Thomas Chatterton

Chatterton, Thomas 

Born Nov. 20,1752, in Bristol; died Aug. 24,1770, in London. English poet.

Chatterton was the author of literary forgeries that expressed a reaction against the rationalism of Enlightenment literature and an interest in the age of chivalry characteristic of preromanticism. Writing in pseudomedieval English under the name Thomas Rowley (an imaginary 15th-century monk), Chatterton composed ballads (“An Excelente Balade of Charitie”), epic poems (“The Tournament,” “The Parliament of Sprites,” and “Battle of Hastings”), eclogues, satires, apocryphal biographies, and treatises (“The Ryse of Peyncteynge in Englande”). The poetic works are marked by a longing for tradition, mystery, and solemnity. Chatterton was also the author of dramas (the tragic interlude Ælla and the burlesque The Revenge, staged in 1770), poems, and other works in the comtemporary style, as well as political essays.

In April 1770, Chatterton moved to London, where extreme poverty and the discovery by Walpole of his forgeries drove the young poet to suicide. Almost all of Chatterton’s work was published posthumously. His tragic fate attracted the interest of many writers, including Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti, and de Vigny.

WORKS

The Complete Works, vols. 1–2. [London] 1971.
In Russian translation:
In N. V. Gerbel’, Angliiskie poety v biografiiakh i obraztsakh. St. Petersburg, 1875.
In Khrestomatiia po zapadnoevropeiskoi literature: Literatura XVIII v. Moscow, 1938.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 1, fasc. 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1945.
Meyerstein, E. H. W. A Life of Thomas Chatterton. London, 1930.

A. B. GORIANIN