Thomas Chatterton and the Performance of Literary Thesis Title : Professionalism

Home , Chatterton (horse), Thomas Chatterton, Thomas Langley

Thomas Chatterton and the Performance of Literary Professionalism Katherine Sumner

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences October 2020

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/ Dissertation Sheet Surname/Family Name : Sumner Given Name/s : Katherine Abbreviation for degree as give in the University : PhD calendar Faculty : Arts and Social Sciences School : School of Arts and Media Thomas Chatterton and the performance of literary Thesis Title : professionalism

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) Mid-eighteenth-century English writer and illustrator Thomas Chatterton was a stylistic chameleon with a keen interest in literary fame and commercial success. The emerging professional and publishing opportunities of Georgian England both engendered and were reflected in Chatterton’s protean stylistic experimentation. This thesis examines Chatterton’s stylistic mediation of this dynamic cultural economy, as expressed through his various textual, visual and antiquarian ventures. It comprises a series of four case studies that explore Chatterton’s engagement with Georgian literary sociability and theatricality, material and visual cultures, literary professional networks, and emergent middle-class cultural economy. It adds to existing scholarship by offering a new conception of Chatterton’s style, both as he understood it himself and as it was constituted in the context of Georgian England’s convivial urban literary milieus. Essential to this recovery is a critical assessment of Chatterton’s lesser known illustrative works as continuous with his precocious stylistic mirroring of the prevailing fashions of Georgian visual and bibliographic cultures. This mixture of archival and cultural historical analysis provides a more accurate reflection of Chatterton’s idiosyncratic experimentation with literary style as a performative means of professional self-promotion, and reveals the broader social catalysts for his ever-changing array of genres, voices and modes. The significance of Chatterton’s protean style lies, this thesis argues, in its often poignant, yet compelling, expression of the anxieties and ambitious failures of the creative underclasses of the Georgian literary economy.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

…………………………………………………………… ……………………………………..……………… ……….…………………….. Signature Witness Signature .…….… Date The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances and require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research.

FOR OFFICE Date of completion of requirements for

USE ONLY Award:

ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’ Signed ……………………………………………...... Date ……………………………………………......

‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents a non-exclusive licence to archive and to make available (including to members of the public) my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known. I acknowledge that I retain all intellectual property rights which subsist in my thesis or dissertation, such as copyright and patent rights, subject to applicable law. I also retain the right to use all or part of my thesis or dissertation in future works (such as articles or books).’

‘For any substantial portions of copyright material used in this thesis, written permission for use has been obtained, or the copyright material is removed from the final public version of the thesis.’

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date ……………………………………………......

AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT

‘I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis.’

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date ……………………………………………...... INCLUSION OF PUBLICATIONS STATEMENT

UNSW is supportive of candidates publishing their research results during their candidature as detailed in the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure.

Publications can be used in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter if: x The candidate contributed greater than 50% of the content in the publication and is the “primary author”, ie. the candidate was responsible primarily for the planning, execution and preparation of the work for publication x The candidate has approval to include the publication in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter from their supervisor and Postgraduate Coordinator. x The publication is not subject to any obligations or contractual agreements with a third party that would constrain its inclusion in the thesis

Please indicate whether this thesis contains published material or not: ܈ This thesis contains no publications, either published or submitted for publication

Some of the work described in this thesis has been published and it has been ܆ documented in the relevant Chapters with acknowledgement

This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) ܆ incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter and the details are presented below

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION I declare that: x I have complied with the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure x where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis. Candidate’s Name Signature Date (dd/mm/yy)

For Lily and Owen

Figure 1. “Chatterton’s Holiday Afternoon”1

1 William Ridgeway, “Chatterton’s Holiday Afternoon”, The Art Journal, 1875. Engraving after a picture by W. B. Morris, 22 x 16.3cm.

-., .%% &)*1'! #!(!).-%%% %-.*"%#/,!-0 Chapter 1 Introducing Chatterton’s .3'! .3'!) /.$*,%' $, .!, %.!,,3-* %%'%.3) +,*"!--%*)'+!,"*,() ! ""! .) "%'/,! -.! /'./,'0'/!) !2 $)#! $+.!,2+!,%(!).') $,*)%-( Knowing “the classicals” Performing “Pyrrha” to the spouting club (#%)%)#(! %eval Bristol’s literary sociability $+.!,,! %*/-$%)#- *&!)-*"!2 $)#! !-.(!).,3 *)-!)-/- %-*, !,'3**&- $+.!, *.$% ,0/, *.$% '' - “Mountaynes joynd bie Cemente” Bristol’s gallery of memories $+.!, *(*-* %'!,"*,() ! !2.%*)-*".$! %0%)!'*0!.,%)#'! ,*.% -*"-.%,% ' ,*-- ,!--%)# *#-) )#'%-$(!) $+.!, ".!,1*, %'%*#,+$3

Mid-eighteenth-century English writer and illustrator Thomas Chatterton was a stylistic chameleon with a keen interest in literary fame and commercial success. The emerging professional and publishing opportunities of Georgian England both engendered and were reflected in Chatterton’s protean stylistic experimentation. This thesis examines Chatterton’s stylistic mediation of this dynamic cultural economy, as expressed through his various textual, visual, and antiquarian ventures. It comprises a series of four case studies that explore Chatterton’s engagement with Georgian literary sociability and theatricality, material and visual cultures, literary professional networks, and emergent middle-class cultural economy. It adds to existing scholarship by offering a new conception of Chatterton’s style, both as he understood it himself and as it was constituted in the context of Georgian England’s convivial urban literary milieus. Essential to this recovery is a critical assessment of Chatterton’s lesser known illustrative works, as continuous with his precocious stylistic mirroring of the prevailing fashions of Georgian visual and bibliographic cultures. This mixture of archival and cultural historical analysis provides a more accurate reflection of Chatterton’s idiosyncratic experimentation with literary style as a performative means of professional self- promotion and reveals the broader social catalysts for his ever-changing array of genres, voices and modes. The significance of Chatterton’s protean style lies, this thesis argues, in its often poignant, yet compelling, expression of the anxieties and ambitious failures of the creative underclasses of the Georgian literary economy.

I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Helen Groth for her time and attention, and for giving me the benefit of her knowledge, craft, advice and superb teaching. Without Helen’s encouragement, humanity, humour, bookcase and well-aimed intellectual shoves, I would not have completed my dissertation. I am grateful to my excellent readers Dr Sean Pryor and Dr John Attridge for their insights and helpful feedback, and to the postgraduate coordinators (Meg Mumford in particular), whose advice and support maintained me during the ups and downs of doctoral candidacy combined with complex family life. I am indebted to the UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Science and the UNSW Graduate Research School for their support during my candidacy, in particular through the provision of funding for conferences and two research trips to the British Library in London, a living expenses stipend in the form of an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship, office space, and administrative compassion when required.

I wish to thank Emeritus Professor Christine Alexander for her long-term friendship and mentoring. Christine and Associate Professor Bill Walker were my original doctoral supervisors, and in their skilled and knowledgeable hands I established a firm base in literary juvenilia studies, and eighteenth-century British literary history and culture. Thanks also to: the blessed staff at the British Library Western manuscripts and maps reading rooms; Emeritus Professor Alan Nelson of UC Berkeley for lending me his flat in Bloomsbury and for his help reading Chatterton’s arcane script; Dr Vanessa Kirkpatrick for her keen eye and encouragement, and for editing my thesis at short notice and through the Christmas school holidays; Mrs Christina Sumner OAM for the gift of time and interest in my developing thesis, for commenting on and proofreading it several times over, and for saving me hours by getting to grips with EndNote and track changes; and finally Mr Matt O’Rourke for an intelligent and patient ear in someone whose professional background has nothing to do with English literary history, and for applying project management strategies to my writing deadlines. Despite the wormholes, it helped.

An earlier and shorter version of some of the materials in Chapter Four on gothic style was published under the title “Urban Landscape, Fantasy and Adolescent Identity in Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Rowley’ Works”, in Home and Away: The Place of the Child Writer, edited by David Owen and Lesley Peterson, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge

Scholars Publishing, 2016. All parts of this thesis have benefitted from conversations held at a number of conferences.

Thanks to those colleagues, professionals, family and friends who have provided encouragement, ideas, support and perspective over the past seven years. I am indebted to Ms Julia Charles, Ms (soon to be Dr) Genevieve Dashwood, Dr Dominic Fitzsimmons, Ms Louisa Glindemann, Dr Belinda Medlyn, Dr Wendy Roncolado, Dr Rod Sims, Ms Veechi Stewart, Dr Joanna Sumner, Dr Shivaun Weybury, the South Durras crew, the Friendly Friday crew, and my guardian angels Mr Dave Best and Mr Peter Sumner. I am especially grateful to Matt, Jo and Veechi for loving and believing in me and understanding why it was important. Without my mother Christina’s unconditional championing, love and all forms of moral and practical support, it would not have been possible to complete my doctorate. Last but not least, love, huge hugs and thanks to my children Lily and Owen, for putting up with my distraction, and for their sporadic interest in my writing and when it might be done.

Figure 3.1 “The owter Walle of the Castle” (folio detail) 71

Figure 3.2. Numismatic layout in Camden’s Britannia (1695) 73

Figure 3.3. “Coynes in Yellow Rolle by T. Rowleie” (folio detail) 73

Figure 3.4. Folio showing Chatterton’s spurious “original” and “transcript” versions of the “Backe of yGuarders Hall with its Towers” 83

Figure 3.5. “Antiquities – Book 3rd” 91

Figure 3.6. “Auntient Saxon Monuments dolven all in Bristol” 93

Figure 3.7. “Emendals to Turgotte by Thos Rowleie as by the Letters” 93

Figure 3.8. “Historie of Peyncters yn Englande bie T. Rowley” 97

Figure 3.9. Map of Bristol castle published in William Barrett’s History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (1789), based on Chatterton’s map 99

Figure 4.1. Chatterton’s landscape sketch of Bristol Castle on the Avon River (folio detail) 104

Figure 4.2. “This most noble Gate was the Thyrde and last ybuilden by Brightricus or Bythaccus Kg of the Western Saxans” (folio detail) 120

Figure 4.3. “Windowe in the Hall” (folio detail) 122

Figure 4.4. Statue of “Syre Johannes de Berkelaie” (folio detail) 125

Figure 4.5. “Backe of yGuarders Hall with its Towers” (folio detail) 126

Figure 4.6. Architectural folio details from the “Bristol Castle” series. Left to right, top to bottom: a) “The new ybuilden Fronte of the Castle”; b) “Castle Warde Logge of Arrowmen”; c) “Governors Hall front”; d) “Backe of the Wardonys Halle” 127

Figure 4.7. Title page engraving (detail) from The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary (1745) 132

Figure 4.8. Title page engraving (detail) from Thomas Tanner’s Notitia Monastica (1695) 133

Figure 4.9. Map of medieval Redcliffe (folio detail) 135

Figure 4.10. “Musei Wormiani Historia” (frontispiece detail) from Ole Worm’s Museum Wormianum (1655) 137

He was an adventurer, a professed hireling in the trade of literature, full of projects and inventions, artful, enterprising, unprincipled, indigent, and compelled to subsist by expedients. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry2

We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel and pelf. And because we are not as yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that isn’t really ‘us’ at all. James Fenton, The Strength of Poetry3

Fame is not popularity, the shout of the multitude, the idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a man surviving himself, in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable. William Hazlitt, Complete Works4

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. James Boswell, Samuel Johnson5

2 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh Century to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (London: Thomas Tegg, 1840), 360. 3 James Fenton, "Wilfred Owen’s Juvenilia," in The Strength of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 26. 4 P.P. Howe, ed. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., vol. 5 (London & Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930), 143-4. 5 James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, vol. 3, 19. Quoted in Nick Groom, "Thomas Chatterton," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature: 5-Volume Set, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 448.

' Introducing Chatterton’s #

Thomas Chatterton was more interested in the art of self-promotion than the art of poetry. He was an early model for commercially contingent literary professionalism, and an inspiration to both the Romantic poets and the “juvenile tradition” of youthful neoclassical publishing in the late eighteenth century. 6 His profound class-based insecurities and ambition to become a celebrated literary gentleman, in the context of mid-eighteenth-century Georgian England’s new reading and publishing markets, drove his sometimes fraudulent experiments in style.7 The Georgian period was characterised by a flourishing of fashion, entertainment, celebrity culture and social mobility. Literary and visual entertainments proliferated and were enjoyed by a population of well- educated, predominantly middle-class men and women. Anything seemed possible in this transitional period, even that a teenage writer from Bristol might become a celebrated member of this privileged urban cultural milieu.

Chatterton’s literary and artistic works were produced during his adolescence, and so his creative voice was still a work in progress. Plagued by anxieties about his limited education and professional prospects, his belief in his capacity to forge a successful literary career remained unwavering. One of Chatterton’s genuine gifts was a wily, perceptive ability to forecast what was commercially viable at any given moment, and to conform to the prevailing codes of taste and value. As this thesis will demonstrate, the professional uncertainties and publishing opportunities of Georgian England both engendered Chatterton’s stylistic experimentation and were mirrored within it. His resulting works were concerned less with his own poetic or artistic technique and development, than with producing intellectually and commercially appealing literary products, setting up professional encounters, and staging scenarios that allowed him to exchange those products as valuable cultural gifts. In this way he hoped to further his

6 Laurie Langbauer, "Prolepsis and the Tradition of Juvenile Writing: Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey," PMLA 128, no. 4 (2013): 890. 7 Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, "Introducing Romantic Sociability," in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770-1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6.

' #

professional ambitions and showcase his precocity by whatever stylistic means seemed most likely to accrue the necessary “Intrest”,8 both pecuniary and aesthetic.

Chatterton was born and raised in the busy English port-town of Bristol, absorbing the proto-industrial language and values of the merchants and traders, those he later derided as the “dancing bears of Commerce”,9 in the decades preceding the Industrial Revolution. Chatterton’s sensitivity to literary mannerisms, his mimicry and experimentation with social and literary styles,10 ranging from scholarly neoclassicism and antiquarianism to populist didactic and picaresque fictions, are best understood in terms of the Georgian cultural field, to invoke Bourdieu’s terminology. His stylistic “habitus” was shaped by a mix of precarity and imitative ambition.11 Drawing upon Bourdieu, John Guillory has usefully elaborated the mid-eighteenth century “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns”, that is the struggle between neoclassical and vernacular English literature for cultural legitimacy and pre-eminence, with reference to Chatterton’s contemporary, the poet Thomas Gray.12 Chatterton’s work was also forged out of and defined by these quarrels. As this thesis will argue, Chatterton’s experiments with both vernacular and neoclassical style reveal his immersion in an elaborate system of distinction, professional aspiration and commercial ambition that position his oeuvre as a hybrid of literary fraudulence, precocious hackery, and virtuosic self-fashioning.

Chatterton was more of a literary “adventurer, a professed hireling in the trade of literature”, 13 than a great literary “genius”, despite William Wordsworth’s poetic conviction that “Chatterton, the marvelous Boy,/ The sleepless Soul” led the plough across the “mountain-top” of the Romantic literary imagination. 14 It must be acknowledged that few of Chatterton’s works contain such lofty poetic vistas, or innovations. While his pseudo-medieval diction in the infamous Rowley works is arcane

8 Thomas Chatterton, "‘Intrest Thou Universal God of Men’," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 377-9, l.1. 9 "Kew Gardens," 516, l.142. 10 David Fairer, "Lyric Poetry: 1740–1790," in The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. Michael O'Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 397-8; Northrop Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," ELH 23, no. 2 (1956): 145-52. 11 Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus," in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (USA: Colombia University Press, 1993), 161-75. 12 John Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 118-9. 13 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh Century to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 2, 360. 14 "Resolution and Independence" in Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors (Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1987), 262, ll.43-46.

( '

and mysterious,15 and many of his lyrics exhibit a subtle sensory play with sound and form, his political and satirical verse are obscure, his love poetry stereotypical, callow and arrogant, and his pornography toe-curling. Chatterton’s capacity for sweet and sensory balladic lyricism is best known in his pastoral, the “Mynstrelles Songe” from “Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude”, in which the mythological British war hero Aella’s new wife Birtha, and her maid Egwina, sing with considerable dramatic irony of the death of her shepherd lover:

O! synge untoe mie roundelaie, O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee, Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie, Lyche a reynynge river bee; Mie love ys dedde, Gon to hys death-bedde, Al under the wyllowe tree.16

The verse exemplifies the mesmerising sing-song rhythm, auditory beauty and lexical obscurity of his pseudo-antique poetry, as well as his imitative literariness – this particular scene echoing a similar chamber-scene exchange between Desdemona and Emilia in Shakespeare’s “Othello”.17

Chatterton was equally capable, however, of writing dubious eighteenth-century female epistolary fiction. In “Letter Paraphras’d”, he ventures into the pornographic, in an obscene rendering of the sexual demands of an “Unknown Girl”:

if your Roger cannot fill The water brook that turns my Mill Go fuck Green Sickness Girls and Wenches On Bulks, in Lanes on Tombs and Benches By God I want a strapping Man My cunt is more than twice a Span

15 In this thesis, Chatterton’s pseudo-medieval writings and illustrations are referred to collectively as the “Rowley” works, because Chatterton attributed authorship of the vast majority of these works to his primary protagonist, imaginary priest and poet Thomas Rowley. References to “Rowleyan” English distinguishes Chatterton’s pseudo-medieval diction from genuine historical forms of Middle English and contemporary eighteenth-century diction. As Chatterton’s Rowleyan spelling is atypical and his meaning obscure, I have provided translations where necessary for comprehension. The textual practice used to identify such interventions are square brackets, placed around my translation, located either in the main body text or in the footnotes. 16 [Oh! sing to my roundelay,/ Oh! weep a briny tear with me,/ Dance no more on happy days,/ but like a running river be;/ My love is dead,/ gone to his death-bed,/ all under the willow tree.] Chatterton, "“Mynstrelles Songe” in Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedie, Wrotenn Bie Thomas Rowlie; Plaiedd before Mastre Canynge, Atte Hys Howse Nempte the Rodde Lodge; Also before the Duke of Norfolck, Johan Howard.," 210, ll. 961-7. 17 Donald S. Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 134-5.

) #

And Faith I speak it without Joking Last Night I put a Cartwheel Spoke in.18

Neither Chatterton’s biographer E.H.W. Meyerstein,19 nor Donald S. Taylor, editor of the twentieth-century Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton,20 could bring themselves to discuss this particular poem, largely due to the moral and critical codes that bound literary scholarship in the mid-twentieth century. Such critical filtering, however, has historically made it difficult to do justice to Chatterton’s uneven and multifaceted contribution to the rowdy, theatrical and experimental spirit of eighteenth-century literary culture.

By considering examples of Chatterton’s very different stylistic experiments, this thesis provides a more complex and accurate portrait of Chatterton as a product of the diversity of the Georgian period’s transitional literary and visual tastes. Always keeping an eye on the cultural marketplace, Chatterton’s works blended poetic genre, gothic revivalist architecture with antiquarian bibliographic aesthetics, and an autodidactic avidity for curiosities and artefacts like tokens and maps, manuscripts, legal documents and letters. He loved the lyrical and satirical, but equally relished the symbolic and narrative possibilities of both the visual and antiquarian proclivities of his contemporaries. Many of his works are modal “composites” that, like William Blake’s illuminated book plates, combine textual, illustrative and material forms. 21 They exemplify his engagement with Georgian visual and bibliographic cultures, such as extra- illustration and “book disorders”22, and the fashion for sensory entertainments.23 The precocious breadth of his professional and aesthetic impulses serves as a record of the catholic tastes of English reading audiences during this time of profound social and cultural change; his style embodies its inchoate form and flux.

Chatterton was determinedly trying to write his own literary reputation into existence – and he was not alone in this effort. The ambitious failure of his works survives as a

18 Chatterton, "The Letter Paraphras'd," 686, ll.9-16. 19 Edward Harry William Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton (New York: New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930). 20 Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, eds., The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, A Bicentenary Edition ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 21 Jean Hagstrum, William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 23-71. 22 Luisa Calè, "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page," Books as/and New Media (2016): n.p; Fuseli's Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1-15; "Extra-Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page," Eighteenth-century Life 44 (2020): 111-35. 23 Hélène Ibata, The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 11.

* '

record of what Paul Keen suggests was the more common, less often recorded or remembered “failures and marginal successes” of the period. Keen’s portrait of a society of unnamed hack journalists pitting their ambitions against the daunting and exclusive world of eighteenth-century letters bears little resemblance to Jurgen Habermas’ civilised version of the eighteenth-century public sphere.24 Despite his fame, Chatterton belonged to this anxious and fallible creative underclass, and because of his fame his works survive as a record of those whose works did not.

This thesis examines Chatterton’s stylistic mediation of Georgian or mid-century cultural life, as expressed through his textual, visual and material works. As a category of describable and iterative literary practice, a focus on style reveals the energy and ambition of Chatterton’s generic variation and vocal experimentalism, his modal composites, and his calculated, self-regarding play for professional effect and commercial success. This focus on style also demonstrates the need for a different critical approach to Chatterton’s diverse output, his lesser known illustrative work, as well as his more recognised and conventional literary endeavours, that places emphasis on the social and economic aspects of his professional and social ambition as constituted in the related contexts of Georgian visual and bibliographic cultures.

The structure of this thesis reflects this focus on style. Each of the four case studies explores one of the four distinctive styles that Chatterton develops during his short career. While acknowledging the seminal recovery work on his life by E. H. W. Meyerstein,25 his oeuvre and creative “modes” by Donald S. Taylor,26 as well as important historicist studies by Nick Groom, Ian Haywood, Beth Lau and others on Chatterton’s medievalist bardism and historiography in the context of the eighteenth-century culture of literary forgeries, 27 these case studies are focused on examining the intersection between Chatterton’s experimental styles and specifically mid-eighteenth century sociological,

24 Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 136; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT press, 1991). 25 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton. 26 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 7. 27 Nick Groom, "Introduction," in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke & New York: Macmillan & St. Martin's, 1999); "Romanticism and Forgery," Literature Compass 4, no. 6 (2007); "Forgery or Plagiarism? Unravelling Chatterton’s Rowley," Angelaki 1, no. 2 (1996); Ian Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction (Rutherford & London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press & Associated University Presses, 1986); "Chatterton's Plans for the Publication of the Forgery," Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and the English Language 36, no. 141 (1985); Beth Lau, "Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats," Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 4 (2003).

+ #

historical and cultural conditions. To this end, each chapter in this thesis interrogates the deep connections between Chatterton’s social subjectivity and professional performances, his textuality and visual aesthetics, and his engagement with Georgian literary sociability and theatricality, material and visual cultures, literary professionalism, and the emergent middle-class cultural economy.

As this introduction and the four case studies that follow contend, the significance of Chatterton’s works survives as a record of the partial successes or outright failures of the unremembered creative underclasses of the Georgian literary economy. The rest of this introduction will introduce the arguments and interventions made in each case study, and then establish the central theoretical claims on which this thesis rests. Chapter 2 builds on the foundation established in this introduction to explore Chatterton’s experimental anachronism. I examine Chatterton’s autodidacticism, neoclassical “spouting” 28 and imaginary, pseudo-medieval literary world as examples of the way he engaged with anachronistic forms of both neoclassicism and medievalism. Chatterton mimicked the attributes of a humanist education in order to pass as a gentleman writer, invent his own literary reputation and further his professional aspirations.

Critical engagement with Chatterton’s anachronism has tended to concern itself mainly with his neoclassical genre imitations, 29 his Romantic nationalism 30 or his medievalist manuscript forgeries. 31 This work was seminal in its examination of

28 John A Thieme, "Spouting, Spouting-Clubs and Spouting Companions," Theatre Notebook 29, no. 1 (1975): 10. 29 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton; Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 1. He comments that we are all in some way indebted as literary or intellectual imitators of the ancients, even “Vergil” himself (Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 199.). 30 Inga Bryden, "The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry," in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999); Nick Groom, "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity," in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. J. Chandler and M.N. McLane (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); "Fragments, Reliques, & Mss: Chatterton and Percy," in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999); "Introduction."; "Thomas Rowlie Preeste," in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (Basingstoke, England; New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 1998); Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction; Lau, "Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats."; Frances Schouler Miller, "The Historic Sense of Thomas Chatterton," ELH 11, no. 2 (1944); Carolyn D. Williams, "‘On Tiber’s Banks’: Chatterton and Post-Colonialism," in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Great Britain: Macmillan Press, 1999). 31 Robert Folkenflik, "Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great Age of Literary Forgery," Centennial Review (1974); Groom, "Romanticism and Forgery."; "Fragments, Reliques, & Mss: Chatterton and Percy."; "Thomas Chatterton Was a Forger," The Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998); "Forgery or Plagiarism? Unravelling Chatterton’s Rowley."; Haywood, "Chatterton's Plans for the Publication of the

, '

Chatterton’s classical debts and complex historiographical medievalism on their own terms, rather than through the distorted lenses of Romantic genius, fakery, or other such “large-scale historical” theses.32 This chapter challenges these critical precedents through an analysis of Chatterton’s textual relationship with “untimeliness”,33 in the context of mid-eighteenth century literary culture. Chatterton’s works did not deal in small degrees of anachronism, but with extravagant imaginative flourishes, embracing gaping logical aporia and a self-aggrandising nostalgia. Informed by the historical work of Brian Goldberg, John Guillory, Jon Klancher, and Clifford Siskin,34 as well as Eric Hayot and Nicholas Dames on anachronism, 35 this chapter outlines the effects of Chatterton’s educational and social background on his professional aspirations. Through the anachronistic production and dissemination of his neoclassical and medieval works, Chatterton experimented with codes of commercial publishing value and distinction as a professional writer – while at the same time creating new, if fictional possibilities for his own future, and for Britain’s vernacular literary culture.

Chapter 3 explores Chatterton’s fascination with material things, a critical focus that challenges the persistent critical identification of his manuscripts with the eighteenth- century culture of literary forgeries. Notably, Ian Haywood and Nick Groom established Chatterton’s Rowley manuscripts in the historical context of mid-eighteenth-century antiquarianism and literary forgeries. These manuscripts were not Chatterton’s only experiments with material culture. Many of his works blended poetics with textual formalism, and sensory pleasure in and scholarly engagement with tangible tokens and artefacts. Chatterton relished the concrete realm, and the narrative and symbolic possibilities of his composite works.36

Forgery."; Claude Rawson, "Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton," in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999). 32 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 7. 33 Helen Groth and Paul Sheehan, "Introduction: Timeliness and Untimeliness," Textual Practice 26, no. 4 (2012): 572. 34 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon."; Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 35 Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds, Oxford Scholarship Online (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 36 Hagstrum, William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse, 23-71.

- #

This chapter highlights Chatterton’s inexperienced, yet opportunistic commercialism. It examines the Rowley manuscripts as a revelatory example of Chatterton’s stylistic experimentation with concrete symbolism, and precious objects of desire and exchange. Informed by Arjun Appadurai’s work on gift exchange, 37 Keen on the eighteenth-century literary economy, Bill Brown’s “Thing” theory, and Luisa Calè’s “book disorders”,38 this chapter argues that Chatterton’s material poetics was performative in its construction of valuable cultural things, through which he could enact his own distinction and professionalism. His investment in the symbolic, commodified “thingness” of his works resided in the ways he could use them to stage encounters, in person or through letters, with men he knew to have higher literary standing than himself, and who were already influential as eighteenth-century literary critics, writers and taste makers. These precious objects were the hand-crafted manifestations of Chatterton’s ill-informed and naïve desire to buy his way into favour with the coterie of literary men he hoped would provide social sanctification and patronage.

Chapter 4 extends critical findings on Chatterton’s medieval bardic poetry and gothic illustrations beyond historically limited critical accounts of his engagement with British Romantic nationalism, and the gothic revivalist aesthetic. 39 This chapter analyses Chatterton’s different modal expressions of gothic, in terms of their function as Georgian cultural commodities and entertainments, and addresses a significant gap in the critical literature on his visual aesthetic. Informed by Fred Botting, David Punter and Glennis Byron’s work on the literary gothic,40 Katie Trumpener on bardic balladry,41 and Calè and Hélène Ibata on Georgian visual literacy, literary galleries and immersive entertainments,42 this chapter argues that Chatterton’s gothic style was a curated public

37 Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 38 Bill Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them," in A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001); Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800; Calè, "Extra-Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page."; "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page." 39 Bryden, "The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry."; Timothy Mowl, "A Rococo Poet for a Rococo City," in From Gothic to Romantic : Thomas Chatterton's Bristol, ed. Alistair Heys (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2005). 40 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996); David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (USA, UK and Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 41 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997). 42 Calè, Fuseli's Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators”; Ibata, The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art.

. '

performance. His gothic style, which was generally “without the dark inflections” of the eighteenth-century gothic revival,43 expressed a unique and idiosyncratic middle-class aesthetic of historicist optimism. Not only was this aesthetic meant to transform the uncultivated horrors of British history into something more palatable, in British nationalist terms, but it provided his Georgian audience with a multi-sensory entertainment that affirmed their emergent sense of middle-class cultural power.

Chapter 5 deepens and extends traditional readings of Chatterton’s Ossian-style prose poems, epistolary fictions, and picaresque tales by analysing them through the lens of queer theory and recent work on eighteenth-century literary sociability. In particular, this chapter complicates Taylor’s ahistorical and genre-based classification of Chatterton’s works in terms of “heroic” and “satiric” modes, and his ill-defined collection of “imagined places and poetries” that includes the Ossianic poems.44 It also challenges diagnostic literary readings of his undeniably passionate and troubled relationships with men,45 in particular Louise J. Kaplan’s argument for a Freudian sociopathic causality for Chatterton’s creative impulses. Kaplan argues that Chatterton’s creative works developed out of a psychological condition of “imposturous narcissism” as a result of being fatherless,46 and consequently developed an imaginary world of father figures and other male heroes. Neither approach captures the perverse energy that drives Chatterton’s picaresque tales, nor their intersection with his self-consciously gendered professional performativity.

Framed by Heather Love’s “politics of affect”,47 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on the primacy of the homosocial bond, 48 this chapter maps the hidden emotional histories of disempowerment and resentment, desire and anxiety, that run within, or beneath the surface performance of Chatterton’s relationships with God, women, and other men. In the process, new narratives about his passions and vulnerabilities emerge, as well as the ways his genre and gender instabilities were enacted through his literary

43 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 18. 44 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, vii-viii. 45 Phyllis Greenacre, "The Family Romance of the Artist," The psychoanalytic study of the child 13, no. 1 (1958); "The Relationship of the Imposter to the Artist," Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 13 (1958); Louise J. Kaplan, The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton (New York: Atheneum, 1988); Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994). 46 Groom, "Introduction," 6. Citing Kaplan, The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton. 47 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Massachussets & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2009), 10. 48 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia university press, 2015).

/ #

works. Specifically, this chapter will argue that Chatterton’s performative expression of masculine identities and relationships in these works was a response to mid-century Georgian homosocial culture. The underlying affective states implied by his performative renderings point to Chatterton’s own deeply felt anxieties about his role as a middle-class man and literary professional within emergent eighteenth-century social structures.

Style and authorial character

For Chatterton, style was a reflection of his unique and emerging authorial voice – what he called the “character in his pen”.49 Style in this thesis therefore refers to this kind of authorial signature – the writer’s “individual manner”,50 character or voice in writing – what Seymour Chatman describes as the “sets of recurrent features which clearly characterise them in the universe of authors”.51 John Bowen points out that, as a critical approach, style is complicated by its many contradictory meanings. 52 Historically speaking, stylistic enquiry has tended to refer exclusively either to those “features of literary composition which belong to form and expression rather than to the substance of the thought or matter expressed”, or conversely to those features that “shed light on the personality and art of an author”.53 In other words, style has been seen either in large- scale historical, generic, imitable, and solely textual terms, or as an intimate reflection of the writer’s personality, the “drive to break away from uniformity, and to establish, by expressing, one’s particular indefinable uniqueness”.54

In his contribution to Dickens’s Style, Bowen suggests however that “form and expression” and their “conceptual baggage and assumptions” cannot be separated, even if it was desirable to do so for critical purposes.55 In the same vein, but using computer statistics to prove the point, Franco Moretti and the “quantitative formalists” from the Stanford Literary Laboratory argue that the entirely reductionist position that “style is

49 Chatterton, "To Sarah Chatterton, Thomas Cary, and Others, 6 May 1770," 561, l.15. 50 Seymour Chatman, "The Semantics of Style," Information (International Social Science Council) 6, no. 4 (1967): 79-81. 51 Ibid., 89. 52 John Bowen, "Dickens's Umbrellas," in Dickens's Style, ed. Daniel Tyler (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 26. 53 Chatman, "The Semantics of Style," 79-81, 90. 54 Louis Milic, "Unconscious Ordering in the Prose of Swift," The Computer and Literary Style (1966): 79-80. Chatman suggests that style became synonymous with “form” from about the mid-sixteenth century onwards, whereas the idea of style as “individual manner” has Platonic origins. All senses of style are inherited from “antiquity and the Renaissance: as noted they are all Aristotelian, presupposing an essential dualism between form and content.” But the idea of unique style is also a “Platonic monism in which ‘the achievement of the proper form is the content’”. Chatman, "The Semantics of Style," 79-81. 55 Bowen, "Dickens's Umbrellas," 26.

'& '

nothing but its components”, despite being “the more logically consistent” position, “missed the very point of the concept, which lay in its capacity to hint, however hazily, at something that went beyond functionality”. Importantly, in terms of the Georgian cultural context of Chatterton’s works, Moretti’s conclusions include a “social notion of style”.56

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Moretti argues that the author’s values emerge as if “naturally” from the unfolding story of the work, in the minute and repeatable structures of style, and that this in turn can “regulate” the reader’s experience and behaviour; as habitus, in other words, the author’s style “could spill over from grammar and literature into psychic structures and social interactions”. 57 Therefore, to antithetically misquote Michael Riffaterre on the subject of style, the critical approach taken in this chapter is that “literature is made of texts, and intentions”.58 Style is both expressive and provocative, and it can also be socially constitutive. An analytical approach to Chatterton’s ways of creating that recognises features that were “peculiar to the author or shared within periods and genres”, but also expressive of “the deepest interests and values of the fiction”,59 will best illuminate the creative nature and ambitious function of Chatterton’s material poetics and his obsession with the production and exchange of physical artefacts.

To Chatterton’s contemporaries in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the dominant sense of the term “style” was still one of rhetorical fluency in established and imitable genre, rather than unique authorial voice. Daniel Hartley contends that the poetics of both poets and their critics in these early modern times was the “induction (or deduction) of the specific rules or techniques of fine writing”. 60 The pedagogical expectation that informed such writing in the early to mid-eighteenth century was reliant on paraphrasing and translation of classical Latin and Greek literary works. Chatterton’s engagement with this “trope of imitation”61 was genuine but second-hand at best, because he received a basic commercial, not an elite, grammar-school education. His knowledge

56 Franco Moretti, "Style at the Scale of the Sentence," Literary Lab (2013): 1. 57 Ibid., 27-8. Moretti is referring to Bourdieu, "The Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus." 58 Michael Riffaterre, "The Stylistic Approach to Literary History," New Literary History 2, no. 1 (1970): 39. My misquotation is shown with italics. In fact, he argues that a stylistic approach “protects us from an over-emphasis” on historical and other contextual matters, for “literature is made of texts, not intentions”. 59 Daniel Tyler, "Introduction," in Dickens's Style, ed. Daniel Tyler (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1. 60 Daniel Hartley, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Brill, 2016), 2-3. 61 Laurie Langbauer, "Leigh Hunt and Juvenilia," Keats-Shelley Journal 60 (2011): 121.

'' #

of the Greek and Roman writers, the European genre system, and even the neoclassical parodists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was therefore autodidactic and limited to English translations.

Nonetheless, Chatterton’s works were profoundly influenced by the traditional authority of the classical genres, as well as the satirical skewering of these “idealising modes”62 by poets like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Chatterton’s earliest poems, written at about age eleven, are therefore modelled on satirical and didactic styles from The Book of Common Prayer and John Gay’s Fables.63 His subsequent medievalist literary forgeries, now known collectively (and in this dissertation) as the “Rowley” manuscripts, included “dramatic verse and tragedies, eclogues, heroic ballads, lyrical elegies and odes… and reams of architectural, biographical, curatorial, heraldic, historical, and numismatic prose, as well as ephemera, legal documents and letters”.64 In the final year of his life, after Horace Walpole exposed Rowley’s inauthenticity, Chatterton entered a more contemporary kind of “extravagant literary renaissance” in which Taylor suggests everything he wrote was either satirical or celebratory.65 “By the time the cocksure Chatterton came to the capital in late April 1770 to win fame and fortune with his pen”, Michael Suarez notes, the seventeen-year-old Chatterton “had published 31 titles in seven different journals, five of which were London publications”.66 He was a prolific mimic, deeply motivated by professional ambition, and his resulting works took forms that were of a kind that, at least sometimes, resulted in publication.

These works appear eclectic, even anarchic, emotional, and plain odd when described purely in terms of classical genres; Chatterton was, as Claude Rawson points out, more of a creative “pasticheur” than a neoclassicist.67 Even Taylor, Chatterton’s preeminent twentieth-century critic, found it challenging if not impossible to classify his disparate and amorphous “groupings of artistic possibility”, between whose:

62 Blanford Parker, "Modes of Mockery: The Significance of Mock‐Poetic Forms in the Enlightenment," in A Companion to Satire, ed. Ruben Quintero (UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 507-8. 63 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 30. 64 Kate Sumner, "Urban Landscape, Fantasy and Adolescent Identity in Thomas Chatterton's 'Rowley' Works," in Home and Away: The Place of the Child Writer, ed. David Owen and Lesley Peterson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 135. 65 Nick Groom, "Chatterton, Thomas (1752–1770)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), n.p; Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 170. 66 Michael F. Suarez, "‘This Necessary Knowledge’: Thomas Chatterton and the Ways of the London Book Trade," in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke, England New York, NY: Macmillan & St. Martin's, 1999), 96. 67 Rawson, "Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton," 19.

'( '

tentative directions and achieved forms, conventional possibilities in medium and technique and a consequent range of possible shaping principles, traditional or innovative, seem gradually to have presented themselves to his awareness.68

Nonetheless he tried. In Thomas Chatterton’s Art, Taylor’s critical enunciation of the poet’s “imaginative matrix” is deeply conventional, based on the major literary genres of history, epic, satire and pastoral – with some telling outliers that seem an uncomfortable fit with the attempted schema. More recently, Groom has argued that Chatterton’s complex and often derivative work has been “too mercurial”, its characteristic formal and factual slipperiness “perpetually challenging the genres of writing, mixing national histories, national fictions, and national myths in a great post-Enlightenment reinvention of the past”.69 As a consequence, Ivan Phillips adds, the works have sometimes been relegated to the academic “too-hard basket”, or have triggered nervous scholarly fantasy, reduction or avoidance.70

Early editors and critics were most likely to link Chatterton’s youth with unnatural genius, “uncommon abilities” or “bad principles”. 71 Early critics of Chatterton’s drawings were equally unsympathetic. In the 1803 preface to his Works of Thomas Chatterton, for example, Robert Southey described the “Bristol Castle” drawings as “mere scratches of a school-boy, with a pen”, aghast at the “confusion of styles [that] exhibit no evidence whatever of having been copied from Nature”.72 Even in the late twentieth-century, Claude Rawson continued critical condemnation of Chatterton’s style, protesting at the “unprocessed expressions of adolescent silliness” 73 in Chatterton’s undeniably misogynistic verse. In complete contradiction to this, however, Rawson also expressed disappointment at the boy’s mildness, complaining that “One looks to Chatterton’s schoolboy humour for a Larkinesque eruption on the lines of ‘And he yaf hym a sodynge gode kyk in the balles, causing him grete dole and lamentacions’, alas in vain”. 74 Chatterton cannot win. He is chastised for being smutty, then dismissed as

68 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 14. 69 Groom, "Introduction," 5. 70 Ivan Phillips, "A Clash of Harmony: Forgery as Politics in the Work of Thomas Chatterton," Critical Survey 24, no. 3 (2012): 41. 71 Daniel Cook, "The Critical and the Curious: Thomas Chatterton's First Reviewers," Romanticism 15, no. 2 (2009): 114-5. Citing John Duncombe’s Review of Books, Gentleman’s Magazine, 47 (1777), 275-9. 72 Robert Southey, "Preface," in The Works of Thomas Chatterton: Containing Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose, ed. Robert Southey and Joseph Cottle (London: T. N. Longman & O. Rees, 1803), 516-7. 73 Rawson, "Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton," 22. 74 Ibid., 29.

') #

disappointing for not being smutty enough – and neither criticism has much to do with his works, style or creative purpose.

Within this critical gap there is room for a reappraisal of Chatterton’s versatile and chameleonic voice, particularly in the transitional contexts of both his adolescence and emergent Georgian literary sociability and theatrical culture. Dismissing interpretations of the mimetic nature of much creative work by children, Christine Alexander argues in her seminal book, The Child Writer, that in the context of young writers’ literary apprenticeship, their writing ought to be “seen as a variation, a commentary on, an interpretation, or a reproduction of the world around them”, and therefore recognised as a valid and independent cultural contribution.75 Clara Tuite argues in relation to the critical approach used in her own writing on Anne Lister’s sociability, that “style is a particularly enabling category for elaborating the complicated relations between the social system and the literary system, sociability and textuality, social agency and textual effects, and the corporeal and phantasmatic aspects of social subjectivity and social performance”.76 Such critical perspectives are used in this thesis to transform existing scholarship on Chatterton’s generically diverse writerly habits into a new conception of his style, or his signature vocal character. This conception of his style avoids the conflation of “juvenilia” with “terrible immaturity”,77 and instead analyses his stylistic experimentation both as it was constituted in the transitional mid-century context of Georgian England’s convivial and bookish milieu, and as he understood it himself.

Despite the established generic view of style in the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, critical investment in the notion of Chatterton’s unique voice is not an anachronism. Chatterton himself was aware of and valued his own developing public character. In a letter to his sister from “Tom’s Coffee House” in London, he wrote that his “employment will be in writing a voluminous history of London, to appear in numbers the beginning of next winter”, as well as “political essays” for which he professed himself entirely willing to write for whichever side offered him pecuniary “interest” – for “he is

75 Christine Alexander, "Play and Apprenticeship: The Culture of Family Magazines," in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 31-2. 76 Clara Tuite, "The Byronic Woman: Anne Lister’s Style, Sociability and Sexuality," in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770-1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 186. 77 Christine Alexander, "Defining and Representing Literary Juvenilia," in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005), 72-3.

