Guilty Thing (10 page)

Chatterton left the works of Thomas Rowley behind in April 1770 and lit out for London, following in the footsteps of other ambitious writers, such as Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. ‘
Bristol's mercantile
walls were never destined to hold me,' he announced on his arrival. ‘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.' He survived here for only four months, but they were months of astonishing productivity. Presenting himself to the city's newspaper and magazine editors, Chatterton was commissioned by them all and penned, in his cramped attic bedroom in Holborn, over fifty-six articles, many satirical. His journalism was still appearing in print a year after his death.

During the height of the summer, Chatterton swallowed a lethal dose of arsenic and opium. He was seventeen, and his body was found by the landlady of his room on Brook Street, the appropriately named Mrs Angel. He was lying on the bed beneath the window, the sun streaming through. The door had been locked and on the floor around him, scattered like snow, were
torn-up pieces of manuscript
. Chatterton took the secret of Thomas Rowley's identity with him to the grave, but it is unclear where his grave actually was. His body may have been buried in London, it may have been removed to Bristol, or it may have been used for dissection by doctors.

Thomas Chatterton had died in obscurity, but Thomas Rowley became famous. Queues of tourists, including Samuel Johnson, made their way up the narrow staircase to inspect the now famous ‘Muniment Room'. The first Rowley poem was published in 1772, and in 1777 Thomas Tyrwhitt brought out a scholarly edition of
Poems, Supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and Others
. In the same year Rowley was included in a major volume on the
History of English Poetry
edited by the future Poet Laureate, yet another Thomas – Thomas Warton. Before long, the doubts set in: had Rowley ever existed, or was he the invention of the boy Chatterton? If Rowley and Chatterton were the same person, was Chatterton an artist of rare skill or, as the red-faced Thomas Warton later put it, no more than an ‘
adventurer
, a professed hireling in the trade of literature. . . artful, enterprising, unprincipled, indigent, and compelled to subsist by expedients'? By the time Thomas De Quincey was born, it was Chatterton-the-forger who was famous, while Rowley was forgotten.

The bulk of De Quincey's knowledge of Chatterton almost certainly came from Sir Herbert Croft's epistolary novel,
Love and Madness: A Story Too True
, published in 1780. This curious work, which is not about Chatterton at all, nonetheless contains a long biographical digression on the boy's life and death which is based on research undertaken by Croft himself, who reproduced private letters sent from Chatterton in London to his family in Bristol, purloined from the poet's grieving sister. In order to get a sense of his last days, Croft also interviewed Chatterton's Brook Street neighbours. The figure he presents in
Love and Madness
is a hack with a fatal pride and an active libido, who would sooner starve than admit defeat. De Quincey learned from these pages that Chatterton had ‘presided over his playmates as their master and they his hired servants', and that he had tried to win the patronage of Horace Walpole. Knowing that Walpole was compiling a study of English art, Chatterton sent him some of Rowley's poetry and a document called ‘The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englade', which he suggested Walpole might find useful. Suspecting that he was being made fun of, Walpole rebuffed Chatterton's advances; a cruel rejection, it was later said, which killed poor Chatterton. Croft pointed his finger at Walpole, but he also accused Bristol itself of driving Chatterton away, and London of ‘murdering' her newest young poet. Furthermore, Croft raised the issue of Chatterton's lost corpse. ‘Tell me, Bristol,' he asked: ‘Where has thou hid the body of
murdered Chatterton
?'

Did Chatterton commit a crime? This was De Quincey's concern, and in an essay he later wrote called ‘Great Forgers: Chatterton, and Walpole, and “Junius”' he proclaimed Chatterton's innocence. ‘
Whom did he deceive
? Nobody but those who well deserved to be deceived, viz., shallow antiquaries, who pretended to a sort of knowledge which they had not so much as tasted.' Walpole, on the other hand,
was
guilty; he had committed ‘a far more deliberate and audacious forgery' in
The Castle of Otranto.
‘There, Laureate!' De Quincey imagined the dead Chatterton triumphantly announcing to the scholars now quarrelling over Rowley's authenticity, ‘there, Tyrwhitt, my man! Me you have murdered amongst you. Now fight to death for the boy that living you would not have hired as a shoeblack. My blood be upon you!'

Through Hannah More in Bath, De Quincey was near enough to Chatterton's world to reach out and touch it. More, childhood friends with Mrs Chatterton, had comforted her after the death of her son just as she was comforting Mrs De Quincey – as we must now call her – over the death of William. De Quincey of course identified with the fatherless child who shared his first name, devoured books, lived inside his own imaginings, and whose story was composed of locked doors, staircases and
forbidden rooms
. But in his disruptive energy, Chatterton recalls not so much Thomas as William Quincey, and while Thomas claimed not to mourn for his brother, he became fixated by the figure of Chatterton. De Quincey himself was more like a fledgling Thomas Rowley. He too would spread the word about his magnificent patron and, as the Victorian chronicler of the Romantic poets, he would also celebrate the glories of a bygone age. And like Rowley, De Quincey was destined to be a
ghost crab
inhabiting another's shell.

