No More Learning

He believed in a daemon or conscience which prompted every
man to follow good and avoid evil; but--different men different
daemons--his held self-slaughter justified when life became
intolerable; with him therefore it would be no crime. Wilson suggests
too that the boy who had read theology, orthodox and the reverse, held
to the common eighteenth century view that death was annihilation; and
this may well have been the case. One thing at any rate is certain,
that Chatterton on the 14th of April 1770 left on his desk a number of
pieces of paper filled with a jumble of satiric verse, mocking prose,
and directions for the construction of a mediaeval tomb to cover the
remains of his father and himself. Part of this strange document
was headed in legal form--'This is the last Will and Testament of me
Thomas Chatterton,' and contained the declaration that the Testator
would be dead on the evening of the following day--'being the feast of
the resurrection. ' The bundle was dated and endorsed 'All this wrote
between 11 and 2 o'clock Saturday in the utmost distress of mind. ' Now
while one need not doubt that the distress was perfectly genuine, it
is tolerably certain that Chatterton intended his master to find what
he had written and draw his own conclusions as to the desirability of
dismissing his apprentice. The attorney (who is represented as timid,
irritable and narrow-minded)[9] did in fact find the document, was
thoroughly frightened, and gave the boy his release. He was now free
to starve or earn a living by his pen--so no doubt he represented
the alternative to his mother. He must go to London, where he would
certainly make his fortune. He had been supplying four or five London
journals of good standing with free contributions for some time past,
and had received it appears great encouragement from their editors. He
gained his point and started out for the great city.

His letters show that he called upon four editors the very day he
arrived. These were Edmunds of the _Middlesex Journal_; Fell of the
_Freeholders Magazine_; Hamilton of the _Town and Country Magazine_;
and Dodsley--the same to whom he had sent a portion of _AElla_--of the
_Annual Register_. He had received, he wrote, 'great encouragement
from them all'; 'all approved of his design; he should soon be
settled. ' Fell told him later that the great and notorious Wilkes
'affirmed that his writings could not be the work of a youth and
expressed a desire to know the author.
' This may or may not have
been true, but it is certain that Fell was not the only newspaper
proprietor who was ready to exchange a little cheap flattery for
articles by Chatterton that would never be paid for. [10]

We know very little about Chatterton's life in London--but that little
presents some extraordinarily vivid pictures. He lodged at first with
an aunt, Mrs. Ballance, in Shoreditch, where he refused to allow his
room to be swept, as he said 'poets hated brooms. ' He objected to
being called Tommy, and asked his aunt 'If she had ever heard of a
poet's being called Tommy' (you see he was still a boy). 'But she
assured him that she knew nothing about poets and only wished he would
not set up for being a gentleman. ' He had the appearance of being much
older than he was, (though one who knew him when he was at Colston's
Hospital described him as having light curly hair and a face round as
an apple; his eyes were grey and sparkled when he was interested or
moved). He was 'very much himself--an admirably expressive phrase.
He had the same fits of absentmindedness which characterized him as
a child. 'He would often look stedfastly in a person's face without
speaking or seeming to see the person for a quarter of an hour or
more till it was quite frightful. ' We have accounts of his sitting
up writing nearly the whole of the night, and his cousin was almost
afraid to share a room with him 'for to be sure he was a spirit and
never slept. '[11]

He wrote political letters in the style of Junius--generally signing
them Decimus or Probus--that kind of vague libellous ranting which
will always serve to voice the discontent of the inarticulate. He
wrote essays--moral, antiquarian, or burlesque; he furbished up his
old satires on the worthies of Bristol; he wrote songs and a comic
opera, and was miserably paid when he was paid at all. None of his
work written in these veins has any value as literature; but the skill
with which this mere lad not eighteen years old gauged the taste
of the town and imitated all branches of popular literature would
probably have no parallel in the history of journalism should such a
history ever come to be written.

His letters to his mother and sister were always gay and contained
glowing accounts of his progress; but in reality he must have been
miserably poor and ill-fed.

In July he changed his lodgings to the house of a Mrs.