'* '

a poor author, who cannot write on both sides”.78 Chatterton was clearly confident of his hired skills in generic imitation, and implicit in his literary engagement with public debate was a belief in the power of his own literary voice to make an impact on the world of meaning beyond the works themselves, and thereby to “form a new public culture”79 together with the other gentlemen of letters assembled in the coffee-house. By performing his mastery of a variety of experimental aesthetics and modes, he effectively willed this signature, albeit protean, style into being.

Significantly, the notion of style was shifting in this period, referring not only to genre, but also to the individual’s imaginative, performative and self-aware poetic voice. Discourses of poetic voice or character spoke to new cultural interest in the expression of “primitive” psychological or emotional states.80 Hartley identifies this cultural shift to “Romantic modernity” as one in which the “fiction” of fine writing as genre and rhetoric “became obsolete”, because “the drive for constant literary innovation and the gradual disintegration of… the rule-bound systems of classical poetics and rhetoric – including the tomes in which they were explicated – were gradually replaced by manifestos”.81 These were the manifestos of the Romantic poets and aesthetes, and the possibilities they implied for impressing their perceptive worlds upon readers’ “psychic structures and social interactions”.82 Chatterton certainly believed in the radical, transformative power of his own voice. He was inspired by the formalism and frank, emotional lability of the “angry young men” of his time, whose work James Engell argues responded to social uncertainty in Britain through a “literature of cultural comment, social protest, and private disaffection”. 83 Drawing on Northrop Frye’s earlier work, David Fairer argues that Chatterton belonged to a small group of mid-century poets who creatively “set their own agenda”, and whose self-absorbed “pre-Romantic” voices relied absolutely on personal manifesto as the functional mode of their creative work.84

78 Chatterton, "To Mary Chatterton, 30 May 1770," 587-8, ll.16-18, ll.34-5. 79 Markman Ellis, "An Introduction to the Coffee-House: A Discursive Model," Language & Communication 28 (2008): 162. 80 "! – "# 81 Hartley, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics, 2-3. 82 Moretti, "Style at the Scale of the Sentence," 27-8. 83 James Engell, "Satiric Spirits of the Later Eighteenth Century: Johnson to Crabbe," in A Companion to Satire, ed. Ruben Quintero (Oxford: Oxford : Blackwell, 2007), 233. 84 This group including Thomas Gray, William Collins, the Warton brothers, Christopher Smart, James Macpherson, and Robert Burns. In Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," 145; Fairer, "Lyric Poetry: 1740–1790," 397. As Fairer notes, “the challenge is to find critical perspectives that will do justice to them as individual poets while acknowledging their contemporaneity and suggesting lines of connection between them”, ibid.

'+ #

Literary sociability and professional performance

The generic forms and thematic content of Chatterton’s literary works were less important to him than his relationship with certain intellectual and literary celebrities of the London coffee-houses, and his sense of shared value in the performance of “character” or marketable literary style.85 Not long after moving to London to take up his new trade as a Grub Street journalist, Chatterton wrote to his mother Sarah that he was “quite familiar with the Chapter Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there. A character is now unnecessary; an author carries his character in his pen”.86 Samuel Johnson gives the following contemporary definitions of “character” in his 1755 Dictionary: as the physical, scribal “manner of writing”; but also “personal qualities; particular constitution of the mind”; as well as “the hero of the piece… advanced foremost to the view of the reader or spectator”.87 “Character” was therefore a loaded and complex term for the unique poetic voice or style, both material and mental, intellectually frank and performative.

Chatterton’s authorial voice developed within the lively homosocial clamour and “culture of improvement”88 of mid-eighteenth-century London’s coffee-house libraries, with their “extensive connections with the book trade, being frequented by writers, printers, and booksellers”.89 His works are infused with the ambitious, gendered and apparently democratic sociability that was integral to the emergence of Habermas’ notion of the eighteenth century “public sphere” and the cultural literacy, professional possibility, and economic power brought by newly emergent middle classes. Chatterton relied absolutely upon the possibilities inherent in the increasing social fluidity of the eighteenth century, and its shifting delineations of rank and opportunity, particularly the opening of publishing possibilities for middle class, female and young writers.

Klancher and Markman Ellis’s analysis of English reading audiences and the London coffee-house discourse of the mid to late eighteenth century provides some useful

85 Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011). 86 Chatterton, "To Sarah Chatterton, Thomas Cary, and Others, 6 May 1770," 560-1, l.12-5. 87 “Character”, in Samuel Johnson, "A Dictionary of the English Language," (London: Consortium, 1755), vol. 1, 41. 88 Peter Borsay, "The Culture of Improvement," in The Eighteenth Century: 1688-1815, ed. Paul Langford, The Short Oxford History of the British Isles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 183; Markman Ellis, "Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London," The Library 10, no. 1 (2009): 159-61. 89 "Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London," 3.

', '

historical context for the loquacious, networking quality of Chatterton’s style. 90 As Klancher argues, this period:

ushered in a confusing, unsettled world of reading and writing. Ideas, signs and styles had to cross new cultural and social boundaries… No single, unified “reading public” could be addressed in such times… This inchoate cultural moment compelled a great many writers to shape the interpretive and ideological frameworks of audiences they would speak to. They carved out new readerships and transformed old ones.91

Chatterton’s experimental style expressed this discourse of social uncertainty and transformation, of immense cultural possibilities, imbued as it was with the sense of his own vocal, literary power to shape readers’ beliefs and responses.

The definition of eighteenth-century literary sociability and theatricality used in this thesis draws inspiration from the work of Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite in their introduction to Literary Sociability, and Russell’s subsequent study on Women, Sociability and Theatre in the context of mid-eighteenth century London and the emergent public sphere.92 Russell and Tuite argue that Georgian literary society had an intensively “convivial and theatrical” side that was itself a form of cultural production.93 These cultural events were “engendered by” and produced within “venues such as the coffee-house, the inn, tavern, alehouse, the proliferation of forms of voluntary association, theatres, pleasure-gardens, dancing assemblies, and so on”. 94 Russell argues in particular for the “interventionist role in the shaping of public opinion” held by theatre at the time, whereby it was “an enactment of the possibility of self-transformation”.95 Sociability and theatricality, as cultural products that could voice and “embody the nation”, were a conduit for the performative exploration of alternative and emergent social, class and gender possibilities.96

Chatterton saw his own literary and multimodal works as this kind of sociable cultural product, as well as a professional performance that aspired to the emergent male-

90 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832; Ellis, "Coffee-House Libraries in Mid- Eighteenth-Century London." 91 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832, 3. 92 Russell and Tuite, "Introducing Romantic Sociability."; Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 93 Russell and Tuite, "Introducing Romantic Sociability," 4. 94 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39, 192, 451. 95 Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 138. 96 "“Keeping Place“: Servants, Theatre and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain," The Eighteenth Century 42, no. 1 (2001): 29-30.

'- #

dominated, bourgeois “republic of letters”. 97 Expressed through his chameleon-like experimentation with vocal styles and visual aesthetics, Chatterton’s homosocial obsessions and aspirational reach for connections and recognition within the ranks of this dynamic intellectual world, corresponds with the “discursive model” of coffee-house literary and political debate that Ellis describes as “facilitating a social interaction that disregarded status, fostered a toleration of a broad range of discussion, and was accessible to all”.98 Feathering his own cap through different efforts to perform his membership to this illustrious, masculine club, Chatterton put on a bespangled literary limelight act.

Chatterton’s works and letters are full of this performance of commercial, homosocial literary professionalism. In his attempts to publish the Rowley works, he sent pseudo- medieval manuscripts and letters to William Barrett, John Dodsley, Horace Walpole and others. In works imitating Charles Churchill’s “coarse, vigorous” tone99 he directed his ranting satires at men he knew, and men he wanted others to think he knew, and discoursed upon political and intellectual topics on which he was scarcely informed. He wrote fraudulent love poems for male friends courting real women, and autobiographical stories for the London magazines in the fictional voices of marketable female protagonists. Taylor comments that Chatterton’s poem “The Art of Puffing”100 was “an effective satire about what three months in London had taught him concerning the tricks of his trade”.101 In a sardonic tone, Chatterton suggested that either eulogising or self- promoting success in the Grub Street trade came down to a catchy title, as a writer with a “good Frontispiece to grace the door… Will always find his cover’d Dullness sell”.102 In this way, Chatterton’s sociable literary experiments demonstrated how deeply he desired and keenly he imagined himself embedded in Georgian London’s civilising, critically informed and culturally powerful homosocial literary culture.

Affect and failure

The coffee-house bonhomie Chatterton expresses in his letter from London to his mother Sarah belies the reality of his circumstances as a struggling London writer, and his

97 Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 9. 98 Ellis, "An Introduction to the Coffee-House: A Discursive Model," 162. 99 Thomas Chatterton, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton: A Bicentenary Edition, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1040. 100 "The Art of Puffing by a Bookseller's Journeyman," 650-1. 101 “Puffing” was a synonym for eulogising another, or self-promotion, in common usage in the eighteenth century. Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 246-7. 102 Chatterton, "The Art of Puffing," 651, ll.35-6.

'. '

anxious and fraudulent relationships with other men. He was not alone in the dissonance between his expressed and lived experience. Feminist criticism of Habermas’ sociological model of the emergent eighteenth-century public sphere, and Georgian cultural studies, have established that a smooth and unchallenged transition to patriarchal, male- dominated bourgeois cultural and political power is neither accurate nor historically comprehensive.103

Nancy Fraser and Joan Landes argue that despite the rhetoric of publicity and accessibility, “the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions” from public life. The key axes of these exclusions were gender and class, namely “women of all classes and ethnicities… [and] plebeian men”.104 Keen also reworks Habermas’ notion of the public sphere as a cultural moment whose true spirit might with greater accuracy be described as “untidy and disorderly”, conflicted, anxious, ignorant and “giddy” Grub Street commercialism.105 Through his thoughtless fraudulence and ambitious literary campaigns, Chatterton’s experimentalism thus exemplifies a more complex and diverse version of public life than the sanctified domain of Georgian London’s coffee-houses.

Quoting Roland Barthes at the start of her book, Feeling Backward, Heather Love asks: “who will write the history of tears?”106 Chatterton’s tears, his passionate, insecure and vexed feeling states in response to his lived experience, were writ large across his works. Each one of the major stylistic experiments discussed in this thesis is marked in its own way by the affective themes that coursed within Chatterton’s ambitious and unsettled affective life. Love’s subtle theorisation of the “politics of affect” brings to life the queer dynamics and homophilic insecurities underlying Chatterton’s works – his anger and ambiguous feelings, his sense of exclusion from and vulnerability within the social system he was trying to take advantage of, take part in, and even constitute through his literary works.107

103 Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 59-63; Joan B Landes, "The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration," in Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Joan B Landes and Johanna Meehan (Routledge, 2013). 104 Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," 59-63; Landes, "The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration," 95-8. 105 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 9-19. 106 Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, frontispages. Citing Roland Barthes, “A Lover’s discourse”, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (Random House, 1993), 427. 107 Ibid., 12.

'/ #

Love critically examines the incidence of painful affective states in a range of late eighteenth to early twentieth century literary texts – writings “visibly marked by queer suffering”. She uses a critical approach that she calls an “archive of feeling” to catalogue and account for:

the corporeal and psychic costs of homophobia. In their work, I pay particular attention to feelings such as nostalgia, regret, shame, despair, ressentiment, passivity, escapism, self-hatred, withdrawal, bitterness, defeatism, and loneliness. These feelings are tied to the experience of social exclusion and to the historical “impossibility” of same-sex desire.108

While Chatterton was not writing about same-sex relationships, he repeatedly wrote about and for his relationships with other men. Even his writings about women, or in the voices of women, were entirely mediated though relationships with specific real or imaginary men. These writings therefore can be read in terms of the love triangle, in the way suggested by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick in Between Men, in which the three-way relationship strengthens the primary, male and patriarchal relationship. 109 Love’s technique uncovers these hidden emotional histories, running beneath the shining, performative surfaces of Chatterton’s stylistic exchanges.

Part of the enduring curiosity of Chatterton’s creative projects is their idiosyncrasy, and the consequent difficulties they caused him in his professional relationships with men. Keen argues for the significance of this kind of professional failure in eighteenth- century letters, because:

Ironically, it may well be the failures and marginal successes – the “men [and women] of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment” who tried their hand as authors with varying but usually limited degrees of success – rather than the small minority of highly successful authors who best illuminate the highly mediated nature of the evolving literary field. Or we need both perspectives – those writers who managed to carve out a degree of success in the daunting world of late eighteenth-century letters and their far more numerous counterparts, the largely unremembered hoards who belonged to “the low-life of literature . . . who failed to make it to the top and fell back into Grub Street”.110

Chatterton’s ambitious and ill-fated professional performances were not his alone. His inability to achieve the degree of professional success he felt he deserved was representative of the continued social inequalities of literary professionalism in this

108 Ibid., 4. 109 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 110 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 136. Citing James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1743, 106; and Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, 1982, 16.

(& '

transitional period. In the context of a sociological understanding of the emergent public sphere as a “messier”, less glamorous and more chaotic transition than Habermas’ theory suggests, Chatterton’s style was significant for its representation of desperate, obsessive striving, and failure. His vocal style survives as a record of the inchoate multiplicity of voices emerging from the adventurous Georgian literary “low-life”, and their fight for cultural relevance and access to the privilege, publishing opportunities and professional success they desired.

Taste, cultural value and exchange

Chatterton understood, in his irreverent adolescent way, the practices of taste-making, cultural commodity value and exchange in kind – and their necessity to his success as an eighteenth-century gentleman of letters. Raised in the shadow of his father’s schoolhouse, his mother’s business as a seamstress, and the mercantile port-town of his hometown Bristol, Chatterton’s precocious talents developed in such a way that he could “fall in love” with gothic script, spend hours reading history in the corner of Mr Goodall’s book shop, 111 invent and manufacture a hoard of pseudo-medieval bardic poems and manuscripts, while “seldom resist[ing] the temptation to parody, travesty, burlesque, or undercut” his subjects.112

In his political verse “The Whore of Babylon”, Chatterton complains bitterly about the lack of true poetic taste in Bristol, celebrity and fortune being reserved for successful merchants, and tolerance for verse extended only as far as superficial “Panegyric”. With some frustration he writes of Bristol’s commercial avidity and excesses:

The Muses have no Credit here, and Fame Confines itself to the Mercantile Name Then clip Imagination’s Wing, be wise And great in Wealth, (the real Greatness) rise Or if you must persist to sing and dream Let only Panegyric be your Theme…

Damn’d narrow Notions! tending to disgrace The boasted Reason of the Human Race Bristol may keep her prudent Maxims still But know my saving Friends I never will The Composition of my Soul is made

111 George Gregory, The Life of Thomas Chatterton : With Criticism on His Genius and Writings, and a Concise View of the Controversy Concerning Rowley's Poems (Lond.: Lond. : Printed for G.Kearsley, 1789), 4; Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 48. 112 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 169.

(' #

Too great for Servile avaricious Trade: When raving in the Lunacy of Ink I catch the Pen and publish what I think.113

The verse demonstrates Chatterton’s consciousness of the explicit differences between the value system of his “saving Friends” in trade, and his own, which corresponded overtly with the Romantic trope of the dreaming imagination, greatness of soul, and ink- stained madness.114 However, Chatterton’s Grub Street ethos informs this verse, through the juxtaposition of visionary and mercantilist notions of muses’ credit (surely an anticipatory synonym for Bourdieu’s cultural capital) and traders’ celebrity, and in the strategic psychological illness he “catches” from the pen, that still allows him to “publish what I think” with a portion of “boasted Reason” shared with his avaricious friends. There was perhaps less to differentiate him from the merchants than Chatterton imagined.

As Laurie Langbauer points out in The Juvenile Tradition, Chatterton had an almost uncanny commercial ability to forecast the necessary cultural codes of taste and value, and was “adept from before his teens in the latest venues, sniffing out publication opportunities almost before they happened”.115 She argues that while his:

[medievalist] material seemed to refuse print through its simulation of ostentatiously hand-drafted relics and remains, it also pointed straight to the modernity against which it reacted. Its fakery called attention to the machinery of simulation which counterfeited the past… and to the techniques of forensic exegesis, which convicted it of fabrication. At the same time, Chatterton’s acknowledged periodical writing openly exploited print publication as a new kind of machinery to produce effects: his periodical writing, about contemporary matters, was shrewdly political and frankly reflective, even cynical, about such practice and his proficiency in it. It cast its lot with the future of industrialised mass-market print – indeed, Chatterton seemed to occupy that future in advance.116

Despite their fraudulence, the focus of his gothic bardism and manuscript fakery was on their employment as tasteful commodities and desirable cultural exchange objects. His view of his verse and fictions was equally commercial. Langbauer contends that Chatterton’s cultural astuteness and technological inventiveness was the immediate inspiration for a proleptic “juvenile tradition” of periodical and newspaper authorship amongst writers at the end of the eighteenth century. Like Chatterton, these young men and women made the most of expanding middle-class reading markets, and

113 Chatterton, "The Whore of Babylon," 466-7, ll. 523-28, 31-38. 114 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Routledge, 2013). 115 Laurie Langbauer, The Juvenile Tradition: Young Writers and Prolepsis, 1750-1835 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 150. 116 Ibid.

(( '

pseudonymous publishing opportunities.117 They even imitated his generic neoclassical allusions, recognising the ongoing cultural value of “mastering classical languages and texts since the conventions of classically inspired male juvenilia continued to shape the possibilities for young writers throughout the century”.118

Unlike the mechanically produced books and magazines so widely read and contributed to by the middle-class literati of the later eighteenth-century, Chatterton’s works looked back to an earlier transitional time between the Early Modern and Romantic periods, when coterie literature still embodied what was tasteful, valuable and desirable. 119 In this nostalgic vein he also constructed fraudulent material objects or concrete tokens like manuscripts and love letters. These hand-made works were produced on scraps of paper, like the precious collections and cuttings of a seventeenth-century gentleman scholar’s commonplace book, almost courtly in the narrow circle of their exchange and intended impact.

In the sociological sense outlined by Appadurai, Chatterton saw his literary works and illustrations in terms of gift giving and the exchange of obligation. 120 Notwithstanding the anachronism and lack of sophistication of his creative style, and his professional neediness, Chatterton gave his precious cultural objects to selected literati for their professional use, in hopes of establishing relationships through which he might receive patronage, social advancement, and the pecuniary reward he desperately desired. This thesis uses Brown’s critical theory of “things”121 and the semantic “codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful”, 122 to illuminate Chatterton’s fascination with the concrete symbolism of his works, and the ways he constructed and gifted them for his own professional advantage.

The thread of commercial opportunism and mechanical inventiveness runs through Chatterton’s stylistic experiments and is thus a central focus of each chapter of the following thesis. Being a paid writer was an imperative: he needed the money. However, Chatterton’s works are equally laced with an intelligent awareness of the commercial machinations and performative dishonesty of professional success. As Jerome McGann

117 Ibid. 118 Langbauer, "Leigh Hunt and Juvenilia," 114. 119 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832. 120 Appadurai argues that faux gifts come with a social requirement or obligation that give the exchange features of an economic transaction. Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value." 121 Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them," 1. 122 "Thing Theory," 4.

() #

argues, Chatterton’s “daemon is parody, and his work… [was] driven by a profound intuition of the theatrical potential of language as such”.123 Chatterton was compelled to reproduce the codes of taste and cultural value in his works, by necessity of his social insecurities and intense professional ambition, but his commitment to becoming a gentleman of letters was combined with a healthy dose of cynicism about his own “hungry Muse”. 124 It is an endearing antiestablishment and pragmatic quality in his writing, perhaps lost to later Romantics in their commitment to the more mystical qualities of the writer’s life and sources of inspiration.

123 Jerome J McGann, "The Infatuated Worlds of Thomas Chatterton," in Early Romantics (Springer, 1998), 236-8, 41. 124 Chatterton, "Hobbinol and Thyrsis," 363, l. 36.

(* (

( "

Chatterton’s most well-known creative project, his construction of fake medieval manuscripts and the entire literary, historical and historiographical fantasy they contain, is an experiment in anachronism. Some part of this element of Chatterton’s signature style is recognised in a range of excellent historical findings on the Romantic nationalism and forgery of the Rowley works.125 However, Chatterton’s experiments with anachronistic style were broader and more complex than nationalism or medievalism. This chapter argues that Chatterton’s anachronism comprised both neoclassical and medieval experiments and was consistent and significant enough as part of his immensely variable creative enterprise to be described as a feature of his developing vocal signature.

Specifically, this chapter will examine Chatterton’s self-education in classical and neoclassical literature, his neoclassical lyrical imitation of Horace’s “Ad Pyrrham” (“Ode to Pyrrha”) 126 and his medieval literary fantasy, as examples of experimental anachronism. It will consider the impact of biographical and eighteenth-century cultural contexts on the anachronistic features of Chatterton’s style, and how that style reflected his professional uncertainties and aspirations, and those of the Georgian period’s creative underclasses. Chatterton’s desire to be a gentleman of letters, in the sense of being classically literate and writing for a profession, and his anxiety about the negative effect on his prospects of a commercial education, were the driving force in both his neoclassical and medievalist experiments.

History and the accidents of birth failed to give Chatterton the humanist education he wanted, as an aspiring literary gentleman, and he perhaps felt himself to be an

125 The series of literary and historical writings and illustrations which Chatterton spuriously claimed he had transcribed from manuscripts by Thomas Rowley, an imaginary fifteenth-century priest and poet. Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction; Groom, "Forgery or Plagiarism? Unravelling Chatterton’s Rowley."; "Thomas Chatterton Was a Forger."; "Romanticism and Forgery." 126 Chatterton, "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510. Following R. Storrs’ and David Watson’s leads, I refer to Chatterton’s version of Ad Pyrrham as his “Ode to Pyrrha”, or “Pyrrha” for short, because it’s far easier to read than the title given to the poem by Chatterton. Ronald Storrs, Ad Pyrrham: A Polyglot Collection of Translations of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha (Book 1, Ode 5) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); David Watson, "Ode V: To Pyrrha," in The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace: Translated into English Prose… the Whole Adapted to the Capacities of Youth at School, as Well as of Private Gentlemen (London: Printed for J. Oswald, at the Rose and Crown, near the Mansion-House, Stock-Market, 1712), 22-3.

(+ #

anachronistic, anatopic presence amongst Bristol’s “dancing bears of Commerce”. 127 Chatterton used up considerable amounts of paper and ink in versifying about the social inequality that determined his status as poet and scholar, in relation to his Bristol merchant friends. “The composition of my Soul is made/ Too great for servile avaricious Trade”128 he wrote, in frustration at living in a place where “Every Idea of a City Mind,/ Is to Commercial Incidents confin’d”, and as “hardly twenty in the Town can read”, there are none to “bring in Int’rest to maintain/ The wild Expenses of a Poet’s Brain”.129

John Guillory emphasises the intrinsic instability of middle-class self-identification in this period, because of its claim to upwards mobility, as well as the “conflicting and mutually exclusive ways” the middle classes identified themselves, such that “even within the ‘middling sort’ the difference between, for example, the merchant and the scholar is crucial”.130 This instability was not only a personal problem for Chatterton, but a broadly social one. Accepting a place amongst the dancing bears would have been increasingly difficult for the literate middle classes.

Chatterton’s attempts to resolve this dilemma, as evidenced by attitudes expressed in his verse, speak volumes for the class-based difficulties inherent in social mobility in this period. The eclectic curriculum in commercial schools demonstrated middle-class families’ desire for their children to be taught both pragmatic and aspirational humanist subjects. Chatterton’s contempt for the “classic Roman-loving fools”131 he was imitating, the “empty Pleasures” of their learning, and their literary production which he cruelly characterised as the “putrid Foetus of a barren brain”132 is as rancorous as his verses about the illiterate merchants, expressing what Guillory describes as the unresolved “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” for cultural legitimacy and pre-eminence.133

Chatterton wanted to be considered a gentleman in the sense of being classically literate. Like Thomas Gray’s poetry, his work “registers the level of anxiety produced by increased vernacular literary production in the public sphere”.134 However, as Guillory points out, the troubling emergence of the “common reader” and “literary public” made it “quite possible to regard the tendency toward a cultural homogenisation of the middle

127 Chatterton, "Kew Gardens," 516, l.142. 128 "The Whore of Babylon," 467, ll. 535-6. 129 "Kew Gardens," 524, ll. 433-4; "The Last Will and Testament of Me Thomas Chatterton," 502, ll. 40-2. 130 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 117-8. 131 Chatterton, "On Mr. Alcock of Bristol, an Excellent Miniature Painter," 170, l. 25. 132 "Epistle. To the Revd. Mr. Catcott," 416, ll. 200-3. 133 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 118-9. 134 Ibid., 118.

(, (

and upper classes as the degeneration of culture itself”.135 Chatterton’s anachronistic style comprises a complex mix of neoclassical grammar-school mimicry and performative oratory, and untimely pro-vernacular medieval fantasy. As will become evident through the research presented in this chapter, Chatterton’s anachronistic style expresses both his wish to take part in the classical culture from which he was excluded by birth and education, and his awareness that to do so was to accept his innate vernacular vulgarity and undermine the elite literate status he felt he deserved.

These anachronistic experiments were equally a response to the cultural instability, inchoate literariness and professional uncertainty of middle-class Georgian England. The literary marketplace, and notions of what constituted scholarly or imaginative literature, and who could write it, were in a state of flux and change. In The Work of Writing, social historian Clifford Siskin argues that there was a vernacular boom and a “surge of print” publishing in this period, as readers became writers too.136 This transformation was partly linguistic. Subjective and hierarchical cultural meanings of terms like “literacy”, “literary” and “literature” found new definitional forms:

Literary, which had been synonymous with literate in the sense of being well-read, was not, until the eighteenth century, identified with the practice and profession of writing. And, only then were it, and literature, even more specifically written up – hierarchically up – as referring solely to special kinds of imaginative writing.137

In Chatterton’s day, the term “literature” was still used in the sense of having literature, meaning reading ability and experience in scholarly and classical poetry and drama, philosophy, history and essays. It was not until the later eighteenth century, after Chatterton’s death, that literature was used to refer to a category of imaginative writing, including English poetry and prose. 138 At mid-century, the notion of a high-status vernacular literature had not yet emerged as a stable cultural concept, despite Chatterton’s attempt to make it so through the anachronistic poetics and literary criticism of his medieval avatar Thomas Rowley.

Literacy was essential for middle-class Georgians to engage with what Peter Borsay describes as the “culture of improvement”, that “faith in the human capacity to better the

135 Ibid. 136 Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830, 4, 10. 137 Siskin’s emphasis. Ibid., 6. 138 Raymond Williams and Raymond Henry Williams, Marxism and Literature, vol. 392 (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1977), 3; Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 122.

(- #

self and the world”, that marked English society from Enlightenment through to the Victorian period. 139 The mid to late decades of the eighteenth century, however, saw the rise of forms of social mobility in which lower order folk, particularly town-dwelling males, “joined the ranks of the elite”. 140 Vernacular writing and publishing were increasingly accessible to literate middle-class people. This more egalitarian culture flourished in and emerged from the male-dominated London coffee-houses of the early eighteenth century.141 Chatterton’s insecurities and aspirations, and his protean stylistic experimentation, can be understood in terms of this upward social mobility, and contemporary discourse on what constituted the cultured, bourgeois “man of letters”.

Vernacular English reading and writing in this period was emerging as a socially and individually transformative force, particularly for middle-class and mixed-gender audiences such as Chatterton and his peers. In The Making of English Reading Audiences, John Klancher maps out the way new audiences and publishing markets emerged in the mid to late eighteenth century, in particular the vernacular textual society of what he describes as the “newly self-conscious middle-class public”.142 Clara Tuite and Gillian Russell argue that this middle-class literary society had an intensively “sociable” or “convivial” relationship with texts that was a form of cultural production in itself. The cheeky thespian upstarts of Chatterton’s adolescent “spouting” club, his male and female apprentice friends who performed for one another at the local tavern, are an exemplary instance of this new mode of literary sociability. As ambitious young people of the underclasses, the simple fact of their meeting and shared vernacular and performative engagement with the literary arts is what made their activities experimental and radical.

The notion of vernacular literariness was implicated in the transitional British nationalist ideology of this period, and it influenced Chatterton’s anachronistic style. Chatterton’s medievalism in particular adheres to what Rolf Lessenich describes as the “retrospective, primitivist, and nostalgic” cultural tone at mid-century, “because of a growing fatigue with the ‘tyranny of reason’ in Enlightenment philosophy, neoclassical art, and the Church, as well as the state embodied in the ancien regime”.143 In response to the classics’ wilting relevance, as B. Gasparov and M. Scott argue, the “invention of

139 Borsay, "The Culture of Improvement," 183-4, 94-5. 140 Ibid. 141 Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History. 142 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832, 3-4, 15. 143 Rolf Lessenich, "Preromanticism," in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1104.

(. (

national mythology” was necessary to the “messianic efforts” of Romantic culture “to reclaim the ‘soul’ of a nation from the primordial depths of its folk poetry”, as well as the earlier and related antiquarian fashion for “recovering artefacts relevant to Britain’s distant past”. They further argue that this “led into a more literary preoccupation with the recording of popular poetic traditions and the creation of a national canon independent of the classics”.144 But of course, this vernacular “national canon” has been shown to have its own exclusive, patriarchal and heteronormative parameters, as has been demonstrated through recent feminist and queer theory readings of British Romanticism.

These Romantic values, which were associated with anti-neoclassicism, antiquarianism, “nativist” 145 literary nationalism and vernacular literary culture, are deeply entwined in Chatterton’s medievalist Rowley world. As Chatterton scholar Nick Groom writes, “in the face of a mass-print society with little access to the ‘ancients’, it was necessary to find a common and indigenous heritage”. 146 Given these cultural tensions and possibilities, the idea of imaginatively rewriting British history and literary culture, and his own professional future into the bargain, was seductive for Chatterton.

In Chatterton’s works, we are not speaking of small degrees of anachronism, however, but extravagant imaginative flourishes, gaping logical holes and a self- promotional agenda plastered across the gothic revival portico. Rowley’s writings draw on the gothic element of eighteenth-century Romantic nationalism, absorbed from and appropriated from Horace Walpole’s seminal definition of his own untimely gothic style in his preface to the Castle of Otranto, as a “blend of two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern”. 147 Chatterton’s spurious imaginative antiques included ballads and songs, in imitation of those published to great public interest at mid-century by Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Chatterton’s populist critical discourse on old and new poetry, which owes a considerable intellectual debt to his London literati hero Walpole, expressed the emergent interest in and cultural value placed upon the notion of an historically indigenous British literature by mid-eighteenth-century audiences.

144 B. Gasparov and M. Scott, "Romanticism," ibid., 1220, 23. 145 Lau, "Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats." 146 Groom, "Romanticism and Forgery," 1626. 147 Horace Walpole, "Preface to Second Edition," in The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9.

(/ #

An eighteenth-century retro-futurist, Chatterton essentially remembered new possibilities for the future, both his own and Britain’s, through a critically and creatively reimagined, if profoundly anachronistic, past. Chatterton’s poetic mobilising of collective national mythologies of Britain’s cultural history, both neoclassical and nativist, were critical of the contemporary world he belonged to, while imaginatively enhancing the one he wished to live in. As Eric Hayot claims in relation to such imaginary worlds, “no matter how they form themselves, [they] are among other things always a relation to and theory of the lived world, as a largely preconscious normative construct, a rearticulation, or even an active refusal of the world-norms of their age”.148 The narrative that runs through Chatterton’s “untimeliness” 149 resonates with this double task of addressing the shortcomings of the present by rethinking or re-remembering the past.

The next three sections of this chapter explore Chatterton’s experimental anachronism as part of the invention of his unique literary style. Through an analysis of his autodidactic neoclassicism, neoclassical “spouting” and imaginary, pseudo-medieval literary world, I demonstrate that Chatterton’s anachronistic experimentation represented a complex response to transitional Georgian literary and professional culture, as well as his own professional anxieties and ambition.

The first section asserts that Chatterton adopted the pretence of a humanist education through his autodidactic classical reading program in order to perform the necessary skills of a gentleman writer to his coterie circle of peers, patrons and publishers. The second section then argues that the significance of his imitation of Horace’s “Ad Pyrrham”150 lies less in its pedagogical imitation of the ancient Roman lyricist than in Chatterton’s attempt to invent his own literary status by harnessing the self-performative and transformative possibilities of neoclassical oratory and his “spouting club”.151 Finally, the third section demonstrates that the Rowley literary works can be read together as an anachronistic imaginary world. By reimagining Bristol’s culture and literature as vernacular, bourgeois and anti-classical, this world offers a critique of contemporary mid-

148 Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 44-5. If literary worlds are fictional re-articulations of the lived world, and if as György Lukács argues fiction always has some degree of “necessary anachronism”, then one can argue that all literary worlds are anachronistic to an extent. György Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 151. 149 Groth and Sheehan, "Introduction: Timeliness and Untimeliness," 572. 150 Chatterton, "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510. 151 Thieme, "Spouting, Spouting-Clubs and Spouting Companions," 10.

)& (

eighteenth-century literary society and a coherent alternative to neoclassical cultural dominance.

Knowing “the classicals”

In a letter to his sister not long before moving to London, Chatterton complained: “I wish I knew the classicals, I then could do anything”.152 As these naively ambitious words reveal, he wanted recognition as a gentleman of letters, in the sense of being literate in classical languages and literature. L. B. T. Houghton and G. Manuwald emphasise the “dominant part played by educational practices and attitudes in the entrenchment of Latin verse-writing among the upper echelons of British society”, from the fifteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, such that capability in handling Latin verse “helped to define experience of this discipline as a mark of social distinction, an indispensable element in the register of accomplishments expected of a civilised and educated gentleman”. 153 Chatterton’s belief that a facility with the classics would increase his chances of literary success was therefore reasonable, as was his certainty that without evidence of classical training he would not be taken seriously by the literati. In his anxiety, he set about rectifying this deficiency through a retrospective classical reading program, one that itself encompassed the older, catholic notion of literacy as being well-read not only in poetry and drama, but in works on history, politics and religion.

Chatterton “stole” his classical education in much the same autodidactic manner as other young men and women of the period who had restricted access to the ancients in original Latin or Greek.154 According to E. H. W. Meyerstein, Chatterton subscribed to Green’s circulating library and also spent time after school haunting Bristol booksellers’ establishments, where “he was permitted to take from the shelves any volume he chose to select: that he did not confine himself to any particular head, but perused

152 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 62. Meyerstein acknowledges this conversation was recorded by earlier biographer Michael Lort in 1784. 153 L.B.T. Houghton and G. Manuwald, "Introduction," in Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles, ed. L.B.T. Houghton and G. Manuwald (London UK: Bristol Classical Press, an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 5-6. 154 This included Catholic men, many middle-class and most working-class boys and privileged young women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montague. I am indebted to Isobel Grundy for the idea of a “stolen” neoclassical education, and for her discussion of the influences of class and gender on Montagu’s broad autodidactic program of reading, and her exposure to historical, classical and contemporary literary culture. Megan Crosland and Isobel Grundy, "Introduction," in The Adventurer: By Lady Mary Pierrepont, ed. Isobel Grundy and students of English 696 at the Univerity of Alberta (Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 2000).

)' #

promiscuously works on religion, history, biography, poetry, heraldry, and, in short the most abstruse treatises on every subject”.155 John Evans the printer recollected that:

Chatterton’s favourite book-shop was that of Mr. Goodall, in Tower-lane, afterward Joseph Lansdown’s, nearly opposite to Cider-house Passage. Here (as Mr. Goodall informed the writer) our youthful poet passed many hours in a day, buying such books as came within his means, and sitting to read those which he either did not wish to possess or could not afford to purchase.156

In such reveries, Chatterton engaged with classical and neoclassical literature in its imaginative, historical and critical forms, albeit at a remove from the primary sources. In vernacular translation, he read chorographic works such as Edmund Gibson’s 1695 and 1722 editions of Camden’s Britannia, as well as histories by Robert Ricart, Raphael Holinshed, John Stow, John Speed, Peter Heylyn and John Leland.157 He read John Dryden’s “heroic”158 vernacular renditions of Theocritus’ bucolic “Idylls” (1679) and Virgil’s “Eclogues” (1697). He absorbed pastoral forms through John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637), William Collins’ “Persian Eclogues” (1742), and Edmund Spenser’s archaism in “Shepheardes Calender” (1579) and “Faerie Queene” (1590-6). He learnt about parody through Alexander Pope’s “Dunciad” (1728), thoughtful lyricism in contemporary translations of Horatian odes, and Pindar’s fervent strains through Gray’s odes and James Macpherson’s “Ossian” epics (1760). He clearly believed that such a diverse reading programme would allow him to incorporate classical genres and tropes into his own writings. It certainly did provide him with a broad familiarity with the themes and genres of antiquity, of different poetic styles, and a superficial neoclassical poetics of his own.

Chatterton understood the lingering cultural power of classical canonicity. He reflected with some dissatisfaction that his limitation to writing in English meant that his verse “may be reckon’d weak/ As nothing but my Mother Tongue I speak”.159 Classical literacy continued to represent a form of linguistic and cultural capital. 160 Humanist education, with its emphasis on reading, writing and speaking Latin and Greek, deep

155 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 46-8. 156 Ibid., 48. 157 Donald S. Taylor, "Introduction," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), xliv. 158 As C. S. Calverly notes, “Dryden and Pope wrote ‘heroics,’ not from any sense of their fitness for bucolic poetry, but from a sense of their universal fitness: and their followers copied them. But probably no scholar would affirm that any poem, original or translated, by Pope or Dryden or any of their school, really resembles in any degree the bucolic poetry of the Greeks.” Charles Stuart Calverley, Theocritus: Translated into English Verse (Deighton, Bell, 1869), xiii. 159 Chatterton, "Epistle. To the Revd. Mr. Catcott," 416, ll. 153-4. 160 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 86.

)( (

knowledge and imitation of the “ancients”, and internalisation of the values of the classical poets, orators and statesmen, still gave boys from elite and wealthy families the tools to think and write, as well as models to imitate. Canonical Early Modern works by poets like Dryden and Pope were still defined by classical genre and allusion, and the way that, as Eric Rothstein argues, “such works announce their poetic citizenship not out of caution or awe for the past but out of a desire for a location within the shared, understood aesthetic space that poetry, as a social heritage, occupies”.161 What “poetic citizenship” meant in this period, however, was not necessarily the self-assured civic “announcement” that Rothstein seems to suggest of poets who claim to have arrived at this uniform, “shared, understood” and privileged point.162 In the Georgian period, poetic citizenship was something more fractured and diverse, as new social and educational values, reading audiences and publishing markets emerged. Chatterton’s neoclassical imitations were in a sense a performative grab at this sociable sense of literary citizenship, but his writings were as contradictory and contentious as the times.

Chatterton’s classical reading and mimicry provided opportunities for this kind of socially diverse upwards mobility through performative neoclassical display to newer, middle-class literary markets. With the broadening of classical publishing at mid-century, there was, as Penelope Wilson argues, “never a time when a better and more comprehensive ‘off-piste’ classical education could be had without access to the original languages”. In fact, she argues that the vitality of English literary translations in the period had “more to do with an extension of access, beyond that élite – a process of removing barriers (specifically, of linguistic and cultural barriers related to gender and class)” than with reinforcing such distinctions.163 Aspirational families at mid-century sent their sons to schools that taught both practical skills in accounting, scribing and surveying, and traditional knowledge of classical languages and literatures, as a performative “means of exhibiting status”.164 The display of such academic and literary capital was enough to signify that a young man “had literature”. In this new context, despite the fact that Chatterton’s own schooling provided only the practical skills, his autodidactic reading

161 Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-1780, Routledge Revivals (London: Routledge, 2014), Chapter 2, n.p. 162 Ibid. 163 Penelope Wilson, "The Place of Classics in Education and Publishing," in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, ed. David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 30-33. 164 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 96.

)) #

takes on the appearance of social mobility, based on his acquired ability to perform classical literariness in a sociable middle-class milieu.

Chatterton wanted to emulate “the classicals”, but he was also troubled by its often contemptuous culture that “damns good English if not Latinized”, and in which pompous “Oxonian Sages hesitate to speak/ Their native Language but declaim in Greek”. 165 Guillory notes that in the early modern period, the “renewed valuation of classical literary production was so universally assumed that Waller could write as late as the mid- seventeenth century, that “poets that lasting marble seek,/ Must carve in Latin, or in Greek”. 166 Uncomfortable with this kind of cultural exclusivity and the prejudices of learned “Roman-loving” gentlemen, Chatterton’s medieval mouth-piece, Thomas Rowley, grumbled in a cod-medieval echo of Waller, that: “Whoever spekethe Englysch ys despysed,/ The Englysch hym to please moste fyrste be latynized”.167 At mid-century, the value systems determining linguistic power and canonicity were in transition to vernacular cultural dominance. Chatterton’s stylistic expression of his transitional sense of poetic citizenship, within this milieu, was diverse enough to entertain its own fusions and contradictions, comprising both vernacular neoclassical “spouting” and pseudo- medieval nativist anti-classicism.

Guillory asserts that at mid-century the “vernacular Hochsprache” finally took precedence over neoclassicism to the point where “there ceased to be a readership for such writing”.168 Nevertheless, pointing out a contradiction in this transition, he notes that “the classical languages continued to define the most elite educational capital as against the actual social importance of the languages disseminated in the coffeehouses and the vocational academies”. 169 Contradicting Guillory, Laurie Langbauer argues for the ongoing relevance of neoclassicism as a publishing vogue, particularly amongst young male writers for whom “Neo-Latin writings of the Renaissance, along with English responses to that imitative poetry, established a decidedly male tradition defining the

165 Chatterton, "Happiness. A Poem," 406, l. 108; "Epistle. To the Revd. Mr. Catcott," 417, ll. 209-10. 166 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 119. Citing S. Johnson and A. Chalmers, The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper: Waller, Butler, Rochester, Roscommon, Otway, Pomfret, Dorset, Stepney, J. Philips, Walsh, Dryden (J. Johnson, 1810), 69. 167 [Whoever speaks English is despised; to please, the English hymn must first be translated into Latin.] “Epistle to Mastre Canynge”, in Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedie, Wrotenn Bie Thomas Rowlie; Plaiedd before Mastre Canynge, Atte Hys Howse Nempte the Rodde Lodge; Also before the Duke of Norfolck, Johan Howard.," 175-6, ll. 17-8. 168 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 75. 169 Ibid., 119.

