Sidetracks

O Education, ever in the wrong,

To thee the curses of mankind belong;

Thou first great author of our future state,

Chief source of our religion, passions, fate …

Priestcraft, thou universal blind of all,

Thou idol, at whose feet all nations fall,

Father of misery, origin of sin,

Whose first existence did with Fear begin …

That particular attack on priestcraft was probably picked up from the seventeenth-century radical political poet, Fulke Greville; another proof of Chatterton’s range, for he must have read Greville’s play Mustapha.

James Thistlethwaite, who has already had much to say on his school-friend’s ‘inordinate vanity’, had even more to say on the fantastic range of Chatterton’s obscure researches. (This was also to be an outstanding trait in Rimbaud, who turned to alchemy.)

In the course of the year 1768 and 1769 – Chatterton being between 15 and 16 years old – wherein I frequently saw and conversed with C., the eccentricity of his mind, and the versatility of his disposition, seem to have been singularly displayed. One day he might be found busily employed in the study of Heraldry and English Antiquities, both of which are numbered amongst the most favourite of his pursuits; the next, discovered him deeply engaged, confounded, and perplexed, amidst the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition, or lost bewildered in the abstruse labyrinth of mathematical researches; and these in an instant again neglected and thrown aside to make room for astronomy and music, of both which sciences his knowledge was entirely confined to theory. Even physics was not without a charm to allure his imagination, and he would talk of Galen, Hippocrates, and Paracelsus, with all the confidence and familiarity of a modern empirick.

Thistlethwaite, it should be pointed out, considered himself to be something of a bard at this time, and was renowned for striding around Bristol with a pair of pistol-butts sticking out of his pockets. But allowing for his love of flourish – perfectly displayed in the peacock struttings of these sentences – the picture of Chatterton in his jackdaw enthusiasm, his frantic and undaunted explorations into whatever caught his fancy and then perhaps his imagination, is tremendously compelling. It is also recognizably provincial and oddly unbalanced. It is not what Matthew Arnold, a hundred years later, would confidently describe as ‘of the centre’. It is peculiar. It contains the essential dissenting element, the waywardness, the impatience, the somehow attractive pigheadedness, of the radical innovator. It also contains the delinquent, the social outcast.

There would be something about the eyes; they would be over-bright, incalculable.

4 ‘This group of dirty-faced wits’

Chatterton was solitary in Bristol and in London, but he was never alone. In fact all his life he had the gift of striking up acquaintances; people were fascinated by him, although in the long run one gains the strong impression that most people were uneasy with him and disliked him. His letters from London to Bristol often include a positive confetti of greetings to old school-friends and ladies of the green. But they contain as well this telling aside: ‘My youthful acquaintances will not take it in dudgeon that I do not write oftener to them, than I believe I shall: but as I had the happy art of pleasing in conversation, my company was often liked, where I did not like: and to continue a correspondence under such circumstances would be ridiculous.’ What is telling is of course the way he says it.

Chatterton did not feel diffident about seeking help and interest from men of experience and influence either. When, in an ironic and somewhat posturing exchange of letters, Horace Walpole rebuffed him and his ‘antiquities’ in the spring of 1769, it seems clear that Walpole was considerably pinched by a sixteen-year-old addressing him as an equal, a presumption which he found ‘singularly impertinent’. Chatterton later recounted the affair to an adult relation – Mr Stephens of Salisbury – in the very coolest and most casual of manners: ‘Having some curious Anecdotes of Painting and Painters, I sent them to Mr Walpole, Author of “Anecdotes of Painting”, “Historic Doubts” and other pieces, well known in the learned world. His answer I make bold to send you. Hence I began a Literary correspondence, which ended as most such do. I differed with him in the age of a MS. He insists on his superior talents, which is no proof of that superiority. We possibly may engage in one of the periodical publications; though I know not who will give the onset …’ This was written when Chatterton was about sixteen and a half. What is quite breathtaking is the discipline and absolute outward control in retelling what had actually been his first major rejection by the London cognoscenti, a bitter blow. Most aspiring adolescents would have fallen into passionate recriminations. But Chatterton: ‘which ended as most such do.’

