Volume 35, Number 6 · April 14, 1988
The Marvelous Boy
By David Lodge
Chatterton
by Peter Ackroyd
Grove Press, 234 pp., $17.95
The Family Romance of the Imposter-Poet Thomas Chatterton
by Louise J. Kaplan
Atheneum, 301 pp., $24.95
Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) is one of the great enigmas of English literary history. Born posthumously the son of a humble Bristol schoolmaster and brought up in straitened circumstances by his widowed mother, educated at a charity grammar school and apprenticed to a lawyer as a scrivener, Chatterton fabricated between the ages of fourteen and sixteen a large quantity of verse purporting to be the work of a fifteenth-century monk called Thomas Rowley, carried out under the patronage of Sir William Canynge, a celebrated mayor of Bristol. Chatterton claimed to have transcribed this poetry, which was written in a plausible pastiche of late Middle English, from old parchments found in the muniment room of the parish church of St. Mary Redcliffe, where his father had been a lay clerk. The Bristol bourgeoisie, delighted by these relics of local history, accepted them with eager credulity, and it was not until more sophisticated literary judges such as Horace Walpole inspected the Rowley poems that serious doubts about their authenticity were aroused.
Review, 3231 words
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