Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture

After enjoying cult status in the nineteenth century, Thomas Chatterton dwindled in significance in the twentieth, becoming little more than footnote in literary history. As Nick Groom notes in his Introduction, only a handful of serious scholarly and critical works on Chatterton were available in the early 1990's. The time is ripe, however, for a rediscovery and reevaluation of the life and work of Thomas Chatterton. Current interest in marginalized literary figures from the past, who were disadvantaged by class, country or region of origin, or gender, as well as in works that engage the politics of their time render Chatterton an apt and fruitful subject for analysis. In addition, postmodern attitudes toward history as an imaginative construction, usually composed by those in power, permit a more sympathetic view of Chatterton's poetic enterprise than prevailed under earlier notions of history as an objective, factual record of events, according to which the Rowley poems were mere fraudulent forgeries. The present collection of thirteen critical essays, along with various appendices and collateral short pieces (Preface, Introduction, and Afterward), makes a significant contribution toward filling the gap in Chatterton studies and demonstrates fruitful approaches to this poet's complex body of work.

A number of the essays explore Chatterton in relation to eighteenth century writers and intellectual milieus. Claude Rawson's "Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton," notes parallels between Chatterton's works and those of other eighteenth-century writers such as Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Defoe, among others. According to Rawson, Chatterton's poetry, both those works written in modern English and the Rowley poems, has more in common with Augustan literary modes and sensibilities than many readers have heretofore assumed. Nick Groom explores connections between Chatterton and Thomas Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) largely initiated the eighteenth century interest in early literature and had a profound impact on Chatterton's creations. Groom notes differences between Percy's and Chatterton's representations of the minstrel figure and attitudes toward manuscripts. For Percy, minstrels were "instruments of the state" (189) and manuscripts were "little more than the raw material of the printing-press" (191), whereas for Chatterton minstrels "were really no more than performing musicians, and had none of Percy's court status" (191), and manuscripts were fetishised into "the very matter of literature, the stuff of history itself" (203). By means of careful archival research, Groom also presents new information on Percy's role in assessing the authenticity of the Rowley poems before their initial publication.

Paul Baines's "Chatterton and Johnson: Authority and Filiation in the 1770's" analyzes the literary relationship between Chatterton and Samuel Johnson, drawing upon Walter Jackson Bate's theory of the burden of the past and Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence model of poets' responses to their precursors. Although Chatterton satirized Johnson in a number of poems, Johnson was remarkably tolerant, even paternal, in his treatment of Chatterton. Maria Grazia Lolla, in "'Truth Sacrificing to the Muses': The Rowley Controversy and the Genesis of the Romantic Chatterton," presents a lucid and perceptive analysis of the debate over the Rowley poems' authenticity in the decades following Chatterton's death. Later scholars have wondered at the ignorance and naivete of eighteenth-century literati who could take seriously the question of Rowley's authenticity, but Lolla argues that this question was not the main point of the controversy. Instead, Rowley proved a mere pretext for researching and discussing historical issues. "Those who took part in the controversy," Lolla writes, "seemed more interested in arguing and pursuing research than in winning the argument or answering questions" (157). In addition, the Rowleyans and the Anti-Rowleyans were less concerned with Rowley per se than in arguing for different versions of literary history. Anti-Rowleyans such as Thomas Warton and Edmond Malone fought to preserve their view of English poetry as following a steady course of improvement to its culmination in the Augustan age. They also wished to retain literary studies as the preserve of an educated elite, against the incursions of a growing body of amateur antiquarians contributing their opinions on Rowley and other matters to magazines and newspapers. Rowleyans like Jacob Bryant, by contrast, argued that the past was more complex and unknown than Warton allowed and that more unbiased research was needed. Pat Rogers's essay, "Chatterton and the Club," defends Warton, Malone, and other members of the Literary Club (otherwise known as "Johnson's Club" or "the Turk's Head Club") against charges of elitism in their repudiation of Rowley's authenticity. Instead, Rogers claims, these men were practicing rigorous literary scholarship, which they had learned in their close study of classical texts (a field which, Rogers reminds us, also contained its forgeries and apocryphal works that required detection and expulsion from the canon). Moreover, Rogers notes, many members of the Literary Club, such as Samuel Johnson, came from humble, provincial backgrounds and were therefore similar to Chatterton in their class origins (a point that Baines also makes). Overall, Rogers argues, "The rejection of Rowley's authenticity [by members of the Literary Club] . . . was a scholarly and not a social decision" (124).

Other essays in the collection address Chatterton's legacy for later writers. In his important piece, "Chatterton's Poetic Afterlife, 1770-1794: A Context for Coleridge's Monody," David Fairer argues that several images of Chatterton circulated in the late eighteenth century besides that of the frail victim of a hostile society that dominated in the nineteenth century. In addition to this image, which Fairer calls the "lyric Chatterton," other versions featured in late eighteenth century poems were the satiric, political, manly Chatterton and the "dramatic Chatterton," characterized by grotesque, highly emotional depictions of the young poet's death. In the first, 1790 version of Coleridge's "Monody on the Death of Chatterton," the satirical and dramatic images of the poet dominate, with the result that the poem has a biting edge of social criticism lacking in the 1794 version of the poem, in which the ethereal, childlike, lyric Chatterton has replaced the more disturbing, mature figure of the earlier poem. Richard Holmes's short but provocative analysis of several portraits once thought to be of Chatterton (now considered spurious) similarly groups these into contrasting images of the poet: an eighteenth-century "tough," unsettling image of the poetic genius as "something uncanny, solitary, and even savage" (257) and a nineteenth-century image that is much more pretty and sentimental.

