Sidetracks

Which I suppose will do for you …

When in the morn with thoughts erect

Sly Dick did on his dream reflect,

Why faith, thinks he, ‘tis something too,

It might – perhaps – it might – be true

I’ll go and see – away he hies,

And to the Garret quick he flies,

Enters the room, cuts up the clothes

And after that reeves up the hose:

Then of the cloth he purses made,

Purses to hold his filching trade.

The true identity of the ‘Garret’s spacious dome’, and the store of cloth which he ‘cuts up’ to make his fortune, flash up at one instantly. They are of course the Muniment Room and the ancient papers within it. Without leaning on this little piece too much, it seems likely that the eleven-year-old Chatterton at some level or other was powerfully aware of the peculiar forces now gathering in and around him ready for his disposal. They had not yet taken the shape of Rowley. But already he was deeply divided as to whether it would be for the best or for the worst. His second early poem, ‘Apostate Will’, about a Methodist preacher who turns High Anglican when a convenient place is offered, contains a similar sense of a ‘filching trade’, and also that characteristic feeling of ambivalent identity which is so marked in Chatterton and the nature of his creative gift. (Both poems also have strong elements of childish plagiarism, relating to fables by John Gay.)

Strictly speaking, this is to anticipate. The first piece of ‘medieval’ writing was not actually made public by Chatterton until he was fifteen and had left school; and then, in answer to inquiries, he was to say – defending his ‘originals’ from first to last – that he had only recently discovered such great treasures in his mother’s house. But it seems unquestionable that Rowley and the world of Rowley’s fifteenth-century Bristol had been maturing long and steadily in Chatterton’s mind and imagination. Colston Hall, built on the site of the medieval Priory of St Augustine’s Back, was always remembered favourably by him in this connection. In his ‘Will’ he adopts the satiric medieval practice, used notably by François Villon, of bequeathing his better qualities (such as Modesty) to the various public figures who are most in need of them. His ‘disinterestedness’ is bequeathed as follows, in a wry passage which connects Rowley and Colston Hall: ‘Item … To Bristol all my spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on her quay since the days of Canning and Rowley! ‘Tis true a charitable Gentleman, one Mr Colston, smuggled a considerable quantity of it, but it being proved that he was Papist, the Worshipful Society of Aldermen endeavoured to throttle him with the Oath of Allegiance.’ Chatterton rarely had anything good to say for a modern institution of Bristol, and when he does, it is remarkable.

Colston served him in two ways. First by providing an embryo group of friends, or at least acquaintances, in whom he could begin to satisfy his need for notice and applause. And second, in failing to weigh his mind down with any academic material of the depressing kind which such establishments are formally designed to provide, but rather allowing him freedom to pursue his own private and increasingly idiosyncratic reading and research. His sister, Mrs Newton: ‘About his tenth year he began (with the trifle my mother allowed him for pocket-money) to hire books from the circulating library … Between his eleventh and twelfth year, he wrote a catalogue of the books he had read, to the number of seventy: History and Divinity were the chief subjects. At twelve he was confirmed by the Bishop … Soon after this, in the week he was door-keeper (at Colston), he made some verses on the last day, I think about eighteen lines; paraphrased the ninth chapter of Job; and not long after, some chapters in Isaiah. He had been gloomy from the time he began to learn, but we remarked he was more cheerful after he began to write poetry. Some satirical pieces we saw soon after.’ Now he was started.

Chatterton left Colston some time in the winter of 1766, or the spring of 1767; at any rate when he had turned fourteen. Before that time had come, a number of events occurred whose significance was great but indirect. He formed a close friendship with a boy somewhat older than himself, Thomas Phillips. The relationship was to be tragically short, but Phillips was one of those invaluable personalities, a catalyst. A school-friend gave this typically portentous picture: ‘The poetical attempts of Phillips had excited a kind of literary emulation amongst the elder classes of the scholars; the love of fame animated their bosoms, and a variety of competitors appeared to dispute the laurel with him.’ This helped; it was the first materialization of Chatterton’s company of poets. Related to it, the death of the brilliant contemporary satirist, Charles Churchill, who had gone to visit Wilkes (exiled in Boulogne on account of the notorious No. 45 of the North Briton), served to give the young writers both a literary and political martyr. Churchill died in 1764. In the following year there was a notable publishing event, the appearance in three duodecimo volumes of Percy’s celebrated Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. These certainly came into Chatterton’s hands, one of the primary texts of the Romantic revival. So the hidden medieval world was nourished as well.

When Chatterton left Colston, he was extremely lucky to be apprenticed to a Bristol attorney, John Lambert Esq. He took up the job in July 1767. It was a remarkable success for an ex-Colston boy; but in practice it involved mere clerical copying and drudgery, and Chatterton did not find himself occupied fully for more than two or three hours a day. He continued to haunt the circulating libraries; he took to walking certain young ladies on the green; and most important of all, he began to take old St Mary Redcliff papers and parchments with him to work. Friends referred to vague ‘copying’ and ‘transcribing’ processes. He covered many parchment scraps with his own version of medieval script. He became fascinated by architecture and heraldry and the business of family trees. These subjects also fascinated Thomas Rowley. For Rowley now existed.