By the time he was sixteen, De Quincey had ‘
carried
' himself, as he put it, ‘over the whole ground of the Rowley controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familiarised me with the “Black Letter”, that I had begun to find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances'. Through Chatterton, De Quincey discovered Chaucer, and through Chaucer he developed his ‘enthusiastic knowledge of the elder poets'. It was through Chatterton that he also found his way to the younger poets. De Quincey described his feelings for Chatterton as love, ‘
if it be possible
to feel love for one who was in his unhonoured grave before I was born', but the story of the half-educated prodigy who escaped from the real world by inventing his own poetic tradition resonated with all the Romantics. Keats dedicated
Endymion
to ‘the Most English of Poets Except Shakespeare: Thomas Chatterton'; Shelley and Byron offered their tributes to Chatterton; Chatterton was Coleridge's ‘heart-sick wanderer', a poet out of place, both geographically and historically, and Wordsworth's lines, ‘we poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness' was written in Chatterton's memory. Southey had edited the first edition of Chatterton's collected works, donating the profits to the boy's impoverished mother and sister. ‘
Poor Chatterton
!' Southey wrote, ‘oft do I think upon him and sometimes indulge in the thought that had he been living he might have been my friend.'

The city was steeped in poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge had first crossed paths in the late summer of 1795 at a political society in Bristol. Coleridge was living in rooms in College Street and making a name for himself as a radical lecturer; Wordsworth was a guest of John Pinney, the West Indian sugar merchant, in his newly built mansion on Great George Street. During his stay in Bristol, in the weeks before he and Dorothy set up home together in another of Pinney's houses in Racedown, Dorset, Wordsworth composed the first lines of
The Prelude
. That year, Coleridge had walked down the aisle of St Mary Redcliffe with a local girl called Sarah Fricker, while Southey married her sister Edith in the same church; the Fricker sisters were raised on Redcliffe Hill. Robert Southey had a point when he said, in response to Chatterton's derision, that the city ‘deserves
panegyric instead of satire
. I know of no other mercantile place so literary.'

De Quincey could not have arrived in the West Country at a more auspicious moment. The Bristol that he encountered was not an uncultivated marketplace, but the cradle of English Romanticism.

During the summer of 1799, when he was home from Winkfield for the school holidays, De Quincey had a reading experience which was to prove what he called ‘
the greatest event
in the unfolding of my own mind'. The manuscript of a poem called ‘We Are Seven' was being ‘handed about' in Bristol and Bath and found its way to him. It originated from the home of the book's Bristol-based publisher, Joseph Cottle, and came to De Quincey by way of Cottle's friend, Hannah More.

‘We Are Seven' describes an exchange in a country graveyard in which a man asks an eight-year-old ‘maid' how many there are in her family, and she answers ‘seven': two are in Conwy, a town in Wales, two are at sea, and two are buried here, while she lives at home with her mother. The man protests that if two of her seven siblings are dead and buried, then she must surely be one of five. Ignoring his logic, the child persists:

‘The first that died was sister Jane;

In bed she moaning lay,

Till God released her of her pain;

And then she went away.

So in the churchyard she was laid;

And, when the grass was dry,

Together round her grave we played,

My brother John and I.

And when the ground was white with snow

And I could run and slide,

My brother John was forced to go,

And he lies by her side.'

‘How many are you, then,' said I,

‘If they two are in heaven?'

Quick was the little maid's reply,

‘O master! we are seven.'

‘But they are dead; those two are dead!

Their spirits are in heaven!'

'Twas throwing words away; for still

The little maid would have her will,

And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!'

This was to be De Quincey's first encounter with Wordsworth, although he did not then know the identity of the poet. Elemental and spare in comparison with the artifices of high eighteenth-century verse and the verbal curlicues of Thomas Rowley, the macabre exchange did not seem like poetry at all. Wordsworth's aim was to strip away ornament and expose a skeletal form which would take us straight to the centre of the subject. ‘
Nothing
,' he later explained, ‘was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.' The maid stands resolutely by the belief that her love for her deceased siblings makes them present, while the flat-footed adult stands resolutely by his belief that death means absence.
It was a disturbing exchange for those, like Coleridge, with a belief in the afterlife. Most abhorrent to Coleridge was Wordsworth's ‘frightful notion' of a boy ‘lying awake in his grave' instead of being transported to heaven. The poem's whole meaning, Coleridge said in the
Biographia Literaria
, was ‘reducible to the assertion that a
child
, who by the bye at six years would have been better instructed in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than of lying in a
dark, cold place
.' Wordsworth's friend, James Tobin, entreated him to ‘cancel' the poem, ‘for, if published, it will make you everlastingly ridiculous'.

To De Quincey, ‘We Are Seven' was neither frightful nor ridiculous, but ‘the height of the moral sublime': ‘
How deep
must a man have gone below the thoughts of the generality, before he could have written such a ballad!' De Quincey's reaction to the death of his own first sister, also called Jane, was that ‘summer and winter came again . . . Why not little Jane?' For the four-year-old boy, Jane, like Wordsworth's Lucy, was rolled around with rocks, and stones, and trees. When he reached the age of six, De Quincey imagined Elizabeth transported to heaven through vaults of light, but he had also seen her coffin ‘dropped into darkness'. Were his sisters rolling around in the earth or singing in the sky? The stubborn refusal of resolution at the heart of ‘We Are Seven' was, for De Quincey, part of its power. He found, as he later told Wordsworth, ‘
guidance
' in the poem, and he found in the poet the tutor no school was able to provide. When Coleridge described admirers of Wordsworth as ‘distinguished' by a ‘
religious
fervour', he was thinking principally of Thomas De Quincey.

The reading he had done so far in his life directed De Quincey towards the person he would later become, but ‘We Are Seven' described an experience he had lived through already, and addressed the person he already was. The poem knew him; in its deceptive naivety it understood the loss of Jane and Elizabeth, but also of William, whose own sudden death coincided with De Quincey's chance discovery of the unknown poet's manuscript.