Bridget Keegan, in "Nostalgic Chatterton: Fictions of Poetic Identity and the Forging of a Self-Taught Tradition," explores Chatterton's importance for later plebian poets such as Ann Yearsley and John Clare. Unlike more mainstream Romantic poets for whom Chatterton's life was more important than his work, Keegan argues, peasant poets like Yearsley and Clare actually studied Chatterton's works and allude to them in their own poems. Moreover, they were sympathetic to Chatterton's strategy of impersonating a fifteenth-century monk, which "allowed him to hide behind a more authoritative voice than his own to gain access to a literary world from which he would have otherwise been excluded" (214). Like Chatterton, Yearsley, Clare, and other plebian poets felt the need to adopt voices other than their own in order to be accepted by the literary establishment. Keegan perceptively notes the layers of insecurity in Chatterton's works, as he not only creates Rowley as an authority for his own voice but buttresses Rowley with patrons and precursors of his own. "Each Rowley text," Keegan writes, "reveals that Rowley's poetic identity is always dependent upon other, more authoritative voices" (215).

Most of the other essays in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture examine satirical, anti-lyrical aspects of the poet's work and persona or interpret these as the expressions of a marginalized, lower-middle-class figure (or both). In "'This Necessary Knowledge': Thomas Chatterton and the Ways of the London Book Trade," Michael F. Suarez describes Chatterton's efforts to find publishers for his work and make a living from his pen in London. In Suarez's account, Chatterton was an astute, savvy networker who quickly picked up a knowledge of the book trade and "Contrary to popular belief . . . was earning quite a decent living through the sale of his writings at the time of his death" (100). "In both Bristol and London," Suarez argues, "Chatterton's strategies and practices for publishing his work were far removed from the archetypal image of the hapless and naive Romantic poet he was later imagined to be. Rather, Chatterton approached the problem of seeing his writings into print with remarkable inventiveness and acumen" (96). Many of the works Chatterton did publish in London were political in nature and appeared in journals associated with the Patriot cause. Suarez speculates that, given his talents and activities in London, had Chatterton lived he might have become "a party political writer . . . the successor to the masterful satirist Charles Churchill" (111). Suarez's essay concludes with two helpful appendices, the first listing in chronological order all the works by Chatterton published in his lifetime and the second grouping those works in various categories, such as how many appeared in each journal, before and after Chatterton arrived in London. Suarez's piece is clearly the result of impressive primary research.

Timothy Morton's "In Your Face" analyzes food fights in two of Chatterton's satirical poems, "The Constabiliad" and "The Consuliad," the latter a revised version of the former. These poems, Morton writes, "enact Chatterton's entry into political life, the move from Rowley to Chatterton the satirist, from Bristol to London" and "describe how consumption plays with figuration in a highly politicized way" (79). Georges Lamoine notes a number of original aspects of Chatterton's poetry. One of his major points is that not just the overtly political poems but also the Rowley works can be considered social satires. The world of fifteenth-century Bristol created by Chatterton can be regarded as a utopia, used to comment on the ills of contemporary society in the mode of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Carolyn D. Williams offers a provocative reading of Chatterton's work through the lens of post-colonial theory. Excluded from mainstream British culture by "educational and social disadvantages" (48), Chatterton shares many characteristics with colonized peoples. In particular, Chatterton reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the dominant culture, both resisting it and participating in many of its "critical and political assumptions" (48). Chatterton's creation of an ideal English world located in fifteenth century Bristol also mirrors the efforts of many post-colonial subjects who gain "inner strength" to resist colonialism "by returning 'to a pre-imperial period to locate a 'pure' native culture" (55; quoting Edward Said). "The Rowleyan writings," Williams concludes, "fit neatly within this paradigm" (55). Finally, Inga Bryden in "The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry" argues that Chatterton's interest in heraldry and genealogy, in relation to both Arthurian legend and his own family, reflect the efforts of the working-class poet to "engineer a kind of social sabotage" by "constructing his own social origins" as he likewise constructs the family lineage of his nation through references to King Arthur (69, 75).

The collection is rounded out with a Preface by Peter Ackroyd, who makes rather hyperbolic claims for Chatterton's achievement and importance for English literature (as does Nick Groom in places in his Introduction); an Afterward by Michael Wood, who speculates on some of the paradoxes posed by Chatterton's life, work, and posthumous reputation; and a useful, extensive "Checklist of Creative Works Inspired by Thomas Chatterton's Life and Writings," compiled by John Goodridge.

Chatterton and Romantic Culture is a truly significant collection. One may not fully agree with Nick Groom that Chatterton is "a seminal figure in English literature" and a writer of "stupendous achievement" (5). Still, most would agree that Chatterton was an important figure for the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who was neglected for most of the twentieth. Literary interests and approaches are now flourishing that help us understand and appreciate Chatterton's work in important new ways. The present volume contains many valuable and original essays that are likely to stimulate further research into Chatterton's art and legacy.