This control, this inner hardness, is certainly paramount in his relations with his two redoubtable patrons, Catcott and Barrett; and he seems to have exercised it generally in his choice of friends and his maintenance of a deliberate distance between them and himself. A list of these friends, published in Robert Southey’s edition of 1803, is particularly fascinating in that it shows their jobs and professions, giving a striking proof of Chatterton’s intellectual isolation. Part of the list reads as follows: ‘T. Skone, a surgeon; Thomas Cary, pipe maker; H. Kator, sugar baker; W. Smith, a player; M. Mease, vintner; Mr Clayfield, distiller; Mr William Barrett, surgeon; Mr George Catcott & Mr Burgum, pewterers and partners; The Rev. Alexander Catcott, antiquarian; John Rudhall, apothecary; Carty, woollen-draper; Hanmer, grocer; Capel, jeweller; James Thistlethwaite, stationer.’ Altogether there are twenty-seven names. Further, it will be remembered that in their letters of reminiscences collected by Herbert Croft and Robert Southey, none of them – Thistlethwaite, Thomas Cary, Smith, John Rudhall – felt there was the least chance that Rowley and Chatterton could possibly have been the same.

Neither did Catcott and Barrett. But their position is a good deal more ambiguous.

To Barrett next, he has my thanks sincere

For all the little knowledge I had here.

But what was knowledge? Could it here succeed?

When scarcely twenty in the town can read.

With one exception (the Eclogue published in The Town and Country in May 1769), all the Rowley poems were first obtained direct from Chatterton by either Catcott or Barrett. (About the forgery aspect: only two of the forty-two ‘original parchments’ had by the British Museum after Barrett’s death turned out to contain poetry; the rest were prose pieces, catalogues, heraldic designs and drawings. All the other poetry exists only in Chatterton’s undisguised ‘copies’.) The character and motives of these two men are intriguing. Barrett is faintly sinister. A retired surgeon living in a comfortable house on the banks of the Avon, he was immersed in local antiquarian studies for his proposed ‘History of Bristol’. He thus had considerable personal interest in Chatterton’s MSS, and published them in his ‘History’ several years after the poet’s death as bona fide documents, although by then their validity was clearly very doubtful. It is ironic that Chatterton, and not he, should be called dishonest. There is something cold about the man, and one does not like to think of them together. ‘Mr Barrett adds, that he often used to send for him from the Charity-School (which is close to his house) and differ from him on purpose to make him earnest, and to see how wonderfully his eye would strike fire, kindle, and blaze up …’ There is also that curious reference in Chatterton’s Will: ‘Being sound in body, or it is the fault of my last Surgeon’. There is no proof whatsoever that this was a disguised reference to Barrett; but once it has been noticed, one cannot help wondering if it might have been. The significance is both comic and unpleasant.

Barrett’s friend, George Catcott the pewterer – the only person in Bristol who ever paid Chatterton for his work – was altogether different. Chatterton called him ‘Catgut’. He stammered and liked loud poetical recitation; he was impetuous and eccentric, partially humpbacked, totally unabashed. In his shop he once spat in the eye of a customer, ‘because he had a propensity’. He had a mania for ‘pre-eminence’ and getting in the news that must have delighted Chatterton. He once transported himself across the skeleton of the new Bristol Bridge on a donkey because he desired to be recorded as the first man ever to cross over it. He also dragged himself up by a rope to the top of the new spire of St Nicholas, in order to have the honour of placing one of his pewter plates (commemorating the deed) in the unfinished stonework at the 200-foot summit. The story goes that when this had been achieved, the workmen removed the rope – ‘the bargain being for going up only’. All these and many other glorious deeds, Chatterton recorded in a lively satiric poem entitled ‘Happiness’. Catgut wore fistfuls of ostentatious rings, the largest being a carnelian representing the profile of Charles I. What grotesquely distorted reflections were he and Barrett of Rowley’s fatherly, distinguished and beloved patron William Canynges:

Catcott is very fond of talk and fame;

His wish a perpetuity of name …

Incomparable Catcott, still pursue

The seeming Happiness thou hast in view;

Unfinish’d chimnies, gaping spires complete,

External fame on oval dishes beat;

Ride four-inch bridges, clouded turrets climb,

And bravely die – to live in after-time.

