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    The Poetry Of Thomas Chatterton - Vol 2: "It is my pride, my damn'd, native, unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction."
    The Poetry Of Thomas Chatterton - Vol 2: "It is my pride, my damn'd, native, unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction."
    The Poetry Of Thomas Chatterton - Vol 2: "It is my pride, my damn'd, native, unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction."
    Ebook74 pages52 minutes

    The Poetry Of Thomas Chatterton - Vol 2: "It is my pride, my damn'd, native, unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction."

    By Thomas Chatterton

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    Thomas Chatterton was born on November 20th, 1752 in Bristol. Somewhat lonely as a child his consuming interest was the contents of several chests of books, parchments and documents in the church at St Mary Redcliff of which his family was sexton. By the age of twelve he had written “Elinoure and Juga”. Knowing that the works of such a youngster would not be taken seriously he continued to write but to present them to the world as the work of others long before him. His hoaxes were enormously successful. He moved to London to find patronage and to escape his poverty but in the end although his works continued their brilliant trajectory he could gain no financial comfort. On 24th August 1770, aged just seventeen years and nine months, he retired to his small Brook Street attic for the final time, carrying the arsenic with which would kill himself, desperately and hopelessly tore up his remaining work, and drank. In the second of three volumes we bring you some of his acclaimed and fascinating works.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopyright Group
    Release dateOct 22, 2013
    ISBN9781783945313
    The Poetry Of Thomas Chatterton - Vol 2: "It is my pride, my damn'd, native, unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction."

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      Book preview

      The Poetry Of Thomas Chatterton - Vol 2 - Thomas Chatterton

      The Poetry Of Thomas Chatterton – Volume 2

      The Battle Of Hastings & Others

      Thomas Chatterton was born and raised in Bristol, the son of father, Thomas, and mother Sarah. His father, who was variously a musician, poet and numismatist, and a sometime partaker in the occult, and who had been a sub-chanter at Bristol cathedral, died some four months before his birth on 20th November 1752, leaving Thomas and his mother in a difficult, unsupported position. However, his mother’s education enabled her to establish a girls’ school, specialising in ornamental needlework and sewing. Chatterton himself was admitted to Edward Colston’s Charity, a charity school in Bristol, whose curriculum comprised reading, writing and arithmetic, and, more unusually, the catechism. However, of more interest to Chatterton was the church of St Mary Redcliffe, at which his family had long held the office of sexton, while Chatterton’s father had been master of the Pyle Street free school.

      For the young Chatterton, then, St. Mary’s Redcliffe was home, both spiritual and actual. Moreover, its history and mysteries consuming his interest far more than his schooling ever could, he soon became familiar with the church’s chivalric, ecclesiastic and civic past, learning the names and circumstances of the various knights and civic dignitaries buried in the alter tombs and the church’s graveyard. The imagination of the young boy was captured particularly by the contents of several ancient, oaken chests, stored in the muniment room over the church’s north side porch, among which he found parchment deeds dating back to the Wars of the Roses, long since forgotten. Though they were not hidden so much as neglected, it proved a treasure beyond any curious young boy’s wildest dreams and compelled him to teach himself letters in his own time, apart from the education he continued to receive courtesy of Edward Colston’s Charity, discovering capitals from an old musical folio in the church and other script from a black-letter Bible. Indeed, his sister spoke of his dislike of small books, and his grandiose attitude: on being asked how he would prefer a bowl which was to be his be painted, she reports as his response Paint me an angel, with wings, and a trumpet, to trumpet my name over the world. All this, and his lack of interest in the normal games played by his fellow children, amounted to his generally being considered educationally backward.

      From very early in his life he was often overcome with fits of abstraction, either sitting for hours in a trance-like state, and sometimes even crying without reason. This was attributed to his loneliness, which we can in turn attribute to his fascination with St. Mary Redcliffe and its history. This loneliness proved to encourage the natural sense of reserve which he would carry with him throughout his life. Moreover, his love of the mystery of St. Mary Redcliffe helped develop the genius for mystery, mysticism and archaism which characterises his life and career. He was only six when his mother recognised the capaciousness of his talent, while by eight she observed how, left to his own devices, he could spend entire days reading and writing. This rapacious attitude to reading and writing found him a position at the age of eleven as contributor to Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal. Some of his most notable contributions to the journal are the poems he wrote, inspired by his confirmation, and a satire he wrote about the churchwarden who, in 1763, destroyed the beautiful cross which had adorned the churchyard at St. Mary Redcliffe for the past three centuries. Chatterton was greatly affected by this, and the spirit of veneration encouraged his contribution. Having achieved such young success, he precociously accrued an attic in his mother’s house which he considered his study; in it, he hoarded his books, parchments and the documents he rescued from the muniment room at St. Mary Redcliffe. Chatterton displayed a talent for drawing alongside his verbal genius, and this attic became a sort of microcosmic creative environment populated by his medieval idols.

      He had written the first of his significant literary mysteries, the dialogue of Elinoure and Juga, before he reached the age of twelve. Though he sought honest and impartial criticism and advice, he saw that he would not be taken seriously if he presented the work as his own, and so he resorted to showing it to Thomas Philips, the usher at the boarding school Colston’s Hospital, where he was now a pupil, under the pretence that it was the work of a 15th century poet which he had just found. Philips was impressed, and Chatterton was duly encouraged. Remaining a border at Colston’s Hospital for the next few years, he began to construct the hoax by which the ‘discovery’ of his works would be framed, while continuing to write those works themselves. Though three of Chatterton’s schoolmates are noted as youths in whom Philips’s critical appreciation stimulated

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