The Rowley Poems

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rowley Poems, by Thomas
Chatterton
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Rowley Poems
Author: Thomas Chatterton
Release Date: July 28, 2004 [EBook #13037]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. 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
MCMXI
CONTENTS.

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 their importance 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, and promising 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