)* (

attitudes and utility of youthful writing”. Through this “juvenile tradition”, she claims, Chatterton, Keats and the young Romantic poets who came after them recognised “the utility to literary ambition of mastering classical languages and texts since the conventions of classically inspired male juvenilia continued to shape the possibilities for young writers throughout the century”.170 Although this burgeoning tradition remained superficially within the purview of the male elite, new publishing markets in the later part of the century actually “fuelled the ambition” of young poets other than the educated elite, which helped to break down class and gender barriers.171 Hence there was still a youthful publishing market and lively readership for neoclassical writings, despite the indisputable marginalisation of classical culture and its poetic forms at the time. For Chatterton, writing just before such changes really took shape, opportunity did not translate directly into publishing success. For him, classicism continued to represent the skills of the elite gentleman of letters and was therefore his conduit to literary fame.

Chatterton’s classical reading program was anachronistic in the simple sense that it furnished him with skills in an outdated, catholic, early modern notion of literacy. His reading program encompassed not only the imaginative works of the Augustans and the early English vernacular poets and playwrights, but also the Enlightenment historians and philosophers. His self-education spoke to more than one ambition. The literary repertoire of poetic citizenship with which he emerged from his autodidactic pursuits was as contradictory as the times dictated, and eventually found expression in his experimentation in both neoclassical and medievalist sub-styles. As readerships and publishing markets for vernacular writing at mid-century were increasing in popularity and cultural status, Chatterton’s neoclassicism might be seen as somewhat untimely. However, as the next section of this chapter will demonstrate, the persistence of classicism as a mark of literary distinction and the opportunity to exhibit such status through the sociable performance of neoclassical oratory to his company of spouters represented an irresistible (if ultimately unsatisfactory) opportunity for aspirational mobility.

170 Langbauer, "Leigh Hunt and Juvenilia," 113-4. 171 Ibid., 115.

)+ #

Performing “Pyrrha” to the spouting club

Chatterton’s version of Horace’s “Ode to Pyrrha” is an exuberant, ecphonetic and sing- song sonnet, in which he expresses a series of apostrophic turns from Pyrrha’s desirability and deceitfulness, her young lover’s disappointment, and the poet’s own release from the “sweet but galling chain”172 of her beauty and faithlessness. Whereas Horace’s original Latin version is a richly sensory and emotive, metaphorically consistent “poetry of transitions”, 173 Chatterton’s version is an imitation of another poet’s vernacular paraphrase, and although lyrically appealing is not particularly original. Despite the cliché and bravado, the significance of Chatterton’s version lies less in its pedagogical imitation of Horace than in its aspirational performance of neoclassicism.

Chatterton’s “Ode to Pyrrha” was written between February and April 1770, three months before he left Bristol to seek his fortune in London, and not long after writing his parodic suicidal “Will” to frighten his master Lambert into releasing him from indenture.174 The dramatic and exclamatory rhetorical style of “Pyrrha”, along with the date and contexts of its composition, suggest that it was written for the noisy conviviality, youthful hijinks and public performances of his Bristol apprentices’ literary and thespian society that he knew simply as the “Juvenile Club”. This widespread cultural vogue of “spouting” was popular amongst young apprentices and tradesmen, who wrote for publication in local journals and magazines and met regularly in a hired room of a public house to entertain themselves by performing their plays and poetry.175 Meyerstein records certain details about the group with whom Chatterton “had been venturing in the fields of Parnassus”, namely that both young women and men were involved, and that their society was characterised by a “spirit of literary emulation, jingoism, dramatic zest, and satirical tendencies”. Theatricality of address was an intrinsic aspect of spouting. To become a spouter, D. F. Smith and M. L. Lawhon suggest, required “only a good memory, a loud voice, and the conviction that one possessed an undiscovered dramatic talent”.176 Loud passionate expression and thespian performativity was therefore required: a contemporary poem describes spouters improvising makeup from charred wine bottle

172 Chatterton, "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510, l.18. 173 W. Fitzgerald, "Horace: The Sensation of Mediocrity," in How to Read a Latin Poem: If You Can’t Read Latin Yet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 110. 174 Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 1064. 175 Thieme, "Spouting, Spouting-Clubs and Spouting Companions," 9-18. 176 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, xv, 100; D.F. Smith and M.L. Lawhon, Plays About the Theatre in England, 1737-1800: Or, the Self-Conscious Stage from Foote to Sheridan (New Jersey and London: Associated University Presses, 1979), 148.

), (

corks to provide “smooth-faced young men with beards (‘The cork/ Intruded swift in the candle’s blaze/ Is nigrified, and marks th’aspiring youth/ With whiskers bold’)”. 177 According to Meyerstein, Chatterton “stood out from its members merely as a splenetic and ambitious person”.178

Like other “convivial and theatrical” entertainments of the time, Chatterton’s spouting club was a significant medium through which he engaged with Georgian literary sociability,179 and the predominantly middle-class “discourse and conversation…central to the emergence of new notions of public opinion and civil society”.180 Such notions were part of the social changes in the eighteenth century, conceptualised by Habermas as the emergent “public sphere” in which middle-class men “came together to engage in reasoned argument over key issues of mutual interest and concern, creating a space in which both new ideas and the practices and discipline of rational public debate were cultivated”.181 The Juvenile Club was part of this emerging public culture of active, educated, loquacious, civilised and powerful men.

Chatterton’s dramatic apostrophe of a poem, “Ode to Pyrrha” was an ambitious rhetorical performance in which he recast himself in the role of an articulate, bourgeois male poet, in a sense pre-empting the emergence of this professional breed in late- eighteenth-century English Romantic culture. “O, I am a poet”, Chatterton tells his audience, though not in so many words, but by way of his self-consciously emotive and exclamatory outcries of passion, theatrically expressed through the traditional rhetorical signposts “O…” and “Yet, ah!”182 He is in good company, having learned the ecphonetic trick from canonical poets like Edmund Spenser, whose Colin Cloute cries to himself of Rosalinde, “alas why doe I love?”; or John Donne’s lusty and possessive “O my America!” to his lover’s naked body; or even William Collins’ “Lo!”, addressing the

177 James Peller Malcolm, “The picture of a spouting club” (1759) in Anecdotes of the manners and customs of London during the eighteenth-century including the charities, depravities, dresses, and amusements, of the citizens of London during that period; with a review of the state of society in 1807, 2 vols, ii, 208. Cited in David Worrall, "The Theatricalization of British Popular Culture: A General Historical Anthropology," in Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773-1832 (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2007), 247. 178 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, xv, 77, 100. 179 Russell and Tuite, "Introducing Romantic Sociability." 180 Ellis, "Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London," 5. 181 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 2; Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," 63; Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts, "After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere," Sociological Review Monograph (2004). 182 Chatterton, "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510, ll. 11, 13.

)- #

nymphs of poetical character.183 Chatterton’s style here adopts the performativity that is part of classical literary heritage, in which the writer is firstly an orator,184 and his poetry is already an “intrinsically vocative” mode of the classically “distinguished tradition of commentary”.185

Chatterton replaced the loose prose form of David Watson’s vernacular translation of “Pyrrha”, which he was imitating, with the disciplined rhythm of iambic pentameters that turned the poem into an English sonnet. 186 Like Horace’s original ode and most paraphrases since, Chatterton constructed his first quatrain and a half as a series of rhetorical questions: “What gentle Youth…now courts thee to the bow’r?...[and] why does thy Loose hair sweep/ In simple curls around thy polish’d brow?” 187 As invocational, rhetorical devices, these questions are meant to be unanswerable, their purpose to reflect attention back onto the orator’s address. In the case of “Pyrrha”, these emphasise the poet’s greater understanding of the mysterious circumstances undermining the young lovers’ union and sexual bliss. The original rhetorical meaning of “apostrophe” differentiates it from the exclamatory function of ecphonetic address in providing the poet with an opportunity for subjective movement, an ability to “turn aside” from the principal audience or matter, to address someone or something else.188 As J. Douglas Kneale points out, it allows the poet to interrupt his or her own discourse. This too is the sense in which Fitzgerald describes Horace’s Latin original as a “poetry of transitions”.189 Although Chatterton’s version of “Ode to Pyrrha” lacks the subtlety and beauty of Horace, he makes effective use of this performative rhetorical “turn” from Pyrrha’s questionable seductive motives to her young lover’s delusions and disappointment, and lastly to his (the poet’s) own relief at his release from Pyrrha’s beauty and faithlessness.

183 Edmund Spenser, "The Shepheardes Calender," in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 422, l. 61; John Donne, "Elegy 19 to His Mistress Going to Bed," in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (England, USA, Australia, Cananda, New Zealand: Penguin Books, 1971), 125, l. 27; William Collins, "Ode on the Poetical Character," in A Collection of Papers in Four Volumes: By Several Hands (London: printed for G. Pearch, 1770), 34, l. 9. 184 W. Waters, "Apostrophe," in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 61. 185 J. Douglas Kneale, "Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered," ELH 58, no. 1 (1991): 141. 186 Watson, "Ode V: To Pyrrha." Cited in George Gregory, ed. The Works of Thomas Chatterton : Containing His Life (London: Printed by Biggs and Cottle for T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1803), I, 349. 187 Chatterton, "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510, ll. 1-2, 5-6. 188 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, cited in Waters, "Apostrophe," 61. 189 Kneale, "Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered," 147-8; Fitzgerald, "Horace: The Sensation of Mediocrity," 110.

). (

This final “turn”, in which Chatterton makes use of the rhyming, summative force of the heroic couplet, asserts the poet’s claims of betrayal:

Thank heav’n I’ve broke the sweet but galling chain Worse than the horrors of the stormy main.190

He has survived and actively “broken” away from Pyrrha. In his apostrophic, performative address, the poet’s purpose is, as Waters puts it, to “become an event itself rather than to narrate events”. His self-referential questioning, “extravagant verbal gesturing” of simulated and artfully passionate cries to his absent poetic objects (both Pyrrha and her young lover), and his apostrophic “turns” from one subjective experience to another self-consciously stages “a drama of the self calling”.191 As Jonathan Culler maintains, poetic apostrophe “makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself”. 192 Thus through the communicative processes of poetic apostrophe, Chatterton dramatically established his own authorial voice.

As a vernacular paraphrase of a Latin ode, turned eighteenth-century heroic sonnet, Chatterton’s “Ode to Pyrrha” fraudulently appropriates the pedagogical milestones of elite, classically educated schoolboys. Clarke relates the ritual significance of translating Horace for grammar school boys in the period, whereby “the two highest forms were given the strange task of turning an ode of Horace into Latin elegaics”.193 Wilson also notes that the “pervasiveness of the habit of attempting a Horatian ode or two is indicated by the translations and imitations regularly contributed to the poetry pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine”. 194 Chatterton’s imitation of Horace, and classical rhetorical address, was an attempt to assert his own literary status through the implication of his own completion of such milestones.

According to Robert Southey and Joseph Cottle, Chatterton paraphrased David Watson’s “literal version; a book which his friend Mr. Edward Gardner lent him for the express purpose”.195 Watson’s rendition of “Pyrrha” was only “literal” in the sense that it captured the metaphorical sense of Horace’s ode and was not expressed in rhyming meter,

190 Chatterton, "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510, ll. 17-8. 191 Waters, "Apostrophe," 61. 192 Jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe," diacritics 7, no. 4 (1977): 59. 193 Martin Lowther Clarke, Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 56. 194 Wilson, "The Place of Classics in Education and Publishing," 15. 195 Watson, "Ode V: To Pyrrha." Cited in Gregory, The Works of Thomas Chatterton : Containing His Life, I, 349.

)/ #

but was in most other senses a popular eighteenth-century paraphrase. Recognising the necessity of imagination to a “rendering” of Horace’s ode several times removed from the original source, Meyerstein notes that Chatterton “was following Milton’s lead, but his work is less a paraphrase than a free fantasia on the prose version he used”.196

W. Fitzgerald’s twenty-first-century translation of “Pyrrha” pays close attention to Horace’s metaphorical use of water and storm elements to express the poet’s subjectivity. For example, the poet describes the young lovers “drenched in liquid perfumes” (perfusus liquidis urget odoribus). He empathises with the inexperienced boy who “bewails a change in your affections and the gods” (mutatosque deos flebit et aspera) and “wonder(s) at seas rough with black winds, unused to it all” (nigris aequora ventis/ emirabitur insolens). Pyrrha herself he compares with the glittering sea, in making “wretched those/ to whom you shine, untried” (miseri quibus/ intemptata nites). Finally, in the poet’s own grateful deliverance from this shipwreck of love, he emerges from the water to “dedicate…my dripping clothes/ to the sea’s powerful god” (suspendisse potenti/ vestimenta maris deo)”.197

Part of this sensual, metaphorical beauty, as well as the actual sense of the original verse, is lost in Milton’s extremely literal translation, for example when he apostrophises:

O how oft shall he Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas Rough with black winds, and storms Unwonted shall admire!198

The metaphorical reference here to Pyrrha is oblique in the extreme, and in Milton’s hands the young man’s complaint about the faithlessness of both Pyrrha and the gods is confusingly conflated with admiration of “unwonted” storms, rather than of Pyrrha. Overall, Chatterton’s version bears greater resemblance to renditions by contemporaries like Christopher Smart and Watson, than to Milton’s earlier, “academically faithful” translation199 – or for that matter, to W. Fitzgerald’s rendition. Watson demonstrates his understanding of the ode’s central metaphor by paraphrasing it thus: “That the Lovers of

196 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 346. 197 Here I give Fitzgerald’s English translation with Horace’s original Latin verse in brackets. Fitzgerald, "Horace: The Sensation of Mediocrity," 110-11. 198 Milton’s translation is from Margaret Jourdain, ed. Translations of the Odes of Horace (London: J.M. Dent & Co, 1904), 12. 199 Penelope Wilson, "Lyric, Pastoral, and Elegy," in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. S.F. Gillespie and D. Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 176.

*& (

Pyrrha are miserable; and that he escaped out of her Embraces, as from a Shipwreck”.200 Otherwise, his grasp of Horace’s liquid metaphors loses integrity, such that the lovers are no longer oiled, but only “perfumed with sweet Odours”, but he is clearer than Milton in his expression of Pyrrha’s comparison with a stormy ocean, and the boy’s shock “to see the Seas rough with boisterous Winds, your Smoothness of Temper ruffled”.201

By the time Chatterton had re-written Watson’s paraphrase, the wetness and storm of Pyrrha’s love and the immediacy of the poet’s sodden, grateful emergence from the sea had all but disappeared. They survive only in a warm pastoral “Zephyr” shifting her hair about, and dream-like sublimations of Horace’s original metaphor, such that Pyrrha’s nature is hidden underneath the deceptively “smooth surface of th’untroubled stream”. The shipwreck is gone entirely, replaced only with the poet’s imagined and rather clichéd comparison of evils, such that breaking off with Pyrrha is “Worse than the horrors of the stormy main”.202 The semantic shifts and losses affecting Horace’s metaphors, through translated and paraphrased vernacular iterations of the poem over time, demonstrate the difficulties faced by the classically educated, let alone the comparative impossibility for Chatterton and his less well-educated like to attain such pedagogical milestones. Therefore, despite Chatterton’s imitative enthusiasm in lyrically re-imagining “Ode to Pyrrha”, he could do little more than provide a superficial – and certainly pedagogically and metaphorically compromised – display of virtuosity.

Like Smart’s and Watson’s versions, which reframed neoclassical tropes for predominantly vernacular, middle-class, mixed-gender readers, Chatterton’s “Ode to Pyrrha” catered less to pedagogical requirements than to the aspirational reading practices and tastes of this increasingly diverse audience. These readers valued vernacular editions of poetry with exactly these hallmarks of high poetic lyricism and expressive elegance, combined with new gothic themes. While literary preoccupation with female sexuality would more fully express itself in late eighteenth-century and Victorian gothic, nonetheless during Chatterton’s time, the publicity surrounding Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) established a taste for gothic gloom and sexual danger, which contextualises Chatterton’s portraiture of Pyrrha’s manipulative and transgressive female sexuality.

200 Watson, "Ode V: To Pyrrha," 22. 201 Ibid., 22, ll. 8-9. 202 Chatterton, "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510, ll. 5, 10, 18.

*' #

Compared with his frankly pornographic poetry on the subject of other, real eighteenth-century London temptresses and their noxious sexuality,203 Chatterton’s polite euphemism and rather obvious erotic allusions to Pyrrha’s “perfum’d…bower” and the rose that “glows with lustre red” in “Love’s enchanting hour”,204 were a titillating but socially acceptable evocation of female sexuality for his Juvenile Club audience. He imitated the gentlemanly “drawing room” phraseology used by Smart and Watson in their neo-Latin versions. For example, Smart alternates between civil complaint at Pyrrha’s “deplorable perfidy” and the wan but similarly gallant hope that she would continue “always disengaged, always amiable!”205 Watson introduces the courtly romantic conceit of the “promise broke by you”, worrying less about poetic economy than courteous expression, paraphrasing Horace such that the young lover,

unacquainted with such Treatment, will be amazed to see the Seas rough with boistrous Winds, your Smoothness of Temper ruffled on a sudden, he who now securely enjoys your Charms, who hopes that you will always be free from other Lovers, always fond of him, who is ignorant of the deceitful Gales of your Affections!206

Chatterton’s version retains Watson’s charms, broken promises and general mannerliness, if not the garrulous looseness of his prose poetry. Chatterton transforms Pyrrha into a coiffed and fashionable temptress embroiled in an eighteenth-century love triangle, whose sweet softness and flattering attentions belie the “galling…horrors” and “dark poison” lurking beneath the “smooth surface” of her beauty. The metaphorical power of his lyricism arose not in imitation of the classical ancients, therefore, but instead in his proto-gothic portrait of malignant female sexuality for the entertainment and titillation of his spouting club audience.

As a cultural expression of what Gillian Russell describes as the “dangerous theatricality”207 of Georgian sociability, spouting clubs had a bad reputation. It was this opportunity to challenge traditional social and gender hierarchies, and to take part in an “improving” countercultural sociability, that would have attracted Chatterton to writing performative poetry for spouting. They were occasions in which, as the character Gargle complains in Arthur Murphy’s farce “The Apprentice” (1756), “giddy young Men

203 Such as the poem quoted in the introduction to this thesis: "The Letter Paraphras'd," 686-7. 204 "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.," 510, ll. 2-4. 205 Jourdain, Translations of the Odes of Horace, 12. 206 Watson, "Ode V: To Pyrrha," 22. 207 Russell, "“Keeping Place“: Servants, Theatre and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain," 128.

*( (

intoxicated with Plays…meet in Public Houses to act Speeches…neglect Business, despise the Advice of their Friends, and think of nothing but to become Actors”.208 As such, spouting clubs were seen as a threat to civilised behaviour and social order itself.209 Murray’s intention in his farce was to “repress, by timely ridicule, a passion then growing to excess among the younger branches of the commercial community”.210 Indeed, as George Catcott related to Michael Lort, Chatterton’s earliest biographer, his spouting club was “composed of such profligate youths, as may now probably all be dead or obliged to quit this city”.211 The nature of the challenge to social order posed by spouting clubs also related to the gender of its participants – a fact which impacted upon what Chatterton wrote for the Juvenile Club. In an epilogue tacked onto the end of Murray’s “Apprentice”, a “spouting junto of the Female Kind… Well dress’d, full voiced, and nobly built for show”, claims that “there’s girls enough for all the fellows”, and scolds the playwright for not including parts for herself and her milliner, lace-dealing and other “squinting eyed” friends who “fain would fill the fair Ophelia’s place”.212

Notwithstanding Chatterton’s likely adolescent attraction to such hijinks in mixed company, the eighteenth-century mode of expression and thematic concern with love and female sexual agency in his “Pyrrha” demonstrate his relationship with new, increasingly diverse, mixed-gender reading audiences of the period. Georgian conviviality was gendered, as “fashionable” social engagement was “influenced by sensibility and the public presence of women”, as opposed to the club, coffee-house and tavern, which was “strongly identified with male homosociality”.213 Despite male domination of the roles of author, playwright and performer in the Juvenile Club, female apprentices and daughters of local tradesmen took part as audience members and occasionally as actors.214 The Club selected plays containing significant female speaking roles. For example, in a performance of Addison’s “The Drummer: Or, the haunted-house”, the cobbler’s

208 Cited in Smith and Lawhon, Plays About the Theatre in England, 1737-1800: Or, the Self-Conscious Stage from Foote to Sheridan, 150-1. 209 Gillian Russell, "Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing," in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770-1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 138. Citing Thieme, "Spouting, Spouting-Clubs and Spouting Companions." 210 John Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, Comedian (1839). Cited in Worrall, "The Theatricalization of British Popular Culture: A General Historical Anthropology," 246. 211 Conversation dated Aug 2 1778, cited in Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 77. 212 "Epilogue", Arthur Murphy, "The Apprentice: A Farce, in Two Acts," in The British Drama: A Collection of the Most Esteemed Tragedies, Comedies, Operas, and Farces, in the English Language (London: Cowperthwait, 1838), 76. 213 Russell and Tuite, "Introducing Romantic Sociability," 5. 214 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 101-2.

*) #

daughter “squeaks in Mrs. Abigail”. They had performed Joseph Addison’s “Drummer” amongst themselves, as the “young lady” plays the part of Mrs. Abigail.215 Similarly, on the back of one of the Rowley manuscripts, a handwritten note appears thus:

The Czar Mr Thomas Alcibiades Williams Pitholeon Fowler Messalina P.R. 216

From this graphic scribble, Meyerstein surmises the “key of a satire, or the cast of a play”, and that “P.R”. is likely Polly Rumsey, one of several girls to whom Chatterton wrote love poetry on behalf of his friend Jack Fowler, whose name also appears in this cast list.217 Clearly, young women were having a lot of mildly illicit fun in spouting clubs.

Gillian Russell notes the moral complexities for women in the 1750s and later, such as these girls in the Juvenile Club for whom the “didactic aims” of entertainments like lectures and debating clubs would have offered a more socially and morally legitimate avenue for “female sociability…than the morally suspect attractions of playgoing”.218 Despite Habermas’ male-dominant characterisation of the “public sphere”, feminist and historicist revisions have demonstrated the existence of a range of “publics” in this time, including those of sociable women.219 The fact that the Juvenile Club was comprised of women and plebian men engaged in convivial, “dangerous” public theatrics evidences Fraser’s argument that, despite the rhetoric and increasing hegemonic power of educated middle-class men as the century aged, from the start “counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public”.220 At mid-century, women’s inclusion in the convivial, predominantly homosocial entertainment of the Juvenile Club was an aspect of this countercultural contest, one that Chatterton harnessed to his own ambitious purposes.

215 Joseph Addison, "The Drummer: Or, the Haunted-House. A Comedy," in The English Theatre: In Eight Volumes: Containing the Most Valuable Plays Which Have Been Acted on the London Stage. (London: T. Lowndes in Fleet-street, 1765); Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 102. 216 Thomas Chatterton, "Theere Was a Broder of Orderys Whyte," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 22. Play cast notation on British Library Add M.5766B f.88. 217 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 103. 218 Russell, "Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing," 132. 219 Siltanen and Stanworth (1984) cited in Crossley and Roberts, "After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere," 12. 220 Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," 61.

** (

In spite of their disreputable antics,221 Chatterton’s “Ode to Pyrrha” exemplifies the way the Juvenile Club’s productions challenged their exclusion from the literary professions. The social threat posed by spouting clubs arose not only from the obvious association between youth, taverns and disorderly behaviour, but also from projects of literary self-cultivation.222 The perceived threat to the traditional social order embodied by middle-class theatrics, Russell argues, was due to its “interventionist role in the shaping of public opinion”, whereby it facilitated the “enactment of the possibility of self- transformation…explaining in part the suspicion of amateur acting, especially that of the male lower-orders”.223

Chatterton’s spouting company understood the socially transformative nature of their productions, humorously describing them as “demolitions and improvements”. In an article entitled “A Bristol Spouting-Club”, printed in the Town and Country Magazine not long after Chatterton’s death but nonetheless referring to his club, the fortnightly “demolition” works by these “young artisans” are outlined, wherein if any adult “neighbour” has “rendered himself ridiculous, these wits immediately publish his folly in a lampoon…to the great diversion of themselves and the public”.224 Through similarly good-humoured “improvements”, the apprentices aspired to the republic of letters in a “bid fair to be great ornaments to the stage and society, though but very indifferent tradesmen”. The club’s performative activities gave “full scope to their natural free-born sentiments”, facilitating a kind of personal transfiguration whereby:

the apprentice, who trembles at the commanding voice of his master, being stripped of his timidity and his apron, transforms himself to the victorious general of an army. Here you may see a blacksmith dying at the feet of a sempstress, a taylor roaring in Bajazet, a turner in Sir John Brute, or, by a Garrick-like transition, starting in Richard or Hamlet.225

Modelling themselves on the London coffee-house critics and wits, Chatterton and his company turned their conscious, self-deprecating and articulate humour upon their own apprenticed working status, and in doing so staged their own emancipation. By invoking

221 Biographer Michael Lort reported that “C’s Bristol acquaintance [were] of the most abandoned sort”; that he was “about at nights” and spent much time “in the company of very disreputable young men.” and thus very likely his “profligacy was equal to his abilities.” Lort’s comments are to be found in Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 77. 222 Crossley and Roberts, "After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere," 2-3. 223 Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 138. 224 “A Bristol Spouting-Club”, printed in the Town and Country Magazine in June 1771. Cited in Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 100-02. 225 Ibid.

*+ #

the wealth of canonical English literary culture in their performances, as Chatterton did in his “Pyrrha”, the Juvenile Club made a boast of their self-cultivation, despite the tacit acceptance of their class-based inferiority implied in the need to adopt such literary improvements in the first place.

Chatterton’s engagement with the Juvenile Club demonstrates his recognition of the upward mobility of public theatricality and literary conviviality in his day, and his attempt to harness the performative opportunities offered by spouting for his own ambitious purposes. As an elitist, his own neoclassical display would have been problematic for him at some level, because it enacted middle-class cultural homogenisation, and contributed to neoclassicism’s loss of cultural power.226 Certainly, he would have found himself at a cultural and temporal dead end with the Juvenile Club, because “spouting” lacked serious ambition. As Thieme writes, “the very word precludes our taking the activity totally seriously”. 227 In the context of Chatterton’s likely discomfort with the cultural homogenisation represented by the company’s literary activities, its lack of professionalism and sense of class-based inferiority, ultimately the spouters’ thespian sociability would not have satisfied Chatterton. He wanted to be a gentleman of letters, or a journalist on Grub Street in London.

Imagining medieval Bristol’s literary sociability

Written and constructed at much the same time as his Horatian spouting, Chatterton’s medievalist Rowley works represent a different experimental approach to address the problem of his professional anxieties and ambition. These works comprised scores of interrelated pseudo-historical and imaginative texts, inspired by his autodidactic reading of British history and poetry. Read together, they represent an anachronistic history of medieval Bristol’s literary culture. Chatterton imagined medieval Bristol as a world of vibrant sociability, patronage and cultural investment, literary and artistic production, and literary-critical discourse. In a simple nostalgic sense, this fantasy would have been deeply familiar to Chatterton’s contemporary, sociable readers.

The Rowley works were a multimodal paracosm or imaginary world, with literary, artistic and material components. The fantasy comprised several hundred medievalist texts and drawings, as well as the constructed pseudo-antique manuscripts in which he

226 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 86-7. 227 Thieme, "Spouting, Spouting-Clubs and Spouting Companions," 14.

*, (

distributed these works. The complete cultural production of Rowley’s society included not only historical and autobiographical writings like “Rowley’s Printing Press”228 and imaginative literature like “Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude”,229 both of which are considered in greater detail in this section, but also architectural designs and antiquarian illustrations, as well as scholarly and critical commentaries by both Chatterton and his literary device, Thomas Rowley.230 Taylor comments on how “the Rowley imaginary world was thick and rich and interrelated. Places and people occur again and again in different contexts”.231 He proved this by tabulating the intertextual references and chronological links between the seventy-odd Rowley texts which themselves sometimes comprised multi-textual, multi-modal sub-texts, in essence plotting the interwoven fabric of this productive literary world and establishing it as an internally-congruous creative entity.232 Taylor’s chronology shows that the literary production of Chatterton’s fantasy world included: prose works of an antiquarian, autobiographical or historical nature; ephemera such as letters and sermons; longer ballads, dramatic and tragic verse, and shorter lyrical poetry; and Rowley’s literary critical commentary on these spurious works of fiction. Most of this production was authored or transcribed by Chatterton’s scholarly medieval avatar Rowley. The volume and modal breadth of these works, and Rowley’s commentary on them, implied the productive vibrancy of Bristol’s medieval literary society in a way that was reminiscent of mid-eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural life and the London coffee-houses.233

Chatterton scholars Beth Lau and Carolyn Williams both remark upon the socio- political impulse behind Chatterton’s anachronism, and how his “treatment of the past comment[s] on contemporary British society”. Rowley’s Bristol, Lau writes “is a vital society populated by generous patrons of the arts [and] brilliant poets”. Arising from his middle-class background and aspirations beyond “traditional class prerogatives”, she argues that his “attempt to revive a past world is in part a consequence of [this] social

228 Chatterton, "Rowley’s Printing Press," 60. 229 Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 174-228. 230 The stylistic significance of the material and visual aspects of the Rowley works are considered in the next two chapters of this thesis. 231 Taylor, "Introduction," xviv. 232 Taylor’s chronology also shows that Chatterton’s productive engagement with his anachronistic medieval experiment spanned his short creative life, from October 1768 until his death in 1770. This, as Taylor relates, puts an end to assumptions that Chatterton’s writing was divided into two parts, the “early” Bristol-based Rowley works, and the “later” contemporary London works. His interest simply peaked between October and November 1768. Ibid., xxxix. 233 Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History.

*- #

position and has political implications”.234 Williams refers to the “dual relationship” in Chatterton’s mind between Bristol in the present, which “was the focus for all his outrage and contempt; while Bristol, in the late medieval past, was the projection of everything he loved and desired and imagined”. 235 While these observations make sense of Chatterton’s retrospective medievalism, as well as his satirical vitriol towards contemporary Bristol’s merchant vulgarity and his willingness to leave his spouting apprentice friends behind, they do not fully address the anachronistic significance of the Georgian London flavour of the Rowley texts. In the profound similarity of cultural interests and sociable literary networks between the two worlds, imaginary medieval past and real contemporary present, the reminiscent connections and disconnections are palpable and significant.

These worlds were connected by Chatterton’s uneasy relationship with his own socioeconomic background, and his drive not simply to overcome his educational limitations as a writer, but to change the fabric of professional possibilities within his social and cultural milieu. In this period, Guillory maintains, “gentlemen continue[d] to be educated in the traditional classical languages, their ‘useless’ knowledge…a pure sign of their noble status”. High literature and scholarly literariness were still fundamentally classical and the exclusive preserve of the educated elite. This circumstance understandably “installed in the ‘middling’ and commercial classes, as the upwardly mobile classes, a linguistic ambivalence which [took] the form of suspicion toward the classical languages as useless knowledge, and envy of the social distinction they represent[ed]”.236 This ambivalence was not resolved until the later eighteenth century, with the discursive emergence of a category of high literature that included imaginative vernacular English poetry and prose. 237 The introduction of English literature into middle-class schools, where it acted like Latin or Greek as another “linguistic sign of social distinction” for its young scholars,238 did not take place until after Chatterton’s death. His anachronistic medievalism thus contained an implicit criticism of peculiarly mid-century literary culture, arising from his own ambivalence about the incomplete state of social change from the classical to the vernacular. Rather than feeling totally

234 Lau, "Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats," 520. 235 Williams, "‘On Tiber’s Banks’: Chatterton and Post-Colonialism," 50-1. 236 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 96-7. 237 Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830, 6. 238 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 97.

*. (

disempowered and discouraged by his low status in this transition, however, Chatterton believed in the transformative power of his own literary voice.

Represented within the untimely conceptualisation of Rowley’s literary world, the notion of high vernacular literature had not yet emerged as a stable cultural concept. It is evident from my research that Chatterton’s underlying purpose in the Rowley works was to imagine a different historical trajectory for British literary culture, and therefore a different contemporary reality, from which he might find himself emerging into a dynamic bourgeois future that recognised his form of vernacular literariness as the new canon. For Chatterton, vernacular language and literature had to become the new Latin. His retro-futurist Rowley fantasy was not too far removed from late eighteenth-century reality, with the emergence of the Romantic poets and their culturally “high” vernacular imagining. Concerning romantic literary worlds, in their fundamental difference from realism, Eric Hayot writes that “Romance restores to the world the idea of its being a work; and if the world is a work, then it has been (and can be) made”.239 Implicit in the romantic nature of Chatterton’s anachronistic fantasy, therefore, is the belief that his voice had the power to make an impact on the world of meaning beyond the Rowley works themselves. In this way, Chatterton’s medievalist experiment reimagined the historical possibilities for Bristol’s literary culture as a “new workable past”. 240 It was more workable to Chatterton, that is, in his educational and literary ambivalence and insecurity, as an already powerfully bourgeois, sociable, unashamedly vernacular literary society, and one that could stand in for British cultural history as a whole.

On a scrap of parchment from a treatise dated 1451, Chatterton pretends to be the ingenious scholarly inventor, Rowley, musing on a novel idea for moveable type for book printing. With this invention to preserve the “eyen and hondes of poor clerkes”, 241 typesetters might:

gette lytel letters cut in wood, or caste in yron, and thane followynge by the eye, or with a fescue, everyche letter of the boke thei meane to copie, fix the sayde wooden or yron letters meetelie disposed in a frame or chase; thane daube the same over with somme atramentous stuffe, and layinge a thynne piece of moistened parchment or paper on these letters, presse it doune with somme smoothe stone or other heavie weight: by the whiche goodlye device a manie hundreth copies of eche boke might be wrought off in a few daies.242

239 Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 129. 240 Ibid., 12. 241 [eyes and hands of poor clerks] Chatterton, "Rowley’s Printing Press," 60, l.1. 242 Ibid., 60, ll. 1-13.

*/ #

Chatterton imagines that the genesis of Rowley’s “Instrument of the new invented Art of marking Letters”,243 in other words the printing press, took place in his own hometown of Bristol. Rowley’s conception date for the idea is close to Johannes Gutenberg’s actual invention of the press in Germany, but some decades before William Caxton introduced the technology to England.

Medieval Bristol was a regional, merchant town, not a thriving cultural metropolis. Books would have been a scarce commodity, and predominantly handwritten in Latin. Readers would have been equally scarce. Rowley’s interest in a printing press certainly would not have been supported by the reading practices of the medieval commercial classes, who read English only for business purposes.244 Certainly, medieval Bristol would not have produced the kinds of richly imaginative and critical writings in the English language, or literary sociability, that the Rowley fantasy represents. Despite the fact that works by real fifteenth-century poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet depicted people from different walks of life, like most English works of the time they were commissioned for an aristocratic, classically- educated court audience, and were written either in Latin, French or the London-based English dialect. 245 Books, writing and reading, particularly romances and vernacular chronicles, were the pastimes of the educated, and predominantly aristocratic minority.246

The symbolic significance of this little piece of pseudo-historical writing by Chatterton lies in its anachronistic reference to the taste for vernacular reading, and the rapid expansion of printing and publishing markets of all kinds amongst mid-century Georgian England’s commercial classes.247 As inventor of the printing press, Rowley is written into British cultural history as progenitor of the social changes wrought by printing technology. His musing on the “goodlye device” 248 offers a new cultural genealogy for medieval Bristol’s innovative bibliophilic technology and vernacular precocity. From Chatterton’s Georgian perspective, these changes culminated in new

243 “IV Deed of the foundation of an additional college at Westbury”, in Chatterton, "Nine Deeds," 128. 244 G. A. Lester, "The Books of a Fifteenth-Century English Gentleman, Sir John Paston," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 88, no. 2 (1987): 215. 245 "‘Standard English’: History," York St John University, https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/changing- englishes/unit-1-defining-english/standard-english-history/. 246 H. S. Bennett, “The author and his public in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Essays and Studies, 23 (1937): 22-3. Cited in Lester, "The Books of a Fifteenth-Century English Gentleman, Sir John Paston," 200-6. 247 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832, 4, 15; Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 96. 248 Chatterton, "Rowley’s Printing Press," 60, l. 1.

+& (

publishing markets for vernacular readers, the expansion of available printed matter, and the flourishing networks and institutions of the “newly self-conscious middle-class public”.249 In Chatterton’s hands, Rowley’s medieval Bristol appears to be in the midst of its own London-style sociable literary and publishing boom.

This precocious literary society emerges largely in Chatterton’s stories about Rowley’s relationship with William Canynge, the literary priest’s patron and Bristol’s pre-eminent merchant and civil benefactor. Demonstrating the productive links between Rowley’s creative brilliance and Canynge’s cultural enrichment activities, Rowley’s pseudo-autobiographical text, “A Brief Account of William Cannings: From the Life of Thomas Rowlie Preeste”, establishes Canynge’s role as Rowley’s “mickle Courteous” and generous patron, and Bristol’s champion of antiquarianism, visual arts and literature, and preeminent civil works benefactor. Rowley’s role is likewise established as antiquarian collector, historian, poet and playwright, and recipient, facilitator and eulogist of Canynge’s civic largesse.250 Rowley notes that at “Master William’s desire” and for “manie Markes,”, he visited “all the Abbies and Pryoryes” to “gather together auncient drawynges”251 as inspirational architectural models for Canynge’s church-building plans. In the song “Onn Oure Ladies Chirch”, lyrically inspired by Canynge’s munificence, Rowley describes his awe as he sits “mouche wonderynge” at “The counynge hendie worke so fine,/ Han well nighe dazeled mine Eyne”. For this piece of congratulatory lyricism, he notes Canynge “did praise it more than I dyd think Myself did deserve” and “did send mee mickle good Thynges”.252

Rowley regularly refers to the role remuneration plays in the productivity of this relationship, which was also a hopeful literary parable of patronage Chatterton presented to his manuscript collectors, Bristol antiquarians George Catcott and William Barrett. Canynge’s largesse translated repeatedly into scholarly and literary output. Rowley notes that he “gave Master Canynge my Bristowe Tragedie for which he gave me in Hande Twentie Pounds”.253 With these funds, Rowley “did purchase the Saxon Manuscript, and

249 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832, 15. 250 [most courteous] Thomas Chatterton, "A Brief Account of William Cannings: From the Life of Thomas Rowlie Preeste," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 51-2, l. 4. 251 [gather together ancient drawings] 252 [much wondering at the cunning handywork so fine, that has nigh well dazzled my eyes] Chatterton, "A Brief Account of William Cannings," 51-4, ll. 5, 14-15, 68, 87-8; "Onn Oure Ladies Chirch," 53, ll. 3-4. 253 "A Brief Account of William Cannings," 54, ll. 85-7. This sum would have represented a fortune for a fifteenth-century priest, given that a chantry priest’s wages in 1379 were just over four pounds per year,

+' #

sette Myself diligentlie to translate and worde it in Englishe Metre”. 254 Out of this productive, admiring and financially-rewarding relationship, Canynge emerges as Bristol’s medieval patron of literature and public works, and Rowley his cultural protégé and Bristol’s preeminent vernacular author. The anachronistic representation of their Georgian-style homosocial relationship contains Chatterton’s own hopes for contemporary recognition, patronage and literary productivity.

The anachronistic function of this homosocial portrait of Rowley’s Bristol was to reinforce the historical possibility of an educated, bourgeois society of educated and intellectually sophisticated patrons and writers, and their audience, taking part in and promoting vernacular literary culture. Writing to Rowley in the role of theatrical investor, Canynge requests that the priest “Penne an Entyrlude to bee plaied upone laieynge the fyrste Stone of the buyldeynge and wricte a greete Parte for Iscamme”.255 The result was Chatterton’s longest complete work of pseudo-medieval imaginative writing, the verse tragedy “Aella”.256 Chatterton’s representation of the thespian players and audience for “Aella” is significant, for they are one and the same. A subtitle to the prologue notes that the performance is first “Plaiedd before Mastre Canynge, ate hys howse nempt the Rodde Lodge”. Canynge and his merchant family, Rowley’s ecclesiastic colleagues, and certain unnamed “Knyghtes” and “Mynstrelles” watch on, and sometimes take small parts in the play. The list of actors includes Rowley as the tragic hero Aella, Canynge’s son “Mastre Edwarde” as the heroine Birtha, and Rowley’s friend the poet John Iscamme as the traitor Celmonde.257 These hearty, local, predominantly non-aristocratic dramatic arrangements bring to mind the noisy theatricality of Chatterton’s spouting club, or the private theatricals Jane Austen later refers to, albeit with characteristic ironic condemnation, in Northanger Abbey.

It is evident, however, that Chatterton imagined a broader public audience than these for his works, and so he gave the same hope to Rowley. Although the prologues to “Aella” are nominally written to Canynge as the patron of the tragedy, Rowley also addresses a

but it was a good suggestive sum for an eighteenth-century scrivener’s apprentice like Chatterton, wishing to be paid likewise for his literary works. Alec Reginald Myers, London in the Age of Chaucer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 254 Chatterton, "A Brief Account of William Cannings," 54, ll. 92-3. 255 [Pen an interlude to be played upon laying the first stone of the building and write and great part for Iscamme] "Life of W: Canynge—by Rowlie," 231, ll. 120-1. Johan Iscamme, Rowley’s ecclesiastical colleague and only literary rival in this imaginary society, is clearly also a willing actor and participant. 256 Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 174-228. 257[Played before Mr Canynge, at his house near the Red Lodge]. Iibid., 174-5, play title and "Personnes Representedd".