Horrid idea! if on rolls of fame

The twentieth century only find thy name … On matrimonial pewter set thy hand, Hammer with evr’y power thou canst command, Stamp thy whole self, original as ‘tis To propagate thy whimsies, name and phyz – Then, when the tottering spires or chimnies fall A Catcott shall remain admir’d by all.

This sort of comic and occasional verse gives a clue to the sump of literary sub-life in which posturing poetasters like the stationer Thistlethwaite wallowed, and which Chatterton seems both to have arrogantly disdained and to have frequently utilized for his own purposes. In the June 1771 edition of The Town and Country, an anonymous correspondent – possibly Cary – gives a lively description of this local Bristol scene which was already coming into some national prominence as a result of Chatterton’s death. (This was one of E. H. Meyerstein’s most notable discoveries.) It is from this that Chatterton had made his bid to escape:

Nor are we altogether without literary improvements, a fondness for which seems to be infused even in the lower classes of society; amongst other refinements, there is started up a set of geniuses, who call themselves a Spouting Club … These disciples of Melpomene choose to keep their scheme as private as the nature of the undertaking will admit, as many of the principal performers are still in their non-age, and servants by covenant for a certain term; but like lads of spirit, detest control, scorn the drudgery of dirty mechanics, and pant for fame in the more glorious fields of literature … In this group of dirty-faced wits, are three or four Authors and Poets, who have already composed, or at least transposed, more verses than Dryden or Pope ever wrote, and with much more elegance and fire, as these prodigies of erudition, their fellow members, very confidently assert. The effusions of their brains are eclogues, elegies, epigrams, epitaphs, odes and satires, with the last of which they keep their neighbours in awe; for if a man by any transaction has rendered himself ridiculous, these wits immediately published his folly in a lampoon, by setting his name at the top of a halfpenny publication called A New Copy of Verses, to the great diversion of themselves and the public …

This is in many ways a locus classicus: a phenomenon like Chatterton is never isolated; however exceptional, he is the product of a definite social ambience. In the Spouting Club of 1771 one recognizes many of his characteristics continuing to exist in less extraordinary form. Moreover, it is fascinating to see that in another twenty years’ time the situation in Bristol had been almost revolutionized from a literary point of view. For this became the city where Coleridge and Robert Southey planned the Panti-socratic society on the banks of the Susquehanna; and from where Southey wrote back to his London publishers – ‘Bristol deserves panegyric instead of satire. I know of no mercantile place so literary.’ It is bitterly ironic that Chatterton should be so largely responsible for Bristol’s salvation in the eyes of the metropolis. He himself had written from London in May 1770: ‘Bristol’s mercenary walls were never destined to hold me – there, I was out of my element. Now I am in it – London! Good God! How superior is London to that despicable place Bristol – here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities, which disgrace that miserable hamlet.’

Alone among Chatterton’s Bristolians, perhaps one man perceived any of the poet’s true qualities. We know little enough about him except that Chatterton thought him an irredeemable bigot. He was Catgut’s elder brother, the Rev. Alexander Catcott. When the scholar-investigator, Michael Lort, first began to comb Bristol for evidence in the 1770s, the Rev. Catcott alone suspected the true authorship of Rowley. His penetrating comment is recorded by Lort: ‘A. Catcott told me that, his suspicions being awakened, Chatterton was aware of this, and much on his guard; he had a large full grey eye, the most penetrating Mr (sic) Catcott had ever seen, and the eye of his understanding seemed no less penetrating. He would catch hints and intelligence from short conversations, which he would afterwards work up, and improve, and cover up in such a manner that an attentive and suspicious person only could trace them back to the source from whence he derived them.’

Later, Keats would call a process, very similar to this one, Negative Capability. The anvil and smithy of his brain.

5 ‘The pale children of the feeble sun’

In the only fragment of his last letter from London in August 1770 that has survived, Chatterton said: ‘I am about to quit my ungrateful country. I shall exchange it for the deserts of Africa, where tigers are a thousand times more merciful than man’ (quoted by Winslow, The Anatomy of Suicide, 1840). One thinks of Rimbaud.

