. In the eighteenth century that rudimentary training was enough to qualify him as a ship’s doctor, provided Barrett would vouch for him. At the end of a letter to Catcott on 12 August he wrote: ‘I intend going abroad as a Surgeon, Mr Barrett has it in his Power to assist me greatly by giving me a physical Character: I hope he will.’ That the last sentence was as near a cry for help as Chatterton ever allowed himself. But it did no good. Mean-minded to the last, Barrett failed to oblige.

The August issue of the Town and Country Magazine was not, as he had hoped, filled with his work and none of the editors who owed him for contributions would pay up. His ‘damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride’ would not allow him to take whatever menial alternatives there may have been to starvation, So he hung on, ‘living on the air’, until 24 August. There is a story that on that day his landlady, Mrs Angel, ‘as she knew Chatterton had not eaten anything for two or three days … begged him … to have some dinner with her. He was offended at her request, which seemed to hint to him that he was in want, and assured her he was not hungry.’22 The story fits his character but is probably untrue; survivors of a suicide usually try to cheer themselves up after the event by showing that they, at least, were not to blame.

That night his neighbours in the lodging-house said they heard him pacing restlessly to and fro until the small hours. When he failed to appear in the morning they thought he  was sleeping late. By the afternoon they were alarmed and finally forced his door. They found him, said Barrett, lying on his bed, ‘a horrid spectacle, with features distorted, as if from convulsions’. He had swallowed arsenic. As always, his floor was littered with manuscripts torn into fragments no bigger than a sixpence.

No one came to identify his body at the inquest, and in the Register of Deaths they got his Christian name wrong, putting him down as ‘William Chatterton’. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Shoe Lane workhouse. He was still three months short of his eighteenth birthday.

Chatterton’s tragedy is one of waste, a terrible waste of talent, vitality and promise. But it is also a peculiarly eighteenth-century tragedy of stinginess and snobbery and exploitation, a product of the high Tory, port-steeped arrogance of a time which was willing to squander any talent for the sake of its prejudices. Yet, in a way, Chatterton’s abounding gifts themselves made his suicide more likely. Out of them he built a last line of defence: that pride which enabled him, as a final gesture, to destroy contemptuously all those gifts which those around him so conspicuously lacked. William James once wrote:

Mankind’s common instinct for reality … has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this way or that, if yet we cling to life, and he is able ‘to fling it away like a flower’ as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that a highhearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.23On these terms, Chatterton may have taken his own life ambitiously, to vindicate himself and cancel out his failure. That, certainly, accounts for the hold he has had over the imaginations of succeeding generations, despite the fact that his poetry, for good reasons, is not much read. He is the supreme illustration of the belief that those with most life and passion go soon, while those with little to lose hang on.

Yet the basic questions remain: why did he turn so readily to suicide – even if only as a gesture – when his life in Bristol became impossible? Why, pride apart, did he do it in the end? After all, pride is a superficial motive, an excuse you offer yourself for impulses you do not care to examine too closely. My own guess is that, even if his luck had been better and social prejudices less impossibly loaded against him, suicide would still not have been too far away. Certainly, what we now know of the mechanics of the act suggests most of the elements were present in Chatterton from the start. His father had died before he was born. I do not know if he was buried in the graveyard of St Mary Redcliffe but he and generations of his family had been associated with the church and had their graves there. What is sure is that, apart from a book on necromancy which the young Chatterton valued highly and kept with him until his sudden departure for London, the boy’s only patrimony was a pile of old parchments his father had taken from the Muniment Room of the church, where they had been left scattered over the floor. Since some came from ‘Mr Canynge’s Cofre’, a number of them must have concerned that wise, magnanimous patron – almost patronsaint – of the Rowley poems. In time they assumed a great emotional importance for the boy.

Despite his vast precocity, he was a slow starter. According to his sister, ‘My brother was dull at learning, not knowing many letters at four years old.’24 The master of the local infant school sent him home as unteachable, Then one day, when his mother was tearing up an old folio music book which had belonged to his father, his eye was caught by the large illuminated letters and, said his mother, ‘he fell in love with them’. From then on he learned quickly. But he objected to small books, so his mother taught him to read in a big black-letter medieval bible. In other words, he was soaked from the start in a medieval world which was directly associated with his dead father.

Later, when he came to write the Rowley poems, he was not satisfied simply with writing the verse, he also took huge pains to make the calligraphy, spelling and vocabulary resemble the parchments his father had left him. The results seemed authentic enough to convince many of the amateur antiquarians of his day. Add to that the poems’ framework of a benign, father-like Canynge who encouraged and cared for his devoted poet and admirer Thomas Rowley as a kind of insurance against oblivion, and who built, as his other monument for posterity, St Mary Redcliffe, the Chatterton family church. The whole extraordinary effort seems to me like an attempt to recreate an idealized image of his dead father for himself and exclusively on terms of his own making. It may even have been fantasies of this kind which possessed him when those weird fits of abstraction came over him, particularly when he was writing the Rowley poems. His friend William Smith, whose brother later committed suicide, remarked: ‘There was one spot in particular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed always to take a particular delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of ecstasy or trance.’25Chatterton was a genius – in precociousness, if not in actual achievement – and there is never any simple mechanical explanation for that. All I am suggesting is that the need to resurrect his dead father – to set him up, as the psycho-analysts would say, in his ego – might account for some of the urgency and forwardness of his creative drive, just as it accounts more obviously for the over-all plan of the Rowley poems. It may also have made the idea of suicide, when the going got rough, more than usually tempting. As with Sylvia Plath, death might have seemed less terrible if it meant rejoining someone loved and already dead.

Yet no shadow of this gets into his poetry, except at a considerable remove of abstraction. His Rowley poems are part of the Gothic Revivial, as eighteenth-century in their way as his political pamphleteering. So, too, were his reasons for suicide. They had nothing to do with imagination or poetic vulnerability or extremism. Instead, suicide was a solution to a practical problem, altogether more obvious and nasty: Grub Street failure and starvation. Arsenic merely forestalled by a few days an ending that was already inevitable.

Al Alvarez

The Savage God