+( (

larger implied audience of “trades, and toune folck”.258 Drawing on the Elizabethan trope of the prologue apology and implied compliment, he orates to them: “I kenne your myghte/ Wyll make mie faultes, mie meynte of faultes, be less./ …you/ Wylle from ytte caste awaie, whatte lynes maie be untrue”. 259 This mighty and poetically-discerning commercial audience, “you”, bears more than a passing resemblance to Chatterton’s own potential mid-eighteenth-century audience – the increasing number of middle-class, vernacular and educated readers.

Chatterton’s fantasy about Bristol’s literary production in Rowley’s day included an anthological body of imaginative writings (a literature within the literature) and related literary critical writings. Conscious of the continuing “quarrel” Guillory describes for cultural recognition and dominance between classicism and vernacular writing, in these writings Chatterton attempted both to emulate the English literary greats and to elevate the cultural status of vernacular literariness above that of classicism. These imaginative writings, mainly penned by Chatterton’s avatar Rowley, comprised long ballads, dramatic and tragic verse, and shorter songs and lyrical verse. Chatterton provided a complete generic oeuvre that paralleled the broad range of Georgian literary texts he was familiar with from his autodidactic reading. These included works of neoclassical literature and literary criticism, theatre, balladry and other nominally low forms like vernacular anthologies and short epistolary fiction. Chatterton mimicked genres and tropes from canonical literary greats in his pseudo-medieval writings, in much the same way as Shakespeare, Spenser or Pope, although with far less experience, and with the frankly experimental sensibility of the Early Romantic poets.260

An example of Chatterton’s practice of mimicking canonical literature is his verse tragedy “Aella”, which has often been compared with “Othello” as its main action and style of language is clearly derived from Shakespeare’s work. The eponymous hero, Aella, like Othello and any one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, is a man of wealth and power who falls victim to the struggle with hamartia and external forces of evil. The play is structured as a long verse tragedy, complete with prologues, sonnets, dramatic irony, and powerful figurative language, although in Rowley’s cod-medieval English as opposed to Shakespearean English. This is a direct imitation of Shakespeare’s craft. The

258 Ibid., 175-8, l. 61. 259 [I understand your strength. You will make my faults, my many faults, less…by casting away (ignoring) what lines of my verse may be untrue (unconvincing)] ibid., 176, ll. 39-42. 260 Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility."; Fairer, "Lyric Poetry: 1740–1790."

+) #

prologues to the tragedy, while Elizabethan in form and function, also imitate the parodic impulse and mock-scholarly language and textuality of Pope’s “Dunciad”. By infusing Rowley’s literature with canonical themes and forms that eighteenth-century readers would recognise as high literature, Chatterton attempted to lend his imaginary literature- within-literature the same cultural status.

Rowley’s critical commentary on his own fictions, however, expressly denigrates classical learning and literary neoclassicism, most particularly in the prologues to “Aella”. Using Pope’s “Dunciad” as a satirical model for his prefaces, Chatterton (through Rowley) discredits forms of writing other than his own lyricism. As John Mullan writes of Pope’s literary satire, it is “an amazed record of the forms that stupidity can take” in the hands of hack writers, bad poets, “vain patrons and ruthless publishers”.261 Pope himself commented wryly that there is “A Lumberhouse of books in ev’ry head,/ For ever reading, never to be read”.262 Clearly inspired by the impact of Pope’s goddess of “Dulness” extending her stultifying reign over creative and independent critical thought, Rowley is scornful of Latin scholars like “Syr John, a knyghte, who hath a barne of lore,/ Kenns Latyn att first syghte from Frenche or Greke”. He denigrates such dusty old “Graiebarbes” for the triviality of their achievements and ridiculous prejudices. Rowley tells us, with some dry hyperbole, that Syr John “Pyghtethe hys knowlachynge ten yeres of more,/ To rynge upon the Latynne worde to speke”.263 And yet this academic pedant holds a deep bias against vernacular speakers and writers, such that: “Whoever spekethe Englysch ys despysed,/ The Englysch hym to please moste fyrste be latynized”.264 In fifteenth-century Bristol’s critical circles, Chatterton (again as Rowley) intimates that classicism was considered worthless and intellectually deadening, and its practitioners bigots.

In a type of chorus, Chatterton performs himself as literary critic, wading into the argument against classicism in the margins of his own Rowley manuscripts. In the “Bristowe Tragedie”, he comments pedantically that in his “humble Opinion, the foregoing Verses are far more elegant and poetical than all the Parade of Aurora’s

261 John Mullan, "Darkness Visible," The Guardian, 10 May 2008. 262 Alexander Pope, "The Dunciad, Book 3," ed. Henry Walcott Boynton, The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (Boston and New York: Mifflin & Co, 1903), www.bartleby.com/203/. ll. 193-4. 263 [Sir John pits his knowledge of ten years or more, to ring upon (choose) the Latin word to speak] Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 175, ll. 13-18. 264 [See footnote 48] ibid., 177, l. 73.

+* (

whipping away the Night, unbarring the Gates of the East &c &c”.265 His purpose was to emphasise the anti-neoclassical discourse that pervades Rowley’s criticism by praising Rowley’s native English lyricism and dismissing that of the annoyingly elevated neoclassical poets.

In Rowley’s prologue to “Aella”, the “Epistle to Mastre Canynge”, Chatterton compares two imaginary characters, Vevyan the monk and Geofroie the aristocratic writer, in order to challenge the assumption that with elite classical education comes literary brilliance. Vevyan, he relates “can preache so wele, eche hynde hys meneynge knowes”, and this is despite the fact that Vevyan is “as bade yn vearse as goode yn prose”. He is “ne foole, beyinde hys lines” for he understands that the power of his “synges of seynctes” lies in their affective impact on his audience – which is great, for Rowley says, the listening “fooles… Sommetyme at tragedie theie laughe and synge”.266 On the other hand, Rowley continues, literature by educated lords can be as senseless and impoverished as handicrafts compared with fine arts. Geofroie’s “Wordes wythoute sense full groffyngelye he twynes” and “Cotteynges hys storie off as wythe a sheere”. Clearly, one of Pope’s dull “lumberhouses”, the aristocrat “Wrytes months on nothynge, and hys storie donne,/ Ne moe you from ytte kenn, than gyf you neere begonne”.267 Essentially, Chatterton uses the contrast between fine art and handicrafts to draw a distinction between high literary art and an absence of art entirely. By comparison, Rowley maintains that even Vevyan’s vernacular prose is better than erudite, neoclassical verse, as it is comprehensible and has greater affective and rhetorical power.

Deepening his anti-classical ventriloquism in Rowley’s prologues to “Aella”, Chatterton addresses the relative powers of ancient and modern poetic styles in a dialectic he appears to have imagined arising from Walpole’s description of his own gothic style in his preface to Otranto. Walpole retrospectively constructs the artistic fraudulence of

265 Chatterton, "Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin," 6. Chatterton’s marginal comment is given as footnote 2 to line 4 of the poem. Some of this commentary is taken from my previous publication, Sumner, "Urban Landscape, Fantasy and Adolescent Identity in Thomas Chatterton's 'Rowley' Works." 266 [Vevyan preaches so well that each peasant knows his meaning. He is as bad in verse as he is good in prose, but he is no fool behind his lines. He understands that the power in his songs of saints lies in their affective impact. This power is great, for the listening fools sometimes laugh and sing at his tragedies.] Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 175, ll. 19-31. 267 [Geofroie writes for months about nothing, and when his story is done you know no more from it that if you had never begun reading. He foolishly weaves together meaningless words, cutting his story off as if with shears.] Chatterton undermines the value automatically attributed to such educated nonsense, by comparing it with other supposedly meaningless, low-status craft-based cultural production, such as knitting and weaving. An unfair metaphorical comparison, for it assumes a shared belief in the different purposes and cultural value of the fine artist’s work in relation to the craftsperson’s. This distinction was commonly held in Chatterton’s time, and still today in certain circles. Ibid., 176, ll. 32-6.

++ #

his gothic style in the first edition of his gothic tale in a way that he would not allow in Chatterton’s fictions:

It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if, in the latter species, Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances.268

Like Walpole, Chatterton argues from Rowley’s perspective that the old poetic style, by which he meant not classical poetry but early English gothic, was synonymous with greater lyrical beauty and poetic truth. In the “Epistle”, Rowley poses a rhetorical question to Canynge, asking “whatt was vearse yn daies of yore?” Rowley answers by stating that gothic poetry was lyrically superior, with its “Fyne thoughtes, and couplettes fetyvelie bewryen”.269 Furthermore, he argues that critical opinion in medieval Bristol was universally one of “general protest against cautious plodding in poetry”, and the belief that the “onlist lecturn, and songe adygne” of ancient poetry placed it at a higher literary register than modern verse.270

Conversely, however, through Rowley’s voice, Chatterton disputes the greater claim of empirical history to truth, arguing instead that the imagination could access more psychologically profound truths. In an emphatic rhetorical style of nebular opposition, Rowley argues that in history one will often “fynde therein that trouthe ys left wythoute”. He lists respected neoclassical historians through the ages, including “Asserius, Ingolphus, Torgotte, Bedde”, impudently likening their scholarly work of “makynge everyche thynge bee hystorie” to riding on a cart horse. The lyrical work of the imagination, according to Rowley, compared more favourably to “mountynge on a winged horse”. He explains the process of managing the poetic relationship between lyricism, intellectual control and truth as riding “the stede, botte yev to hym the reene”, Instead of being pent up “between crased molterynge books”, the poetic Pegasus will then “soare on hyghe, and yn the sonne-bemes sheene”, for, as Rowley cries exultantly at last, identifying in the process as man of feeling: “Wee wylle ne cheynedd to one pasture bee,/

268 Walpole, "Preface to Second Edition," 9. 269 [Fine thoughts and elegantly expressed couplets.] Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 178, ll. 89- 94. 270 Citing Taylor’s translation of “Rowleyan” English from his commentary on “Aella”, in Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, Vol 2, 930, point 92. [vast and boundless themes and beautiful lyricism.] Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 178, ll. 89-94.

+, (

Botte sometimes soare ’bove trouthe of hystorie”. 271 The poetry-horse analogy is an emblem of the distinction Chatterton is trying to make between the “low” empirical writing and “high” imaginative writing.

Although Chatterton’s thematic oppositions may appear untimely and illogical, in essence they comprise a comparison of plodding and dusty neoclassicism with imaginative, psychologically truthful and poetically powerful Gothic lyricism. His argument reflects the seismic shift in eighteenth-century poetics, away from the Early Modern focus on social satire and the “faithful mirrour of manners and of life”,272 towards greater interest in subjective experience, imagination and psychological truthfulness. Through Rowley, Chatterton was essentially arguing for the poetic power of what was coming into vogue anyway in the Early Romantic period, namely that imaginative expressiveness Wordsworth later calls his “overflow” and Leigh Hunt describes as the “utterance of passions for truth, beauty and power”. 273 However, in one large anachronistic scrawl of the pen, having adopted Walpole’s nationalist gothic style from Otranto, Chatterton projected this discourse backwards onto his imagined medieval literary society. Rowley’s discourse in the prologues to “Aella” expressed the central aspirational purpose of Chatterton’s medieval literary fantasy, which was to retrospectively establish the lyrical beauty and poetic truth of a gothic vernacular poetry for his contemporary Georgian audience, who were themselves seeking confirmation of their nascent British cultural power.

Chatterton’s anachronism was an ameliorative tool for personal and cultural transformation. Implicit in his experimentation were his educational insecurities, his desire for social mobility and his fervent literary ambition. His experiments in anachronistic style were a way of reshaping his social existence into new narratives that provided the “necessary prehistory” of a more desirable present, or future, in which his social anxieties and intense ambition to become a gentleman of letters might be realised, and in which the vernacular literary works of writers like himself might develop into a canonical English literature.

271 [ride the steed, but give him the reins][between crazed and mouldering books][soar on high, and in the sunbeams shine][We will not be chained to one pasture,/ But sometimes soar above the truth of history.] "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 177-8, ll. 68-70, 78-88. 272 Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare” (1755), cited in M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 32. 273 Ibid., 49, 57.

+- #

In its exuberant, apostrophic bravado, the significance of Chatterton’s “Ode to Pyrrha” lies in his attempt to harness the self-transformative possibilities of neoclassical oratory for his own ambitious literary purposes. Re-casting himself in the role of the educated and articulate bourgeois poet, Chatterton offered his audience a superficial display of neoclassical literary power, overlaid with a proto-gothic portrait of female sexual power, that together satisfied the spouters’ aspirational desire for “high” but nonetheless entertaining and titillating vernacular literary engagement.

Chatterton’s Rowley works can be read together as an anachronistic fictional world. By reimagining medieval Bristol’s literary culture and its imaginative writings as vernacular, bourgeois and anti-classical, his sociable fantasy world offered a critique of transitional mid-eighteenth-century literary society and a coherent alternative to neoclassical cultural dominance. Through his poetic and historical ventriloquism, in medieval poet and priest Rowley’s voice, Chatterton experimented with cultural nostalgia as a way to engage with what Guillory describes as the “quarrel” between classicism and vernacular literacy for cultural legitimacy in the mid-eighteenth century, 274 and to actively transform it. As an anti-classical allegory, the Rowley works are Chatterton’s attempt to imagine a different historical trajectory for British literary culture, and therefore a different present-day reality from which he might find himself in a dynamic bourgeois future that recognised his form of vernacular literariness as the new canon, the culturally dominant, lyrically powerful and poetically truthful alternative.

This chapter has demonstrated that Chatterton’s anachronistic experimentalism was a means to reshape his own literary status and professional expectations into new cultural narratives. His literary experiments reflect the tensions between his adoption of outmoded classical forms and the emerging gothic style. On the one hand, his classical mimicry aimed to demonstrate his literary skills and establish his status as a professional gentleman of letters to his coterie circle of peers, patrons and publishers. His recognition of gothic style, on the other hand, can be viewed as emblematic of the powerful new Georgian sociability and nationalist discourse that promised a high English literature and a culturally powerful, vernacular, bourgeoise society in which Chatterton himself would be recognised for the great writer he wanted to be. More than a simple nostalgic conflation of old and new, Chatterton’s neoclassicism in “Ode to Pyrrha” and his medievalism in the Rowley texts were inherently critical of his present-day social reality. In fact, they

274 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 118.

+. (

represent Chatterton’s attempt to change history by creating a more “workable” past from which a radically different future might grow – a future that would mitigate his literary anxieties and his thwarted professional ambitions. Chatterton’s anachronistic experiments opened imaginative possibilities for a “high” vernacular English literature and therefore also for the Romantic literary professionalism his works presaged.

)

Chatterton’s handmade, pseudo-antique manuscripts have attracted a great deal of attention since they were constructed in the late 1760s. Ian Haywood’s and Nick Groom’s recent critical studies respectively read the Rowley manuscripts as arising from a broader eighteenth-century culture of fake historical and literary manuscripts, and as examples of the eighteenth-century craze for rediscovering old British ballads.275 Based on Robert Folkenflick and Haywood’s findings that establish the critical narrative of this “great age of literary forgery”,276 Groom’s work in particular illuminates the slippery intersections between history, fiction, and notions of authenticity, arguing that in this period the literary manuscript “remained…a metaphor, for history”.277 His reading emphasises Chatterton’s identity as a writer who nonetheless “forged literature; he forged language, he forged scholarly credentials, he forged sources”, and that the rest of his creative output was consistent with the “aberrant works in the canon of a forger”. According to Groom, the purpose of this project of forgery was a conscious, manipulative, even “bullying” attempt by the young writer to illustrate the emergent Romantic discourse of historical relativism, “that meaning has an origin outside of history”.278 Despite the subtlety and importance of Groom’s analysis, particularly in terms of rehabilitating Chatterton’s works, this thesis challenges the notion that Chatterton set out with a “consistent plan to commit the crime of literary fraudulence”.279

Chatterton’s manufactured fourteenth-century maps, manuscripts and illustrations are fakes, notorious eighteenth-century textual and visual contrivances and immersive entertainments, and they comprise the largest and most comprehensive example of his experimentation with material style. There are two accounts of Chatterton’s physical “antiquating” techniques, the hands-on methods he used to create manuscripts that

275 Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction; Groom, "Romanticism and Forgery." 276 Folkenflik, "Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great Age of Literary Forgery."; Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction. 277 Groom, "Thomas Chatterton Was a Forger," 278. 278 Ibid., 276, 83. 279 Groom, "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity," 43.

,' #

appeared to be medieval. His apprentice friend John Rudhall observed Chatterton writing words on a parchment, which he then held over a candle, “which changed the colour of the ink (Rudhall said), and made the parchment appear black and a little contracted”.280 As a child, Edward Gardner also recollected seeing Chatterton “rub a parchment in several places in streaks with yellow ochre…then rub it several times on the ground, which was dirty, and afterwards crumple it in his hand”, and being told “That was the way to antiquate it”.281 It is significant that Chatterton seemed so little concerned to hide his “antiquating” methodology, and as Meyerstein muses “It may be that the intention was to leave openings by which the truth might leak out”. 282 However, my research suggests that Chatterton was not thinking consciously in terms of truth or falsehood, authenticity or forgery, but was consumed by his act of tangible creation.

Chatterton’s material style was the process of making valuable objects or gifts through which he could stage and enact his literary professionalism. As Paul Keen suggests, “the highly charged commercial aspects of the eighteenth-century debates” about literary artefacts tend to be underestimated, and misunderstood, and in fact the status of books “as commercial objects means that the question of their history has as much to do with the fetishistic realm of the commodity as with the typographic world of bibliography”.283 Keen’s observation resonates with the history of critical studies on the Rowley manuscripts. Chatterton’s fascination with the symbolic “thingness”284 of his works resided in the ways he could use them to stage encounters, in person or through letters, with men he knew to have high literary or academic status, or cultural capital in Bourdieu’s terms,285 and who were already recognised in the eighteenth-century economy of taste.

His ambition was to produce cultural works of value to barter with – tokens of exchange that simultaneously imitated and symbolised the depth of classical and antiquarian learning, the taste, wit and genius, and public savvy and rhetorical grace, that distinguished the literati of his time.286 With these valuable antiquarian and documentary objects in hand, he could invite encounters with the people (mainly men) he sought to

280 Rudhall was the “Printer of Felix Farley’s Journal, Small Street” and a contemporary lad about Chatterton’s age. Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 120. 281 Gardner was the son of a friend of Chatterton’s father. Ibid., 120-1. 282 Ibid., 12. 283 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 4. 284 Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them," 17. 285 Bourdieu, "The Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus." 286 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800.

,( )

impress, build his own professional networks, and ultimately, through these affiliations, exchange his precious artefacts with influential readers such as William Barrett and Horace Walpole. By putting his carefully constructed works into the public domain, he put himself on the cultural market in pursuit of distinction and of immortality through publication.

In contrast to the prevailing critical view of Chatterton as a literary conman, this chapter will argue that his intention was not to defraud, nor to take part in an intellectually ironic or conniving culture of forgery or plagiarism. Although he constructed fake medieval manuscripts and tried to pass them off amongst the antiquarian literati of Bristol, and then Walpole and others in London, he did so in the spirit of an inexperienced and adolescent publishing opportunist. Like a hungry child in a sweet shop with very few coins in his pocket, his eyes were caught by a series of delightfully promising and highly desirable possibilities, and his imagination worked hard to resolve the uncertain contingencies of getting his hands on them. Chatterton’s manuscripts and other tangible works were, in this sense, curated from worldly craving and materialism, and shaped by his avid notions of what constituted desirable consumer objects – those shiny baubles of mid-century antiquarian and Georgian literary culture that were the key to his professional standing, fame and monetary security. Chatterton was not adhering to a particular discourse, but imitating and experimenting with adolescent intensity, like the inexperienced apprentice he was, with whatever styles and tropes seemed most popular in the Bristol and London magazines, and hence most culturally valuable to his acute, if inexperienced, eyes. He was still learning the craft; his biggest concern was how to get himself professionally noticed, and to benefit from his constructed imitations of these precious objects.

For “things are never really just things”, as Bill Brown argues, because the act of paying attention to physical objects gives them meaning, some culturally determined, some personal, that we respond to in turn. 287 Brown’s theory of “things” owes a considerable critical debt to Arjun Appadurai’s sociological reading of gifts, those “things that are exchanged” for their political and personal, rather than strictly economic, value. The value of gifts, Appadurai argues, is not inherent in the things given, but “is a judgement made about them by subjects”, and thus gifts “like persons, have social

287 Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them," 1; "Thing Theory," 4.

,) #

lives”.288 Chatterton’s pseudo-medieval treasure maps, and his other tangible, token-like works can be read in Appadurai’s terms as socially-determined objects, “with a particular type of social potential”, whose value is “both reflective and constitutive of social partnerships and struggles for preeminence”. Indeed, the poetics of Chatterton’s material works arose from his own ambitious struggle for recognition and social standing as a literary professional. However, as Appadurai argues, in the gift economy objects of exchange can come with a social obligation.289 Chatterton certainly saw his words, books and manuscripts as objects of exchange with his readers. The notion of the “exchange and consumption”290 of precious objects speaks to the heart of Chatterton’s material style, not only because it explains his impulse to make valuable things, but also because, as Severin Fowles writes, “things make people” and “objects mediate social relationships – ultimately…inanimate objects can be read as having an agency of their own”.291

Chatterton’s physical artefacts – his books and tokens, manuscripts and documents – were intimate, handmade and small-scale in terms of their readership and distribution. They catered to the reading practices of specific men, known and desired addressees, like a courtly coterie audience. His tokens, precious parcels of paper, ink and glue, and their detailed physical constructions and layouts, did not belong to the mass-produced consumerism that was appearing on the Romantic horizon. They were emblematic of the earlier eighteenth-century world of luxurious artefacts, precious follies and personalised gifts. They acted as conduits of communication and complicity between Chatterton and his coterie, concerning the cultural value of his works and his professional literary ambitions. My research suggests that Chatterton knew that on his own he could not achieve the professional success as a man of letters that he desired, because of the limitations of his commercial education and socioeconomic background. He therefore needed help. Experimental and blatantly opportunistic to the core, Chatterton gave his composite literary fragments to specific individual gentlemen, in the spirit of faux gifts that come with a social obligation. The obligation Chatterton sought was the investment

288 Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," 3. 289 Appadurai argues that faux gifts come with a social requirement or obligation that give the exchange features of an economic transaction. Ibid., 3-4. 290 Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them," 4, 5-8. Brown draws on twentieth- century critical theories of modernity, consumer practices and “the way value is created in specific social formations and lodged in specific material forms, the way that people code, recode and satisfy their material wants and needs.” (p. 4). 291 Severin Fowles, "Thing Theory: Course Description," Columbia University, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/accs/syllabi/thingtheory.pdf.

,* )

of time and professional interest. In this way, he leveraged his small literary curiosities into larger economic exchanges, in which he willingly gave up his claim of sole authorship in return for co-authorship and far greater access to publishing networks and possibilities.

Chatterton’s material poetics was performative; he set up encounters with a range of precious and valuable material forms. His creative modus operandum often involved a campaign to attract the attention of patrons and publishers, individual men such as Bristol historian William Barrett, cultural critic and antiquarian Horace Walpole, or London publisher James Dodsley,292 to whom he would send his manuscripts, for publication, or indeed for literal inscription into their own historical works. To this end, for example, he shared his spurious medieval histories, poems and drawings with Barrett as documentary evidence, ideally suited to fill the gaps in the gullible man’s incomplete History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol.293 Similarly, he sent Walpole a manuscript called the “Historie of Peyncters yn Englande bie T. Rowley”,294 with a view to it being included in a further edition of Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting.295 In this way, Chatterton offered up to each man specially-crafted, pseudo-documentary fragments of apparent personal interest and significance, and so seductively incomplete in historical terms, that he hoped they would incorporate them into their own historical research and publications.

Chatterton’s literary objects were symbolic, drawing on pre-existing cultural beliefs about material, manuscript and documentary forms. His style blends textual formalism with a flagrant sensory pleasure in, and scholarly engagement with, tangible artefacts of the early modern world like maps and manuscripts, documents, letters and tokens. The large number of such features in his oeuvre suggests that he relished the concrete realm, and the symbolic possibilities he found there. Chatterton’s preoccupation with the symbolic dynamics of his works, both medievalist and contemporary, is illuminated by Brown’s notion of the “codes by which our interpretive attention makes [things]

292 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton; Michael F. S. J. Suarez, "What Thomas Knew: Chatterton and the Business of Getting into Print," Angelaki 1, no. 2 (1993). 293 William Barrett, The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol: Compiled from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, in Public Offices or Private Hands; Illustrated with Copper-Plate Prints (William Pine, in Wine-Street, 1789). Evidence of Chatterton’s contribution can be found throughout this publication, from historical source, to topography, to pseudo-historical poetry. The history of this relationship is given in Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton. 294 [History of Painters in England by T. Rowley] Chatterton, "Historie of Peyncters Yn Englande Bie T. Rowley," 263-7. 295 The second edition had already been published in 1765. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (Murray, 1871).

,+ #

meaningful”.296 In particular, Chatterton relied upon pre-existing cultural beliefs about such objects; for example, the authenticity of manuscripts, the scholarly authority of antiquarian and historical publications, the statutory reliability of legal documents, the revelatory honesty of love letters, the personal recording culture of commonplace books and miscellany,297 and the entertainment-based formal style of chapbooks, broadsheet ballads, and graphic print series.298

Chatterton’s irregular bibliographic practices expressed his awareness of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century habit of record-keeping through commonplace books, and his response to what Stephen Colclough describes as the intersection of reader, textual and manuscript cultures in the eighteenth century.299 Luisa Calè argues that in the eighteenth century such bibliographic practices gave rise to “book disorders” and the cooperative authorial practice of “extra-illustration”.300 Calè’s findings on how books behave symbolically when unbound or disassembled, then altered and reassembled into new composite forms, even by multiple authors, are particularly useful in both contextualising and clarifying Chatterton’s sometimes manipulative and unfathomable textual practices. Chatterton’s composite Rowley manuscripts were manufactured to look like commonplace books, and as such, they invited cooperative completion through extra- illustration.

As stated above, this chapter challenges the persistent critical identification of Chatterton’s manuscripts with the eighteenth-century culture of literary forgery. Instead, in the following three sections, I read exemplary documentary components of the Rowley manuscripts, along with Chatterton’s mock “Will” and his imposturous love letters to Eleanor Hoyland, as examples of his broader experimentation with material style. Informed by Appadurai’s theory of the gift exchange and social obligation, 301 Bill Brown’s “thing theory”, Keen’s study of the eighteenth-century literary economy, and

296 Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them," 4. 297 Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695-1870 (Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 35. 298 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. 299 Stephen Colclough, "Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience," Publishing History 44 (1998): 30-39. 300 Calè, "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page." 301 Appadurai argues that faux gifts come with a social requirement or obligation that give the exchange features of an economic transaction. Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value."

,, )

Luisa Calè’s work on disorderly bibliographic practices in the period,302 this chapter argues that Chatterton’s material poetics was performative in its construction of valuable cultural things, through which he could enact his own literary distinction and professionalism. His fascination with symbolic tokens resided in the ways he could use them to stage encounters, in person or through letters, to manipulate, entertain and please. However, these tokens were predominantly the handcrafted manifestations of Chatterton’s ill-informed and naïve desire to curry favour with the coterie of literary men in whom he had hopes of social sanctification and patronage.

Tokens of exchange

It is evident that Chatterton saw the exchange of tokens in persuasive or obligatory terms. These precious physical objects like letters, bracelets, documents and manuscripts were symbolic gifts, infused with contextually specific and commonly held cultural meanings, which Chatterton mobilised for his own ambitious purposes. A unique feature of Chatterton’s style in his composite works is the way he experimented with tangible and formal symbolism, as well as with the persuasive possibilities inherent in the exchange relationships he established with his readers through his tokens.

Tokens – symbolic physical objects that serve as a visible or tangible representation of something else, such as a special feeling or quality, an invitation or a gift – abound in Chatterton’s textual, visual and mixed-media documentary and manuscript works. The best known of his tokens are the pseudo-medieval Rowley manuscripts. However, he also created socially understood or official documentary forms, such as his love letters to Eleanor Hoyland, impersonating her suitor John Baker, Chatterton’s best friend,303 and his mock-testamentary document, the “last Will and Testament of me Thomas Chatterton”.304 Sometimes, his tokens were words that represented the physical, sensual and kinetic worlds, such as the “gift” of a bracelet to Hoyland, which was both symbolic and possibly real. These objects had specific attributes, layouts or formats that were recognised and understood in the eighteenth century in specific ways that related to

302 Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them."; "Thing Theory."; Calè, "Extra- Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page."; "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page."; Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800. 303 Chatterton, "Ode to Miss Hoyland," 159; "Acrostic on Miss Eleanor Hoyland," 159; "To Miss Hoyland I," 158; "To Miss Hoyland Ii," 160; "To Miss Hoyland Iii," 162; "To Miss Hoyland with a Present," 163; "To Miss Hoyland Iv," 164; "To the Beauteous Miss Hoyland," 257. 304 "The Last Will and Testament of Me Thomas Chatterton," 502.

,- #

cultural beliefs. For example, in the context of Britain’s cultural nationalism, readers of Rowley’s lyrical verse, with its pseudo-medieval diction and word order, would immediately suspect their significance as archaic literary manuscripts. Chatterton equally relied upon Eleanor Hoyland’s recognition, and more than that, her mistaken reliance upon the revelatory honesty and promise of love letters and presents such as jewellery.

Physical tokens of love, testamentary documents and literary manuscripts embodied cultural codes that were both subjectively and affectively compelling, and authoritative, not only to Chatterton but to the majority of his eighteenth-century readers. Talismans and material records were understood to embody forms of power and authority, such as the statutory enactment of intention embodied by the hand-signed testamentary will; or they were nostalgic souvenirs of the past or lost experiences.305 The social history of the talismanic objects left with newborns at the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, in mid- eighteenth-century London, by war-widowed and poor mothers, poignantly exemplifies the way a tangible object can stand in for both memory and document, operating as a symbol of love, loss, longing and fear.306

From 1741, when the Foundling Hospital opened, mothers were asked to “affix on each child some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token, so that the children may be known thereafter if necessary”.307 The tokens, which were poems, coins or medallions carefully marked or engraved, ribbons with delicate embroidery, a beloved thimble or ring, or even a dried piece of the birth caul, were snatches of the love song between mother and child, a single tiny materialisation of all those carefully chosen words, washed and cleaned clothes, goodnight kisses and scoldings in a mother’s imagination – embodied in and inscribed upon an otherwise unremarkable household object. Wrapped around this miniaturised object, like the blanket around the precious child itself, was a “billet” of personal details by which the mother might later prove the child was hers. As Susan Stewart argues, miniaturisation “continually refers to the physical world”, illustrating “the conjunction of the material and abstract nature of the sign”. Furthermore, she argues, the “reduction in dimensions does not produce a corresponding reduction in significance; indeed, the gemlike properties of the miniature…make these forms especially suitable ‘containers’” for projected,

305 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 135. 306 "The Tokens," https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/collections/whats-on-display/the-tokens/. 307 Ibid.

,. )

encapsulated meaning.308 The token therefore stood in place of documentary proof of authentic intimacy, in the case of the foundlings’ mothers, where otherwise names and other identifiers of their babies had been bureaucratically erased.

In her discussion of “this capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience”, Stewart argues that the material “souvenir distinguishes experiences. We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative”.309 Chatterton’s love letters, Rowley manuscripts and other documentary forms behaved similarly as symbolic miniatures or souvenirs, objects operating as containers for symbolic personal and professional narratives of far greater significance, at least to Chatterton, than their small- scale, handmade, apparently fraudulent and often incomplete nature implied. For Chatterton’s souvenirs did not represent a genuine experience of the past but were aspirational projections of his desire to memorialise an event that had not yet come to pass.

Such works suggest that Chatterton was obsessed with the semiotic possibilities of his texts as tokens of intimate and meaningful exchange. He understood tokens as conduits through which he could interact with his audience, to express and consolidate the connections between poet and reader, and to play with their thoughts, feelings and impulses. The Rowley manuscripts are carefully constructed to communicate with the reader about artefactual antiquity, documentary history, scholarly authenticity and professional possibility. Groom points out that the major difference between what he describes as Chatterton’s forgery, and that of Macpherson’s “Ossian” poems or Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,310 is that Chatterton attempted to fabricate the original manuscripts from which a treasury of ancient British literary culture was to be rediscovered, whereas others simply referred to an unfortunately lost, hidden or otherwise inaccessible hoard. 311 Chatterton’s construction of fake manuscripts imitated the obscurity of antiquity, the mysterious allure of the found artefact, and the implied scholarly ordering, narrativity and satisfaction of historiographical page layouts such as Rowley’s numismatics. Like a visual apostrophe, or a speaking gallery, the hundreds of

308 Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 43-5. 309 Ibid., 135. 310 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian (Walker, 1835); Walpole, "Preface to Second Edition." 311 Groom, "Thomas Chatterton Was a Forger," 286-8.

,/ #

handmade folio pages that comprise the apparent antiquity of Rowley’s spurious history teach readers, or handlers, how to feel, think and behave in relation to these artefacts, and the cultural goldmine they supposedly contained.

Chatterton’s manuscripts staged for handlers the direct sensory experience of touching and viewing materials of great age and scholarly significance. Bringing the childhood excitement of treasure maps to mind, drawn in invisible lemon-juice ink, or dirtied and burned at the edges to simulate age and wear, Rowley’s parchment and vellum manuscripts are blackened and roughened in what Chatterton himself described as his technique to “antiquate”, or give the appearance of antiquity.312

Adhered to the composite page of “The owter Walle of the Castle” (Figure 3.1) for example, are two smaller pieces of paper – the one on the left comprising the rounded ink-strokes of Rowley’s Middle English script, with a supposed copy of a Saxon wall painting collected by Rowley below, and the one on the right, the original ground plans for “Brystowe” castle, again sketched by Rowley. Without yet knowing much more about this folio, the sense of handling something old and precious, something worth understanding, is emphasised by the illegibility of the antique script, the inscrutability of the blotched and cramped line-drawn figures, and the medievalesque geometry and tracery of axes and ramparts, concentric circles and squares in the castle’s architectural footprint. His material devices support this aura of time-worn venerability. At the same time, they nourish the handler’s sense of engaging in a scholarly and authoritative antiquarian conversation.

312 John Dix, The Life of Thomas Chatterton, Including His Unpublished Poems and Correspondence (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co. Paternoster Row, 1837), 48, footnote 31.

-& )

Figure 3.1. “The owter Walle of the Castle” (folio detail)313

Chatterton wanted to convince his erudite readers through the representation of historical research practices applied to his spurious, precious antiquities. The layered collection and juxtaposition of salvaged paper scraps, and the differences in paper colours that highlight their collection and preservation at different times and places, and their location in a volume of other such apparently ancient and collectable folio pages suggest the cultural significance of the works. Even the contrast between the “original” Rowleyan and “modern” copperplate texts and the pencilled annotations of the fragments “a” and “b” speak of the need for scholarly transcription and categorisation, as well as other curatorial and critical practices. Imagined writerly and scholarly hands and minds jostle for primacy in these forms, in the suggested cultural value of a medieval manuscript handwritten and “conceived as the form of production and creation”, 314 and in the

313 Thomas Chatterton, The Owter Walle of the Castle, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766A-031. British Library. 314 Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 38.

-' #

intimate historiographical markings and other critical interactions imposed upon the imaginary text by equally spurious antiquarian professional hands.

Chatterton’s Rowley manuscripts speak to the literary relationships of empirical culture that valued documentary and testamentary evidence and handwritten manuscripts as more authoritative than printed materials. 315 In the Rowley works, for example, Chatterton drew on historical and geographical texts with classical roots, as well as contemporary antiquarian and historical sources, to add scholarly, historiographic texture to the symbolic truthfulness of his fabricated material remains. Through his illustrative avatar Rowley, Chatterton imitated the visual techniques of early modern historical, antiquarian and chorographic book illustrations, annotations and layouts, as well as the early modern scholarly technologies represented by commonplace books. Inspired by his reading of Camden’s Britannia,316 a chorographic work that mapped Britain’s history, topography and artefactual remains together in a project to “supplant papal history with national history”, 317 Camden’s work contained illustrations representing physical evidence of antiquity, such as monuments and coins laid out in numismatic tables (Figure 3.2). Chatterton learned that he could work upon the core beliefs held by his educated readers through the authenticating notations and page layouts of historiographic convention.

315 Groom, "Fragments, Reliques, & Mss: Chatterton and Percy." 316 Camden’s Britannia was first published in Latin in 1586. For the Rowley works, Chatterton mined both Camden’s 1695 and 1722 English translations for raw historical data, antiquarian imagery and historiographic formats. William Camden, Camden's Britannia, 1695: A Facsimile of the 1695 Edition Published by Edmund Gibson [Translated from the Latin], with an Introduction by Stuart Piggott and a Bibliographical Note by Gwyn Walters, ed. Edmund Gibson (Newton Abbott: David and Charles Reprints, 1971). 317 Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 141.

-( )

Figure 3.2. Numismatic layout in Camden’s Britannia (1695) 318

Figure 3.3. “Coynes in Yellow Rolle by T. Rowleie” (folio detail)319

318 Camden, Camden's Britannia, 1695: A Facsimile of the 1695 Edition Published by Edmund Gibson [Translated from the Latin], with an Introduction by Stuart Piggott and a Bibliographical Note by Gwyn Walters, "Nummi Britannici", Tabula ii, 88. 319 Thomas Chatterton, Coynes in Yellow Rolle by T. Rowleie, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766B-058. British Library.

-) #

Chatterton’s imitation of these layouts, and the physical nature of the evidence illustrated, demonstrate his understanding of the token-like importance of illustrations in early modern chorographic and historical works, not only for mapping the known and newly discovered world, but because collecting them on the page gave them meaning and made them more authentic. Chatterton imagined Rowley playing at transcribing and documenting the antique past, despite the anachronism of a fifteenth-century priest using Early Modern curatorial collecting and publishing techniques in his medieval documentation of Bristol’s Saxon and Roman treasures. For illustrations of the ancient coins in William Canynge’s “Cabynet”, 320 Chatterton cribbed ideas directly from Camden. For example, Rowley’s numismatic sketches of Saxon and Roman “Coynes in Yellow Rolle by T. Rowleie” (Figure 3.3) are shown in connected pairs with obverse and reverse views, including the addition of a numbering system. The little Saxon English and Latin legends and quirky mint characters are Chatterton’s own, but his page layouts were a fraudulent performance of the page proofs of an authoritative antiquarian textbook.

Chatterton’s experimentation with symbolic literary tokens extended beyond the construction of pseudo-medieval manuscripts. Between 1768 and 1770, Chatterton wrote eight love poems to the “Beauteous” Eleanor Hoyland, impersonating his friend John Baker, who was her actual admirer and had presumably commissioned the fraud.321 The poems include odes, sonnets and an acrostic to the “Empress” of Baker’s heart, his “fair Angel”, “Seraphic Maid”, “heavnly Goddess” and other such banal Petrarchan forms of amorous address.322 The sentiments expressed were of Chatterton’s design, if not the actual ink and paper on which they were written and presented to the young woman. But the sonnets are awash with hyperbole, describing Hoyland’s assets in terms that make her “all the other Beauties of the Day outshine”, and whose “thousand Beauties that adorn the Face… [and] “whose beauteous Charms/ Might court the world to rush at once to Arms”.323 She is a Georgian Helen of Troy, described by Chatterton in trite and repetitive verbal formulations that parrot clichéd eighteenth-century metaphors of devotion, sexual longing and emotional pain. Chatterton similarly employed stereotypical pastoral

320 "Yellow Rolle. Of the Auntient Forme of Monies Carefullie Gotten for Maystre Wm. Canynge by Mee Tho: Rowleie," 64, l.32. In all likelihood in imitation of Ole Worm’s original cabinet of curiosity. Sabrina Richards, "The World in a Cabinet," The Scientist (2012), https://www.the-scientist.com/foundations/the- world-in-a-cabinet-1600s-41184. 321 Chatterton, "To the Beauteous Miss Hoyland," 257. 322 "Ode to Miss Hoyland," 158, l.19; "Acrostic on Miss Eleanor Hoyland," 159, l.11; "To Miss Hoyland I," 160, i.17, 27; "To Miss Hoyland Ii," 161, l.22. 323 "To Miss Hoyland I," 160, ll.9-18.

-* )

metaphors to express Baker’s lovelorn loneliness as he stole “softly to the Grove…singing out my sad complaint”, and pathetic fallacy to express the “wild and dreary dells” and the “blustering Gale” of his alternately depressed and stormy feeling states.324 Notwithstanding the lover’s rhetoric, Chatterton’s sonnets and metaphorical gifts to Hoyland were a fraudulent campaign to compel the young woman to love, on Baker’s behalf, through the social and emotional symbolism of handwritten love letters and gifted tokens of desire and promise.

Callow behaviour and Petrarchan banality aside, Chatterton’s use of sonnet, ode and acrostic forms for these poems demonstrates his cultural awareness of the long-standing and seemingly inevitable symbolic function of certain poetic forms in the game of courtship. These forms and their vocabulary of subjectivity and desire were useful to Chatterton as a means of declaring and fostering love,325 and indeed for attempting to elicit a similar feeling in Hoyland – not for himself, but for Baker. In this case, the poetic forms themselves declared their romantic intention. Through the tangible symbolic form of the love letter, Chatterton and Baker together staged an encounter with Hoyland that, through the gift of the letters themselves, and the rhetorical declarations they contained, they hoped would prompt a return from the young woman. They relied on the certain knowledge that Hoyland would understand the cultural meaning implicit within courtly forms, without necessarily even closely reading them. Chatterton sometimes puns on Hoyland’s name (for example, nature made an “Hoyland” 326 (island) of loveliness in you…), and even jokes about the stereotypical forms of love sonnets. Assuming Chatterton was committed to helping Baker’s campaign, we have to assume he thought Hoyland would not notice his parodies. This demonstrates an appalling degree of chauvinism on Chatterton’s part, and an equal measure of cultural illiteracy and blindness on hers. Sadly, history does not give us Miss Hoyland’s response. The young men simply relied on her mistaken trust in the revelatory honesty and promise of the letters, for their plan hinged on the commercial nature of the gift exchange, whereby in accepting, she would feel an obligation to respond to the letters in kind, “admit the Dart,/ And own a mutual flame”.327

324 "Ode to Miss Hoyland," 158, ll.1, 8, 13-14. 325 Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. 326 Chatterton, "To Miss Hoyland I," 160, l. 4. 327 "Ode to Miss Hoyland," 158, ll.20-21.