Yet in these last four months, it becomes increasingly difficult to take any of Chatterton’s own words literally. His letters home are full of successes that never materialized. The sweltering heat of the narrow streets in summer along which he plodded, from editor to editor, seems to have filled his head with strange delusions and tropical visions. Africa, its heat and violence and beauty, is a continual theme with him, and produces the two magnificent ‘African Eclogues’:

On Tiber’s banks where scarlet jasmines bloom

And purple aloes shed a rich perfume;

Where, when the sun is melting in his heat

The reeking tygers find a cool retreat,

Bask in the sedges, lose the sultry beam

And wanton with their shadows in the stream.

On Tiber’s banks, by sacred priests rever’d

Where in the days of old a god appear’d –

‘Twas in the dead of night, at Chalma’s feast

The tribe of Alta slept around the priest …

(‘The Death of Nicou’, June 1770)

Here, with phrases like ‘reeking tygers’ he reaches a new, exotic precision; one is tempted to call it a hallucinogenic power. It is probable that Chatterton began taking opium at this time, at first as an antidote to his ‘Cold’, and later perhaps as an antidote to reality. One of his last friends was Mr Cross, the chemist on the corner of Brooke Street; he once shared a barrel of oysters with him. Cross supplied him with a number of medicaments, and almost certainly opium. This is not in itself surprising. In the eighteenth century, and indeed well on into the nineteenth century, opium was used as a regular adult pain-killer and stimulant, usually taken in solution as laudanum. Toothaches, head-colds, stomach diseases, gout, rheumatism all yielded to the poppy; it was the exact equivalent of the modern barbiturate. Nevertheless, it seems as if Chatterton was in the end taking opium doses in direct powder or stick form – and that is hardly medicinal. A deep stain running through nineteen leaves of Chatterton’s London notebook was finally analysed in 1947. Dr Walls of South-Western Forensic Laboratory reported conclusive evidence: ‘I cut a piece out of the stain on the back page and tested this. It gives a positive reaction for opium alkaloid (i.e. morphine etc.).’

The relationship between drugs and artistic creativity is still obscure and has always been in dispute; the argument ranges from ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The English Stage Coach’ (De Quincey) to The Naked Lunch and Kerouac’s peyote poems. In the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, a classic Romantic text in this respect, Keats classes drugs – ‘the dull opiates’ – with alcohol – ‘Bacchus and his pards’ – and Poesy as one of the three primary mediums of fantasy. While Rimbaud, making a fierce literal reading of Baudelaire, classes drugs with alcohol and sexual experience (preferably perverse, or at least exotic) as one of the primary means of the poet’s systematic and prolonged derangement of the senses. This is, however, literary and theoretical. In practice, drugs with their expense, their destruction of social relationships, their attendant physical diseases, and their inherent tendency to expand, distort and dissipate the senses into passivity of outlook (whereas all artistic effort requires concentration, sensual intensity and tremendous activity) – drugs make at best only a short-term partnership with creativity. Moreover they occupy the passive, or female, side of that partnership, providing relief rather than direct stimulus, providing the unconscious pool of images rather than the conscious netting and binding of images into actual artistic forms. (Some of these issues are discussed in Alethea Hayter’s book, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, 1968.)

All the same, in poetry the drug-supported and drug-fed imagination does produce quite characteristic and brilliant effects. Most notably, there is a combination of very bright, very minute, highdefinition images with a completely contrasting sense of entirely vague sweeping movements, undefined expanses and landscapes, and massive blurred shiftings of light and shade. In Chatterton’s earliest ‘African Eclogue’, which is dated Shoreditch May 2nd 1770, about a week or ten days after he had arrived in London, these characteristics are already recognizable. The poem is called ‘Narva and Mored’, the names of two young African lovers. The central passage begins:

Three times the virgin, swimming on the breeze,

Danc’d in the shadow of the mystic trees:

When, like a dark cloud spreading to the view

The first-born sons of War and Blood pursue.

Swift as the elk they pour along the plain

Swift as the flying clouds distilling rain

Swift as the boundings of the youthful roe

They course around and lengthen as they go.

Like the long chain of rocks, whose summits rise

Far in the sacred regions of the skies

Upon whose top the black’ning tempest lours,

Whilst down its side the gushing torrent pours,

Like the long cliffy mountains which extend

From Lorbar’s cave, to where the nations end,

Which sink in darkness, thick’ning and obscure

Impenetrable, mystic, and impure,

The flying terrors of the war advance

And round the sacred oak, repeat the dance.

