Chapter Chambers to Chatterton of C by Biographical Dictionary of English Literature

of the 15th century. Hearing of H.Walpole’s collections for his Anecdotes of Painting in England, he sent him an “ancient manuscript” containing biographies of certain painters, not hitherto known, who had flourished in England centuries before. W. fell into the trap, and wrote asking for all the MS. he could furnish, and Chatterton in response forwarded accounts of more painters, adding some particulars as to himself, on which W., becoming suspicious, submitted the whole to T. Gray and Mason (q.v.), who pronounced the MS. to be forgeries. Some correspondence, angry on Chatterton’s part, ensued, and the whole budget of papers was returned. Chatterton thereafter, having been dismissed by Lambert, went to London, and for a short time his prospects seemed to be bright. He worked with feverish energy, threw off poems, satires, and political papers, and meditated a history of England; but funds and spirits failed, he was starving, and the failure to obtain an appointment as ship’s surgeon, for which he had applied, drove him to desperation, and on the morning of August 25, 1770, he was found dead from a dose of arsenic, surrounded by his writings torn into small pieces. From childhood Chatterton had shown a morbid familiarity with the idea of suicide, and had written a last will and testament, “executed in the presence of Omniscience,” and full of wild and profane wit. The magnitude of his tragedy is only realised when it is considered not only that the poetry he left was of a high order of originality and imaginative power, but that it was produced at an age at which our greatest poets, had they died, would have remained unknown. Precocious not only in genius but in dissipation, proud and morose as he was, an unsympathetic age confined itself mainly to awarding blame to his literary and moral delinquencies. Posterity has weighed him in a juster balance, and laments the early quenching of so brilliant a light. His collected works appeared in 1803, and another edition by Professor Street in 1875. Among these are Elinoure and Juga, Balade of Charitie, Bristowe Tragedie, Ælla, and Tragedy of Godwin.

The best account of his life is the Essay by Professor Masson.