-+ #

Chatterton’s fascination with concrete poetics is particularly evident in his rhetorical use of the love token in these poems. In rather stereotypical rhetorical style, in “To Miss Hoyland with a Present”, Chatterton figuratively expresses Baker’s emotional devotion and constancy in love as a physical chain to which he is tied to her.328 However, as the title of the poem suggests, the conspirators also planned to represent and reinforce this bond in tangible token form, with the gift of a necklace or bracelet. “Accept fair Nymph this token of my Love”, Chatterton writes, proceeding to unpack all the expected wealth of symbolic meaning relating to this token, the material symbol of love that acts as offering, promise, trophy and entrapment, all wrapped up in one miniature but metaphorically burdened package. As a chain on her wrist, he muses, the material form becomes a symbol of his trustworthiness, such that the sun itself should not “on his course more constant run,/ And cheer the Universe with coming Day,/ Than I in pleasing Chains of conquest bound/ Adore”.329 A little confusingly, by the end of these lines, the bracelet has transformed into the heavy but welcome bindings upon a captured heart.

The point of the simple token is its meaningful role in the seductive process, even when these sonnets appear cynical and unattractively condescending. In his verse “Journal 6th”, Chatterton writes to Baker at some length and with crude, satirical humour, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, comparing different amorous masculine types including the lover, swain, buck and rake.330 For Chatterton, love is not real but a “Phantom of the Mind”, for the lover exists “without his reasons Aid” in the alternate delights and despair of his object’s “Shadowy Toys”. Whining swains are “fit for nothing but their Chains”, and the buck is an over-sexed “Beast” who “thinks…his parts/ Were not designed to conquer hearts”. Even the complex rake, who apparently has it best because he successfully avoids matrimony, “thinks the almost dearest part/ In all the Body is the Heart/ Without it rapture cannot rise/ Nor Pleasure wanton in the Eyes”.331 Note that the heart is almost the dearest part, but not quite. Love is not real to Chatterton. Nowhere in this is a mature symbolic representation of the fully realised beloved. Instead, the texts are the straightforward literary projection of immature masculine desire.

Like his stereotypical male lover-types, the love sonnet was a well-rehearsed performance of feeling, staged for the social purpose of receiving something in return,

328 "To Miss Hoyland with a Present," 163, l.9. 329 Ibid., 163, ll.1, 7-9. 330 Chatterton, "Journal 6th," 369-71. 331 Ibid., 369-71, ll. 175, 78, 83, 202, 31, 37-8, 23-5.

-, )

whether that was emotional recognition, marital security, or sexual satisfaction. In his mind, Chatterton was operating in a man’s world. As Ilona Bell suggests in Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, the Petrarchan-style lover tends always to be male, and the listener female. Even in what she terms “pseudo-Petrarchan” love poetry which “uses the conventional tropes of Petrarchan idolatry to conceal an underlying persuasive or seductive purpose”, the subject of the poem is still masculine desire.332 Hoyland, the constant object of the lover’s struggle between unrequited love and fleshly desire, is no more than “the object or reflection of male desire – the veil or slate upon which male subjectivity and male imagination inscribes itself”.333 As Chatterton cries out to her, on Baker’s behalf, in full narcissistic flight:

Oh Hoyland! Heavnly Goddess! Angel! Saint! Words are too weak thy mighty worth to paint! Thou best, compleatest work that Nature made Thou art my Substance, and I am thy Shade! Possesst with Thee I joyfully would go Thro’ the loud Tempest, and the depth of woe From Thee alone my Being I derive One beauteous smile from Thee makes all my hopes alive.334

Although idealised, she is at the same time reduced to a substance, almost a substrate, from which he hopes to reform himself into something less than a “shade” or shadow, should he “possess” her in heart and body. The highly limited range of responses available to her, like all women thus addressed, are essentially either “Yes I’ll wear your Chain”, or “No thanks”. Importantly, in terms of understanding Chatterton’s use of tokens, these two possible responses are inscribed in the poems’ texts in the expressive oxymorons he uses, again in standard Petrarchan style, to express Hoyland’s countervailing allure and resistance, for “In thy Smiles, I live am free,/ When Thou frownest, I must die”. 335 However, they are also inscribed in the material purpose of the love token, the bracelet, which the conspirators hope she will feel compelled to accept, to try out upon her wrist, either in reality or metaphorically, and therefore in turn will be persuaded to give the gift of love.

332 Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, 3-4. 333 Ibid., 4. 334 Chatterton, "To Miss Hoyland I," 160, ll.27-34. 335 "To Miss Hoyland Iii," 162, ll.19-20.

-- #

Testamentary consensus

Chatterton’s engagement with his readers and viewers was more than a simple aesthetic invitation to appreciate his poetry or illustrations. The persuasive possibilities inherent in the exchange of tokens was a vital functional component of his material poetics. Using evidence from the Rowley manuscripts, as well as Chatterton’s mock testamentary will, this section argues that the creative purpose of these documents was to build consensus with particular men of Chatterton’s circle, and a kind of obligation to act on the meaning and value of his creations, to serve his ambitious personal and professional purposes.

Chatterton’s gift exchange of symbolic documents facilitated the process of building consensus, and a sense of obligation within his readers. He encouraged his readers not only to physically touch the works and affectively be touched by them, but to be moved to respond in some predetermined way. For example, through tales, poems and letters concerning priest, poet and historian Thomas Rowley’s relationship with his patron William Canynge, and their joint antiquarian and scholarly projects, Chatterton constructed a narrative parable of the ways he hoped his own prospective patrons would value and respond to the Rowley manuscripts.

Jon Klancher’s and Markman Ellis’s findings on English reading audiences and the London coffee-house discourse of the mid to late eighteenth century provides an invaluable historical context for the networking, convival quality of Chatterton’s material style, making sense of what might otherwise seem either critically anachronistic on my part, or grandiose and unrealistic on Chatterton’s.336 His audience was geographically, socioeconomically and chronologically mixed. It comprised middle-class Bristol antiquarians William Barrett and George Catcott, London antiquarian and cultural critic Horace Walpole, a variety of Bristol and London publishing professionals, Chatterton’s adolescent spouting friends from the Juvenile Club, as well as, to some degree, the newly emerging middle-class reading public, as purchasers of the journals and periodicals that occasionally published Chatterton’s works. As Klancher argues, this period:

336 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832; Ellis, "Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London."

-. )

many writers to shape the interpretive and ideological frameworks of audiences they would speak to. They carved out new readerships and transformed old ones.337

Writing in this period could therefore be seen as a potentially radical act, imbued as it was in the minds of his contemporaries with the power to shape readers’ beliefs and responses. This sense of possibility and of cultural transformation arose from what Ellis described as the lifeworld of early to mid-eighteenth-century London’s coffee-houses and libraries, with their discourses of social equality and cultural improvement, through critical reading and the conversation of similarly cultured men. 338 In this context, Chatterton’s emulation of styles of intellectual address and his confidence to actively engage the reader makes sense.

When readers are addressed directly by the writer, Garrett Stewart argues, they are drafted into the text in a way that “marks the site of an implicated response”,339 one that insists, for example, on the reader engaging with the Rowley manuscripts as though they were historically real and culturally significant. In his own and Rowley’s voices, Chatterton variously addressed the reader, imagining different kinds of responses from them, depending on how they were subjectively petitioned within the text, such that, as Stewart speculates, the reader might be:

partly invoked like a muse manqué, partly written to as in a letter, sometimes chastened as if from pulpit or roadside tombstone, now conversed with as if in attendance, now alluded to in absentia and in prospect (“the reader” rather than “dear reader”), occasionally hectored as if by a courtroom prosecutor, here elevated to surrogate patron, there merely patronised, often bowed to, sometimes browbeaten, and everywhere, in a word, conscripted.340

Chatterton’s sensory and visual techniques in the manuscripts operated similarly to this apostrophic rhetoric in “hailing” the reader, who is, as Stewart points, out “the only ‘real’ thing in attendance, for all else is signifiers on a page”. Such direct address and nomination, Stewart argues, annexes the reader’s “receptive consciousness to textual subjectivity”.341 In other words, by turning the reader into the narrator, they become the subjective focal point and protagonist of the story. Chatterton likewise took any

337 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832, 3. 338 Ellis, "Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London." 339 Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 13, 27. 340 Ibid., 27. 341 Ibid., 13.

-/ #

opportunity, textual, visual or tangible, and in a range of voices, to fascinate, cajole, embarrass or hector his readers into consensus with him.

To this end, Chatterton constructed the tangible historical manuscripts his readers wanted to see and touch, and then wrote himself into those physical objects as the lucky discoverer, the antiquarian scholar and the literary critic, as well as giving himself voice through his own medieval muse and avatar, Rowley. In Rowley’s cultural commentaries, visual annotations and historiographic layouts, Chatterton instilled himself deeper into the medieval drama with what Taylor describes as a deep delight in role-playing.342 For example, as we saw in Chapter 1 in the prologue “Epistle” to William Canynge at the start of the epic tragedy “Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude”, Rowley speaks directly to the audience about his own authorial deficiencies, in the full expectation that despite “Requyrynge what I doe notte nowe possess”, he can in confidence leave the task of apprehending and correcting his poetic expression to the immense and discerning imagination of his learned audience: “To you I leave the taske; I kenne your myghte/ Wyll make mie faultes, mie meynte of faultes, be less”.343 Although nominally that audience is Canynge and other powerful and learned men of Rowley’s sociable medieval Bristol, Rowley is also addressing and engaging the implied reader, and praising their understanding by association.

Role-playing as cultural critic of the Rowley works, Chatterton used his own and Rowley’s more benevolent and romantic vocal character as devices to petition the reader in different ways. While he gave Rowley the job of verbally charming the reader, Chatterton himself took on a more complex and cathartic persona within the texts, with a communicative mode that ranged from collegiality to sarcasm, presumably in order to engender within the reader an embarrassed recognition of the works’ intrinsic value. Not only glossing the difficult words, Chatterton annotates Rowley’s medieval writing in ways that reinforce the cultural worth of the works, and his own critical superiority in relation to the reader. For example, in a “Brief Account of William Cannings”, Chatterton writes with contrary understatement: “I think this piece abounds with more true Poetry and Sentiment, than is commonly to be met with in Monkish Writers, Tho’ much inferior to the generality of Rowlies Compositions”.344 In his annotations to Rowley’s ballad, the

342 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 75-8. 343 [Requiring what I do not now possess][See footnote 137] Chatterton, "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude," 176, ll. 38-40. 344 "A Brief Account of William Cannings: From the Life of Thomas Rowlie Preeste," Footnote annotation, 54.

.& )

“Bristowe Tragedy”, Chatterton simultaneously promotes his own intellectual powers, and questions contemporary critical opinion on medieval literature and his readers’ independence of mind, through his editorial decision to “insert the whole as a Specimen of the Poetry of those Days, being greatly superior to what we have been taught to believe”. 345 In a final scholarly dig, Chatterton concludes, in a tone of paternalistic sarcasm,

that if Gentlemen of Fortune wou’d take the Trouble of looking over the Manuscripts in their Possession, which are only valued for their Antiquity, it might possibly throw Light upon many obscure Passages in and help to establish a more Concise History of our Native Country, than even Camden’s Britannia.346

He reminds gentleman readers of their due diligence, encouraging active appreciation of the historical significance of Rowley’s works, and the possibility that manuscript gems containing Britain’s unknown history might be hidden in their drawers and libraries, if only scholars took the time to look, as Chatterton claims he has done.

Rowley’s address, on the other hand, enlisted the reader’s passionate curiosity and subjectivity as an engaged spectator, drawing on the Georgian reader’s emergent visual literacy. In a lyrical paean, for example, Rowley cries out to the imagined witness of Canynge’s church-building prowess, at risk of entirely missing the spectacle due to their understandable focus on the narrative of their own life – “Stay curyous Traveller and pass not bye/ Until this fetive Pile astounde thine Eye/…Thou seest this Maystrie of a human hand”.347 Encoded in this address is the notion that the reader is “apparently otherwise engaged”, until Rowley anxiously and enthusiastically calls them to stop and look, with astonished admiration, at Canynge’s church-building prowess. The reader is thereby encoded as the new “hero of a narrative”, 348 eyewitness and affective responder to Chatterton’s story of Rowley, Canynge and his spectacular church. In this way, Chatterton called on his readers, through Rowley’s direct apostrophic address, to engage with the manuscripts as valuable aesthetic objects.

Chatterton’s inscriptive techniques, particularly his annotations, formal markings and layouts on the manuscript page, operated similarly to such apostrophic text, in terms of

345 "Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin," Footnote annotation no.1, 6. 346 Ibid., Footnote annotation no. 5, 20. 347 [Stay curious traveler and do not pass by/ Until this beautiful building has astonished your eye/…Here you will see the mastery of a human hand] Thomas Chatterton, "A Discorse on Brystowe by Thos. Rowleie Wrotten and Gotten at the Desire of Wm: Canynge Esqur," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterto, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 99, ll. 191-9. 348 Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, 38.

.' #

inviting consensus with the reader concerning the scholarly authenticity of the manuscripts, if not the outright coercion that Groom suggests. 349 Chatterton’s manuscripts, Groom argues, were distinct from Macpherson’s spurious oral tradition in that “calligraphy, orthography, annotation and provenance thus became part of the authenticating project”, which gave the Rowley works “a distinctive cadence and character as physical remains”. 350 Furthermore, Groom argues, Chatterton footnoted everything to the point that at times his annotations “drowned out the poetry”, because “the reader was bullied into seeing in them merely the sign of ancient poetry: the polyvalency of archaisms and footnotes. Annotation was ostentatious: to conspicuously display erudition served to authenticate the poems within the discourses of scholarship”.351 While there is no doubt that Chatterton’s historiographic notations were a feature of his material poetics, and symbolic of scholarly authenticity, it is perplexing that Groom reads this display as aggressive, even coercive.

Chatterton was aware of the popularity of literary hoaxing such as Macpherson’s “Ossian” epics, and Walpole’s claim to have translated The Castle of Otranto, and it is evident he hoped also to benefit professionally from his own constructed imitations of precious historical objects. But he did not have the kind of power that Groom suggests; he was not adhering to a particular cultural discourse, and nor did he have a conscious and consistent plan of literary fraudulence.352 He was an adolescent opportunist, whose fraudulent manuscripts and broader material style were shaped by his immature notion of what constituted desirable consumer objects. Luisa Calè argues that in the “composite” pages of mid-century bibliographic experiments, like Chatterton’s manuscripts, visual devices such as asterisks, annotations and footnotes disrupted the reader’s experience of reading, reducing the text to “a series of aphorisms or captions”.353 They highlight over and again the fact of materiality, antiquity and indecipherability. In the disruption, they also highlight the reading experience itself, and the antiquarian’s attempt to infuse narrative meaning into otherwise meaningless objects, thereby creating “an imagined past which is available for consumption”. 354 Chatterton’s historiography was a means of inviting his readers into a subjective awareness of his work, his precious historical

349 Groom, "Thomas Chatterton Was a Forger," 276, 83. 350 "Romanticism and Forgery," 1629. 351 "Thomas Chatterton Was a Forger," 283. 352 "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity," 43. 353 Luisa Calè, "Blake, Young, and the Poetics of the Composite Page," Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2017): 456. 354 Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 143.

.( )

objects, and of inviting exactly the kind of scholarly interest and engagement that the annotations themselves demonstrated.

Given his immaturity and desperate professional insecurities, Chatterton clearly felt he needed to resort to mild visual trickery and occasional fear tactics as a persuasive tool for building consensus with his readers, concerning the cultural meaning and value of his creations. The most striking example of Chatterton’s historiographic sleights of hand are his visual transcripts of Rowley’s spurious architectural drawings (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4. Folio showing Chatterton’s spurious “original” and “transcript” versions of the “Backe of yGuarders Hall with its Towers”355

355 Thomas Chatterton, The Backe of the Guarders Halle with Its Towers, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766A-035. British Library.

.) #

Figure 3.4 is a single representative folio from the “Bristol Castle” 356 series of writings and drawings, showing an elevation of the back of Bristol Castle’s guard’s hall. Adhered to this folio are two smaller, separate pieces of paper, each with a line drawing, one far easier to make out than the other. If you peer into the murky patina of the upper drawing, rough features emerge that match those found in the drawing below, such as an arched doorway, vertical columns, the tower, and statues. With close consideration, it becomes clear that these are drawings of the same building. “Bristol Castle” comprises over twenty illustrations, each one formally laid out in similarly dual, adjacent terms, one apparently small and old, dirty and poorly drawn, and the other larger and clearer, and executed with far better geometry and intricate detail. Supposedly, each folio juxtaposes one of Rowley’s original drawings of architectural elevations and cityscapes from medieval Bristol in his day, with Chatterton’s contemporary eighteenth-century scholarly transcript of the original. In fact, they are all an imaginative fabrication in paper, glue and pen, made by Chatterton.

Chatterton’s comparative gallery relied on viewer distraction, discouraging them from looking too closely or too long at the “originals” lest they spy out fakeness. The eye cannot rest on Rowley’s “old” drawing, however, because of its partial erasure, and instead the eye is drawn to the easier lines of Chatterton’s transcription. The clean black lines, hatched decorativeness, and two-dimensional simplicity of Chatterton’s transcription offers an easier reading of Rowley’s history, and at the same time distracts the reader from the patent fakeness of the “old”. The eye is taken in and seduced by evidence of antiquity but does not rest long enough to lose faith. By creating new “transcripts” to juxtapose with the “originals” they represent, by simple visual association, the supposedly older drawings take on a patina and mystery of age, and the supposedly newer ones, an aura of contemporary freshness. And perhaps, too, the dramatic Romanesque gate and portcullis, the decorative stonework and impossibly large Anglo-Saxon wall discs, and the fine, energetic cross-hatching all reflect some vibrancy and vitality back into the past, illuminating Rowley’s nebulous and ambiguous visual imagery.

Taylor proposes that these drawings were part of his technique for authenticating the Rowley history, along with his invented Middle English diction and forged manuscripts.

356 "[Bristol Castle]," 118-9.

.* )

“All three ways share a common factor”, Taylor argues, “density of imagining, something akin to what literary criticism calls verisimilitude. When we wish to persuade ourselves of the reality of imagined worlds, of fantasies, or dreams, we thicken the imagining, persuading ourselves, as it were, by sheer weight of detail”.357 Such sensory detail was most certainly a persuasive technique that Chatterton made use of in the conscription of his readers. However, he was perhaps less concerned to represent historical reality than to entice and enlist the reader with the possibility of viewing or touching history.

Chatterton wanted his readers to accept the visual experience being offered by the fakery of the Rowley manuscripts as historical documents. Significantly, in a footnote annotation to Rowley’s illustration of a stained-glass church window in the multimodal text, “The Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis”, Chatterton notes that this drawing is “One of these but I presume not equal to the original Rowley has drawn in his usual rough manner, and is here copied”.358 This annotation expresses the implicit assumption in Chatterton’s comparative historiographic technique, that one drawing is Rowley’s “rough” version, and that the other is Chatterton’s better copy. Rowley’s original sketches are badly done not because he was a careless sketcher, but because they are old. However, in this aesthetic construction there exists a logical problem that he wanted the viewer to ignore, by suspending their disbelief, namely the assumption that antique is synonymous with rough. Chatterton elides his historicist technique by personalising it, so that instead of referring to the Romanesque or Gothic period’s apparently habitual unrefined sketchiness, he makes it “Rowley’s usual rough manner”, which is impossible to disprove. Rowley’s manner is indisputable, and we are as viewers expected to take his style as exemplary, in the same way that Bristol’s cultural and literary heritage is meant to stand in as a nationalist beacon for all of Britain.

Chatterton’s material poetics in his contemporary works demonstrates, perhaps even more than this aspect of his medievalism, the ambitious lengths to which Chatterton was willing to go for professional advancement. His mock “last Will and Testament of me Thomas Chatterton in the City of Bristol”359 exemplifies the way Chatterton put particular cultural values and beliefs concerning documentary forms to use as a persuasive tool,

357 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 49-50. 358 Chatterton, "The Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie," Footnote annotation no.14, 147. 359 "The Last Will and Testament of Me Thomas Chatterton," 502, l. 63.

.+ #

implementing the performance of different kinds of truthfulness to elicit desirable responses from select readers.

Drawing on his experience as an apprentice legal scrivener, Chatterton wrote his will and left it on the desk of his employer, Mr John Lambert. As Meyerstein describes in intricate physical detail, it was “written on small quarto paper, 81/2 by 61/2 inches, possibly the leaves of a copybook”.360 Its literary contents, including the introductory statement that “All this is wrote bet 11 & 12 oclock Saturday in the utmost Distress of Mind”, 361 comprise a paean to his own “great Genius”, 362 fifty-four lines of verse alternately praising and taking satirical swipes at various Bristol personalities. His will proper includes a hyperbolic epitaph, and a humorous set of bequests, including “all my Vigor and Fire of Youth to Mr George Catcott being sensible he is in most want of it”, and “the young Ladys all the Letters they have had from me assuring them that they need be under no Apprehensions from the Appearance of my Ghost for I dye for none of them”.363 Most significant in terms of the manipulative professional purpose of this work is an “Item” that amounts to a suicide note – stating that his death “will happen tomorrow night before 8 oClock being the feast of the resurrection”.364 After such forewarning, Chatterton leaves a “Codicil” that reads: “It is my Pleasure that Mr. Cocking and Miss Farley print this my Will the first Saturday after my Death”.365

Chatterton’s biographer Meyerstein, and Taylor, the editor of the Complete Works, are of one mind when it comes to Chatterton’s persistent desire “to make a stir in the world”. 366 But where Meyerstein reiterated the romantic conviction that Chatterton committed suicide in 1770, Taylor was under no such illusion. Despite how soon after its construction Chatterton did die, Taylor asserts in his commentary on the “Will” that it was “a literary document of mixed genre – satiric epistle and mock will…. [and it] is not clearly understood unless both this immediate personal cause and this literary aspect of it are allowed to outweigh whatever relationship it might have to C’s subsequent death”. He convincingly argues that this piece of writing was a manipulative attempt to alarm Lambert so much that he would “free C from his apprenticeship”.367 Presumably the

360 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 337. 361 Chatterton, "The Last Will and Testament of Me Thomas Chatterton," 501, prefix. 362 Ibid., 501, l.4. 363 Ibid., 504-5, ll. 111-12, 47-9. 364 Ibid., 503, l.71-2. 365 Ibid., 505. 366 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 334. 367 Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 1059.

., )

young writer wanted to move to London to take up lodgings and more satisfactory new employment as a journalist on Grub Street. If this was the case, then Chatterton was successful in his professional goal, as Lambert let him go immediately.

There is some evidence that Chatterton would have encountered mock wills in local periodical publications of the time and imitated the form. Meyerstein lists several such publications and claims that Chatterton may have written at least one of them himself, based on the similarity between the will’s penultimate request that its publication was intended to distribute “my fame to the four winds” – and metaphorically similar, ambitious statements Chatterton certainly made from early childhood onwards.368 The highly curated legalese and familiar format or layout of the work reflected a culture that valued legal documents as more inherently truthful and believable than other written forms – not only to Chatterton, but to the majority of his Georgian readers. The significance therefore lay both in the words and the particular format uses, with the perhaps signed or stamped as further proof of authenticity and veracity.

The manipulative trickery and fear tactics essential to this work therefore lay in Chatterton’s assurance of his employer’s responsive cultural susceptibility to the material testamentary form. Despite the work’s complex, and likely confusing to Lambert, generic literary mix, he would have clearly recognised the format as that of a legal will, with all its connotations of statutory truthfulness. No doubt Lambert was as intelligent as most readers, and he would have been aware of both the generic mixture this work presented to ear and eye, as well as the unlikelihood that “utmost Distress” was its author’s predominant state of mind in putting pen to paper. The risk of not believing the threats contained within a statutory statement, however, and the potential for loss of life and exposure to liability as Chatterton’s employer, despite the readily apparent satire, was entirely too much for Lambert. He released Chatterton from indenture, because the material form of the work as a legal document required belief from him and effected an appropriate response, despite the irrefutable evidence within the same document that the work and its intentions were anything but truthful. Chatterton therefore used both the formal and textual qualities of his work, and the associated symbolic and semantic

368 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 334. His claim is based on the distinct resonance of the penultimate request in the “Will” that the publication ought to distribute “my fame to the four winds”, and Chatterton’s earlier statement about his fame and trumpeting his name about.

.- #

collision between testament and satire, belief and disbelief, to enforce a kind of agreement with his reader, and thereby to control their response for his own professional advantage.

Disorderly books

As demonstrated in the previous section, Chatterton was capable of applying the intercommunicative characteristic of his material style in an opportunistic and manipulative capacity, as a way to achieve his professional aspirations. He knew he needed help from better educated and more professionally well-connected men of letters than himself in order to achieve the literary success he desired. Chatterton therefore devised a brilliant and certainly eccentric plan to leverage the small-scale exchange of his literary fragments into a larger exchange of his sole claim to authorship for his patrons’ interest, co-authorship, and far greater access to publishing networks and possibilities. Consequently, this final section of the chapter reads these manuscripts as the incomplete and fragmentary components of a disordered book, or books.369 It argues that Chatterton circulated his fragments to particular members of his coterie – namely William Barrett, Horace Walpole and James Dodsley – in the hope that if these fragments were not published outright, they would be reinscribed into authorially composite, extra-illustrated books, either way effectively fulfilling his dream of being published.

Luisa Calè’s analysis of what she calls “book disorders” and the practice of “extra- illustration” in the mid-eighteenth century offers useful insights into Chatterton’s irregular bibliographic practices, and how this book completion process might have taken place. Calè argues that cooperative and constitutive eighteenth-century bibliographical and authorial practices gave rise to what she calls “book disorders”, usefully considering how a book might behave symbolically when unbound – that is, disassembled – then altered and reassembled in a new composite form. She “explores the book as a composite form through practices that subvert and dismantle its bibliographic codes, dislocate its orders, and reassemble and reinscribe one book within another”, the process “at the heart of extra-illustration”.370 This is a useful way of conceptualising Chatterton’s manuscripts, that in their incomplete forms and aesthetic lies an invitation to the viewer to discover “the potential for a dynamic and unique personal object”.371

369 Calè, "Extra-Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page." 370 "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page," n.p. 371 "Blake and the Literary Galleries," in Blake and Conflict (Springer, 2009), 194.

.. )

Chatterton scholars have dwelt at some length on what Chatterton believed he was doing, in editorial terms, in constructing this elaborate literary hoax, with its complex layering of literary, critical, historical and historiographical treatments, and its range of role-playing protagonists and ventriloquised voices. Findings by Ian Haywood and Michael F. Suarez, 372 which focus on Chatterton’s technological and professional engagement with emerging possibilities in contemporary London periodical publishing media, are useful in this context. These readings appreciate the importance of Chatterton’s ambition, if not entirely appreciating the full possibilities and significance of his material techniques and the fragmentary incompletion of his works to his overall style and its creative purposes.

Both researchers seek to find discrete publishable groupings or formats within Chatterton’s manuscripts, and to propose a kind of internally generated, conscious and essentially traditional publication strategy for the young writer. Suarez argues that “Chatterton approached the business of getting into print with remarkable inventiveness and acumen”. Citing evidence from correspondence and Chatterton’s publication record, Suarez claims that he initiated relationships with a number of London publishers, “playing the role of the self-assured author”, and from whom “he had good reason to expect at least mild approbation”. 373 James Dodsley, proprietor of one of London’s wealthiest publishing businesses, was Chatterton’s most prestigious contact, and Suarez argues effectively for the “strength of Dodsley’s presence in Chatterton’s consciousness as the publisher for the Rowley forgeries”. Dodsley was attractive to Chatterton because he published Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, as well as a 12-volume Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) which, according to Meyerstein, Chatterton had read. Dodsley published many other antiquarian poetry collections in the mid-century, including works by Horace Walpole.374

Entertainingly, Suarez gives the probable cause of the cessation of this professional relationship as Chatterton’s entirely ill-conceived and immature letter to Dodsley, dated 15 February 1769, in which he “overestimates his value” to the publishing house and attempts extortion to solve his adolescent cashflow problems.375 Chatterton writes to James Dodsley: “that I can procure Copys of several ancient Poems; and an Interlude,

372 Haywood, "Chatterton's Plans for the Publication of the Forgery."; Suarez, "What Thomas Knew: Chatterton and the Business of Getting into Print." 373 Suarez, "What Thomas Knew: Chatterton and the Business of Getting into Print," 83-4. 374 Ibid., 88-9; Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 192. 375 Suarez, "What Thomas Knew: Chatterton and the Business of Getting into Print," 86.

./ #

perhaps the oldest dramatic Piece extent; wrote by one Rowley, a Priest in Bristol, who lived in the Reigns of Henry 6th. And Edward 4th.” However, over-confident and immature, he writes again two months later on 15 February 1769, that:

Having intelligence that the Tragedy of Aelle, was in being, after a long and laborious Search, I was so happy, as to attain a Sight of it. Struck with the beautys of it, I endeavoured to obtain a Copy…to send to you; but the Present Possessor absolutely denies, to give me one, unless I give him a Guinea for a Consideration. As I am unable to procure such a sum…I have made bold to apply to you…I am far from having any mercenary Views for myself in this Affair, And, was I able, would print it on my own Risque. It is a perfect Tragedy…376

Clearly, Chatterton’s inventiveness did not limit itself to creative writing, nor did it cease when straightforward publication of his Rowley manuscripts through Dodsley was no longer possible.

Haywood acknowledges that it was “highly unlikely Chatterton believed his vision would ever be published in any complete form…[as t]he product he had to sell, so to speak, was simply too eccentric and unmanageable”; nonetheless he tries to determine what Chatterton’s intended book format and titles might have been, had he “been able to produce an ‘edition’ of his forgery”. Haywood’s evidence revolves around several copy- books in Chatterton’s hand, that appear to be grouped editorially, and that he argues are “the clearest indication that Chatterton was thinking about a partial though controlled publication of the forgery” – what Haywood describes as “a translation or modification, in his own terms, of a highly involuted art form into an acceptable literary format”.377 If anything, Haywood’s analysis could be seen as demonstrating the opposite, through its illumination of the fragmentary nature of the works.

Evidence of the Rowley works’ fragmentary, unbounded disorderliness splinters and multiplies across the folio pages. Searching for editorial title and contents pages, Haywood cites the one given in Meyerstein’s biography for “Antiquities – Book 3rd”., which is now lost.378 From this reputed title page (Figure 3.5), and Meyerstein’s own guesswork, Haywood conjectures that there may have been three books of “Antiquities”, and possibly even an earlier “ur-Antiquities” that Chatterton was working on before dividing the collection into three. If the “CONTENTS of this BOOK” is an indication, these so-called “editions” were odd medleys of literary and historical works by several

376 Chatterton, "To J[Ames] Dodsley, 21 December 1768," 157, ll. 1-3; "To James Dodsley, 15 February 1769," 171-2, ll. 1-12. ibid. 377 Haywood, "Chatterton's Plans for the Publication of the Forgery," 59-61. 378 Ibid., 63-4. Citing Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 85.

/& )

different poets and historians, known and unknown to the play-acting editor – some of the works incomplete, some duplicate, some extracted, some translated, and some a “sample” of some as-yet-unoffered “teasing morsels of longer works”.379 Even certain words on the contents page itself are apparently subject to “[obliteration]”. The original page has been lost, and all pieces of work are apparently unfinished; their authorship and provenance are uncertain, and even the missing contents page is in a process of disintegration or destruction. This was an extreme form of editorial instability, from which the bibliographic consolidation of a traditional book format seemed highly unlikely to transpire.

Figure 3.5. “Antiquities – Book 3rd”. 380

While traditional publication of the literary and antiquarian contents of the manuscripts may well have been Chatterton’s initial focus, the evidence in the fragmentary and recomposed features of the folio pages themselves suggests that a less

379 Haywood, "Chatterton's Plans for the Publication of the Forgery," 63-6. 380 Image of this page photographed myself, from Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 85.

/' #

traditional, more disordered and composite publication strategy prevailed. Perhaps, after the Dodsley fiasco, Chatterton never really meant to produce a book in the traditional sense, bound by what Calè describes as the “bibliographic codes”381 that determine what we understand to be a discrete, attributable and publishable book; perhaps he did not even see this work as bibliographically whole, or even necessarily directly publishable in parts, in that same traditional sense.

Even when Chatterton’s compilations look something like a book, they tend not be admissible as such, in bibliographical terms. Most are at best a kind of hybrid copybook form, evocative of the creative and intellectual intersection of reader, textual and manuscript cultures in the eighteenth century. For example, his “Discorse on Brystowe”382 is a textually and visually complex collection of historical writings and illustrations, inked onto small, square, off-white pages, sewn together down the spine with white cotton thread, and enclosed within an oil-marbled cover (Figures 3.6 and 3.7). The composite and multi-authorial format of the “Discorse” resembles Colclough’s description of the methodology used in the period to produce commonplace books and personal miscellanies.383 It contains twelve pages of text and drawings in Chatterton’s own hand, but purportedly transcribing Rowley. Like the transcripts that make up the “Bristol Castle” series seen above, these pages are contemporary “transcripts” of unseen original (read imaginary) texts. Rowley’s history summarises or amends another earlier and semi-fictional historian called Turgot, referencing his lost historical works and illustrations.

381 Calè, "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page," n.p. 382 Chatterton, "A Discorse on Brystowe by Thos. Rowleie Wrotten and Gotten at the Desire of Wm: Canynge Esqur," 93-104. 383 Colclough, "Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience," 30-39.

/( )

Figure 3.6. “Auntient Saxon Monuments dolven all in Bristol”384

Figure 3.7. “Emendals to Turgotte by Thos Rowleie as by the Letters”385

Everywhere are signs that this is a similar kind of intertextual, modally composite hybrid, a commonplace book that Rowley was manufacturing, despite its immense untimeliness as such. The work is a conglomeration of poetic and historical textual

384 Thomas Chatterton, Auntient Saxon Monuments Dolven All in Bristol” in “a Discorse on Brystowe, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 24891, f. 2-3. British Library. 385 “Emendals to Turgotte by Thos Rowleie as by the Letters” in “a Discorse on Brystowe”, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 24891, f. 3-4. British Library.

/) #

fragments, illustrations, and inscriptions, some written by Rowley and some written by his historical source the historian priest William Turgot, who records his “noticynge of this my native Cittye yclepen Brightstowe”.386 The sections of text are annotated to show which are Rowley’s and which are Turgot’s, but all is “wrotten and gotten at the Desire of Wm: Canynge Esqur”., Rowley’s patron, and, of course, the whole thing was dreamed up and written by Chatterton. The text, physically divided by the drawings and horizontal lines that quarter the page, is fragmented into “Sectyones” dealing with the origins of the name Bristol and the architectural antiquities of Redcliff, its earliest settlement, and “Emendals”, where Rowley corrects Turgot’s history, saying in linguistic terms that scream of eighteenth-century anachronism, “And nowe myne Author havynge done his first Section I shall with all reverence to so auntient a Pensman give my opine…”387 This opinion however is anything but authoritative. The drawings of a new stone church in St Mary Redcliff add visual conviction to this spurious textual history. As Chatterton writes, communicating to his reader through Rowley, who himself is transcribing Turgot’s history of Redcliff’s entirely fictional original church: “the Woden Chyrche being fallen ybuilden a stone one one goodly to behould having a Towre and on eche Syde fowre square Wyndowes verie large ande under them Sixe Mascil Wyndows with Vaults for buryynge as ye see above”.388

Colclough argues that the creation of commonplace books, as hybrid multi-author texts, was a frequent response to personal reading in the eighteenth century; these new compilations contained “an original editorial arrangement of writings by an array of different authors that had originated in a range of different sources”, often without acknowledgement of source material, thus revealing “that their creators assumed the same right to ‘recompose, reapply, add and reorder’ printed texts as they did with manuscript materials”. This personalising process, he maintains, reinscribed parts of texts into a new composite form, remaking a new text in “the image of the reader”.389 Equally, however, Chatterton’s disordered material techniques pull his text’s narrative continuity apart,

386 [observations of the city of my birth, named Bristol] "A Discorse on Brystowe by Thos. Rowleie Wrotten and Gotten at the Desire of Wm: Canynge Esqur," 93, ll.1-2. 387 [written and commissioned on behalf of William Canynge Esquire ][sections][amendments] ibid., 100, ll.221-3. 388 [The wooden church having fallen, built a new one lovely to behold, having a tower and on each side four square windows very large, and under them six mascil windows with vaults for burying, as you see above] ibid., 94-5, ll.34-43. 389 Colclough, "Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience," 35. Citing Harold Love, “How Personal”, English Clandestine Satire, 2004, 126.

/* )

creating an explicit and conscious relationship between himself and his reader, and insisting on the reader’s self-aware engagement as a critical reader, powerful in their encounter with the material text.

Rowley’s “Discorse” has much in common then with the erudite personal mashups that were commonplace books in the period, recomposed into new forms, in the image of the maker, from fragmented and reordered source materials in the days before printed books were cheap and easy to come by. For this reason, Colclough notes, “historians are less likely to treat manuscript production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a curious anachronism”.390 In Rowley’s case, however, the hybridity of his manuscripts is anachronistic to a nonsensical degree, as the technology was not widely practised until the sixteenth century. It is as though, in the overwhelming experience of antiquity and erudite scholarly importance, Chatterton was counting on his readers to overlook the impossibility of these works, or to feel uncertain enough to ignore it, or perhaps feel compelled to respond regardless of it. The “image” of Chatterton reflected in this work is, therefore, as we have seen, profoundly invested in touching the reader, and inscribing each page with the illusion of value.

A new narrative arises from the Rowley fragments, amidst the sense that something important needs to be remembered in the gaps or reconceived from these scraps of work. Severin Fowles’ critique of Brown’s “Thing Theory” is useful for understanding the operation of Chatterton’s manipulative material techniques, in terms of the way not only tangible things but also “non-things, negative spaces, lost or forsaken objects, voids or gaps – absences, in other words, [can] also stand before us as entity-like presences with which we must contend”.391 For in response to the incompletion of his works, the reader is compelled to complete them – and as Fowles writes: “one is…forced to fill the gap, to project a face or subjectivity or emotional state onto the void. The missing face, then, is not a text to be read so much as it is an inscrutable thing that demands the construction of a text”.392 The function of his fragmentary materiality then was as a lure, an invitation to complete something incomplete, and in doing so to co-construct something both culturally valuable and professionally potent.

390 Ibid., 31. 391 Severin Fowles, "People without Things," in An Anthropology of Absence (Springer, 2010), 28. 392 Ibid.

/+ #

Chatterton’s material poetics was intentionally persuasive to the point of manipulation – he would do anything to get himself into print. His creative modus operandum involved a campaign to attract the attention of patrons and publishers, individual men such as Bristol historian William Barrett, cultural critic and antiquarian Horace Walpole, or London publisher James Dodsley, to whom as previously stated he would send his manuscripts – for incorporation into their magazine or journal, or indeed for literal inscription into their own works of history. Particular fragments or pieces of the Rowley works, Taylor notes, had “quite specific jobs to do: they are clearly designed to exploit the particular needs and interests of actual or potential patrons”.393 In this way, he offered up to each man specially-crafted, pseudo-documentary fragments of such apparent personal interest and significance, and so seductively incomplete in historical terms, that he hoped they would incorporate them into their own historical research and publications. Like a museum gallery, or an antiquarian cabinet of curiosities, open to the historical narrativity and extra-illustration of his visitors, Chatterton created a display of cultural and historical antiquities. Their ultimate form and meaning were left wide open to Barrett and Walpole, who Chatterton hoped would take his works and alter them from the state of antiquarian ephemera to bound and published books.

Chatterton’s dissemination of the Rowley fragments constituted an invitation to dislocate and reinscribe his own work into new material forms – forms which he hoped would assure him a chance at immortality through publication, despite the fact that he had to give up on his claim to sole authorship in the process. To this end, for example, Chatterton shared many scores of his medievalist histories, poetry and drawings with his antiquarian mentor William Barrett, as documentary “evidence” ideally suited to fill the gaps in the man’s incomplete History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol.394 Perhaps because his need for recognition grew stronger Chatterton likewise sent two manuscripts to Horace Walpole – one called “The Ryse of Peyncteynge, yn Englande, wroten bie T. Rowlie. 1469 for Mastre Canynge”, and the other called “Historie of Peyncters yn Englande bie T. Rowley” (Figure 3.8). Needless to say, these were especially dreamed up, written and posted with a view to being included in any further editions of Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting (the second edition of which was already published 1765).

393 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 52. 394 Barrett, The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol: Compiled from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, in Public Offices or Private Hands; Illustrated with Copper-Plate Prints; Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 129-249; Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 63-72.

/, )

Chatterton’s manipulative and obliquely patronising footnote to the “pieces” in his manuscripts read that “the Person under whose Patronage they may appear to the World, will lay the Englishman, the Antiquary, and the Poet, under an eternal Obligation”. This “Person” was of course Walpole, one of Chatterton’s specific readers.395 Clearly, he believed that appealing to his targets’ egotism was the best way to ensure their commitment to his project.

Figure 3.8. “Historie of Peyncters yn Englande bie T. Rowley” 396

395 Chatterton, "The Ryse of Peyncteynge, Yn Englande, Wroten Bie T. Rowleie. 1469 for Mastre Canynge," 259, footnote 1. 396 Historie of Peyncters Yn Englande Bie T. Rowley, 1769. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. British Library.

/- #

As Meyerstein relates, Chatterton was apparently successful in impressing upon Barrett the significance of these manuscripts, for the older (but apparently not wiser) man used significant quantities of the textual materials, and even some illustrations, in his History. Indeed, it seems to have been a two-way relationship in which both worked themselves into one another’s pseudo-historical materials. Barrett’s handwriting appears on many of Chatterton’s Rowley manuscripts – both as annotations in the margins, and as a second transcriber of Chatterton’s renditions of Rowley’s spurious Middle English script (such as in Figure 3.1).

