Chatterton, Thomas (1752–1770)

A picture by Henry Wallis (1830–1916) of the English poet Thomas Chatterton, painted in 1856. Chatterton was remembered by Wordsworth (in ‘Resolution and Independence’) as ‘the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride’. He published his first poem at the age of 11 years.

English poet. His medieval-style poems and brief life were to inspire English Romanticism. Having studied ancient documents, he composed poems he ascribed to a 15th-century monk, ‘Thomas Rowley’, and these were at first accepted as genuine. He committed suicide after becoming destitute.

Seeking a patron, he sent examples to the writer Horace Walpole, who, after originally being taken in, was advised that they were forgeries. In 1770 Chatterton moved to London, where during the four months until his death he contributed prose and satirical verses to various periodicals. He poisoned himself with arsenic, after having lived for weeks on the verge of starvation. His death gripped the imagination of the Romantic poets and tributes were paid to his memory by Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth.

For years there was a heated controversy over the Rowley poems, which Chatterton claimed to have found in the church of St Mary Redcliffe in his native Bristol. An edition of 1871 edited by W W Skeat (1835–1912), an expert on Old and Middle English literature, once and for all demonstrated that they were fabrications. Chatterton's importance in English literature lies not in his use of terms from old glossaries, but in his command of rhythm and his breaking away from 18th-century conventions.