Abstract
When Thomas Chatterton flashed across the sky like a new comet, the Club was ready for him. His appearance presaged the arrival of a Romantic culture which was to subvert many eighteenth-century norms. Yet the members of the Literary Club (‘Johnson’s Club’ or ‘the Turk’s Head Club’) were in various ways prepared and intellectually equipped to enter the fray, as the affair spread from antiquarian and historical concerns to broader literary and cultural issues. At least ten individuals who had been elected to the Club by the time of Johnson’s death in 1784 might plausibly have made some contribution to the debate. Their qualifications ranged from localized skills in editing and interpreting older English poetry, along with philological skills grounded in a thorough classical training, down to forensic talents which had been applied to a number of cognate enquiries.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. B. Redford (Princeton, 1992–4), iii. 12.
Thraliana, ed. K. C. Balderston (Oxford, 1951), ii. 697.
Walpole, Horace, A Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton (Strawberry Hill, 1779), 37–8. For the letter to Bewley,
see also The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (New Haven, 1937–83), xvi. 121–34.
Malone’s Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796), 354–5, quoted in The Piozzi Letters, ed. E. A. Bloom and L. D. Bloom (Newark, NJ, 1989–), ii. 386–7. Someone in a position to know, Hannah More, had a clear idea of Club attitudes. On 13 May 1780 she wrote to Frances Boscawen, ‘I suppose you have read Mr Warton’s second volume [of the History]; I have not seen it, but hear that he totally rejects the authenticity of Rowley’s Poems; so does Johnson, so does Percy, so do most of the antiquaries; but neither their authority nor their reasonings have entirely convinced your obstinate friend’.
See Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, ed. William Roberts (London, 1834), i. 181. It is intriguing to see an eighteenth-century writer link ‘authenticity’ and ‘authority’ in this way.
Boswell, James, Boswell Laird of Auchinleck 1778–1782, ed. J. W. Reed and F. A. Pottle (New York, 1977), Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell, 359. Again there is the small but significant fact that this conversation took place at the home of Frances Reynolds, Sir Joshua’s sister.
Davis, Bertram H., Thomas Percy: A Scholar-Cleric in the Age of Johnson (Philadelphia, 1989), 253.
It may have been Malone’s Cursory Observations which settled his mind. After this response to the Rowleyans had come out, Johnson encountered Jacob Bryant. According to a letter from George Steevens to Thomas Warton, in May 1781, Johnson ‘heard the other day, with no very grave face, the complaints of Bryant’. See The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. D. Fairer (Athens, Ga., 1995), 455. Warton, Steevens, and Catcott were in correspondence about the affair throughout much of 1782, as Fairer’s edition reveals.
Whalley, Thomas Sedgewick, Journals and Correspondence of Thomas Sedgewick Whalley, D.D., ed. H. Wickham (London, 1863), i. 417.
Boswell, James, The Correspondence of James Boswell relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, ed. M. Waingrow, Yale Edition of the Private Papers of ames Boswell (New York, 1969), 254.
Ibid. viii. 198. As Paul Baines remarks, ‘Oliver Goldsmith even took the advice of Lord Hardwicke (not a sympathetic judge of forgers) before making his enquiries’, with citation of a letter from Hardwicke to Goldsmith dated 24 April 1771. See Baines, ‘“All of the House of Forgery”: Walpole, Chatterton, and Antiquarian Commerce’, Poetica 39/40 (1993), 47. As late as 1781, Hardwicke was reporting to Percy that he had been ’staggered’ into belief in Chatterton by the books of Bryant and Milles: see Illustrations, viii. 198. By this date Hardwicke had joined the Walpole party in deploring Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, especially the treatment of their pet Lyttelton.
For Percy’s part in the investigation and the loss of the manuscripts, see Davis, 202–4; A. Watkin-Jones, ‘Bishop Percy, Thomas Warton, and Chatterton’s Rowley Poems (1773–1790)’, PMLA 50 (1935), 769–84;
See The Percy Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Edmond Malone, ed. A. Tillotson (Baton Rouge, La., 1944).
Illustrations, vi. 556; The Percy Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and William Shenstone, ed. C. Brooks (New Haven, 1977), 9–10. Thomas Warton offered assistance with the Reliques, although in the event Percy’s aid to the History of English Poetry was of more consequence (Davis, 83).
For the complex story of the biography of Goldsmith, see Balderston, K. C., The History and Sources of Percy’s Memoir of Goldsmith (Cambridge, 1926); Thomas Percy’s Life of Dr Oliver Goldsmith, ed. R. L. Harp (Salzburg, 1976); Dr Campbell’s Diary of a Visit to England in 1775, ed. J. L. Clifford (Cambridge, 1947), 25–30.
Haywood, Ian, Faking It: Art and the Politics of Forgery (New York, 1987), 63. Haywood’s case is not helped by several errors in facts and dating, most obviously his belief that David Garrick (d.1779) took part in the first performance of Ireland’s Vortigern in 1795 (65). See also Haywood’s earlier study The Making of History (London, 1986) for a more detailed presentation of a similar case regarding the blurring of the concept of forgery.
Warton, Thomas, An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley (London, 1782), 109.
There is a large literature on this topic, but the most immediately relevant items include Fairer, David, ‘Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, and the Recovery of the Past’, in W. B. Hutchings and W. Ruddick (eds), Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays (Liverpool, 1993), 146–70; and idem, ‘“Sweet Native Stream!”: Wordsworth and the School of Warton’, in Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ, and James G. Basker (eds), Tradition in Transition (Oxford, 1996), 314–38.
See The Percy Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, ed. M. G. Robinson and L. Dennis (Baton Rouge, La., 1951), 142–4; also printed in Correspondence of Warton, 342, 368.
The most comprehensive modern treatment of Malone’s career is that of Peter Martin, Edmond Malone: Shakespearean Scholar (Cambridge, 1995). For the Chatterton affair, see 74–80.
Malone, Edmond, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (London, 1782), 41.
de Grazia, Margreta, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford, 1991), 226.
Grafton, Anthony, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, 1990), 5, 8. In addition, relevant information on Isaac Casaubon and others will be found in Grafton’s study Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 145–61 and passim.
See for example Levine, J. M., Dr Woodward’s Shield (Berkeley, 1977); and The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, 1991).
It was members of the Club who had done most to refigure the map of English culture, through their pioneering efforts to codify the artistic inheritance of the nation. See Lipking, Lawrence, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970). With the lone exception of Horace Walpole, all the key figures treated by Lipking – Hawkins and Burney, Johnson and Warton, Reynolds – were Clubmen. To this list we might add the contributions of Gibbon in reconstructing ancient history; Adam Smith in realigning the study of political economy; Boswell in reformulating the genre of biography; William Jones in developing comparative philology; Joseph Banks in institutionalizing the study of botany; Burke in political rhetoric and Garrick in dramatic expression. Moreover, Robert Chambers (with the help of Johnson) was the first to amplify significantly the great codification of law carried out by Blackstone (himself a friend and associate of several members). It would be understandable if such a group had no desire to see poetic conventions remodelled by a rank outsider. Chatterton is supposed to have told his sister, ‘I wish I knew the classicals, I then could do anything’ (Life, 62): whatever his individual merits as a creative writer, this lack would have sunk him in the Club’s estimation as an arbiter of literary destiny.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rogers, P. (1999). Chatterton and the Club. In: Groom, N. (eds) Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390225_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390225_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40581-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-39022-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)