In return, Barrett’s History is a bizarre fusion of fact and fantasy, conceived as a history of Bristol but constructed from a composite of real and Rowleyan materials – in much the same fashion as Chatterton’s own historiography, except that its nominated author presents it as fact, and its form expresses all the qualities of a traditional published history book. But the names of Rowley and Chatterton both appear repeatedly in the book’s contents pages. Rowley is cited as an historical source repeatedly throughout the history, and Chatterton’s scholarly relationship to the Rowley materials is mentioned too, such that for example, “the following curious account of this church was given by Chatterton, as transcribed by him from Rowley, which is submitted to the judgement of the reader”. 397 Furthermore, Chatterton’s Rowleyan poetry and historical texts are printed, verbatim, in the pages of this so-called history book. Barrett even takes Chatterton’s illustrations, such as his map of Bristol castle, and embellishes it (Figure 3.9, as compared with Figure 3.1). While Barrett acknowledges the fact that “various will be the opinions held of these manuscripts accounts, respecting their authenticity; they may probably be called in question as much as the poems have been, published under the name of Rowley”. 398 However, he refuses to determine his own position on the controversy, and deems it “unfair in an Historian to have concealed what the public have a right to canvas”, and instead chooses to call it history, and leave the rest to “every reader of abilities and candour, as to leave him to form an opinion of it without interpolating his own”. He adds, knowing at this point in time that the readers are unlikely to be able to see and touch the obvious material fakery of Chatterton’s scraps, that the “external evidence of the genuineness of these manuscripts was such, as fully to authorize him to

397 Barrett, The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol: Compiled from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, in Public Offices or Private Hands; Illustrated with Copper-Plate Prints, 524. 398 Ibid., 45.

/. )

give them to the public, whatever shall be infer’d from the internal evidence”.399 It is an odd fusion, or confusion, in which the controversy of the Rowley “forgery” and even the adolescent “forger” himself have been incorporated into Bristol’s history – while still dressed in the pretense of historical truthfulness and scholarly authenticity.

Figure 3.9. Map of Bristol castle published in William Barrett’s History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (1789), based on Chatterton’s map 400

While Barrett was a willing dupe, and accepted Chatterton’s literary gifts to “reassemble and reinscribe” into his History, Walpole was more than his match, and soon saw through Chatterton’s fake manuscripts and imaginary self-representations, despite Chatterton’s intention to present Walpole with possibilities any historian would long for

399 Ibid., 45-6. 400 Ibid., 51.

// #

(and indeed that Walpole himself wrote about), of creating meaningful historical narrative from a cabinet of catalogued and described, but as-yet undeciphered, unnarrativised artefacts. Walpole’s class-based rejection of Chatterton as a colleague, and the works as literature, essentially put an end to Rowley in Chatterton’s mind.401 While it lasted, however, Chatterton’s flagrant audacity is reflected in his practice of physically transforming the ideal of the whole, unaltered and bound book, and to “unbind” it as Calè would argue, into antiquarian and literary fragments for other gentlemen of letters with greater socioeconomic clout and access to publishing technologies than himself to use.402 His plan was a daring and profoundly experimental – perhaps even desperate – creative response to this anxiety for recognition and success in publishing terms.

This chapter has challenged persistent critical identification of Chatterton’s medieval Rowley manuscripts with the eighteenth-century culture of literary forgery, in favour of a consideration of his broader material style as an expression of his inexperienced and ambitious opportunism. Through a reading of Chatterton’s precious handmade manuscripts and their symbolic historiographic conventions, as well as of exemplary contemporary works that similarly express his material poetics, such as his fraudulent love letters and testamentary will, this chapter argues that Chatterton’s fascination with the symbolic “thingness” of his works resided in the ways he could use them to stage encounters, in person or through letters, with powerful men and taste makers of the period.

Chatterton was a precocious and talented adolescent writer, experimenting with whatever literary and cultural tropes seemed most popular in the Bristol and London magazines to his inexperienced but culturally acute eyes. His material poetics is fraudulent, an inchoate grab at whatever literary opportunity was most likely to enhance his professional standing, fame and monetary security. He constructed fake medieval manuscripts, and he tried to pass them off amongst the antiquarian literati of Bristol, and then Walpole and others in London. He abused his employer’s respect for testamentary sanctity to trick his way out of an unwanted job, for the professional possibilities of London’s Grub Street. As this chapter demonstrates, however, his intention was not to defraud, nor to take part in an intellectually self-conscious culture of forgery or plagiarism. Chatterton’s manuscripts and other tangible works were curated from his

401 Walpole’s class-based reaction to Chatterton’s overtures are explored in detail in Chapters 4 and 5. 402 Calè, "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page," n.p.

'&& )

worldly cravings and commercialism, shaped by his avid notions of what constituted the precious and desirable cultural objects of mid-century antiquarian and Georgian literary culture.

The persuasive possibilities inherent in the gifting and exchange of these precious things, despite their patent inauthenticity, was a vital, functional component of Chatterton’s material poetics. This chapter therefore examines his broader stylistic experimentation with concrete symbolism and the gift economy, and the way he constructed precious objects for exchange, so that he could perform and enhance his own literary professionalism. The creative function of these documents was to build consensus with particular men of Chatterton’s circle, and a social obligation to engage further with the works themselves, and with Chatterton or his literary avatars, in ways that served his personal and professional ambitions.

Consciously done or more likely otherwise, Chatterton’s experimental transformation of the imaginary, unaltered bibliographic whole of his historical and cultural “books” into antiquarian and literary fragments for the composite authorial use of other powerful, learned and well-connected gentlemen, was audacious and desperate. Published well after the Rowley works’ exposure as fraudulent and Chatterton’s death, his extra-illustrated handiwork achieved a fame that the young writer never saw. It could be argued that Chatterton’s wish has been granted by scholarly collecting practices of the nineteenth century, which saw his manuscripts contained, bound and secured in the British Library. What now holds these fragments together are those collection codes, and the history of how the works were read and wrapped up tightly for the future. In all cases, Chatterton’s original galleries of papers and drawings have been altered through further extra- illustration and over-writing by other hands, starting with Barrett and Catcott, his original collectors, and then other anonymous hands that have left their marks in the margins, in the process of trying to create cultural narratives of genius, or fraudulence, or material poetics from Chatterton’s precious tokens.

'&'

Chatterton was irresistibly drawn to the gothic, because its immense aesthetic popularity and commercial value as an entertainment in the Georgian period was useful to his aspirations for literary success. Inspired by Thomas Gray’s graveyard poetry, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, as well as the influential gothic revivalist aesthetic of his home, Strawberry Hill house, Chatterton’s gothic style operated in the same way as his other stylistic experiments, as an imitative and commercial response to cultural fashions. He imitated the mid- eighteenth-century taste for stone, blood and priests, and antiquity rewritten or redrawn in British nationalist and sublime aesthetic terms. In this way, he harnessed literary and artistic possibilities that were useful to him in terms of developing commercially-viable works of art in the hope of patronage and professional advancement.

Chatterton’s Rowley works include hundreds of pseudo-medieval writings and illustrations. These works are the main subset of his oeuvre in which he experimented with gothic style, some of which have been discussed in earlier chapters of this thesis in the contexts of his anachronism and obsession with material tokens. Chatterton’s gothic works included Anglo-style imitations of regional nationalist ballads, such as his pseudo- biographical “Storie of Wyllyam Canynge”403 and Rowley’s epic “Battle of Hastings II”.404 His themes were medieval and gothic, the past given voice through his bardic ballads in terms more palatable to the emergent national identity of the English people. The ruined castles and churches of Bristol, rebuilt in this reimagined and reconstructed past, were peopled by fictional heroes given substance through his visual symbolism. Chatterton’s technically inexperienced and lesser known visual works mimic gallery-like antiquarian book plates, depicting Bristol’s medieval cityscapes and architecture (Figure 4.1), monuments, heraldry and antiquities. In these drawings, as I have elsewhere argued,

403 Chatterton, "Storie of Wyllyam Canynge," 84, ll. 581-90 . 404 "Battle of Hastings Ii: Battle of Hastyngs by Turgotus, Translated by Roulie for W. Canynge Esq," 68- 88.

'&) #

Chatterton “rebuilt Bristol castle and city walls from the ground up, within his imagination and on paper”.405

Figure 4.1. Chatterton’s landscape sketch of Bristol Castle on the Avon River (folio detail)406

Georgian London had a taste and a market for textual and visual entertainments like medieval balladry and uncanny tales, antiquities museums, architectural follies, and literary galleries, particularly those that minimised the military and civic violence of Britain’s history, and aestheticised British national identity as civilised, noble and triumphant. This chapter argues that Chatterton saw possibilities in contemporary nationalist narratives and the sublime aesthetic that were professionally useful to him, and which he could poach and perform in order to make his literary and artistic works more commercially viable in the sociable Georgian cultural market. In the light of this argument, the definition of gothic that I make use of is necessarily a broad one, encompassing Chatterton’s different modal forms of gothic style, from his textual bardic ballads to his gothic revivalist architecture, and his other visual or bibliographic forms such as antiquarian illustrations and historiographic page layouts. My analysis of Chatterton’s gothic style encompasses his imitative capture of the gothic as a nationalist historical narrative and linguistic mode, and as a reflection of the cult of sensationalism, and the secularisation of Christian architecture as Georgian cultural entertainment. Chatterton’s gothic works were undoubtedly sensitive to these contexts. However, my

405 Sumner, "Urban Landscape, Fantasy and Adolescent Identity in Thomas Chatterton's 'Rowley' Works," 5. 406 Thomas Chatterton, Chatterton’s Landscape Sketch of Bristol Castle on the Avon River, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766A-049. British Library.

'&* *

reading of his diverse, imitative and experimental gothic bravura challenges the critical perception that the primary function of these works was political or aesthetic, reframing their character as a performance of professional virtuosity intended to secure Chatterton’s own commercial literary success.

The paucity of critical work on Chatterton’s gothic illustrations is surprising, particularly given the critical interest in his spurious manuscripts and apparent nationalism. 407 Chatterton’s aspirational and insecure professional relationship with Walpole has been documented, however the connections between their gothic revivalist artistry have not. Timothy Mowl has established that Chatterton’s imagery operates like the larger eighteenth-century gothic revivalist aesthetic, through a “playful, gracious, quite unauthentic rehandling of medieval details”.408 Alistair Heys usefully identifies Chatterton’s preoccupation with the “trope of the builder” in the Rowley works. 409 Despite his findings on builders and spirituality as an imaginative prompt for William Blake’s “Jerusalem”,410 his interpretation of the worker analogy touches less often upon Chatterton’s own aesthetic purposes.

Most scholars have focused on what they perceive as Chatterton’s personal mobilisations of British nationalist discourse in the Rowley manuscripts and other works. Kim Ian Michasiw argues that Chatterton’s African pastorals and Ossian-like Saxon poems voice an English national identity crisis in which his “acceptance of England’s forefathers’ barbarity and bloodlust suggests, at very least, an unease about what roots English nationality”. Michasiw paraphrases what he interprets as Chatterton’s rejection of the doctrine of inevitable character.411 The poet, he says, suggests instead that “the English, like the Africans, have been made, not born”, in a potential range of heroic types from the mythological to the middle-class, and from the “precipitant” and mindlessly violent, to the embattled and nobly resistant.412 Carolyn D. Williams argues that the

407 Groom, "Romanticism and Forgery."; Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999); Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction. 408 Mowl, "A Rococo Poet for a Rococo City," 18, 52. 409 Alistair Heys, "Visionary and Counterfeit," in From Gothic to Romantic: Thomas Chatterton's Bristol, ed. Alistair Heys (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2005), 80. 410 Ibid. 411 Kim Ian Michasiw, "Chatterton, Ossian, Africa," SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48, no. 3 (2008): 625, 42, 49-50. His argument is refreshingly coherent in terms of its focus on the poems, and in ascribing to them a potentially coherent narrative and related creative purpose. Chatterton scholars so often do not bother with the poems, or with Chatterton’s creative purposes, as opposed to his conscious or unconscious personal agenda. 412 Ibid.

'&+ #

Rowley writings were “a form of post-colonial resistance”, whereby those who resist gain inner strength and authority by returning “to a pre-imperial period to locate a ‘pure’ native culture”.413 Inga Bryden argues that Chatterton’s fascination with heraldic patrilineality in his Arthurian-style drawings was an attempt to “invent and fabricate his heritage”, thereby newly “constructing his own social origins” in the context of prevailing mid- century “social fluidity”. Bryden posits a direct symbolic link between Chatterton’s patrilineal writings and heraldic drawings, and contemporary public debate on British history, mythology and national identity.414 Bryden’s work establishes the vitality of Chatterton’s retrospective techniques in his idealistic cultural reconstructions, and, importantly, Williams’ work names the critical connection between Chatterton’s creative habitus and his sense of political exclusion.

The most well-known examples of Chatterton’s performance of gothic balladry are contained within his Rowleyan works, which (as argued in Chapter 2) mobilised anachronistic mythologies, both classical and medieval, to imagine a different historical trajectory for British literary culture. Chatterton’s Rowleyan gothic was a retrospective fantasy that recognised vernacular, rather than neoclassical, literature as the culturally dominant aesthetic, and thereby resolved what John Guillory described as the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” for cultural legitimacy and pre-eminence. 415 However, the Rowley works comprise a complex mix of stylistic responses to such mid- century discourses on British national culture and identity. His gothic and anachronistic styles were linked by a shared “rhetoric of progress”, both nationalist and personal, and a creative technique of “looking backward; [such that] new visions of futurity gave rise to new visions of the past”.416 However, Chatterton’s visual gothic style, exemplified by his drawings, responded to a different set of contemporary cultural and commercial forces, and therefore had a different function, aesthetic and cultural significance.

David Punter and Glennis Byron assert that the eighteenth-century gothic aesthetic was “endlessly mobile”. 417 As Nick Groom points out, however, its different modal strands had parallel functions in terms of nationalist symbolism, sharing themes of “graves and funerary monuments, memory and loss, mortality and melancholia, all combining in an acute awareness of the transience of human endeavor, of loneliness, of

413 Williams, "‘On Tiber’s Banks’: Chatterton and Post-Colonialism," 47-8, 55. 414 Bryden, "The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry," 67-8. 415 Guillory, "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon," 118-9. 416 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, 30. 417 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 5.

'&, *

the weight of the past, of antiquity”, which facilitated a nationalist curation of the past through alternative historical readings. He gives the example of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, which textually condensed the violence of British past into dreamlike sequences of medieval romance.418 Luisa Calè argues that the miniaturisation and domestication of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill gothic architectural folly rearranged the material remains of the past and essentially tamed the stone immensity and barbarism implied by gothic fortification.419 As Punter and Byron maintain, although the values attached to the term “gothic” change through time, its “essential function remains unchanged” as “the symbolic site of a culture’s discursive struggle to define and claim possession of the civilized, and to abject, or throw off, what is seen as other to that civilized self”.420 According to Groom, textual and visual gothic techniques addressed this desire for civilisation, sublimating the “repressed guilt and horror” that were the consequence of the “savagery of English history…and the bloodshed that characterised it and that had made Great Britain”.421 Chatterton’s gothic style in both his ballads and drawings imitated this ameliorative expression of the desire for civility.

As popular literary imitations, Chatterton’s ballads were more commercial performance than nationalist political stance. Kathleen Wilson describes the eighteenth- century regional ballad as a popular communication form and political mouthpiece for “ordinary people”, linking print culture and politics in the period”.422 Katie Trumpener argues that the function of these older-style regional ballads was local linguistic and “cultural rootedness…and its status as historical testimony”. Such works, she asserts, were always a “lament” for the past which was culturally or politically motivated.423 In the transitional Georgian period, however, there was a difference between such regional forms of bardic lament and newer English forms. With Union in the early eighteenth century, and the emergence of middle-class mercantilism and public culture, English ballads expressed the cultural desire for a single national culture with shared civic values, given voice in standard English through national newspapers. While Chatterton must

418 Groom, "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity," 38. 419 Luisa Calè, "Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry Vii in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill," Word & Image 33, no. 3 (2017): 279. 420 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 5. 421 Groom, "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity," 38. 422 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27. 423 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, 4.

'&- #

have been aware of his own cultural roots, as expressed in Bristol’s regional balladic forms, his verse mimicked the aspirational new English form of bardic nationalism.

Like his English-style balladry, Chatterton’s gothic revivalist illustrations are similarly revisionist cultural performance, transforming the uncultivated horrors of Bristol’s medieval history into something more palatable for his Georgian audience. He therefore poached and adapted a form of gothic sublime style for his own commercial purposes. By mid-century, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful 424 had altered British aesthetic thought with its definition of “a new, irrationalist, aesthetics of terror”. 425 Burke’s notion of the sublime as a heightened awareness of the natural world or landscape became a central tenet of the English Romantic movement. Critically indebted to “Longinus”, who originally described the sublime as a rhetorical style that “transported” the reader through a combination of literary devices and innate poetic principles relating to “grandeur of conception” and “vehement and inspired passion”,426 Burke saw something more “natural” in the sublime, as “a mode of aesthetic experience found in literature and far beyond it”.427 He wrote:

The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.428

For Burke, the sublime was a passionate, “astonished” response. Although grounded in terror, he argued that when perceived “at certain distances, and with certain modifications”, the vast ruggedness of the natural world in particular could be “delightful”. Moreover, Burke maintained that we have the same mixed response of horror and pleasure when viewing landscape scenes evocative of the mystery and obscurity of Britain’s past, littered with ancient monuments, ruined abbeys and haunted monasteries. This connection established by Burke between the medieval past and intense forms of aesthetic experience laid the conceptual foundation for the eighteenth-century cultural obsession with the gothic. As such, Fred Botting could argue that the gothic in

424 Edmund Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful. With an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Other Additions., Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Oxford: Gale, 1796). 425 Ibata, The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art, 5. 426 Elizabeth Nitchie, "Longinus and the Theory of Poetic Imitation in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England," Studies in Philology 32, no. 4 (1935): 586. 427 James T. Boulton, standard edition of Bourke’s Enquiry, 1958, xlvii. Cited in Jennifer J. Jones, "Beyond Burke’s Precendent and Back Again: Longinus and the Romantic Sublime," Neophilologus 99 (2015): 180- 1. 428 Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful. With an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Other Additions., 16.

'&. *

general is an aesthetic trend “based on feeling and emotion and associated primarily with the sublime”.429

Hélène Ibata claims that the visual inventiveness of the mid to late eighteenth century in Britain was in fact a competitive cultural response to the Burkean sublime. The old sister-arts “rivalry between painting and poetry” that asserted the comparative mimetic limitations of painting incited visual artists to demonstrate not just “the emotive power of their art, but to explore new, non-mimetic or non-finite visual paradigms”. 430 These “intense experiments with visual form” 431 included dramatic Royal Academy-style paintings of historical subjects, as well as gothic depictions of the morbid, carnivalesque and uncanny. New experimental forms involving “dramatic media of visual immersion” emerged, such as David Garrick and Philip James de Loutherberg’s infamous Eidophusikon and Robert Barker’s immense and beautiful panoramas.432 The London literary galleries, such as Fuseli’s Milton Gallery and William Blake’s composite and extra-illustrated books of engravings, were designed to appeal to the Georgian audience’s sociable literary tastes and emergent visual literacies.433 Chatterton’s gallery-like series of gothic architectural and monumental illustrations, like specialist antiquarian bookplates published in an historical work, or a series made for display in a London literary gallery, were similarly experimental and evocative visual entertainment.

The main gothic motif in Chatterton’s gallery of architectural illustrations is the ruined castle rebuilt. His drawings have a detailed and passionate, if unskilled, architectural draughtsman’s quality. As David Punter and Glennis Byron point out, in the gothic trope, the castle itself is the main and central protagonist in the retrospective narrative.434 Chatterton’s architectural and monumental drawings were most certainly as integral to his aesthetic purposes as were his textual protagonists, priest and poet Thomas Rowley and his patron William Canynge. Botting maintains that the castle and “other medieval edifices – abbeys, churches and graveyards especially” are the usual “locus” of gothic plots and that their “architecture, particularly medieval in form (although historical

429 Botting, Gothic, 3. 430 Ibata, The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art, 11. 431 Ibid. 432 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, ed. David M. Halperin, Ideologies of Desire (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 11. 433 Calè, "Extra-Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page."; "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page."; Fuseli's Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators”. 434 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 8.

'&/ #

accuracy was not a prime concern), signaled the spatial and temporal separation of the past and its values from those of the present”.435 The buildings, as cultural and historical symbols, behave like burnt out shells, “hollowed-out” references to the past, in need of narratorial reconstruction. Robert Kiely suggests that in the gothic text, “space becomes more important than the consciousness, as being, that constructs the world”. Cultural identity is thus “dislodged from its human centers and diffused in an architectural construct which seems to have more life than the characters who inhabit it”.436 In this way, as in gothic writing in general, Chatterton’s castles and churches become protagonists in his narrative, alongside the human characters, voicing specific cultural ideas.

Chatterton undoubtedly stole parts of his gothic aesthetic, and its implied cultural and historical commentary, from Walpole’s Strawberry Hill house. This miniaturised castle, Walpole’s beloved architectural folly, was the most visible manifestation of his project of mythologising the gothic in his writings as an architectural style and historical idiom. As Matthew Reeve claims, Walpole actively reframed the conception of the medieval past into a “privileged historical style fit for revival in the present”.437 By emphasising the aesthetic over the dogmatic dimensions of medieval Catholicism, he maintains, Walpole transformed:

Elizabethan-Stuart political narrative into Enlightenment art history by regarding the Gothic as a period of freedom, elegance, and ornamental extravagance that existed between two periods of repressive, ascetic classicism: the “Saxon”, or Romanesque, and the “Grecian”, or Neoclassical…Walpole celebrates, as many would in the eighteenth century and beyond, the apparent “lawlessness” of the Gothic and its exemplification of artistic and social freedom, or “liberty”, as Walpole would have it.438

Luisa Calé argues that this curated transition, from historical object to art object, and finally to cultural commodity, was “symptomatic of different economies of viewing” in the Georgian period. 439 When Walpole “abstracted” a gothic specimen from its original time, place and function, and turned it into an “element of style” in his house, garden or museum, it took on:

435 Botting, Gothic, 2-3. 436 Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1972), 40. 437 Matthew M. Reeve, "Gothic Architecture, Sexuality, and License at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill," Art Bulletin 95 (2013): 415. 438 Ibid., 416. 439 Calè, "Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry Vii in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill," 281.

''& *

a new life. Transferred from the chapel at Westminster Abbey to a private picture gallery, it now symbolises the flourishing of the arts…The transition from the chapel to the gothic villa…marks a secularisation of the cult economy of the dead, a transition from cult to exhibition value.440

As Susan Stewart writes, the process of miniaturisation, as a curated transformation of the kind described by Calé, “is primarily an aesthetic one, an attempt to erase the actual past in order to create an imagined past which is available for consumption”.441 It was this heady combination of implied social liberty and cultural privilege, its immense contemporary popularity and commercial value as an entertainment, that Chatterton perceived so clearly in the gothic aesthetic and tried to encapsulate in his own miniaturised, gothic literary and artistic “souvenirs”.442

As the next three sections of this chapter will demonstrate, Chatterton’s adolescent gothic bravura was more a curated and commercial performance of virtuosity, catering to the mid-eighteenth-century cultural obsession with the brutal, romantic and uncanny delights of the uncivilised past, than any true political or aesthetic commentary.

Gothic ballads

Fifteen-year-old Chatterton’s bardic voice was inspired by the new fashion for English ballads and medieval romances, with the recent 1765 publication of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Literature from the medieval past, particularly those compositions that deepened the search for a “genuinely ancient British heritage”, such as English ballads and medieval poetry, as well as the medievalism of Spencer and the Elizabethans, had become fashionable.443 Chatterton’s interest in imitating the gothic ballad form was therefore an attempt to draw on folk traditions for the force of their “rudeness and wildness”, in contrast to the rule-bound aesthetics of neoclassical writers.444

Donald Taylor notes that Rowley’s “Battle of Hastinges II”445 is “no touchstone among epic fragments”.446 This may well be true, however the ballad contains a long and

440 Ibid. 441 Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 143. 442 Ibid., 135. 443 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 9-10. 444 Ibid., 10. 445 Chatterton made two attempts at this poem, both published by Taylor in the Works. His versions, “Battle of Hastynges I” and “Battle of Hastings II”, are fairly similar for the purposes of this intervention. However, I use the second as it is more fully developed in metaphorical, gothic terms. Chatterton, "Battle of Hastynges I," 26-43; "Battle of Hastings Ii," 68-88. 446 Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 823.

''' #

relatively sophisticated gothic-style narrative, based mainly on Stowe’s account of the battle between King William’s Norman and King Harold’s Saxon armies, and an imitation of Alexander Pope’s poetic pictorialism and epic similes in his translation of Homer’s “Iliad”.447 Peter Connelly suggests that Pope’s alterations of Homer’s classical original were aligned with the intention “to make a morally intelligible unity from the rich abundance of the original”.448 Pope’s version of the “Iliad” was inspired by John Ogilby’s 1660 illustrated edition, which Maynard Mack describes as replete with bloody action, “all involving collective or individual mayhem, and an equal number of ways of dying in battle, each different from the one before”.449 Pope encountered this work as a boy when he was not much younger than the sixteen year-old Chatterton, and certainly equally receptive to bloodthirsty hullabaloo.

Chatterton adapted Pope’s pictorialist techniques to the historical horror of his gothic ballad. Taylor argues that like Pope, Chatterton was “aware of the tedious butchery” of the epic, and imitated literary techniques like epic similes to “counter the problem”, turning the bloodshed and English loss into a grand and noble sacrifice. But where Pope imitated the classical poets in order “to express old truths in increasingly beautiful and arresting forms”, Chatterton was more interested in technical possibilities for expressing the power of the imagination, and its affective impact on his readers. His gothic style was a pragmatic, commercial choice in the context of the Georgian literary market.

For similarly commercial reasons, Chatterton’s “Battle of Hastinges” employs literary techniques of the poetic sublime to express the “wildness” of physical conflict with its heroic psychology – what Fred Botting describes as the terror, excess and transgression of gothic-style imaginative and psychological boundlessness. 450 Gothic writing, he argues, presents “different, more exciting worlds” which allow protagonists to “encounter not only frightening violence but also adventurous freedom”. 451 This violent and fantastical excess assails the reader in Chatterton’s English ballad. Arrows pierce emblazoned shields. Blood splatters on armour and runs “in smokynge curles

447 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 91; Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 823. This was Chatterton’s second attempt to copy the style of Pope’s epic translation of the Iliad, and apply it to this more local subject. 448 Peter J Connelly, "Pope's Iliad: Ut Pictura Translatio," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 21, no. 3 (1981): 3. 449 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York and London: WW Norton & Company in association with Yale University Press, 1985), 44-6. 450 Botting, Gothic, 2-3. 451 Ibid., 7.

''( *

[that]/ Reflected bie the moone seemd rubies mixd with pearles”. Men yell and howl “like wolfs in wintere”, their superhuman deeds described in epic similes. Chatterton evokes his warriors’ strength and fortitude in the face of death by comparing them with “rocke ytorne” and cleaving a hillside, “a river burstynge” its banks, and “oakes or elmes…hewne”.452

This kind of horrible, sensory boundlessness is representative of the way gothic literature in this period engaged in what Botting describes as an “imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason and unrestrained by conventional eighteenth-century demands for simplicity, realism or probability”. 453 Interspersed with invocations, digressions and similes that mimic the traditional epic genre form are gory descriptions of the battle proper that revel in murderous delight. For example, Chatterton recounts how Aubene, the mighty Norman “Of skyll in bow, in tylte, and handsworde fyghte”, excels that terrible day with “manie Saxons sleene”, but whose final moments of life come to an end when “with bothe hondes a myghtie blowe he sente” at his last opponent the Saxon Alfwould’s head:

as hard as hee could dree; But on hys payncted sheelde so bismarlie Aslaunte his swerde did go ynto the grounde; Then Alfwould him attack’d most furyouslie, Athrowe hys gaberdyne hee dyd hym wounde, Then soone agayne hys swerde hee dyd uprynde, And clove his creste and split hym to the eyne.454

Fight after fight, bloody death after death, Chatterton repeats this technique of pictorial detail combined with unreasonable, tragic narrative and metaphorical rendering of the Battle of Hastings action.

Chatterton’s gothic ballads comprise two main overt vocal forms – nationalist narrative and egotistical panegyric – both of which are often found within the same poem and through which he expressed his own history of Britain’s bloodshed and failure.

452 [in smoking curls that, reflected by the moon, seemed like rubies mixed with pearls][like wolves in winter][rock torn][a river bursting][oaks or elms hewn] Chatterton, "Battle of Hastings Ii," 69, ll. 39-40; 36; 46-7; 70, ll. 48; 78, l. 337. 453 Botting, Gothic, 3. 454 [Skilled in bow, tilt, and hand sword fighting][many Saxons slain][with both hands, he sent a mighty blow][as hard as he could drive it; But on his painted shield his sword abysmally slipped sideways and went into the ground; Then Afwould attacked him furiously, and wounded him through his gaberdine, Then quickly raised his sword again and clove his helmet splitting his head to the eyes]. Chatterton, "Battle of Hastings Ii," 87-88, ll. 701-4, 12-20.

'') #

Trumpener argues that the main difference between regional bardic ballads and English bardic imitations is that in traditional regional ballads:

the bard is the mouthpiece for a whole society, articulating its values, chronicling its history, and marking the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse. English poets, in contrast, imagine the bard…As an inspired, isolated, and peripatetic figure…The English poets are primarily interested in the bard himself…standing apart from and transcending its particular time and place.455

Thomas Gray’s Bard (1757) and Macpherson’s Ossian poems (1760-65), whose bardic cadences Chatterton imitated, are evidence of the psychological possibilities and pathetic fallacies projected onto the landscape surrounding this observant, sensitive and lonely bard. Although the Rowleyan ballads apparently “lament” the regional cultural glories of an imaginary Bristolean past discussed in Chapter 2, the subjective focus of the works is a mythological version of English history, and the thoughts and feelings of their imaginary author Thomas Rowley. His literary imitation of the ballad form drew on British folk traditions, responding to the fashion at mid-century for works that trespassed the intersection between medieval literature, nationalist balladry, and the gothic sublime.

Some considerable part of the “Battle of Hastynges” is taken up with graphic descriptions of Bristolean fighting forces and their comparative heroic importance within the English army, in what appears to be regional panegyric. Rowley the bard cries out to his favourite poetic subject, Bristol’s warriors and their leader Afwolde, “how shalle I synge of thee?” In answer, he compares Afwolde in favourable terms to his own king and leader, relating that “Not Haroldes self more Normanne knyghtes did slee,/ Not Haroldes self did for more praises call”. In addition, he sings that “Like thee their leader, eche Bristowanne fought;/ Like thee, their blaze must be canonical”.456 Through transforming the imagery from warfare to writing, Chatterton indicates that the best poets of the age, like the superior Bristolean fighters, will be remembered in history.

This is curated British nationalism dressed up as Bristolean bardism, and according to Trumpener equally fictional. She writes that:

nationalist movements tend to couch their very claims to historical, ethnic, and cultural specificity in a recognisably standard rhetoric…Although they seem not to

455 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, 56. 456 [how shall I sing of you?][Not even King Harold slayed more Norman knights, Not even Harold himself was more deserving of praise] Chatterton, "Battle of Hastings Ii," 77, ll. 311-17.

''* *

realise it, their sense of community is imaginary as much as it is imagined. Even from its very origins, their nationalism appears as a species of fiction.457

The nationalist political bias of the ballad is indicated, in simplest of terms, by the fact that by the end of the battle action, “out upon the feelde” far more “Normanne bowels steemd” 458 than Saxon, despite the historical reality of the English defeat. In fact, Chatterton either could not or did not finish the ballad. It ends with Afwoulde’s death on the battlefield, as if, once gone, Chatterton could not maintain the narrative without his Bristolean symbol of British courage and power. He had not found a way to write the end of hope, while preserving the nationalist fiction.

Rowley presents himself as the bard in these ballads in a distinctly self-conscious and apostrophic voice. The primary subject of interest is his own thoughts and feelings as the main protagonist of Chatterton’s gothic fantasy world, as well as his thoughts and feelings about William Canynge, patron of medieval Bristol and Chatterton’s secondary protagonist. The shift from outer narrative to inner response and contemplation allowed Chatterton to draw heavily on the wealth of “negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic”459 subject matter available to the gothic voice. Many of Rowley’s ballads focus on his contemplative perspective, or that of another poet or artist he is rhetorically addressing. In the battle, the bard calls out to Turgot, the “shadowy manuscript historian” who is Rowley’s historical source for the supposed ‘Saxonnes Latyne’ original of this poem, and his poetic muse. “Oh Turgotte”, he cries:

wheresoeer thie sprite dothe haunte, Whither with thie loved Adhelme by thie syde, Where thou mayste heare the swotie nyghte larke chaunte, Orre with some mokyne brooklette swetelie glide,… Whereer thou art, come and my mynde enleme Wyth such greete thoughtes as dyd with thee abyde, Thou sonne, of whom I ofte have caught a beeme, Send mee agayne a drybblette of thie lyghte, That I the deeds of Englyshmenne maie wryte.460

457 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, 22. 458 Chatterton, "Battle of Hastings Ii," 82, ll. 498-9. 459 Botting, Gothic, 2. 460 [Oh Turgot, wherever your spirit is haunting, Whether your beloved Adhelme is by your side, Or where you can hear the lovely night lark sing, Or with some bubbling brook sweetly gliding by, Wherever you are, come and brighten my own mind with such great thoughts as yours, For you are like the sun, whose beams I have often caught, So send me a morsel of your light, so that I can write of the deeds of Englishmen] Chatterton, "Battle of Hastings Ii," 84, ll. 581-90.

''+ #

In the middle of representing the horror and violence of this important historical moment in British history, Rowley in this musing way opens a dialogue between himself as bard and his professional and poetic muse, the semi-historical character Turgot. 461 Thus Chatterton makes his imaginary poet a dramatis personae in the narrative action, in a way that is distinctly eighteenth-century in its vocal experimentation with what Keats would later describe as the “egotistical Sublime”.462

This description of writer’s block and the poet’s appeal to the realm of the spirits reflects the cultural shift in focus away from external feats of strength and heroism towards a sense of the psychological, the imaginative and the supernatural. Chatterton invokes the ghostly “sprite” not only of Turgot, but the ghoulish company of dead “Englyshmenne” in the battle history they have both written. For extra measure, he compares Turgot’s writerly brilliance to the “sonne”, requesting that this ghost send “a drybblette of thie lyghte” – that deep and mysterious well of inspiration supposedly required to write his ballad. Chatterton was indeed using every tool in his poetic arsenal to engage the reader through his style of idiosyncratic gothic tale-telling, and through the commercial appeal of the gothic sublime.

Chatterton’s gothic style was exemplary of the cultural shift central to this new literary trend, which loosened the connection between poetic likeness and truth in favour of imagination and psychological experience as higher forms of truth. In the medieval biographical ballad entitled “The Storie of Wyllyam Canynge”, Rowley cuts quite the anachronistic figure in his attitude as contemplative riverside bardic dreamer, because the subjective narrative of his verse is distinctly psychological and associative. Self- consciously describing himself as reclining “Anent a Brooklette”, he watches the river’s twining passage “thorowe the greene Mees” and listens to the water’s “mottring Songe”.463 Fully established in this sensory, relaxed and dreamy, self-aware lyrical mode, Rowley allows the associative possibilities of “the Floude” of water and the “Bankes” of the river to shift his narrative focus – it is quite literally a stream of consciousness.

461 “It must be remembered also that Chatterton was an artist in fiction. He conceived Rowley in intense detail—detail which constantly reminds us of Chatterton himself. He created Rowley by looking within, and perhaps Rowley needed his Turgot, just as Chatterton needed his Rowley.” Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 827. 462 The phrase is first used by Keats in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, dated 27 October 1818. J.R. Strachan, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of John Keats (Routledge, 2003), 17. 463 [By a brook][through the green meadows][muttering song] Chatterton, "Storie of Wyllyam Canynge," 241, ll. 179-82.

'', *

Stanza by stanza, Rowley floats along and his attention shifts from sensory perceptions of the landscape to the deep mythological past of Bristol’s “hardie Champyons” and their engagement with Britain’s bloody history. His thoughts then move to an allegorical vision of “Trouthe”, imagined as an apparition of naked, female beauty: “fromme the dystaunt Streeme arose a Mayde/ Whose gentle Tresses mov’d not to the Wynde”, and finally back to Rowley’s medieval Bristol and his main poetic object, the “dygne Buylder” and patron of arts and civil works, William Canynge.464 Despite the specific geographical location on the banks of Bristol’s River Avon, loosely set in the fifteenth century, and its lament for an even further distant past, the vocal style of the poem unfolds as anything but a traditional ballad. “Trouthe” is an allegorical figure of the kind that would become fairly stereotypical in the Romantic era, and she emerges from the watery depths of the soul, the flood of the imagination, the psychological nakedness of the human spirit – and therefore reflects a higher, more numinous form of truth than empirical reality.

The ballads were written in standard eighteenth-century lyrical style, which as Walpole points out in his letter to his friend the Reverend Mr. Cole, “There is not a symptom in the poems, but the old words, that savours of Rowley’s age – change the old words for modern, and the whole construction is of yesterday”.465 It was written in a bastardised “medieval” form of standard English, not regional dialect, and was therefore aimed squarely at the London literati, and their passion for evidence of “nativist” culture.

Literary techniques such as the gothic sublime used in Chatterton’s “Battle of Hastynges II” ballad, for example, facilitated the nationalist reconstitution of Britain’s past through alternative historical readings. In this ballad, the reader re-encounters the well-known history of the English defeat at Hastings in 1066. Importantly, however, Chatterton represents the battle as subject to the larger, powerful and organised forces of Nature. He compares the English army’s crushing death to fish being eaten by a predatorial bird. Notwithstanding the “majestic” force of “Kynge Harolde” and his “mightie arme”, and how his “asengloave” stops Norman arrows in their tracks, in the end the English lose because the Norman attack has the unthinking and rapacious force of nature. The bard’s simple statement that “Willyam saw” draws us into the predatory

464 [hardy champions][Truth][from a distant stream arose a maid, whose gentle tresses did not move in the wind][respected builder]. Ibid., 242-3, ll. 192, 215-26. 465 Paget Jackson Toynbee, ed. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Oxford, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 447.

''- #

stillness of the conqueror’s simple act of battlefield proprioception. Then once he had seen:

He bent his yron interwoven bowe, Makynge bothe endes to meet with myghte full stronge, From out of mortals syght shot up the floe; Then swyfte as fallynge starres to erthe below.466

From the tangible details and kinesthetic potential of the bending bow and kissing ends of interwoven iron, William’s “floe” (his arrow) shoots upwards to a height physically impossible for a mortal man to reach, and then returns to the ground like a falling star, with similarly godlike accuracy striking and piercing “Afwoldes payncted sheelde…thro the silver-bordurd crosse”. In the next stanza, William’s soldiers take the lead of their “sovrin”, and all as one they “shotte ten thousande floes uprysynge in the aire”. Again, like a meteoric shower the thousand arrows return to the ground, in a perfect visual parallel to William’s rising and falling star. This time, however, it is with the strength and accuracy not of a god, but of the sublime, the inescapable force and unconscious drama of nature.

Chatterton then changes his simile, to emphasise this earthly power, by comparing the arrows with a flock of hungry and fierce “cranes, that take their waie/ In householde armies thro the flanched skie”. They descend to the earth “Inne one blacke cloude” to fall upon the company of men, or prey, who are represented as both the “muddie nation” of King Harold’s doomed English solidiers and the hapless fish. Both appear to Chatterton’s mind’s eye as the “speckled folk” hiding from the rain of arrows “in vayne” amongst the reeds of the “boggie fenne”.467 Chatterton’s imagery makes the reader feel they have been taken by the hand and pulled into the battle, to witness, smell, touch or feel the force and movement of the players. The English loss is described poetically in terms of the natural cycle of predators and prey, in which their defeat was as likely as fish being eaten by birds. The outcome of battle for the English side is depicted as impossible to control in the usual human sense, and therefore avoids being represented as a failure.

Chatterton’s ballad “Battle of Hastynges II” is a performance of poetic lyricism, metaphorical exuberance and gothic excess designed to entertain Georgian readers, using

466 [He bent his iron interwoven bow, powerfully making both ends meet, then shot the arrow upwards beyond mortal sight, so that it then fell swiftly to the earth below like a falling star] Chatterton, "Battle of Hastings Ii," 75, ll. 231-8. 467 [cranes that made their way in household armies through the arched sky][in one black cloud][muddy nation][in vain][boggy fen. Ibid., 75, ll. 239-49.

''. *

a nationalist reading of history that was easier to tolerate. Chatterton reshaped his readers’ affective experience of history through a revised version of England’s bloodshed and failure at Hastings, one that seemed less the fault of King Harold and his English solders, and more a tragic function of an inescapable and sublime nature. “Transporting” the reader into a sense of vicariously experienced gothic terror at the bloodshed and historical violence of the Battle of Hastings, both as readers and as British citizens, allowed a new reading of British history without any uncomfortable sense of loss or responsibility for the past. Indeed, there is a naivety and energetic optimism to these works, even in the “bloudie fyghte”468 of the battle and its graphic literary gore and slaughter, that reflects Chatterton’s sublimation of England’s real military failure. His gothic ballads were English imitations of the bardic nationalist form – as such, they were a stylistic and commercial contingency, the product of his ambitious and populist gothic poetics.

“Mountaynes joynd bie Cemente”

In the intricate and painstaking detail of his architectural elevations, a medieval fantasy world of churches, castles and culture emerges that reflect “a teenage boy’s Gothic delight of crenelated walls, flying buttresses, heraldic motifs, rose windows, spanned archways, and enigmatic hooded priests and sculptured knights”.469 Chatterton’s two-hundred or so line-drawn and occasionally painted illustrations of this fantasy were gothic revivalist in aesthetic. As such, they were imaginative, not historically realistic or factual.