The most extraordinary thing is the almost total dissolution of the formal eighteenth-century couplets into a rushing, shapeless, undirected torrent of images which gives free expression to the wildness and passion of the African tribal dance, as Chatterton understood and imagined it. The dance is both a dance of war by the tribesmen, and a dance of ecstatic sexual expectancy by the young virgin Mored (‘Black was her face, as Togla’s hidden cell, / Soft as the moss where hissing adders dwell’). It is so typical of Chatterton that Lorbar’s cave is impenetrable, mystic and impure. The love of Narva and Mored ends in simultaneous union and destruction: ‘Lock’d in each other’s arms, from Hyga’s cave, / They plunged relentless to a wat’ry grave’. If the passage reminds one of something else, it will turn out to be the opening section of Coleridge’s opium dream-poem ‘Kubla Khan’, written some thirty years later.

In these ‘African Eclogues’, as in the journalistic prose tales and articles Chatterton dashed off for money, and indeed in everything else he wrote during these last four months, one is continually coming across lines or whole passages which recall the reader – with a sudden frisson of horror and pity – to the situation Chatterton himself was in. The most terrible moment in ‘Narva and Mored’ is a single image which bubbles up in the seething flow of description for four lines, and then vanishes again without trace or explanation:

… Where the pale children of the feeble sun

In search of gold through every climate run,

From burning heat to freezing torments go

And live in all vicissitudes of woe …

But it is only in the last of the Rowley poems, ‘The Excelente Balade of Charitie’, that Chatterton seems to have produced a total equivalent of his condition, a complete symbolic enactment of his hopes and terrors. There is a superb equity in the fact that it was only Thomas Rowley, his double, his other self across three centuries, who could provide him with the material, the stance, and the final distancing to accomplish this most measured and beautiful and poignant of his works. The measuredness is particularly important. None of Chatterton’s subsequent critics or biographers seems to have realized just how unbalanced, how thoroughly peculiar Chatterton became in those first few weeks alone. The first two letters home are amusingly carried off, and reveal exactly the pride and rather disarming boastfulness one might have expected from him. The note is aptly struck in: ‘I get four guineas a month by one Magazine: shall engage to write a History of England, and other pieces, which will more than double that sum … I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-House, and know all the geniuses there. A character is now unnecessary; an author carries his character in his pen.’ (That last remark is an interesting side-light on his use of personae at Bristol.)

But by the letter of May 14th, a kind of glittering wildness is coming over him: ‘Miss Rumsey, if she comes to London, would do well as an old acquaintance, to send me her address. – London is not Bristol. – We may patrole the town for a day, without raising one whisper, or nod of scandal. – If she refuses, the curse of all antiquated virgins light on her: may she be refused when she shall request! Miss Rumsey will tell Miss Baker, and Miss Baker will tell Miss Porter, that Miss Porter’s favoured humble, though but a young man, is a very old lover; and in the eight-and-fiftieth year of his age: but that, as Lappet says, is the flower of a man’s days; and when a lady can’t get a young husband, she must put up with an old bedfellow. I left Miss Singer, I am sorry to say it, in a very bad way; that is, in a way to be married. – But mum – Ask Miss Suky Webb the rest; if she knows, she’ll tell ye. – I beg her pardon for revealing the secret; but when the knot is fastened, she shall know how I came by it – Miss Thatcher may depend upon it, that, if I am not in love with her, I am in love with nobody else …’ And so on for another page or so, with Miss Love, Miss Cotton, Miss Broughton and Miss Watkins. It is still amusing stuff, but his imagination seems over-stimulated, the jokes and innuendoes and declarations spin out with a sort of exalted panic. It is also clear that he is very lonely, and he desperately hopes that Miss Rumsey will be coming to the city. A paragraph in the next letter, to his sister dated May 30th, ends with: ‘Humbly thanking Miss Rumsey for her complimentary expression, I cannot think it satisfactory. Does she, or does she not, intend coming to London? Mrs O’Coffin has not yet got a place; but there is not the least doubt but she will in a little time.’ The letter finished with a scrawled PS: ‘I am at this moment pierced through the heart by the black eye of a young lady, driving along in a hackney-coach – I am quite in love: If my love lasts ‘till that time, you shall hear of it in my next.’ It is throw-away, but rather revealing.