After such a long gestation, things moved quickly. The main external events were as follows. In July 1768, the old bridge across the river Avon was replaced by a new one, and Chatterton, making his first of many bids for fame, sent a fictitious account of the opening of the original bridge, purporting to have been drawn from a medieval manuscript, to Felix Farley’s Journal. The Journal was the local Bristol magazine and gossip column, and the publication of his contribution soon brought two Bristol littérateurs, George Catcott and William Barrett, snuffling on to the young man’s trail. Catcott and Barrett are two wholly comic figures, part fools and part villains, who stumble through this period of Chatterton’s career as if Laurel and Hardy had tried to organize the Fourth Act of Hamlet. For the next eighteen months they pose as Chatterton’s patrons, lending him books and showing him off to their friends at numerous little soirées, while encouraging him to bring forth a stream of letters, ballads, elegies and dramatic poetry, all also purporting to be medieval: notably the work of the fifteenth-century writers who surrounded William Canynges in Bristol, and above all of the poet-monk and intimate of Canynges – Thomas Rowley. (Barrett was writing a History of Bristol, and for him Chatterton conveniently produced descriptions of medieval painting and architecture, grotesque family trees, and gorgeous examples of local heraldic devices – all spurious.)

One of the finest of the early Rowley productions was this fragment which praised St Mary Redcliff and its great restorer William Canynges. It is of particular interest in that it performs a strange transmutation of the ‘Sly Dick’ poem; it is a vision and a supernatural command, but this time the opposite of Satanic. Moreover, in using the same short four-stress line and rhyming couplets, it yet manages to produce a simplicity quite literally worlds away from ‘Sly Dick’s’ satiric jingle. ‘Onn Oure Ladies Chyrche’ by Thomas Rowley–

As on a hille one eve sittinge,

At oure Ladies Chyrche muche wonderinge,

The cunninge handieworke so fine

Han well nighe dazzeled mine eyne.

Quod I: some cunninge fairy hande

Yreer’d this chapelle in this lande;

Full well I wot, so fine a sighte

Was n’ere yreer’d of mortal wighte.

Quod Truth: thou lackest knowledgynge;

Thou forsooth ne wotteth of the thinge.

A Rev’rend Fadre, William Canynge hight [called]

Yreered up this chapelle bright;

And eke another in the Towne

Where glassie bubblinge Trymme doth roun.

Quod I: ne doubt for all he’s given

His soule will certes goe to heaven.

Yea, quod Truth, then go thou home

And see thou do as he hath done.

Quod I: I doubte, that can ne be,

I have ne gotten markes three.

Quod Truth: as thou hast got, give almes-deeds so:

Canynges and Gaunts could do ne moe.

This and many other small pieces, together with the brilliant narrative ballad ‘The Death of Sir Charles Bawdin’, the two poetic tragedies ‘Godwyn’ and especially ‘Æella’ (of which the famous and beautiful Minstrel’s Song is a mere chorus), and numerous Epistles, Prologues and Songs, were all accepted blandly and beamingly by Catcott and Barrett who never dreamed of looking a gift-horse let alone a prodigy in the mouth; they calmly accepted everything as genuine curios and antiquities pouring forth in a gratuitous flood at their feet, as if young Chatterton were the keeper of some magic casket of inexhaustible delights. It never seemed to cross their minds that beauty is the most terrible and merciless of masters. Mrs Newton: ‘He was introduced to Mr Barrett and Mr Catcott; his ambitions increased daily. His spirits were rather uneven, sometimes so gloom’d, that for many days together he would say but very little, and that by constraint. When in spirits, he would enjoy his rising fame; confident of advancements, he would promise my mother and me should be partakers of his success … About this time he wrote several satirical poems, one in the papers, on Mr Catcott’s putting the pewter plates in St Nicholas towers. He began to be universally known among the young men. He had many cap acquaintances, but I am confident few intimates.’ ‘Many cap acquaintances’ is apt. The role of the satirical poetry was now becoming obvious; it kept him on balance in a situation fluctuating violently between tragedy and farce which only an English provincial city with its mixture of greed, pomposity and eloquent mediocrity could ever have provided.

When occasionally Chatterton was asked to exhibit his ‘originals’, he either prevaricated successfully or else forged with excruciating crudeness (forty-two scraps still survive in the British Museum) practically illegible parchments which he then aged with ochre, candle-flame, glue, varnish, or plain floor-dirt. Catcott and Barrett, the redoubtable double, stored them away without a murmur. At the same time they judiciously criticized his public forays into the local exchange of satirical verses. And had their noses, or rather their ears, nearly bitten off for it–

No more, dear Smith, the hackney’d Tale renew:

I own their censure, I approve it too.

For how can Idiots, destitute of thought,

Conceive, or estimate, but as they’re taught?

Say, can the satirising Pen of Shears,

Exalt his name, or mutilate his ears?

None, but a Lawrence, can adorn his Lays,

Who in a quart of Claret drinks his praise.