Chatterton’s Poetic Afterlife, 1770–1794: A Context for Coleridge’s Monody

Abstract

Perhaps no other poet offers such a contrast between a brief and obscure life and a vast and powerful posthumous existence as the figure of Thomas Chatterton. When he died in his Holborn garret in 1770 at the age of 17, all he could claim were a scattering of anonymous poems and letters in the newspapers, squibs, imitations, satires and love verses, and a bundle of documents rather amateurishly forged or ‘transcribed’, many purporting to be the writings of a fifteenth-century priest and poet, Thomas Rowley. In the years after Chatterton’s death, curiosity became intense about this odd conjunction of youth and age, the charity boy who had recovered the voice of a fifteenth-century priest – a language whose words were ancient yet seemed new-minted for an age tiring of politeness and wit. Chatterton fast became an object of wonder to those who, like Dr Johnson, made their way to the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe. The young man’s writings began to take their ambiguous place in the literary canon. By 1777 Rowley’s poems had been given a scholarly edition by Thomas Tyrwhitt, and in the following year the fifteenth-century writer was awarded a chapter in Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry.¹