Abstract
The most enduring image of Romanticism is that of the poet in a tiny garret, sprawling supine on his bed: young and beautiful, an exquisite corpse. This angelic poet has suffered for his genius – starving and destitute, mad and suicidal, and now dead. The fatal archetype is, of course, Thomas Chatterton. His painting by Henry Wallis is a secular, a literary, pieta. The poet crucified by his prodigious genius, his flaming head haloed with shredded manuscripts, his lifeless feet resting against his writing-desk. But no-one is there to cradle him, only fictions ….
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Notes
From Taylor’s dating of Rowley, the result of recording the frequency of words derived from the glossaries and dictionaries Chatterton had access to at different times, it appears that from the beginning Chatterton aimed to create a single definable author (Works, ii. 1176–228): see Groom, Nick, ‘Thomas Rowlie Preeste’, in The Early Romantics: Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (London, 1998).
Caine, T. Hall, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Boston, 1869), 184.
The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London, 1872), ii. vii–xlvi;
Dix, John, The Life of Thomas Chatterton including his Unpublished Poems and Correspondence (London, 1837).
For Dix’s duplicity and forgery, see the Chatterton entry by Penny Boumelha in Margaret M. Smith (ed.), Index of English Literary Manuscripts (London, 1986), iii. 1, 195–200.
The manuscript of Meyerstein’s Life is in Bristol Reference Library, 24567. In the same year as Taylor’s incomparable edition, Grevel Lindop also edited Thomas Chatterton: Selected Poems for Carcanet (Manchester, 1972). The two bibliographies are Warren, Murray, A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography of Thomas Chatterton (New York, 1977), and Rowles, Jean C., ‘Thomas Chatterton 1752–1770: An Annotated Bibliography’, Library Association thesis, 1981.
Clarke, Ernest, ‘New Lights on Chatterton’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 13 (1916), 219–51;
Powell, L. F., ‘Thomas Tyrwhitt and the Rowley Poems’, Review of English Studies 7 (1931), 314–26;
Holmes, Richard, ‘Thomas Chatterton: The Case Re-opened’, Cornhill Magazine, 178 (1970), 200–51.
Holmes’s thesis, that Chatterton’s death was not an adolescent suicide but a dreadful accident, is suggested by Donald S. Taylor, ‘Chatterton’s Suicide’, Philological Quarterly 31 (1952), 63–9,
and anticipated by Neil Bell, Cover His Face: A Novel of the Life and Times of Thomas Chatterton, the Marvellous Boy of Bristol (London, 1943).
It is also, of course, the inspiration for Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton: A Novel (London, 1987) – and the most plausible reading of the evidence.
For example, Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), 34–9.
Butler, Marilyn, ‘The Country Movement’, in Romanticism in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge, 1988), 41–51; and ‘Against Tradition: The Case for a Particularized Historical Method’, in Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Madison, 1985), 25–47, esp. 37–41; Stewart, Susan, Crimes of Writing (Oxford, 1991), 148–53.
Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (London, 1897), ii. 197. For a theory of counterfactuals, see Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Mali Ferguson (London, 1997), 1–90.
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© 1999 Nick Groom
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Groom, N. (1999). Introduction. In: Groom, N. (eds) Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390225_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390225_1
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