Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

James Thistlethwaite, who has already had much to say on his school-friend’s ‘inordinate vanity’, had even more to say on the fantastic range of Chatterton’s obscure researches. (This was also to be an outstanding trait in Rimbaud, who turned to alchemy.)

In the course of the year 1768 and 1769 – Chatterton being between 15 and 16 years old – wherein I frequently saw and conversed with C., the eccentricity of his mind, and the versatility of his disposition, seem to have been singularly displayed. One day he might be found busily employed in the study of Heraldry and English Antiquities, both of which are numbered amongst the most favourite of his pursuits; the next, discovered him deeply engaged, confounded, and perplexed, amidst the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition, or lost bewildered in the abstruse labyrinth of mathematical researches; and these in an instant again neglected and thrown aside to make room for astronomy and music, of both which sciences his knowledge was entirely confined to theory. Even physics was not without a charm to allure his imagination, and he would talk of Galen, Hippocrates, and Paracelsus, with all the confidence and familiarity of a modern empirick.

Thistlethwaite, it should be pointed out, considered himself to be something of a bard at this time, and was renowned for striding around Bristol with a pair of pistol-butts sticking out of his pockets. But allowing for his love of flourish – perfectly displayed in the peacock struttings of these sentences – the picture of Chatterton in his jackdaw enthusiasm, his frantic and undaunted explorations into whatever caught his fancy and then perhaps his imagination, is tremendously compelling. It is also recognizably provincial and oddly unbalanced. It is not what Matthew Arnold, a hundred years later, would confidently describe as ‘of the centre’. It is peculiar. It contains the essential dissenting element, the waywardness, the impatience, the somehow attractive pigheadedness, of the radical innovator. It also contains the delinquent, the social outcast.

There would be something about the eyes; they would be over-bright, incalculable.

4 ‘This group of dirty-faced wits’

Chatterton was solitary in Bristol and in London, but he was never alone. In fact all his life he had the gift of striking up acquaintances; people were fascinated by him, although in the long run one gains the strong impression that most people were uneasy with him and disliked him. His letters from London to Bristol often include a positive confetti of greetings to old school-friends and ladies of the green. But they contain as well this telling aside: ‘My youthful acquaintances will not take it in dudgeon that I do not write oftener to them, than I believe I shall: but as I had the happy art of pleasing in conversation, my company was often liked, where I did not like: and to continue a correspondence under such circumstances would be ridiculous.’ What is telling is of course the way he says it.

Chatterton did not feel diffident about seeking help and interest from men of experience and influence either. When, in an ironic and somewhat posturing exchange of letters, Horace Walpole rebuffed him and his ‘antiquities’ in the spring of 1769, it seems clear that Walpole was considerably pinched by a sixteen-year-old addressing him as an equal, a presumption which he found ‘singularly impertinent’. Chatterton later recounted the affair to an adult relation – Mr Stephens of Salisbury – in the very coolest and most casual of manners: ‘Having some curious Anecdotes of Painting and Painters, I sent them to Mr Walpole, Author of “Anecdotes of Painting”, “Historic Doubts” and other pieces, well known in the learned world. His answer I make bold to send you. Hence I began a Literary correspondence, which ended as most such do. I differed with him in the age of a MS. He insists on his superior talents, which is no proof of that superiority. We possibly may engage in one of the periodical publications; though I know not who will give the onset …’ This was written when Chatterton was about sixteen and a half. What is quite breathtaking is the discipline and absolute outward control in retelling what had actually been his first major rejection by the London cognoscenti, a bitter blow. Most aspiring adolescents would have fallen into passionate recriminations. But Chatterton: ‘which ended as most such do.’

This control, this inner hardness, is certainly paramount in his relations with his two redoubtable patrons, Catcott and Barrett; and he seems to have exercised it generally in his choice of friends and his maintenance of a deliberate distance between them and himself. A list of these friends, published in Robert Southey’s edition of 1803, is particularly fascinating in that it shows their jobs and professions, giving a striking proof of Chatterton’s intellectual isolation. Part of the list reads as follows: ‘T. Skone, a surgeon; Thomas Cary, pipe maker; H. Kator, sugar baker; W. Smith, a player; M. Mease, vintner; Mr Clayfield, distiller; Mr William Barrett, surgeon; Mr George Catcott & Mr Burgum, pewterers and partners; The Rev. Alexander Catcott, antiquarian; John Rudhall, apothecary; Carty, woollen-draper; Hanmer, grocer; Capel, jeweller; James Thistlethwaite, stationer.’ Altogether there are twenty-seven names. Further, it will be remembered that in their letters of reminiscences collected by Herbert Croft and Robert Southey, none of them – Thistlethwaite, Thomas Cary, Smith, John Rudhall – felt there was the least chance that Rowley and Chatterton could possibly have been the same.

Neither did Catcott and Barrett. But their position is a good deal more ambiguous.

To Barrett next, he has my thanks sincere

For all the little knowledge I had here.

But what was knowledge? Could it here succeed?

When scarcely twenty in the town can read.

With one exception (the Eclogue published in The Town and Country in May 1769), all the Rowley poems were first obtained direct from Chatterton by either Catcott or Barrett. (About the forgery aspect: only two of the forty-two ‘original parchments’ had by the British Museum after Barrett’s death turned out to contain poetry; the rest were prose pieces, catalogues, heraldic designs and drawings. All the other poetry exists only in Chatterton’s undisguised ‘copies’.) The character and motives of these two men are intriguing. Barrett is faintly sinister. A retired surgeon living in a comfortable house on the banks of the Avon, he was immersed in local antiquarian studies for his proposed ‘History of Bristol’. He thus had considerable personal interest in Chatterton’s MSS, and published them in his ‘History’ several years after the poet’s death as bona fide documents, although by then their validity was clearly very doubtful. It is ironic that Chatterton, and not he, should be called dishonest. There is something cold about the man, and one does not like to think of them together. ‘Mr Barrett adds, that he often used to send for him from the Charity-School (which is close to his house) and differ from him on purpose to make him earnest, and to see how wonderfully his eye would strike fire, kindle, and blaze up …’ There is also that curious reference in Chatterton’s Will: ‘Being sound in body, or it is the fault of my last Surgeon’. There is no proof whatsoever that this was a disguised reference to Barrett; but once it has been noticed, one cannot help wondering if it might have been. The significance is both comic and unpleasant.

Barrett’s friend, George Catcott the pewterer – the only person in Bristol who ever paid Chatterton for his work – was altogether different. Chatterton called him ‘Catgut’. He stammered and liked loud poetical recitation; he was impetuous and eccentric, partially humpbacked, totally unabashed. In his shop he once spat in the eye of a customer, ‘because he had a propensity’. He had a mania for ‘pre-eminence’ and getting in the news that must have delighted Chatterton. He once transported himself across the skeleton of the new Bristol Bridge on a donkey because he desired to be recorded as the first man ever to cross over it. He also dragged himself up by a rope to the top of the new spire of St Nicholas, in order to have the honour of placing one of his pewter plates (commemorating the deed) in the unfinished stonework at the 200-foot summit. The story goes that when this had been achieved, the workmen removed the rope – ‘the bargain being for going up only’. All these and many other glorious deeds, Chatterton recorded in a lively satiric poem entitled ‘Happiness’. Catgut wore fistfuls of ostentatious rings, the largest being a carnelian representing the profile of Charles I. What grotesquely distorted reflections were he and Barrett of Rowley’s fatherly, distinguished and beloved patron William Canynges: