Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

In June the letters quickly began to get shorter. The one to his sister, dated June 19th, begins with a sudden sharpness. ‘Dear Sister, I have a horrid cold. – The relation of the manner of my catching it may give you more pleasure than the circumstance itself.’ His story tells of hanging out of his window in the middle of the night to listen to a drunken woman singing bawdy songs in the street below. It ends with a conclusion that seems, in the context, to have a fairly obvious double meaning. ‘However, my entertainment, though sweet enough in itself, has a dish of sour sauce served up in it; for I have a most horrible wheezing in the throat; but I don’t repent that I have this cold; for there are so many nostrums here, that ‘tis worth a man’s while to get a distemper, he can be cured so cheap.’ The man’s distemper referred to here is almost certainly some form of venereal disease.

Nineteenth-century scholarship has been prudishly silent on this point. As it was silent on Keats dosing himself with mercury for the same complaint. Not until Meyerstein’s book of 1930 was there any consideration of the likelihood that Chatterton might have caught venereal disease; although it was a very common and rather unremarkable fact of a young man’s life in the London of the time. Indeed, in the London of any young man’s time since Shakespeare. The matter would be quite insignificant if it were not for the entirely different light that it throws on the development of Chatterton’s drug-taking, and most important of all, in the actual circumstances of his death. There is only one authentic reference in this matter. It comes from Michael Lort, that shrewd scholar-investigator who had extracted a particularly interesting statement from the Reverend Catcott (see supra, p. 38), and whose manners were, according to Fanny Burney, ‘somewhat blunt and odd’. Michael Lort’s evidence is simply this: that he had cross-questioned the chemist Mr Cross, and ‘Mr Cross says he (Chatterton) had the Foul Disease which he would cure himself and had calomel and vitriol of Cross for that purpose. Who cautioned him against the too free use of these.’ It is tremendously significant. Chatterton ‘would cure himself’ – of course, that is in character. We know that Chatterton was fascinated by medical matters and had in the past borrowed many books on surgery from Barrett. He would look after himself; his pride, his hardness would demand it. Yet suppose things did not go quite according to plan? Suppose the disease, whatever its form, at first seemed merely to get worse; or suppose it disappeared and then recurred – which is often the case? Vitriol could be a long and very painful treatment, especially for someone of Chatterton’s age and in his difficult circumstances.

The crucial fact is, then, this: arsenic, in small regulated doses, could also be used as a more drastic cure for venereal disease; and opium could – rashly but understandably – be used as a pain-killer. Arsenic and opium simultaneously. The Coroner reported arsenic poisoning; Barrett the surgeon recorded evidence of opium, he assumed an overdose. If all these facts are true, then an entirely different picture begins to emerge. One is led to ask, is the tradition of 200 years quite wrong? Is this a case of suicide at all? Why, come to think of it, should Chatterton have left no suicide note, no Villonesque Last Will and Testament? (The only extant ‘Will’, as we have seen, was made four months previously, a device for escaping from Lambert’s.) Is it not possible, is it not really rather likely, that what happened on the night of the 24th of August was a tragic mistake, a terrible miscalculation? In fact did Chatterton ever surrender to his circumstances, to himself, to the soft Romantic gesture of Wallis’s painting? Did his angry courage ever break at all? These are difficult questions to answer. We may never have the evidence to answer them satisfactorily. The ambivalence may have gone with him into oblivion. But I think his death was a mistake.

If the inner life is doubtful to the end, Herbert Croft, the author of Love and Madness, discovered some vivid external impressions from his interviews with Chatterton’s last neighbours. The house where Chatterton lodged in Shoreditch was run by a plasterer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Walmsley. With them were two young relatives, a niece and a nephew. Also Mrs Ballance, whose acquaintance we have already made. After Mrs Ballance’s faux pas over ‘Tommy’, little seems to have passed between them. But Mrs Ballance had something to say about that silence too. ‘He would often look steadfastly 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; during all this time (she supposes, from what she has since heard), his thoughts were gone about something else.’

The master of the household, Mr Walmsley, was less forthcoming. Yet a perfectly ordinary artisan’s opinion of a young poet who was to become the darling of the Romantics is not without what one might call sociological interest. ‘Mr Walmsley saw nothing of him, but that there was something manly and pleasing about him, and that he did not dislike the wenches.’ Chatterton would probably have been rather pleased with that description.

Mrs Walmsley, like all London landladies that ever were and ever will be, looked out for the more domestic virtues in her lodger; but was not without a streak of romance sweetly disguised in the depth of a doubtless ample bosom. She liked her young literary gentleman to have a bit of style. ‘Mrs Walmsley’s account is, that she never saw any harm of him – that he never mislisted her [“misled” her perhaps; or perhaps “mistressed” her?]; but was always very civil, whenever they met in the house by accident – that he would never suffer the room, in which he used to read and write, to be swept, because, he said, poets hated brooms.’ That seems rather to have tickled Mrs Walmsley, but she was certainly not going to admit it: ‘she told him she did not know any thing that poet folks were good for, but to sit in a dirty cap and gown in a garret, and at last to be starved.’ Secretly she may have even approved. ‘During the nine weeks he was at her house, he never stayed out after the family hours, except once, when he didn’t come home all night and had been, she heard, poeting a song about the streets.’ At which point Mrs Ballance rushes back into the breach to cover up for poor Tommy. ‘This night, Mrs Ballance says, she knows he lodged at a relation’s, because Mr W’s house was shut up when he came home.’

But that is only what the adults saw. Mrs Walmsley’s niece kept her eyes much wider open, and took something of a fancy to him; but she was puzzled by him, even slightly alarmed: ‘For her part, she always took him more for a mad boy than anything else, he would have such flights and vagaries – that, but for his face and her knowledge of his age, she should never have thought him a boy, he was so manly, and so much himself – that no women came after him, nor did she know of any connexion; but still, that he was a sad rake, and terribly fond of women, and would sometimes be saucy to her.’ His eating arrangements were peculiar too: ‘he ate what he chose to have with his relation (Mrs B) who lodged in the same house, but he never touched meat, and drank only water, and seemed to live on air.’ To that the nephew added: ‘he lived chiefly on a bit of bread, or a tart, and some water.’

The nephew, whose name Herbert Croft does not record, was probably the youngest in the house, younger even than Chatterton. For the first six weeks of Chatterton’s stay he shared a bedroom with him. ‘He used to sit up almost all the night, reading and writing … he (the nephew) was afraid to lie with him; for to be sure, he was a spirit, and never slept … he never came to bed till very late, sometimes three or four o’clock, and was always awake when he (the nephew) waked; and got up at the same time, about five or six – that almost every morning the floor was covered with pieces of paper not so big as sixpences, into which he had torn what he had been writing before he came to bed.’