In his “Preface” to the 1803 edition of Chatterton’s Works, Robert Southey criticised the “fanciful” Rowleyan sketches for representing a “confusion of styles”,470 in which the illustrator had placed:

Sometimes a Gothic window adjacent to a Saxon Door; sometimes a Gothic shaft surmounted by an Ionic Capital, (and this long before the introduction of Grecian Architecture into England;) sometimes a Tower with the whole of its base occupied with one great door; sometimes a perspective taken from two different points of view, so that the dark shades of a building appear at both extremities, and ROWLEY, on one occasion, in his zeal for the honour of Heraldry, has introduced in the front of a building, twelve CROSS-PATEES. The…whole of the Originals are executed in the rudest style that exhibit no evidence whatever of having been copied from Nature.471

468 Ibid., 71, l. 113. 469 Sumner, "Urban Landscape, Fantasy and Adolescent Identity in Thomas Chatterton's 'Rowley' Works," 5. 470 Southey, "Preface," 517. 471 Ibid., 516-7.

''/ #

The sketch of “This most noble Gate” (Figure 4.2), to which Southey was referring, apparently was for him the most confronting example of Chatterton’s deviation from “Nature”. Though he meant it as neither compliment nor cultural commentary, Southey’s observations are mostly accurate, as the apparently historical detail of Chatterton’s buildings are a non-mimetic, typological and temporal mishmash. This “confusion” may have been experimental and fanciful, but it was not mistaken. As Megan Aldrich observed, Chatterton’s drawings of gothic architecture were eighteenth-century depictions that vary widely in their faithfulness to the structural, ornamental and temporal features of true gothic; as such, they are uniformly gothic revivalist in aesthetic. 472 Chatterton adapted his cityscapes, elevations and floor plans to suit his own fanciful notions of medieval Bristolean civic architecture. My research suggests that they were not meant to be real historical illustrations, but to offer the viewer an idealised vision of the past, and an imaginative alternative for the future.

Figure 4.2. “This most noble Gate was the Thyrde and laste ybuilden by Brightricus or Bythaccus Kg. of the Westonne Saxans” (folio detail)473

472 Megan Aldrich, Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1994). 473 Thomas Chatterton, This Most Noble Gate Was the Thyrde and Laste Ybuilden by Brightricus or Bythaccus Kg. Of the Westonne Saxans, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766B-084 British

'(& *

Chatterton went to some pains in these drawings to portray Bristol’s superior architectural workmanship. In the “Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie”, for example, Rowley describes two “Wyndowes with painted Glass” amongst the “good handiewurche” that went into building the Priory in 1205.474 The “Windowe in the Hall” (Figure 4.3), for example, shows the intricate angular tracery of a stained-glass window with oddly flimsy and insubstantial mullions. The window’s design more closely resembles later Decorative Gothic style than Early English Gothic. The real St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Bristol, which was founded in 1220, and consequently built in the Early English gothic style was far too simple in design and function to have even one such grand glass window. Such vast and seemingly effortless stone and glass spaces were a feature of later Gothic churches, and a consequence of leaps in architectural knowledge, mastery and workmanship. Those later architects understood the lines of weight that freed them from the heavy stone walls and small windows required for structural strength in the Early Gothic period. The visual drama of the Priory’s decorative window heightens its symbolic impact. In his inventiveness, Chatterton thus embellished historical reality, implying a capacity for advanced technical workmanship in medieval Bristol that was anachronistic and fanciful, to say the least.

Library. Published as “Towre Gate” in Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 105, Plate III. 474 [Roll of Saint Bartholomew’s Priory] [good handiwork] Chatterton, "The Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie," 147, ll. 48-50.

'(' #

Figure 4.3. “Windowe in the Hall” in the “Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie” (folio detail)475

Chatterton’s architectural illustrations and cityscapes reflected a “theory of history”476 that sublimated the terror, brutality and failure of Britain’s real bloody history, and reimagined the past in ways that made a different, equally imaginary future possible. In their “playful, gracious, quite unauthentic”477 revivalist style, they operated in aesthetic and symbolic terms very much similar to those at play in Walpole’s folly and museum, Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham. As Luisa Calé maintains, Walpole’s gothic museum was an architectural experiment in miniaturisation that transformed the stone immensity and violence of gothic fortification, and the medieval past, into an exotic

475 “Windowe in the Hall” in the “Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie”, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766C-019. British Library. Published in Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 146, Plate XIVb. 476 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 5. 477 Mowl, "A Rococo Poet for a Rococo City," 18,52.

'(( *

“domestic interior”.478 Similarly historicist in its revivalist style, Langley’s designs for garden structures, self-published in Gothic Architecture, improved by Rules and Proportions (1747), aimed to evolve “native Saxon” architectural forms by imposing classical proportions on them. The visual symmetry and elegance of his gothic garden mash-ups were, as Groom argues, meant to explore fearsome cultural memories “in the shape of uncultivated patches of natural ‘wildness.’”479 As a speaking architectural form, his garden designs offered the spectator a retrospective vista of reassuring rationality and virtue, superimposed onto, and ideally obliterating all cultural memory of, Britain’s uncomfortably bloody and barbaric history. Chatterton’s visual symbolism in his gothic revivalist drawings worked in a similar fashion. His revision of Bristol’s medieval architecture provided a gallery of images suggesting a past refined in its workmanship, passionate about defensive castles and beautiful churches, and populated mainly by a proto-bourgeois class of active merchants, soldiers, builders, priests, antiquarians and poets.

Walpole’s critical responses to both Langley’s and Chatterton’s gothic revivalist aesthetics is instructive in terms of understanding the bourgeois flavour of Chatterton’s gothic symbolism. As the most public and respected practitioner of mid-century gothic revivalism, Walpole was as critical of Chatterton’s upstart, half-baked antiques as he was of Langley’s “massacre” of the “venerable species” of gothic “real imitations”. 480 Walpole clearly believed gothic imitation was his own special province of expertise. His objection to Langley’s revivalism was the illogicality of trying to cultivate a new cultural memory of past British atrocity by handing it right back into the arms of the Romans.481 Walpole took a dim view of Langley’s work for its lack of recognition of the glorious honour of the “real” past and the role of the architect-historian in representing rather than renewing. He wrote in his Anecdotes of Painting that “all that his books achieved, has been to teach carpenters to massacre that venerable species, and to give occasion to those who know nothing of the matter, and who mistake his clumsy efforts for real imitations, to censure the productions of our ancestors”.482 There is an inherent lack of logic in both sides of the argument, either in trying to establish “real imitation” of past glories, or to

478 Calè, "Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry Vii in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill," 279. 479 Groom, "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity," 282-3. 480 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 484. 481 Ibid. 482 M. Harney, Place-Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill (Taylor & Francis, 2016), 76. Quoting Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England.

'() #

improve on those glories and historical authenticity of a cultural aesthetic itself defined by historical inauthenticity.

Assuming we believe some part of Chatterton’s likely skewed and immature rendering of the affair, Walpole’s objection to Chatterton’s revivalism was fundamentally class-based prejudice, apart from the fact that Chatterton suggested to Walpole that his pseudo-medieval manuscripts were authentically old. In an irate verse letter to Walpole, which he notes his sister sensibly “perswaded me out of” sending,483 Chatterton rages at the man’s double standards in rejecting the Rowley works. He argues that Walpole was also “indulge[d] in [the] Deceit” of literary forgery, and accuses Walpole of unfairly dismissing him for his “poor and Mean” socioeconomic condition in life. His final proleptic curse thrown at Walpole, that “I shall live and Stand/ By Rowley’s side – when Thou art dead and damned”,484 is the outraged statement of a creative professional with “a consciousness of superior endowments”.485 Chatterton was mistaken in believing that Walpole would recognise their collegiate status in performing gothic style, but he was perhaps closer to the mark in his assessment of Walpole’s reasons for dismissing the Rowley works. Walpole was representative of the elite class of grammar-school educated gentleman writers, but he had a foot in the fashionable literary camp too, working with the new gothic aesthetic. Consequently, he held all the cultural capital in his hands, and Chatterton almost none. His problem with Chatterton therefore was likely in some way to be related to the young poet’s middle-class background, and his social pretentions.

No wonder, then, in the aspirational limitlessness of his adolescent imagination, Chatterton imagined a version of medieval Britain in which the merchant and working people played a powerful and central role in cultural life. His version of gothic transformed not only the uncultivated medieval barbarism of the past, but also removed the aristocrats from the protagonists’ roles, offering a new historical vision of Bristol that reflected the emergent eighteenth-century public sphere, bourgeois cultural power, and was more politically and culturally contemporary. Indeed, human forms are rare in Chatterton’s illustrations and always represented as stone statuary. For example, this jaunty little sketch of the statue of “Syre Johannes de Berkelaie” (Figure 4.4) standing on a pedestal illustrates Chatterton’s description of one of Bristol’s medieval church buildings, Saint Bartholomew’s Priory. Although Syre Johannes looks as though he could

483 Chatterton, "Walpole! I Thought Not I Should Ever See," 341, l. 21. 484 Ibid., 341, ll. 4-7, 15-18. 485 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 53.

'(* *

be knocked off his pedestal, Chatterton’s commentary makes it clear that the figure has been carved by hand. Such images of Bristol’s mythological and aristocratic figures were set back historically to a time even older than Rowley’s “medieval present day”, but reconfigured by the skilled hands of Rowley’s Bristolean workers. Symbolically reflecting the social fluidity of the Georgian period, Chatterton’s illustration represents the aristocratic classes superseded in cultural relevance and power by their industrious and middle-class inferiors.

Figure 4.4. Statue of “Syre Johannes de Berkelaie” (folio detail)486

Most of Chatterton’s drawings are not human figures, but architectural illustrations, cityscapes and maps, like Chatterton’s sketched elevation of the “Backe of yGuarders Hall with its Towers” (Figure 4.5) from his “Bristol Castle” series of writings and drawings.487 Here the human form has been reduced to tiny classical statues, almost

486 Thomas Chatterton, Statue of Syre Johannes De Berkelaie, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766C-009. British Library. Published as “Statue of Sir John the Berkeley” in Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 143, Plate XIII. 487 Apart from the heraldic drawings discussed in Bryden, "The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry."

'(+ #

entirely overpowered by the Rococo exuberance of the tracery on the building’s façade, from its Palladian-style columnar forms and miniature triangular pediment, to its gothic gate and portcullis, decorative domes, cornices and festoons, and little round Saxon wall emblems. It is unlike any building ever built, and as a building that speaks, it clamours in three, or even five, different and conflicting aesthetic tongues, but still it is a celebration of human workmanship and the possibilities of an alternative reality.

Figure 4.5. “Backe of yGuarders Hall with its Towers” (folio detail)488

Signs of human industry, professional activity and handiwork are everywhere represented in this civic fantasy. The rest of the drawings in the Bristol Castle series (Figure 4.6) represent the central role played by civil construction and military works in Rowley’s medieval Bristol. The titles of these drawings indicate that the buildings were used by the working folk of the castle, the guards, the arrowmen and warden – the “backe of the guard’s hall”, the “logge of the Arrowmen”, and the “back of the warden’s hall”. As architectural elevations, the form that these illustrations take points to their usage in professional terms as the designed blueprints and aesthetic recording of medieval

488 Chatterton, The Backe of the Guarders Halle with Its Towers.

'(, *

Bristol’s civic spaces, walls, gates, halls and lodges. Some titles indicate construction itself is soon to take place, or has recently been completed, such as the “new ybulden front of the castle”. These elevations speak to the work of the architect and builder, as well as the soldiers and administrators. They point back to the professional classes of medieval Bristoleans who constructed these monuments. They tell a story in visual symbols of aesthetic style, local civic development, topological and dimensional problem-solving, skilled construction, professional knowledge, and the everyday working life of defending a city, rather than ostentatious and aristocratic display.

489 The New Ybuilden Fronte of the Castle, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766A-039. British Library; Castle Warde Logge of Arrowmen, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766B- 103. British Library; Governors Hall Front, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766A-041. British Library; Backe of the Wardonys Halle, 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766A-037. British Library. “Castle Warde Logge of Arrowmen” published as “Part of the inner castle” in “Bristol

'(- #

There are in fact two quite different types of architectural illustrations that make up Chatterton’s gothic revivalist oeuvre – those, as above, representing “contemporary” medieval Bristol castle and churches in Rowley’s day (the “modern” fifteenth century), and those representing an earlier medieval period. Rowley’s source for his historical writings and drawings was an eleventh-century priest and historian named Turgot, or Turgotus. While Rowley was entirely imaginary, Turgot had some basis in reality. Meyerstein notes that Chatterton “found” Turgot, “who was a real person, prior of Durham and a historian” in Camden’s Britannia, and then imaginatively attributed to him an entire discourse about Bristol’s history in “Saxonnes Latyn”, as well as the original, unseen “Ur-text” of the “Battle of Hastynges” ballads. Rowley, he observes, “was to be Turgot’s translator and emender in the fifteenth century just as Chatterton was Rowley’s in the eighteenth. Behind Turgot, mercifully, we cannot go in this labyrinth of make- believe”.490

Rowley’s architectural illustrations of early medievalism in Bristol come from his translation and amendments of Turgot’s histories (see Figure 3.6). Often, the folio pages of these older buildings are given as pages of notes and drawings together in the form of a scholarly commonplace book. Examples include the “Emendals to Turgotte”, which shows “The onlie remaining parts of Kyng Brightricus of Bithrychs Palace” and Rowley’s folio containing the drawings of the “Waterr Gate Froune Gate ybuilden by the aforesaid Brichtrycys Kynmge of the West Saxons. Part remayneth todaye…(So sayeth Turgot)”.491 In these few bracketed words, Rowley clearly demonstrates his doubt about the veracity and reliability of his historical source. The rough style of these simple, two- dimensional architectural drawings is meant to give a sense of their extreme antiquity and the uncertainty of knowing the past, in comparison to those architectural elevations and cityscapes that Chatterton “transcribes” from Rowley’s more detailed contemporary architectural drawings of castle and church buildings. Taylor notes that Chatterton’s technique of imagining Rowley as a skeptic, editing or “emending” Turgot, who is “a now lost Norman source”:

has the force of putting the assertions made about pre-Norman Bristol quite beyond criticism, as though Rowley’s skepticism had already taken care of monkish credulity

Castle”, Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 119, Plate VIII. “Castle warde logge” means castle-watch cottage. 490 Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 109. 491 [The only remaining parts of King Brightricus of Bithrychs Palace][Water gate, Froume (River) Gate built by the aforesaid King Brightricus of the west Saxons. Part of it still remains today, according to Turgot]

'(. *

in Turgot…At the same time, the device puts Rowley forward once more as an historian of the fifteenth century of amazingly advanced method and temper, a man subscribing to modern canons of historical inference.492

The sketchiness of these drawings asserts this same uncertainty and inference. Chatterton’s flattening of dimensionality and detail in his early medievalist illustrations symbolises the obscurity of antiquity and, in a modern, nuanced eighteenth-century sense, points to the relativity and constructed, interpretative nature of history. We are left with an interpretation that is Rowley’s imagined vision of Bristol’s past.

Through his historical avatar, Chatterton’s descriptions of these buildings alters depending on whether he is regarding the “old” or “new” medieval past. Taylor points out that Rowley’s style in reporting Turgot and in relation to this earlier medieval history is “atomistic – a stringing together of discrete historical notes”.493 Like an antiquarian’s notebook, the prose is dense and data-driven and his drawings are sketchy and geometric. In contrast, his writing on the contemporary medieval buildings is lyrically excessive, visually descriptive and panegyric. In his “Parlyamente of Sprytes”, for example, in the spirit voices of a range of dead Bristolean heroes, Rowley sings the praises of medieval Bristol’s newly built St Mary Redcliff church in lyrical, panegyric and self-performative terms. Between the spirits’ verses, a story emerges of the old Thomas Church, whose “crasd Arches ande…Carvellynge, And Pyllars…thenne to Pieces felle”. In its place, Canynge commissioned and built a new church, once he had “the Sylver to the Workmenne givne”. The spirits celebrate the construction processes of this “greete Structure”, with its walls and spires like “Mountaynes joynd bie Cemente”, its “Foundationes” and “Rammed Stones”, its “cross Yles ande the Arches fayre”, and “noble Carvel Workmanshyppe”, that altogether combine to make a “wondrous Monumente” to the city. As Rowley writes, this “Glorie and Wonder of the Lande…shewes the Buylders Mynde and Fourmers hande”.494 There is a stark contrast between the documentary note-taking and illustrations of Rowley’s old medieval revivalism, which comes across like the data and diagrams of a scientist’s notebook, and his exaggerated, roccoco revivalism in these later medieval drawings with their panegyric chorus of architecturally impassioned ghost heroes. Despite their painful and violent

492 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 58. 493 Ibid. 494 [crased arches and carving, and pillars then fell to pieces][given silver to the workmen, in payment][great structure][mountains joined by cement][foundations and rammed stones][cross aisles and fair arches][noble carved workmanship][wondrous monument][Glory and wonder of the land, showing the builder’s mind and the former’s (maker’s) hand] Chatterton, "The Parlyamente of Sprytes," 111, ll. 96-99.

'(/ #

deaths, Bristol’s mythological fighting men are apparently soothed and awed by the magnificence of St Mary’s, enough to forget their deaths and focus instead on the positive impact of viewing the marvellous new church. Dead warriors are thus converted into benevolent spirits, rather than malevolent guardians or transgressors, like in traditional gothic tales. Their panegyric fanfare on the work of the builders and the products of their workmanship give Chatterton’s gothic revivalist illustrations a kind of proto-bourgeois optimism.

Embedded in the imaginary forms of Chatterton’s rebuilt castles and their lyrical description, therefore, is a highly anachronistic vision of medieval civic professionalism and workmanship. Chatterton’s gothic revivalist illustrations express an idiosyncratic “theory of history”495 that, like Walpole’s and Langley’s gothic revivalism, sublimated the brutality of Britain’s real gothic history while also representing this bourgeois, aspirational and rather naïve aesthetic. His gothic style speaks to his middle-class Georgian audience and their experience of cultural ascendency and public power, offering them a retrospective vision of a future populated with proto-industrialists, architects and poets.

Bristol’s gallery of memories

Donald Taylor identifies the subject matter of most of Chatterton’s three-hundred-odd illustrations as relevant to the medieval Rowley world. One third are heraldic drawings, and the rest are “objects from that world – coins, inscriptions, ruins, churches, gates, windows, statues – historian’s objects we might call them”.496 Chatterton’s drawings of Bristol castle are representative of the kind of documentary, illustrative, historical authenticity Chatterton’s drawings gave his gothic works. They were designed to appeal to his Georgian audience’s fascination with antiquarianism and the medieval, and the excitement of emergent publishing, performative and communicative technologies, such as “dramatic media of visual immersion”. 497 Like Walpole’s “real imitations” 498 of medieval culture in his architectural folly, Strawberry Hill House, and Batty Langley’s contradictory Paladian-style “native Saxon” garden design, Chatterton’s architectural and monumental illustrations in his Bristol Castle series are designed to provide his readers,

495 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 5. 496 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 50. 497 Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 11. 498 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 484.

')& *

or audience, with an immersive experience of history. Chatterton’s gothic style in his illustrations was bibliographic, and his Rowley drawings were an early form of what Ibata describes as the “unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain” in response to notions of the sublime aesthetic, the fashion for the uncanny and carnivalesque, and experimentation with new forms of “dramatic media of visual immersion”499 such as the London literary galleries.

Chatterton’s gallery-like series of illustrations of churches, castles and statues demanded the attention of his readers, an open mind and a certain responsive awe. They were a curated performance or entertainment, like specialist antiquarian bookplates published in an historical work, or a series made for display in a London literary gallery. Luisa Calé notes the “slipperiness” of the term “gallery” in this mid-century period, at which time it was used “not only to refer to an architectural space, but also to books and engravings reproducing paintings or frescoes, often as a series from famous galleries. These paper ‘galleries’ functioned as a repository of memory but also as paper surrogates for those who did not have access to the originals”. 500 Chatterton’s gothic revival illustrations of architectural buildings and monuments from the past operates in this dual sense, not only as a paper gallery or cabinet for “new memories” of Britain’s past, but also as an exhibition space.

Chatterton’s folios are adorned with architectural elevations and floorplans, monuments and statues, maps, seals, and cityscapes, all illustrating the keeps, halls and churches of Rowley’s medieval Bristol. The illustrations are an imaginative and bookish architectural and antiquarian fantasy, imitating the engraving style of contemporary antiquarian, chorographic and historical publications of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He read and copied from The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary (Figure 4.7) and Thomas Tanner’s Notitia Monastica (Figure 4.8). He also imitated the two-dimensional and symmetrical line drawings similar in style to the Palladian architectural publishing of the period, made popular by Colen Campbell’s Vitruvicus Britannicus (1715) and Isaac Ware’s 1738 edition of Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture. From antiquarian histories like William Camden’s Britannica (1695) and John Speed’s Historie of Great Britaine (1614), he cribbed artefactual ideas and historiographic techniques of visual exhibition, such as Rowley’s drawings of Saxon and

499 Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 11. 500 Calè, "Blake and the Literary Galleries," 192-3.

')' #

Roman coins, shown in connected pairs, with front and back views (see Figure 3.3). In addition, he imitated heraldic and monumental illustrations from antiquarian texts like Peter Heylyn’s Help to English History (1674), John Guillim’s Display of Heraldry (1724) and John Weever’s Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631), adapting them to his imaginary cityscapes in accordance with his own fanciful notions of medieval Bristol’s material and civic culture.

Figure 4.7. Title page engraving (detail) from The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary (1745).501

501 John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary: In Nine Volumes, The Second Edition: Collated and improved from the original MS. With the addition also of a general index ed. (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre: For James Fletcher, Bookseller in the Turl, and Joseph Pote, Bookseller at Eton, 1745), title page.

')( *

Figure 4.8. Engraving (detail) from Thomas Tanner’s Notitia Monastica (1695).502

Chatterton was no brilliant artist or draughtsman, however. The sketches of Bristol’s medieval churches and castle keep, like the “Backe of yGuarders Hall” above, and the rest of the “Bristol Castle” illustrations (Figure 4.5), all demonstrate the difficulty Chatterton had representing proportion, symmetry and dimension with any accuracy. His elevations are naïve, mainly freehand sketches, rather than traced or technically constructed with a rule, grid and scale rods. The rhythm of his horizontal lines of windows is irregular, his vantage points and shadows are inconsistent, his hatching and rendering rather rough and unconvincing, and his buildings seem to defy gravity. Indeed, they seem more likely to topple over in a gentle breeze than withstand the fighting force of the invading Danes. Yet they have their own appeal and are captivating and pleasurable to look at. The repetition and scrolling of the stonework and windows express a convincing solidity and determination, and the fine ink drapery and features of his tiny statues invite the viewer close; all express the young artist’s multi-sensory absorption in reconstructing, embellishing and mythologising Bristol’s medieval past.

502 Thomas Tanner, Notitia Monastica: Or a Short History of the Religious Houses in England and Wales (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, and are to be sold by A. and F. Churchill at the sign of the Black Swan in Pater-noster-row, London, 1695), title page.

')) #

These sketches are a lovingly detailed, completely imaginary series of architectural elevations representing various views of the buildings that made up the castle keep. In Chatterton’s day, the castle was “little more than teasing ruins”. Undeterred, he recreated the buildings of the keep in a series of drawings and descriptions, that he “shaped as an antiquarian’s notebook combining description, historical notes, and drawings to give a conception of how Bristol Castle…must have looked in its heyday”. 503 Taylor dryly records that Chatterton had access to “all the confusing and contradictory detail of the visible ruins and of William Wyrcestre’s fifteenth- and Leland’s sixteenth-century descriptions”, which “left him considerable room for invention”. 504 Worcestre “was fascinated to the point of obsession with numbers, distances and angles”,505 describing the keep in minute mathematical detail from “dungeon” to lead-covered eaves, not in architectural or even visual terms, but instead in “in thyknesse at fote” using units of “pedes”,506 the length of his own foot for the horizontal plane and fathoms of ship’s rope for height. Chatterton extracted what he could from these obscure measurements and from existing topographical data to create a gallery of some twenty-odd fine elevations and dynamic cityscapes, all “embellished…with a rich proliferation of detail”.507

Like a wandering antiquarian, Chatterton took long walks around his local suburb. During these excursions, Taylor suggests, he “picked up and elaborated the least hint he could see of any ancient structure”.508 His little imaginary map of medieval Redcliffe (the Bristolean suburb where Chatterton grew up and where much of the Rowley fantasy takes place) is annotated like a guidebook, with numbered place references and “historical notes on the chief buildings and ruins Chatterton imagined to have existed in his own neighbourhood in the year 1443”509 (Figure 4.9). Like the process used in his writings, Chatterton created this scholarly appearance of historical science by fabricating a visual fantasy from scraps of real topography, material remains and textual sources. Taylor has identified this methodology of interwoven historical reality and fantasy in most, if not all, of Chatterton’s creative styles, but most particularly in the Rowley works. But the detailed

503 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 60. 504 Ibid.; Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 884. 505 "Introduction", F. Neale, ed. William Worcestre: The Topography of Medieval Bristol (Bristol: University Press, 2000), xiii. 506 “The tower called the Keep is 25 feet thick at the base, and 9.5 feet at the eaves under the lead roofing, and 60 feet in length east to west, and 45 feet north to south, with 4 towers standing at the four corners.” Ibid., 222-3. 507 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 60. 508 Ibid., 61. 509 Ibid., 61-2.

')* *

sketches of cityscapes and castle elevations were not only designed for viewing pleasure, they were products of a purposeful, imaginative reconstruction of Bristol’s gothic past. As I have argued previously:

Time and again he must have envisioned this imposing mediaeval fortified city as it might have appeared to a painter or to Rowley, or even to himself, walking on the opposite bank of the River Avon. In reality, Bristol Castle was little more than stony foundations, so Chatterton rebuilt its chapels, fortifications, towers and walls as the power centre of Rowley’s Bristol.510

The detail and obscurity of his raw data make Chatterton’s reconstruction of the past astonishing, and also reinforce just how committed Chatterton was to the staging of this immersive gothic-style experience of his idiosyncratically antiquarian fantasy world.

Figure 4.9. Map of medieval Redcliffe (folio detail)511

Like Horace Walpole and Batty Langley, those most infamous practitioners of mid- eighteenth-century gothic revivalist style, Chatterton staged an immersive and historically reconstructed medieval experience for his readers that relied, as Punter and Byron maintain, “on dramatic effect rather than real Gothic structures”.512 Groom claims

510 Sumner, "Urban Landscape, Fantasy and Adolescent Identity in Thomas Chatterton's 'Rowley' Works," 142. 511 Thomas Chatterton, Map of Medieval Redcliffe 1768. Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper, Add 5766B- 38. British Library. 512 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 34.

')+ #

that Walpole made Britain’s medieval past immanent in the architectural forms and museum displays of Strawberry Hills House. He highlights how Walpole’s architectural and artistic collection become a fetishistic symbol for the whole “Gothick” aesthetic, arguing that Walpole:

made antiquarianism visionary, a way of feeling the ‘magic hardiness’ of the Gothic…[by describing] the English Gothic past as an enormous painting or piece of architecture, both visual and tactile – ‘vaults, tombs, painted windows, gloom, and perspectives’ – analogous to his own medieval simulation, Strawberry Hill.513

The purpose-built, miniaturised and historically-sanitised battlements and turrets of his Strawberry Hills “castle”, and its decorated and “domesticated” museum interiors, were designed to evoke contemplation, pleasure, and a feeling of spiritual reverence, heightening the visitor’s sense of being physically immersed in and spiritually touched by history in “real imitation”. 514 Marion Harney describes this dramatic aspect of Walpole’s museum interiors, as “a sequence of theatrical spaces that played with scale, atmosphere and colour as a background to his collection of objects, all ‘singular’, ‘unique’, or ‘rare.’”515 A similar effect was achieved by landscape designer Langley who sought to improve on Gothic architectural forms by giving them classical, Palladian proportions.516 His aesthetically “batty” and contradictory classical-cum-gothic styled garden monuments and pavilions provided the “spectators” walking through, or sitting and absorbing the vistas staged by his domestic landscapes, with an entirely curated sense of sublime, natural wilderness tamed to neoclassical proportionate lines.

In their curiosity-piquing and immersive quality, Chatterton’s gothic illustrations behave something like Walpole’s or Langley’s rarified gothic spaces. They resemble the frontispiece of Ole Worm’s sixteenth-century catalogue of his cabinet of curiosities, Museum Wurmianum (1655) (Figure 4.10). Echoing Worm’s catalogue, and Walpole’s similarly illustrative and curatorial Description of Strawberry Hill, Rowley’s text “Englandes Glorye revyved” describes in graphic and passionate detail the medieval artefacts in the “Cabynet of auntient Monumentes” that he has collected on behalf of his patron William Canynge.517 As collector, caretaker and “the onlye Manne acquainted

513 Groom, "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity," 282-3. 514 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 484. 515 Harney, Place-Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, 4. 516 Batty Langley and Thomas Langley, Gothic Architecture: Improved by Rules and Proportions in Many Grand Designs... With Plans... Geometrically Explained (Taylor, 1742). 517 Chatterton, "Englandes Glorye Revyved in Mastre Canynge: Beinge Some Accomte of His Cabynet of Auntiaunt Monumentes," 65-7.

'), *

wyth all of ytte”, Rowley boasts that Canynge’s cabinet is “the moste pretyous Performance in England”, its vast and extraordinary holdings including “Stonen Bedde” statuary, “Coynes on greete Shelfes”, and histories in a “Greete Ledger”. Bringing his painterly eye to the “Instruements of Warre” in particular, Rowley uses visually detailed descriptions that enlist readers’ responsiveness to his imagery in sublime terms – he writes of “Sheeldes blazoned with a Rafen”, and axes, shields and other military artefacts “Raunged in Suche arraie that in the Lyghte of the Sunne or comynge of a Lycandle it shyneth most marvellous to behoulde”.518

Figure 4.10. “Musei Wormiani Historia” (frontispiece detail) from Ole Worm’s Museum Wormianum (1655).519

One might ask exactly what kind of “performance” Rowley believed his curation of Canynge’s cabinet delivers. Bathed in uncanny sunshine or candlelight, or like stage light

518 [cabinet of antique artefacts][the only man acquainted with all of it][the prettiest performance in England][stone bed][coins on great shelves][great ledger][instruments of war][shields blazoned with a raven][arranged in an array that shines in the light of the sun or a candle in a fashion marvellous to behold]. Ibid., 66-7, ll. 29-40. 519 G. Wingendorp, Frontispiece to Ole Worm's "Museum Wormianum", 1655. Engraving printed on paper. Isaac Elzevier.

')- #

shining in the darkness of this cabinet, Rowley comments on the “prettiness” of the display of artillery, purposely arranged to catch this beautifying light. It is a conjurer’s sleight of hand, this contradictory juxtaposition of the loveliness and terror of the sublime. The military artefacts brought to life with such bloody might in his ballads are here reduced to museum objects, polished and clean to be sure, but nonetheless domesticated in eighteenth-century antiquarian terms, and relegated to the dusty, collected and catalogued past. Chatterton’s gothic aesthetic emerges like a golem in broad daylight, blinking and naïve, mostly “without the dark inflections”.520 The spectator engages with this stage-lit past in a way that supports the “possession of the civilised” and the dispossession of all that is “other to that civilised self”.521

Chatterton’s illustrations staged an awakening in the spectator of scholarly appreciation, and a feeling of reverence and awe most familiar when viewing the vast interior spaces of a church, opening the eye to great vistas of human constructive ingenuity and workmanship through stained-glass windows, flying buttresses, a forest of tall columns, or a slender, soaring spire reaching towards the heavens. Some depict the exterior power and self-confident impenetrability of battlements, or the bird’s-eye view of watchtowers and turrets. With their naïve and enthusiastic quality, Chatterton’s illustrations effectively form a Wunderkammern, 522 or gallery of works. During this transitional period, they mixed both Enlightenment curiosity and bookishness with Georgian sociable gadding and literariness, in the spectator’s sense of being invited to walk into a space deliberately laid out to entice with diverse entertainments, but also to be didactic and offer something new to experience or learn about the world. Together, then, the illustrations comprise what Calé describes as a visual gallery of the past,523 or a series of images translating the past into nationalist terms more palatable to the viewer.

To conclude, this chapter has argued that Chatterton saw commercial possibilities in bardic balladry and the gothic revivalist aesthetic that were professionally useful to him, and which he could imitate in his own literary and artistic works for the Georgian market in gothic entertainments. In this chapter, I have extended existing critical work on Chatterton’s medievalist writings and gothic illustrations beyond rather outmoded accounts of his engagement with British nationalism, and addressed a significant gap in

520 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 18. 521 Ibid., 5. 522 “Wonder-rooms” were “collections of all sorts of curiosities and artefacts from around the world that became the rage throughout Europe” in the 1600s. Richards, "The World in a Cabinet". 523 Calè, "Blake and the Literary Galleries."

'). *

the critical literature on his visual works and their gothic aesthetic. This chapter has demonstrated that Chatterton’s gothic style in the Rowley works comprised a range of fashionable forms, including imitations of English nationalist ballads, and gallery-like series of gothic revivalist architectural and monumental illustrations. His gothic writings and illustrations reflected a “theory of history”524 that sublimated the terror, brutality and failure of England’s real history. Despite the fact that eighteenth-century gothic fantasy generally expressed sublime horror, entrapment, supernatural evil, or fear for a protagonist’s integrity, Chatterton’s gothic style tended to be mostly without these “dark inflections”.525 Instead, Chatterton’s gothic works celebrated and affirmed the emergent consciousness of middle-class cultural power.

Chatterton’s gothic experiments were immensely sensitive in their imitative textual and visual capture of nationalist and linguistic modes of expression, of the cult of gothic sensationalism, and also Walpole’s and Langley’s secularisation and domestication of Christian architecture, all as Georgian cultural entertainment. I have argued in this chapter, however, that Chatterton’s gothic bravura can be viewed as a further example of his insecure and ambitious performance of professional virtuosity. I have therefore reframed the technical and symbolic operation of his gothic works as primarily commercial, rather than political or aesthetic. For it was the heady combination of implied social liberty and cultural privilege of eighteenth-century gothic, and its immense contemporary popularity and value as an entertainment for Georgian audiences, that Chatterton perceived so clearly and tried to encapsulate in his own miniaturised, gothic literary and artistic “souvenirs”.526

524 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 5. 525 Ibid., 18. 526 Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 135.

')/

Just before responding to his friend John Baker’s letter, whose intense declaration of “Friendship and evry tender Passion I possess”527 required some form of reciprocal address, Chatterton had been writing one of his popular pseudo-ancient Saxon poems, called “Ethelgar”.528 Triggered by the need to acknowledge Baker for the epistolary “compliment of including me in your happiness”, Chatterton declared in return that:

My friendship is as firm as the white Rocks when the black Waves roar around it, and the waters burst on its hoary top, when the driving wind ploughs the sable Sea, and the rising waves aspire to the clouds teeming with the rattling Hail; so much for Heroics; to speak in plain English, I am and ever will be your unalterable Friend.529

The intensity of their verbal expressions of romantic friendship is full of homosexual innuendo to the standard modern ear. In the mid-eighteenth century period, however, it was encoded with what Jeffrey Masden calls the “queerness of this early modern rhetoric” of address, 530 and contemporary discourse concerning the male-to-male ideals of metaphysical union or soulful friendship.531 Chatterton’s shifting vocal style, initially courteous and gentlemanly, then Ossianic in its abundant pathetic fallacy, and back again, was comical, possibly ironic, and highly performative – perhaps meant both to reassure and to entertain Baker. Chatterton’s parody of Macpherson’s high lyrical style effectively undercut the sincerity of his declaration of love, and even if it was not received this way by Baker himself, certainly points to a level of homosocial discomfort and anxiety in Chatterton. This kind of vocal instability and performativity was another dominant and idiosyncratic stylistic feature of Chatterton’s work which has received little critical attention.

This concluding chapter aims to complicate traditional readings of his works, particularly Taylor’s ahistorical genre-based classification of Chatterton’s works in terms of “heroic” and “satiric” modes, an ill-defined collection of “imagined places and

527 John Baker, "From John Baker, 5 January 1769," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 165, ll.2-4. 528 Chatterton, "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 253-5. 529 "To John Baker, 6 March 1769," 257, ll.34-40. 530 Jeffrey Masten, "Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 370. 531 Harriette Andreadis, "Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire," SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 46, no. 3 (2006): 524.

'*' #

poetries”, including the Ossian-style prose poems. 532 This chapter also challenges psycho-biographical readings of Chatterton’s troubled and passionate relationships with men533 – in particular Louise J. Kaplan’s argument for a Freudian sociopathic causality for his creative impulses. 534 While Taylor’s conception of Chatterton’s “imaginative matrix” of heroic experimentation includes a psychological reading of the young poet’s creative motivation as the “search for a beneficent father and for a role as gifted son”, he subordinates these biographical factors to his ultimate focus on the search “in the major Rowley works, for believable heroes and viable heroic modes”. 535 However, not all Chatterton’s homosocial writings are heroic. Seeing his homosocial writings as manifestations of eighteenth-century literary sociability, and reading them through a queer theoretical lens, allows a more text based and culturally nuanced understanding of his obsessive identification with the male characters, both real and imaginary.

The intervention provided in this chapter is to therefore identify and examine Chatterton’s performative literary style, in the context of Georgian mid-eighteenth- century literary sociability and theatrical culture. The second intervention this chapter makes is to elucidate his performative style through queer and feminist theories. Specifically, this chapter will argue that Chatterton’s performative expression of masculine identities and relationships in these works was a response to mid-century Georgian homosocial culture. These performative renderings point to deeply felt anxieties about his own role, as a literary professional within the emergent new class, gender and cultural structures of the eighteenth-century public sphere.536

Heather Love’s approach to reading the archive for hidden emotional and gendered histories of vexation, desire and anxiety, helps illuminate the affective history of Chatterton’s homosocial relationships with God, women, and other men.537 This chapter

532 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History. See Taylor’s contents page for the structural outline of his monograph, and subsequent chapters for his argument about Chatterton’s creative approach to different generic “modes”. 533 Greenacre, "The Family Romance of the Artist."; "The Relationship of the Imposter to the Artist."; Kaplan, The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton; Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. 534 Kaplan’s argument was that Chatterton’s creative works developed out of a psychological condition of “imposturous narcissism” as a result of being fatherless, and as a consequence developed an imaginary world of father figures and other male heroes. Groom, "Introduction," 6. Citing Kaplan, The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton. 535 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 44-78, 79. 536 Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy."; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society; Landes, "The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration." 537 Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.

'*( +

firstly examines Chatterton’s Ossian-style prose poem “Ethelgar” and his freethinking verse “If wishing for the mystic Joys of Love”538 in relation to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as the primary power and importance of the homosocial bond within the heterosexual love triangle,539 in order to reveal the vexed and conflicted feelings about spiritual love and homosocial relationship underlying Chatterton’s lyrical performativity. Secondly, this chapter considers Chatterton’s short epistolary fiction, the “Astrea Brokage Letter”, 540 as a satirical literary performance of transgressive middle-class femininity, through which Chatterton invited homosocial bonding through rhetorical enforcement of domestic, private notions of female virtue. Thirdly, it compares Chatterton’s hudibrastic wit in “Journal 6th” with his picaresque “Memoirs of a Sad Dog”,541 cataloguing the performative possibilities for mid-eighteenth-century men in their courtship of women and one another.

Chatterton’s homosocial style was a response to Georgian literary sociability and the excitement surrounding public entertainments “engendered by the commercialisation of culture in venues such as the coffee-house, the inn, tavern, alehouse, the proliferation of forms of voluntary association, theatres, pleasure-gardens, dancing assemblies, and so on”. 542 Entertainments in the period were “influenced by sensibility and the public presence of women”, where others such as the club and tavern were “strongly identified with male homosociality”.543 As Terry Castle argues, public masquerades too were a feature of urban public life in the period, 544 providing a performative “dream-like zone where identities became fluid and cherished distinctions – between self and other, subject and objects, real and unreal – temporarily blurred”.545 In the “rhetoric of masquerade”, Castle argues that the “controlling figure was the antithesis”. The relationship between costume and wearer was ironic, and “replicated a conceptual scandal” such as “duchesses dressed as milkmaids, footmen as Persian kings, pimps as cardinals, noblemen as ancient bawds, young ladies of the court as ‘trowser’d’ hussars”.546 In this context, therefore, it

538 Chatterton, "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 253-5; "If Wishing for the Mystic Joys of Love," 447. 539 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 21. 540 Chatterton, "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 431-2. 541 "Journal 6th," 369-71, ll. 173-254. The lines in question are a section of this verse letter, comprising a metrical epistle on love, bucks and rakes. "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," 651-62. 542 Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, 39. 543 Russell and Tuite, "Introducing Romantic Sociability," 5. 544 Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford University Press, 1986), 2. 545 The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 17. 546 Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, 5.

'*) #

is easy to imagine the young, male and middle-class Chatterton clothing himself (in literary terms) in antithetical voices and costumes, as an antiquarian scholar, gentlemanly rake, modern picaresque man about town, aristocratic lady in distressed circumstances, or foul-mouthed hussy.

Chatterton’s homosocial writings reflect “the inextricable gender, class, and national anxieties of mid-eighteenth-century English men”.547 His staged articulations of literary professionalism and masculinity in these poems and short prose fictions, including his female ventriloquism and cross-dressing, and his picaresque narratives, must also be understood in the cultural context of the emergent “public sphere”, and the way literary performance was implicated in the negotiation of new class and gender identities in the Georgian period. Noisy, public theatrics amongst young employed men and women, like Chatterton and his Juvenile Club, were considered dangerous at the time, not only because they encouraged women in the indecent act of taking the stage, but also because trying on costumes and new habits of address or manner, as Gillian Russell argues, operated as a “transgression of rank…by destabilizing any impression of manners, gesture, and behavior as being reliable signifiers of social rank”. 548 The way theatre and the performance of social class, gender roles and literary persona could “embody the nation” and in fact reconstitute it in middle class terms, was what gave theatre in this period its particular “political potency”.549 In this context Chatterton was conscious of his literary works as a form of commercial performance that aspired to the emergent new male- dominated, bourgeois “republic of letters”,550 but was perhaps less consciously aware of its deeper engagement with representations of the public and private faces of masculinity, and therefore of himself. In her seminal text, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick demonstrates the complexity of homosocial bonding between men in the second half of the eighteenth century, and its impact on women. 551 Writing of the period, she argued, was often concerned with the “several different paths by which men may attempt to arrive at satisfying relationships with other men” 552 – not necessarily homosexual and not necessarily friendly, but satisfying nonetheless. I have borrowed Sedgwick’s heuristic of erotic triangles, in which men socially and sexually “traffic in women” primarily to create

547 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 16. 548 Russell, "“Keeping Place“: Servants, Theatre and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain," 28. 549 Ibid., 29-30. 550 Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 9. 551 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 552 Ibid., 49-50.

