No More Learning

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 Name over the World. '

At ten he was making progress in arithmetic, and it should be
mentioned that he 'occupied himself with mechanical pursuits so that
if anything was out of order in the house he was set to mend it. ' At
school he read during play hours and made few friends, but those
were 'solid fellows,' his sister tells us; while at home he had
appropriated to himself a small attic where he would read, write
and draw pictures--a number of which are preserved in the British
Museum--of knights and churches, and heraldic designs in red and
yellow ochre, charcoal, and black-lead. In this attic too he had
stored--though at what date is uncertain--a number of writings on
parchment which had a rather singular history. In the muniment room
of St. Mary Redcliffe, the church in which Chatterton's ancestors had
served as sextons, there were six or seven great oak chests, of which
one, greater than the others and secured by no fewer than six locks,
was traditionally called 'Canynges Cofre' after William Canynge the
younger, with whose name the erection and completion of St. Mary's
were especially associated. These had contained deeds and papers
dealing with parochial matters and the affairs of the Church, but some
years before Chatterton's birth the Vestry had determined to examine
these documents, some of which may have been as old as the building
itself. The keys had in the course of time been lost, and the
vestrymen accordingly broke open the chests and removed to another
place what they thought of value, leaving Canynge's Coffer and its
fellows gutted and open but by no means void of all their ancient
contents. Such parchments as remained Chatterton's father carried
away, whole armfuls at a time, using some to cover his scholars' books
and giving others to his wife, who made them into thread-papers and
dress patterns.

In the house to which Mrs. Chatterton had moved upon her husband's
death there was still a sufficient number of these old manuscripts to
make a considerable trove for the boy who, then nine or ten years old,
had first learnt to read in black-letter and was in a few years to
produce poetry which should pass for fifteenth century with many
well-reputed antiquaries.