The Rowley Poems

Thomas Chatterton

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• Publié par: fewyor
• Publié le: 01 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 51
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rowley
Poems, by Thomas Chatterton
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Title: The Rowley Poems
Author: Thomas Chatterton
Release Date: July 28, 2004 [EBook #13037]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK THE ROWLEY POEMS ***
Produced by Leah Moser and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.THE
ROWLEY POEMS
BY
THOMAS CHATTERTON
REPRINTED FROM TYRWHITT'S THIRD
EDITION
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
MAURICE EVAN HARE
MCMXICONTENTS.
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
I. CHATTERTON'S LIFE AND DEATH AND THE
GENESIS OF THE ROWLEY POEMS
II. THE VALUE OF THE ROWLEY POEMS
III. BIBLIOGRAPHY
IV. NOTE ON THE TEXT
V. NOTES
VI. APPENDIX ON THE ROWLEY
CONTROVERSY
REPRINT OF THE EDITION OF 1778. (The Table
of Contents follows the 1778 title-page.)EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION.
I. CHATTERTON'S LIFE AND DEATH AND THE
GENESIS OF THE ROWLEY POEMS
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on the 20th
of November 1752. His father—also Thomas—
dead three months before his son's birth, had been
a subchaunter in Bristol Cathedral and had held the
mastership in a local free school. We are told that
he was fond of reading and music; that he made a
collection of Roman coins, and believed in magic
(or so he said), studying the black art in the pages
of Cornelius Agrippa. With all the self-acquired
culture and learning that raised him above his class
(his father and grandfathers before him for more
than a hundred years had been sextons to the
church of St. Mary Redcliffe) he is described as a
dissipated, 'rather brutal fellow'. Lastly, he appears
to have been 'very proud', self-confident, and self-
reliant.
Of Chatterton's mother little need be said. Gentle
and rather foolish, she was devoted to her two
children Mary and, his sister's junior by two years,
Thomas the Poet. Of these Mary seems to have
inherited the colourless character of her mother;
but Thomas must always have been remarkable.
We have the fullest accounts of his childhood, and
the details that might with another be set down as
chronicles of the nursery will be seen to have theirimportance in the case of this boy who set himself
consciously to be famous when he was eight,
wrote fine imaginative verse before he was
thirteen, and killed himself aged seventeen and
nine months.
Thomas, then, was a moody baby, a dull small boy
who knew few of his letters at four; and was
superannuated—such was his impenetrability to
learning—at the age of five from the school of
which his father had been master. He was
moreover till the age of six and a half so frequently
subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently
causeless crying that his mother and grandmother
feared for his reason and thought him 'an absolute
fool.' We are told also by his sister—and there is
no incongruity in the two accounts—that he early
displayed a taste for 'preheminence and would
preside over his playmates as their master and
they his hired servants.' At seven and a half he
dissipated his mother's fear that she had borne a
fool by rapidly learning to read in a great black-
letter Bible; for characteristically 'he objected to
read in a small book.' In a very short time from this
he appears to have devoured eagerly the contents
of every volume he could lay his hands on. He had
a thirst for knowledge at large—for any kind of
information, and as the merest child read with a
careless voracity books of heraldry, history,
astronomy, theology, and such other subjects as
would repel most children, and perhaps one may
say, most men. At the age of eight we hear of him
reading 'all day or as long as they would let him,'
confident that he was going to be famous, andpromising his mother and sister 'a great deal of
finery' for their care of him when the day of his
fame arrived. Before he was nine he was
nominated for Colston's Hospital, a local school
where the Bluecoat dress was worn and at which
the 'three Rs' were taught but very little else, so
that the boy, disappointed of the hope of
knowledge, complained he could work better at
home. To this period we should probably assign
the delightful story of Chatterton and a friendly
potter who promised to give him an earthenware
bowl with what inscription he pleased upon it—such
writing presumably intended to be 'Tommy his
bowl' or 'Tommy Chatterton'. 'Paint me,' said the
small boy to the friendly potter, 'an Angel with
Wings and a Trumpet to trumpet my Name over
the World.'
At ten he was making progress in arithmetic, and it
should be mentioned that he 'occupied himself with
mechanical pursuits so that if anything was out of
order in the house he was set to mend it.' At
school he read during play hours and made few
friends, but those were 'solid fellows,' his sister tells
us; while at home he had appropriated to himself a
small attic where he would read, write and draw
pictures—a number of which are preserved in the
British Museum—of knights and churches, and
heraldic designs in red and yellow ochre, charcoal,
and black-lead. In this attic too he had stored—
though at what date is uncertain—a number of
writings on parchment which had a rather singular
history. In the muniment room of St. Mary
Redcliffe, the church in which Chatterton'sancestors had served as sextons, there were six or
seven great oak chests, of which one, greater than
the others and secured by no fewer than six locks,
was traditionally called 'Canynges Cofre' after
William Canynge the younger, with whose name
the erection and completion of St. Mary's were
especially associated. These had contained deeds
and papers dealing with parochial matters and the
affairs of the Church, but some years before
Chatterton's birth the Vestry had determined to
examine these documents, some of which may
have been as old as the building itself. The keys
had in the course of time been lost, and the
vestrymen accordingly broke open the chests and
removed to another place what they thought of
value, leaving Canynge's Coffer and its fellows
gutted and open but by no means void of all their
ancient contents. Such parchments as remained
Chatterton's father carried away, whole armfuls at
a time, using some to cover his scholars' books
and giving others to his wife, who made them into
thread-papers and dress patterns.
In the house to which Mrs. Chatterton had moved
upon her husband's death there was still a
sufficient number of these old manuscripts to make
a considerable trove for the boy who, then nine or
ten years old, had first learnt to read in black-letter
and was in a few years to produce poetry which
should pass for fifteenth century with many well-
reputed antiquaries. It was no doubt on blank
pieces of these parchments that he inscribed the
matter of the few Rowley documents which he ever
showed for originals. We have the account of acertain Thistlethwaite, one of the 'solid lads' with
whom Chatterton had made friends at school, that
his friend Thomas in the summer of 1764 told him
'he was in possession of some old MSS. which had
been found deposited in a chest in Redcliffe
Church, and that he had lent some or one of them
to Thomas Phillips'—an usher at Colston's, an
earnest and thoughtful man fond of poetry, and a
great friend of Chatterton's. 'Within a day or two
after this,' (Thistlethwaite wrote to Dean Milles,) 'I
saw Phillips … who produced a MS. on parchment
or vellum which I am confident was "Elenoure and
Juga"[1] a kind of pastoral eclogue afterwards
published in the Town and Country Magazine for
May 1769. The parchment or vellum appeared to
have been closely pared round the margin for what
purpose or by what accident I know not … The
writing was yellow and pale manifestly as I
conceive occasioned by age.'
This was the beginning of the Rowley fiction—
which might be metaphorically described as a
motley edifice, half castle and half cathedral, to
which Chatterton all his life was continually adding
columns and buttresses, domes and spires,
pediments and minarets, in the shape of more
poems by Thomas Rowley (a secular priest of St.
John's, Bristol); or by his patron the munificent
William Canynge (many times Mayor of the same
city); or by Sir Thibbot Gorges, a knight of ancient
family with literary tastes; or by good Bishop
Carpenter (of Worcester) or John à Iscam (a
Canon of St. Augustine's Abbey, also in Bristol);
together with plays or portions of plays which theywrote—a Saxon epic translated—accounts of
Architecture—songs and eclogues—and friendly
letters in rhyme or prose. In short, this clever
imaginative lad had evolved before he was sixteen
such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter
of one kind or another that his fictitious circle of
men of taste and learning (living in the