'** +

and maintain a homosocial bond, rather than for heterosexual love or marriage.553 The socio-sexual exchanges expressed in Chatterton’s representations of relationships between men and women animate the connections between his passionate and troubled relationships with men, his performative homosocial style, and its parallel instabilities of class, gender, genre and voice.

Chatterton struggled with his relationships with men. His literary role-playing was a litany of intimate contracts and manipulations. These texts express his love, arrogance and jealousy, his ambitious needs and dependence on the cultural and political power of others, like Walpole, Barrett, and Catcott. His habit of literary masquerade, as disguised self-revelation, speaks to his professional and personal ambitions and insecurities, in the context of cultural changes leading to a world in which he might play a greater role and have more success. Chatterton borrowed different voices, or characters, to externally represent certain internal states of masculine psychological authenticity, such as Macpherson’s passionate sublimity, Butler’s witty hudibrastics, Smollett’s “broad and ludicrous” picaresque,554 and Churchill’s contemptuous and digressive anger:

Here in the malice of my stars confin’d, I call the Muses to divert my Mind: Come Inspiration mysticly instill, The Spirit of a [Churchill] in my Quill.555

David Fairer argues that this performative poet’s voice, as a vehicle for exploring the poet’s own “primitive” psychological or emotional states, was a defining experimental feature that Chatterton shared with a number of mid-century poets, including Thomas Gray, William Collins, the Warton brothers (Thomas and Joseph), Christopher Smart, James Macpherson and Robert Burns.556 It is this staging of self-awareness, and the theatrical quality of poetic emotionality that makes it more difficult to work out what Chatterton might genuinely have thought or felt, if he even knew it himself.

This thesis has already mapped some of Chatterton’s stylistic experiments in response to the “irrational and gothic” underside of eighteenth-century culture,557 including his

553 Ibid., 21. 554 Mr Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch says to Mr Casaubon: "Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett – Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker. They are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know”. Stewart Kelly, "Summer Voyages: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett," The Guardian, 12 August 2013. 555 Chatterton, "Kew Gardens," 523, ll.395-406. 556 Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility."; Fairer, "Lyric Poetry: 1740–1790," 397. 557 Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 7.

'*+ #

intense frustration with his inadequate education, and his endlessly creative and protean barrage of stylistic attacks on the London publishing scene, his willingness to scare his employer Mr Lambert with a mock-testamentary threat of suicide, his gothic revivalist fantasies, as well as his desires to seduce and manipulate Barrett and Walpole into publishing his works. As Castle points out, with regards to new social understandings of the eighteenth century:

No more the expansive, unruffled, serenely self-confident “Age of Reason” commemorated in nineteenth-century Whig historiography: we now see the period more darkly – as riven by class and social tensions, as brutal and often neurotic in underlying character, and fraught with political, moral, and psychic instabilities. The “new” eighteenth century is not so much an age of reason, but one of paranoia, repression, and incipient madness”.558

There have been plenty of critics willing to attest to Chatterton’s madness, certainly where his relationships with father figures are concerned. However, as already stated above, this chapter’s purpose is to present a less diagnostic, more stylistically nuanced account of his literary representations of men and love.

Love’s work on the “politics of affect” 559 provides a useful critical strategy for uncovering precisely these nuances – Chatterton’s anxious rhetorical performance of his desire to be part of a glamourous and male literary milieu that he feared would always exclude him. Love’s theoretical approach draws on queer theory, and the work of critics who “have sought to think systematically about the relation between emotion and politics…the conjunction of the psychic and the social”.560 She critically examines the incidence of deep and painful affective states in a range of late eighteenth to early twentieth century literary texts, writings “visibly marked by queer suffering”, using a techniques she calls an “archive of feeling” to catalogue and account for:

While Chatterton himself was not same-sex identifying, he was a member of a social group constituted by failure, exclusion, despair and “founded on a history of suffering,

558 Ibid. 559 Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, 10. 560 Ibid. 561 Ibid., 4.

'*, +

stigma, and violence”.562 Chatterton felt the pain of social exclusion acutely and this pain manifests in his frenetic production of one literary failure after another, served up to derisive and withholding gatekeepers such as Walpole; a pattern that can be read as a “history of insult and abuse”. 563 Ultimately his death was also connected with his sexuality, suffering and isolation.564

Chatterton’s “history of tears” informed his creative style at its deepest level. The next three sections map the hidden emotional histories of power and disempowerment, resentment, desire and anxiety that run beneath the surface of Chatterton’s literary performance of his love relationships. In the process new narratives about his passions and vulnerabilities emerge, as well as the ways his genre and gender instabilities were represented in his work. Love’s affect theory helps to name the powerful currents and determinants of Chatterton’s creative style, its extreme changeability and experimentation.

Vexations of the divine love triangle

Feelings of disempowerment and resentment are central undercurrents in Chatterton’s homosocial style. His Ossian-style poem, “Ethelgar”, and his libertine freethinking verse, “If wishing for the mystic Joys of Love”, are imitations of two very different styles of fashionable genre writing in the 1760s London periodical publishing market. Both narratives consider “how extensive is the power of God!”,565 and the impact of that power on the relationship between man, woman and god (in masculine form), which Chatterton represents in the gendered homosocial terms identified by Sedgwick as the love triangle.566 Using Love’s “politics of affect”567 as a critical strategy for uncovering the centrality of pain and suffering in these poems, the stylistic expression of Chatterton’s feelings of resentment at divine injustice are revealed.

Written in blatant imitation of Macpherson’s lyrical style, “Ethelgar” is one of Chatterton’s pseudo-Saxon prose poems. Of all Chatterton’s works, his Ossian imitations

562 Ibid., 1. 563 Ibid., 2. 564 In his biography of Thomas Chatterton in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Nick Groom relates that despite long-held and often convenient beliefs to the contrary, “Chatterton was neither starving, neglected, mad, nor suicidal: he died of an accidental overdose of arsenic mixed with opium, which he was taking as treatment for a sexually transmitted disease”. Groom, "Thomas Chatterton," 447. 565 Chatterton, "If Wishing for the Mystic Joys of Love," 447, l. 4. 566 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 21. 567 Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, 10.

'*- #

were perhaps the most successful in terms of publication and positive public review.568 Yet Chatterton critics, such as Taylor, did not have much time for his Ossian-style ancient Saxon poems, however. While Taylor acknowledged that, to contemporary cultural sensibilities “Ethelgar” might have been something more than “unintelligible lapses of taste or hackwork”, Chatterton’s “constant harping on nature’s starkest, most somber forms and movements… and on their human equivalents in warfare, the hunt, and fierce attachments and hatreds” put a superfluous and detrimental metaphorical strain on his poetic forms, to the extent that they were “being asked to carry a load of significance that they cannot really bear”.569 He suggested that Chatterton’s extreme use of pathetic fallacy was a technique to express humanity’s loss of connection with nature during the Industrial Revolution, as “interrelated growths of technology, cities, and trade were radically altering the human environment”.570 This may have been the case, but Taylor’s analysis, and his patience, came unstuck when accounting for Chatterton’s sublime “claptrap”, and simultaneous “contemptuous parodies of the style”.571 Chatterton’s generic flexibility did not fit neatly into the categories Taylor attempted to apply to his works, hence the Saxon poems ended up in his miscellaneous generic category of “Other imagined worlds” that were neither pastoral, epic, nor satire.

This thesis presents the view that Chatterton’s sublime and parodic forms make more sense when mapped in the context of his homosocial performances. In these poems, Chatterton conceptualised man’s relationship with God in sociable, homophilic terms, modelled on early modern notions of the metaphysical union or soulful connection between men. 572 The bardic poet introduces Ethelgar in this poem in the passionate homoerotic terms considered appropriate in the eighteenth century to represent heightened feelings of positive regard for another man.573 The poet describes Ethelgar as “Comely as the white rocks; bright as the star of the ev’ning; tall as the oak upon the brow of the mountain”.574 He is in every sense an extraordinary man’s man – tall, brave, strong

568 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 273. 569 Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, 67; Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 283. 570 Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 283. 571 Ibid., 273. 572 Andreadis, "Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire," 524. 573 Ibid. 574 Chatterton, "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 253, ll. 20-25.

'*. +

and strikingly handsome, but “soft as the showers of dew, that fall upon the flowers of the field”, meaning both gentle, and gentlemanly, or of “noble” ancestral birth.575

Importantly, Ethelgar is also portrayed as spiritually sensitive, virtuous and devout, and a happy man for it. His immaterial, immortal soul was not yet weighed down by cares, but “with the lark, every morning ascended the skies, and sported in the clouds”, light as a feather, playing in the stratosphere somewhere up near God. Without saying a word, Ethelgar is in a state of union with the divine, which responds to him through nature. When he sings aloud the world sings too, and “the works of the Lord; the hollow rocks joined in his devotions; the stars danced to his song”. 576 Chatterton’s passionate hyperbole instructs the reader in the sublime condition of human fusion with and dependence on the natural world. It similarly indicates the correspondence between Ethelgar’s inner and outer personae. Chatterton’s technique of pathetic fallacy also emphasises the spoken and unspoken conversations, and metaphysical union, between these two masculine entities, man and his god.

The gendered terms of both “Ethelgar” and “If wishing for the mystic Joys of Love” bear a resemblance to the eighteenth-century homosocial power dynamics Sedgwick describes as “erotic triangles”.577 In superficial terms, the narrative of “Mystic Joys” concerns the sexual and power relations between the heterosexual male poet, the essential Woman, and God. He voices his vexation that even simply wishing for the “mystic” joys of love, by which he means the carnal joy of sex, is “by eternal Justice deem’d a fault”. He includes women in this shared fault of desire, and the “forc’d iniquity” of original sin decreed by “the Power of God”, but his focus in the poem is on his freethinking dialogue with God, not on any real female lover.578 “Ethelgar” superficially tells the tale of his love for and tragic loss of Egwina, when she is struck by lightning. The greater part of the poetic narrative concerns God’s power, “terrible as the face of the earth…; gentle as the sacred covering of the oak;… secret as the bottom of the great deep”, as well as Ethelgar’s relationship with God, and his process of rage and grief, and ultimate need “to submit to the will of God”.579 As argued by Sedgwick, the main narrative function of these divine

575 Ibid., 253, ll. 21-23. 576 Ibid., 254, ll. 24-5, 30-2. 577 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 21. 578 Chatterton, "If Wishing for the Mystic Joys of Love," 447, ll. 2, 4, 6. 579 "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 255, ll. 95-6.

'*/ #

love triangles are not to represent heterosexual love or marriage, but to represent the primacy of the masculine bond.580

The social relationships in these poems excluded women for a purpose. There is a gender imbalance in this depiction of the three-way relationship with God, that reflects Chatterton’s acceptance of contemporary eighteenth-century beliefs about women, and in fact supported emerging new middle-class discourses regarding gender differences and roles. The figure of “Woman” in “If wishing for the mystic Joys of Love” is abstract, essentialised here as predisposed to sexual “evil”. 581 Chatterton responds with the contemptuous whinge, “Tell me Ye Pow’rs what Woman’s Innocent”, in a poetic version of “It’s not fair! She does it too”. As Barbara Darby argues, one of the main strategies of eighteenth-century conduct books was to “encourage women to be self-regulating by recognising their ‘natural’ predispositions for both good and evil, encouraging the former and quelling the latter”.582 In this poem, Chatterton is not concerned with any one woman, nor particularly with women’s damnation, but with using their flawed nature to strengthen his argument against the injustice of a God “Who gave us Passions which we must obey…/ And for such forc’d iniquity we’re damned”.583 He might be philosophical about sexual love, but the story of women’s experience is not told by Chatterton.

If Egwina had a relationship with God like Ethelgar’s, then as readers we are not told of it. Nor are we told the reason why God chooses to strike her dead in the most aggressive and brutal way. She is Ethelgar’s statuesque and passionate equal, being “tall as the towering elm; stately as a black cloud bursting into thunder; fair as the wrought bowels of the earth”. Paradoxically, Chatterton also describes her as “gentle and sweet as the morning breeze; beauteous as the sun; blushing like the vines of the west; her soul as fair as the azure curtain of heaven”.584 Her loveliness is natural, modest and silent, in that traditional and essentialist “image of femininity” Darby argues contributed in the period “to the consolidation of a middle class distinct from both the aristocracy and the working poor, with a particular type of domestic woman at its center”.585

580 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 21. 581 Barbara Darby, "The More Things Change… the Rules and Late Eighteenth‐Century Conduct Books for Women," Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29, no. 3 (2000): 336. 582 Ibid. 583 Chatterton, "If Wishing for the Mystic Joys of Love," 447, ll. 9-11. 584 "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 254, ll. 34-38. 585 Darby, "The More Things Change… the Rules and Late Eighteenth‐Century Conduct Books for Women," 335-6.

'+& +

Significantly, Egwina does not speak in this poem, but like a good and virtuous woman loves Ethelgar, her “soft soul melted” only once he declares his love for her. She becomes his wife at the “shrine of Cuthbert” and conceives a child immediately after the euphemistic “minutes fled on golden wings of bliss”. Minutes? Poor Egwina! Chatterton unwittingly exposes his adolescent sexuality, and his related failure of imagination where Ethelgar’s sexual prowess and generosity as a mature man is concerned. She bears their son Aelgar after exactly “nine horned moons had decked the sky”,586 and until her death she is otherwise always at his side, so that together they are “like two stars that move thro’ the sky”.587 Like the “Woman” in “Mystic Joys”, Egwina is depicted in a reduced and idealised way, as the perfect wifely companion, but more importantly in terms of the narrative themes and functions of both works, as a commodity, the third “other”, desired but not central to the story.

It is entirely possible to read Chatterton’s poems as a meditation on the sexualised and abusive power imbalance between man and God. His outraged sense of injustice at what he sees as God’s cruel misuse of power is apparent, and in fact consumes the whole, brief poetic narrative and affective tone of “Mystic Joys”. In God’s “extensive” creative power, Chatterton argues, our “nature” is not our own, because God “formd the Mind and… instill’d the Soul” with “Passions which we must obey”. Yet as sexual love is “deem’d a fault” by this same “power of God”, we are “Conceiv’d in Sin [and] we Sin by Gods decree/ And for such forc’d iniquity are damned”. Chatterton’s logic is impeccable. His sense of confused hurt and outrage is almost tangible, at the unfairness of being born and damned in the same moment, and purposefully created this way by a supposedly benevolent deity.

Donald Greene writes that despite the intellectual diversity of the eighteenth century, and the revolutionary and anti-authoritarian values so clearly inscribed in the literature of the period, “the list of important British writers who unequivocally rejected orthodox Christian doctrine is a small one”.588 Even the titles of two of Chatterton’s earliest extant poems, “A Hymn for Christmas Day” and “Apostate Will”,589 which were written when he was eleven years old, demonstrate the fact that like the vast majority of eighteenth- century children he was immersed in Christian teachings. The former of these verses

586 Chatterton, "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 254, ll. 40-1. 587 Ibid., 254, ll. 62-3. 588 Donald Johnson Greene, The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century English Literature, vol. 18 (Random House Inc, 1970), 93. 589 Taylor and Hoover, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 1-5.

'+' #

lyrically celebrates God, in imitation of similar devotional hymns in the Common Book of Prayer, and the latter satirises the fickle denominational character, and pecunious motivations of an apostate. Chatterton continued to think and write about his own religious beliefs, and to satirise others’ Christian beliefs, particularly in relation to eighteenth-century notions of love, sex and marriage. He produced what Taylor describes as freethinking poems, and “libertine epistles discussing or expressing love”,590 as a way to understand God through Nature, rather than the scriptures.

In fictionalised terms, “Ethelgar” explicitly represents the affective devastation and disempowerment of the divine love triangle. Well after the poet-bard’s initial injunction to Ethelgar: “’Tis not for thee, O man! To murmur at the will of the Almighty”,591 the tale unfolds like a Shakespearean drama, replete with murderous male jealousy and rivalry, cruelty, emotional vicissitudes, and body count. Sedgwick argues that in the love triangle, homosocial desire based on sexual rivalry and the pleasure of power can be “even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved”.592 “Ethelgar” represents in metaphorical detail Chatterton’s sense of this cruel and violent relationship, of the homoerotic power imbalance between man and his god, of God’s relational jealousy and destructiveness, and the disempowerment, emotional pain and ultimate submission of the masculine “other” arising from it.

As established, the passionate and hyperbolic style of this tragic narrative reflects the condition of human fusion with “Nature”, but it is likewise animated by God. This power imbalance is written into the lyrical physics of the world, and while the natural world mirrors Ethelgar’s emotional states, it both reflects and is actively manipulated by God for his own purposes. Chatterton would have encountered such religious free-thinking notions in his day, in coffee-house debates on spiritual pantheism and the possibility of God’s hypostatic existence. Not only did this divine puppetry, or ventriloquism, allow human nature and larger Nature to be ruled over and loved by God, but also animated and

590 Donald S. Taylor, Thomas Chatterton's Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton: Princeton Uuniversity Press, 1978), 235. 591 Chatterton, "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 253, l. 1. 592 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 21. Citing René Girard, “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel”, The Novel: An anthology of criticism and theory 1900-2000 (1965). She argues that her use of the term “desire” equates not with “a particular affective state or emotion”, but more in the psychoanalytical sense of the term “libido”, meaning “the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship. (ibid., 2.)

'+( +

directed by the divine in the most intimate ways. Thus we read that “young Aelgar” is killed by a wolf, with:

eyes flaming like two stars; he roared like the voice of the tempest; hunger made him furious, and he fled like a falling meteor to the war…. The wolf raged like the voice of many waters, and seizing Aelgar by the throat, he sought the regions of the blessed.593

This is God clothed in wolfskin, the body of the animal animated by the celestial light of stars and their meteoric speed, and by the power and noise of wild earthly storms and water. But the wolf is hungry and desirous for physical satiety, and he is “furious”, “raging” and barreling into the fight “like a falling meteor to the war”. Yet, for all this, in death he sends Aelgar to heaven, the “regions of the blessed”. God is some part mercy, Chatterton seems to say. The divine animated forces of Nature kill Aelgar, out of anger, for reasons not immediately apparent to the reader, except that once the grieving parents had “wept like the rains of the spring… the power of God settled their hearts”.594 It is a social circumstance rife with God’s hypostatic jealousy and manipulation.

Egwina’s death is even more absolute and vicious. While caught in a storm on the mountain side, she is raped and murdered by the divinely animated forces of nature:

Swift from the dark cloud the lightning came; the skies blushed at the sight. Egwina stood on the brow of the lofty hill, like an oak in the spring; the lightenings danced about her garments, and the blasting flame blackened her face: shades of death swam before her eyes; and she fell breathless down the black steep rock; the sea received her body, and she rolled down with the roaring water.595

When the “skies blush”, the lightning becomes phallic in its destructive power. The storm light reveals her naked legs in an erotic dance of moving fabric, and in the moment of burning penetration her face is “blackened”, burnt from the inside by electricity, divine sexual satisfaction, and perhaps moral impurity; and it kills her. But Chatterton does not tell us any more about Egwina’s experience, beyond the disconcertingly flat parlour-room fallacy of the skies “blushing” for her, as if modesty would concern her more than being simultaneously raped and electrocuted. He isn’t interested in her mortal and moral devastation. She is a commodity in what Sedgwick describes as the “traffic in women”, not primarily for the purpose of love or marriage, but to create and maintain the

593 Chatterton, "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 254, ll. 50-55. 594 Ibid., 254, ll. 52-9. 595 Ibid., 255, 73-80.

'+) #

homosocial bond.596 Egwina herself is effaced. Her rape and destruction reveal the true nature of Ethelgar’s relationship with God, and facilitates its consummation.

The way Chatterton represents Ethelgar’s transition from open and empowered trust in God, to despair, disempowerment and submission, resonates with contemporary eighteenth-century tropes of men behaving badly to one another. It can be understood in the terms Sedgwick describes as the complex power and sexual games of male-to-male rivalry, in which cuckoldry can be seen as a “sexual act, performed on a man, by another man”, and in which the nature of this homosocial desire is based in the pleasure of the power imbalance itself.597 Chatterton represents God as the cuckolder, perhaps sexually jealous of either human being, or of their love for one another; certainly God was metaphysically jealous of Ethelgar, and needing to destroy Egwina to solidify his own union with Ethelgar.

The terms of this relationship between God and Ethelgar are absolute and brutal, requiring both Ethelgar’s disempowerment and submission to God’s will, cloaked in a stereotypical veneer of justice and mercy. As the poet-bard enjoins, when the “sea of trouble and affliction overwhelm thy soul, look unto the Lord, thou shalt stand firm… in vain shall the waves beat against thee: thy rock shall stand”. When the worst does occur, for a moment Ethelgar stands in profound and powerful metaphysical solitariness, “terrible as the mountain of Maindip”; but soon he becomes vulnerable to the realisation of his loss and betrayal, and “waves of despair harrowed up his soul… [and] wild as the evening wolf, his eyes shone like the red vapors in the valley of the dead; horror sat upon his brow”. At this turning point in the story, and from the privileged safety of the narratorial bardic role, the poet tells Ethelgar that “resistance is futile”.598 He must cheer up and “submit to the will of God…. Learn that you art a man, nor repine at the stroke of the Almighty, for God is as just as he is great”.599

There is not much evidence of justice in this fictional Saxonic universe. Ethelgar submits “like a tall oak breaking from the roaring wind”. He cannot withstand the embodied impact and willful force of this jealous nature-God. His protagonist now spiritually broken, Chatterton finishes the tale in a way that continues the pantheist

596 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 21. 597 Ibid., 49-50. 598 A phrase coined by the Borg, from the “Star Trek” fantasy franchise, who are another example, like Chatterton’s notion of the Christian God, of hypostatic existence and hive-mind mentality overcome by the need for domination and perfect union at the cost of happiness and individual selfhood. 599 Chatterton, "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem," 255, ll. 99-100.

'+* +

arborial metaphor, imaginatively shifting the ancient Saxon world into a kind of mythological, magical realism by turning Ethelgar into a tree. God sends a “holy vision” of the Celtic monk Saint Cuthbert to catch his beloved, “the falling mortal”, and bear him gently “to the sandy beach”. In total submission, once Ethelgar had “bent his way” to the woods, he thereafter “flourishe[d] as a hoary oak”. 600 As an oak tree, rooted and respirating, a magnificent part of nature, rather than moving and thinking through his individual human form and mind, God possesses Ethelgar entirely. Ethelgar is spiritually enlarged by God’s hypostatic incorporation of his separate embodiment, but utterly reduced as an individual man. In his submission to God’s powerplay, the primacy of the bond between them is upheld, in a way that disempowers and devastates Ethelgar.

Despite Chatterton’s capacity to imagine Ethelgar, the net affective impression given by the expressive themes of these works is a far cry from this state of spiritual submission and self-denying grace. Using Love’s technique of archiving the underlying feelings in these poems about the divine love triangle, Chatterton’s hurt confusion and contemptuous resentment emerges here at what he perceives as moral injustice and the abuse of power. In “Ethelgar”, Chatterton paints a portrait of human virtue through submissive and self- annihilating homosocial union with God. In his letter to Baker, he parodies his own excessive, Ossian-like metaphorical style, essentially undercutting its seriousness as a performative parable for masculine spiritual relationship, either with God, or with one another. The excessive metaphorical language, and the absurdity of Ethelgar turning into a tree at the end (as when authors kill their protagonists, unable to imagine a more satisfactory closure for the narrative), suddenly appear as an orientation to homosocial connectedness rather than as art. In the letter to Baker, Chatterton refuses to entirely give up his external position of satirical observation and commentary, even for the sake of his best friend’s declaration of romantic love. Chatterton’s reply tries to do two things that are mutually incompatible, to declare love in return, and to undermine the possibility of union by turning the psychological “primitive” expressed in poetic excess, into bathos. In his freethinking “Mystic Joys”, on the other hand, Chatterton does more directly “murmur at the will of the Almighty”.601 As we have seen in that small poem, Chatterton cannot reconcile the standard, eighteenth-century theological teaching of a just and loving God with contemporary religious beliefs about sexual morality, and the cruel rejection of the

600 Ibid., 255, ll. 100-03. 601 Ibid., 253, l. 1.

'++ #

human loving impulse in the unavoidable debasement of original sin. Chatterton’s mistrust and uncertainty, his unwillingness to fully submit to union with his God, are apparent.

Erotics of satirical cross-dressing

Like his feelings of disempowerment and resentment, desire was another affective undercurrent in Chatterton’s homosocial style. In “Astrea Brokage”,602 an example of his later experiments with short epistolary fiction, Chatterton engaged in literary cross- dressing and author surrogacy. He gave voice to a stereotypical portrait of a young and fashionable female protagonist, and then ventriloquised his own satirical vision through her. His female stories depicted scandals, moral corruption and “scenes of distress of no common kind”,603 in which he often implicated himself romantically or sexually, as a male character. A reading of his character Astrea’s letter, based on Love’s “politics of affect”,604 uncovers Chatterton’s homosocial desire to belong, to be witnessed, and to witness himself taking part in Georgian sociable culture both as a man and as a successful literary professional.

Published in the racy and gossipy Town and Country magazine, and therefore functioning as a form of eighteenth-century soft-core pornography, Chatterton’s women’s fictions were erotically charged. In “Astrea Brokage”, Chatterton bastardises the “letters to the Editor” form, in the private, confiding first-person narrative voice of his heroine, engaging in a form of literary cross-dressing. He impersonates a fashionable, wealthy and educated young woman from a mercantile Bristol family, who believes herself “qualified for society” despite her “great mortification” at still being “confined in a boarding school”. It transpires that her family is planning to marry her to “Bob Barter”, the “hopeful son” of her father’s business colleague, and “in the polite language of Bristol, a devil of a Buck” who, she says with heavy irony, “overturns a basket of oysters, or beats a dog with a better grace than any youthful votary of Bacchus, in that elegant city – the cream of politeness”. 605 The transgressive frisson of the epistolary confidence of a schoolgirl is established through her dialogue, and her dangerous morality is suggested by her bad language and sarcastic contempt for her family’s choice of fiancée, as well as

602 Chatterton, "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 431-2. 603 "The False Step. A Real History: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 600, l. 2. 604 Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, 10. 605 Chatterton, "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 431.

'+, +

the unconscious sexual connotations of her description of Barter’s “Bacchanalian” activities.

Astrea’s stated purpose in writing to “Mr. Ham”, the printer of Town and Country Magazine, 606 was to ask for romantic advice. Assuming Hamilton had correctly “imagine[d] a tendresse for some other has made [Bob’s] faults more conspicuous”, she admits to secret feelings for another man, whose interest in her, though both physically and intellectually complimentary, does not extend to marriage, nor anything more than might be accomplished during a “têtê-à-têtê conversation; or a walk in the wood”. Her claim of having “always courageously denied” his advances, despite her lover being “reported to have ruined three young ladies of fortune”, only makes her confidences the more salacious. Astrea’s question to the Editor is that if her only means of escape from school is to marry “that insignificant wretch, Bob Barter, will the forced ceremony oblige me to hate my literary lover?”607 Her familiar address, combined with willful secrecy in entertaining an unsanctioned romantic relationship, and her contemplation of adultery, transform her into a sexual object, a titillating literary possibility.

Chatterton drew on stereotypical characterisations of women of his own class and acquaintance in Bristol to flesh out Astrea. Despite her passion for reading and her disobedience, Astrea’s thoughts, feelings and plans still relate solely to love and marriage. She has no interests or life beyond that prescribed by her relationships with her father, fiancée and lover. Chatterton’s portraits of women, and their male guardians, lovers, husbands and fathers represented the emerging new social discourse in the mid to late eighteenth century that polarised gendered behavior, allowing “little or no overlap between the sexes; each sex was assigned its own sphere of influence and behaviour, and relations between the sexes were predicated upon this restricted vision of masculinity and femininity”. 608 Even Astrea’s name, as a female pseudonym first popularised in the seventeenth century by Aphra Behn, who gave the name to the speaker of her poems,609 made the work even more gendered, because it “minimised personal identity in favour of a corporate, gendered identity”.610

606 Mr Alexander Hamilton, who founded Town and Country Magazine in 1769, hence a new publishing market in Chatterton’s day. 607 Chatterton, "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 431-2. 608 Jean I Marsden, "Modesty Unshackled: Dorothy Jordan and the Dangers of Cross-Dressing," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22, no. 1 (1993): 21. 609 Arlene Stiebel, "Aphra Behn," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aphra-behn. 610 Edward H Jacobs, "Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History," Book History 6, no. 1 (2003): 5.

'+- #

Chatterton ventriloquised his satirical and political themes through Astrea. Cross- dressing as a young woman, he becomes the mouthpiece for mainstream eighteenth- century ideas about female education. He enacts a warning story about why too little education, or too much of the wrong kind, undermines a woman’s moral character, and thereby represents a threat to the prevailing norm of this “middle-class ethos of domesticity”.611 Nevertheless, fictions in this period did give voice to alternative social and sexual possibilities for women, despite their overt moral and didactive purposes. In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong argues that novels in this period “portrayed aristocratic women along with those who harboured aristocratic pretentions as the very embodiments of corrupted desire, namely, desire that sought its gratification in economic and political terms”.612 Catherine Craft-Fairchild argues similarly that “along with conduct-books, the novel created and defined a domestic woman whose main attributes were psychological rather than physical” and that these women, in “valuing bodily display and public amusement, resisted enclosure in a physically regulated private sphere”. Either lavish aristocratic display of the body, or menial work done by the body to secure economic or social advantage, were contrasted with “middle-class female propriety and domesticity”.613 Chatterton’s stories supported this limited, paternalistic view of women, while also giving voice to their psychological sovereignty.

Astrea is the beneficiary of an eighteenth-century middle-class female education, and as a consequence of her newly acquired literacy, a devotee of Georgian literary and theatrical sociability. Despite her incarceration in a boarding school, Astrea is “not debarred the pleasure of reading”, nor limited by the walls of that educational institution from ready access to circulating libraries and other intellectual, convivial, and amorous entertainments. She estimates her own “internal merit” in this way:

I know all the real names of your têtê-à-têtês; and am very well skilled in decyphering an asterism or dash”. I have perused every novel, published by Lowndes or Noble, and could upon occasion compile a secret history, as pathetic and moving, as any other female author. There is no modern play which I have not read; from the bright sallies of Foote, to the dull dialogue of Cumberland. You see I am a judge of theatrical merit: my knowledge of the drama, is hereditary; for my cousin Ben, who understands

611 Catherine Craft-Fairchild, "Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 2 (1998): 185. 612 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987), 23. 613 Craft-Fairchild, "Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity," 185-6.

'+. +

heraldry, can prove himself (and consequently me) to be descended from Ben Johnson’s grandmother’s sister.614

Chatterton’s portrait of Astrea is one of obsessive adolescent passion for gossip and society. She can see through the thinly disguised identities in scandalous high society magazine reports, but she also reads the kind of gothic, sentimental novel generally understood in the period to have detrimental effect on women’s sensibilities and morality. In addition, she reads Foote’s contemporary theatrical satires, and Cumberland’s conventional sentiment and morality plays, which would hardly have been considered high culture, as she suggests. Her claim to hereditary theatrical expertise is pure farce. Chatterton makes the assumption that his readers’ education is broader, and their cultural values are deeper than Astrea’s. Her self-assessment would have made most moderately well-educated eighteenth-century readers laugh, as it does still today. Chatterton’s dramatic irony was intentionally diverting, giving voice to a self-confident character unconscious of her own ignorance and superficiality.

Astrea’s sarcasm barely covers the deeper irony that her words signify the opposite of what she intends. Asking forgiveness, to cover her vanity and swearing, she relates that “The young Fox-hunters in the neighbourhood swear I am a wounded pretty maid! The politer sort protest before God I am an angel; and madame gouvernante tells me, I am very fair, very elegant, and every way accomplished”. Indiscreet, she admits to having “ten thousand pounds, at my own disposal”. Disobedient and disrespectful, she writes that her father “is a plodding sort of man, and upon Bristol exchange”. 615 Rude and contemptuous of her own class, her betrothed, and indeed the institution of marriage, she relates that Bob:

seems to look upon me as already married, and treats me with a suitable indifference. Upon the exit of the Gouvernante, he claps on his hat, takes a turn round the room, very politely exposes his backside to the fire, and remarks it is cold, or something of equal importance. I never regard the wretch; but if I am reading, consider myself as alone, and read on.616

Astrea is not what she hopes to present to the reader: she addresses them with the fashionable language of genteel politeness and sensibility, which ought to make her a valuable female commodity, but it is clear that her ladylike and civil qualities are skin deep. Even her surname, “Brokage” is symbolically instructive emphasising her status as

614 Chatterton, "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 431-2. 615 Ibid. 616 Ibid.

'+/ #

a product of the mercantile class, and the commercial nature of her vested interests. Given the synonymic possibilities of using and merchandising, and the context of the racy gossip magazines, her surname resonates with the off-colour implication of base transactional negotiations or even prostitution. She is an ironic caricature of the upwardly mobile pretentions, moneyed tastelessness, and immorality of the fashionable, female middle- classes.

As a theatrical puppet of Chatterton’s imagination, she becomes an uncanny cross- dressing figure, enacting something she has been educated to be, but is not. In Vested Interests, Marjorie Garber describes this figure as a “third term”, which undoes the gender binary of female and male, creating a “category crisis” – “a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another”.617 Chatterton’s female stories traverse this queer literary territory, through his ventriloquism of women who step outside of traditional gender roles, and challenge the increasingly defined borders of masculine and feminine embodiment in the Georgian period. 618 His transgressive representation of Astrea’s behaviour, such as her crass speech, forward sexuality and independence of mind, were in the period more socially accepted masculine behaviours, and as such can be read as ambiguous, what Kirsti Bohata calls “transgender ventriloquism”. 619 Chatterton’s shifting constructions of masculine and feminine types, speech and behaviours are implicated in his satirical female ventriloquism, and in Astrea’s fantasy of escape from the rigid roles and behavioural expectations of her class, sex and stage in life.

Transgressive sexual ambiguity like Astrea’s, while acceptable and routine in the theatre, as Marsden argues was by the end of the century becoming “an increasingly disturbing spectacle”620 thought to threaten the social fabric – particularly where women were concerned. The “phenomenon of female cross-dressing captured the public imagination” in the eighteenth-century, based on male impersonators such as Hannah Snell and Mary Hamilton, and their absolute rejection of stereotypical female norms.621 In her study of Henry Fielding’s pamphlet, The Female Husband, Terry Castle argues

617 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Routledge, 2012), 16. 618 Marsden, "Modesty Unshackled: Dorothy Jordan and the Dangers of Cross-Dressing," 22. 619 Kirsti Bohata, "" A Queer-Looking Lot of Women": Cross-Dressing, Transgender Ventriloquism, and Same-Sex Desire in the Fiction of Amy Dillwyn," Victorian Review 44, no. 1 (2018): 122. 620 Marsden, "Modesty Unshackled: Dorothy Jordan and the Dangers of Cross-Dressing," 21. 621 Craft-Fairchild, "Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity," 171-5.

',& +

that his scandalous fictionalised biography of Hamilton’s “sexual impersonation” was characteristic of the “tension in his fiction between moral vision and amusement at human villainies”. His “half-pious, half-prurient account” expressed a “larger ideological tension… between his wish for ‘natural’ distinctions between the sexes – a theory of gender – and his counterveiling… awareness of the theatricality and artifice of human sexual roles”. 622 As for Fielding, there must have been huge comedic pleasure for Chatterton in vocalising such a character, because of her transgressive nature. However, his satirical purpose was the rhetorical enforcement of domestic notions of female virtue and to invite readers to join with him in a sense of moral and intellectual superiority at this cross-dressing “third term” in the shape of Astrea. What we are witnessing, then, is Chatterton as contemptuous puppeteer, pulling Astrea’s literary strings, projecting his voice into her stereotypical female emptiness, and looking back towards his readers in an attempt to establish sociable literary contact through the popular form of a saucy and humourous story of a sexy schoolgirl.

The possibility that Chatterton’s cross-dressing romp was read in Town and Country by both men and women, gave it the character of both heterosexual and homoerotic pornography. As soft-porn comedy, Astrea’s letter could be read as Chatterton’s adolescent desire for sex without social complication. But “Astrea Brokage” takes on an even greater queer, autoerotic complexity as a consequence of Chatterton’s technique of author surrogacy. He writes an unnamed, but barely disguised version of himself into the story as her secret admirer. He is a confirmed rake, she says, who “never pays a compliment to my person, without a concomitant one to my understanding”; yet when the subject of matrimony is “forced into his discourse, [he] rails against it religiously”.623 By his own account, Chatterton was a ladies’ man. In a letter to his mother, he jokes that he “promised, before my departure [for London], to write to some hundreds, I believe; but, what with writing for publications, and going to places of public diversion, which is as absolutely necessary to me as food, I find but little time to write”. In keeping with rakish values, he was cautious in his view of the “comfortable yoke of Matrimony”, suggesting that on departing Bristol for London, he left a friend Miss Singer “I am sorry to say it, in a very bad way; that is, in a way to be married”.624 The power of Chatterton’s

622 Terry Castle, "Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding's the Female Husband," ELH 49, no. 3 (1982): 602-4, 17. 623 Chatterton, "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 431-2. 624 "To Sarah Chatterton, 14 May 1770," 571, ll. 54-5.

',' #

desire to perform in the world as a man is symbolised in the erotic terms of rakish eighteenth-century conquest. Written into these tales is his narcissistic self-portraiture, titillating his male readers by making them watch him seduce, imagine his knowledgeability, or their own in the game of love, and ultimate success, at the expense of the seduced woman. In this sense, Chatterton’s surrogacy operates as literary masturbation, as well as homoerotic display.

Chatterton’s characterisation of this erotic avatar tells us much about the nature of the desire expressed in this story. Astrea tells us that her “literary lover” is a “young author, who has read more than Magliabechi, and wrote more love-letters than Ovid”.625 Reading Ovid’s erotic poems in “Heroids”, “Amores” and “Ars Amatoria”, many written to a beloved wife, would most certainly have been considered a scandalous education for a young woman. The fact that her lover is compared with a Roman poet gives him a certain prestige. He may be educated, privileged, and certainly prolific. His aspirational affinity with the historical Italian scholar and bibliophile Antonio Magliabechi is more complex, but instructive. Emerging eighteenth-century stereotypes of Italian sexual dissolution aside, Chatterton was comparing himself with the academically gifted son of a wealthy burgher, who was apprenticed to a goldsmith, but through education and voracious auto-didactic habits became a central figure of Florentine literary culture in the late seventeenth century, and all despite his negligent and antisocial personal habits.626 Chatterton’s erotic self-representation provoked voyeuristic sexual enjoyment in both his female and male readers, even more importantly it was how he saw himself in the eyes of his readers. His self-portraiture as the “literary lover” was a performance of gender permeability and homoeroticism for his own homosocial purposes.

The deepest form of desire being expressed in these stories can be mapped in his narcissistic characterisation of the lover as literary. Chatterton’s desire to engage with and belong to the male-dominated public sphere, at the expense of female liberty and individuality, emerge in these fictions. As an aspiring professional writer, Chatterton had everything to gain in personal and professional terms from the emergent bourgeoise public sphere, and its highly gendered social structures. He saw hegemonic forces as an opportunity for himself as a middle-class male writer to find his own power. In symbolic terms, by entertaining through the satirical performance of transgressive middle-class

625 "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine," 432. 626 Chiara Beccalossi, "The ‘Italian Vice’: Male Homosexuality and British Tourism in Southern Italy," in Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

',( +

femininity, Chatterton invited homosocial bonding through moral and intellectual superiority, and the rhetorical enforcement of domestic, private notions of female virtue. The cultural enforcement of the division of the sexes would, logically, thereby launch Chatterton himself into the similarly prescribed certainty of homosocial cultural and economic power. Essentially, Chatterton’s commodification of Astrea as a means of consolidating his shared experience of masculine homosociality with his readership, was a form of literary “traffic in women”, that cemented the “special relationship between male homosocial… desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power”.627 His deepest desire in this fiction was therefore homosocial, even homoerotic. It was the desire to perform, to be seen and to fascinate his Georgian readers, both as a man and as a literary professional.

Sad dogs and Englishmen

Despite constant talk of lovers, assignations and nuptial machinations, Chatterton’s supposedly private verse journals and epistles to his friend John Baker, such as “Journal 6th”, and his contemporary picaresque tales like “Memoirs of a Sad Dog”, expressed an intense need for masculine attention, positive or negative, with both specific real men and imaginary masculine characters. Chatterton’s style in these small literary works was a performance of intimate interiority, and his representation of apparently egalitarian homosocial relationships is undercut with insecure masculine power play. A reading of this tension between empowered and disempowered masculinity, based on Love’s “politics of affect”, 628 uncovers the vulnerability driving Chatterton’s epistolary and picaresque tales, and their intersection with his self-consciously gendered professional performativity.

Herbert Croft, Chatterton’s first and rather unhelpfully biased biographer, established these contemporary works as written for “booksellers and bread”, as opposed to the “fame and eternity” of the Rowley writings.629 Daniel Cook defends what he describes as these “wonderfully playful hacks”, 630 examples of mid-century journalism that historically

627 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 25. 628 Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, 10. 629 As opposed to the Rowley works, which he says were written “for fame and eternity”. H. Croft, Love and Madness, a Story Too True, in a Series of Letters between Parties, Whose Names Would Perhaps Be Mentioned, Were They Less Known, or Less Lamented (G. Kearsley, 1780), 234. 630 Daniel Cook, "Authenticity among Hacks: Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’ and Magazine Culture," in Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity, ed. Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), 94.

',) #

have been condemned as banal and populist “little compositions”. 631 Chatterton was writing for the garrulous and fashionable mid-eighteenth century readers, who as Markman Ellis writes were “composed of rakish cosmopolitan society”.632 Published in the gossipy Town and Country magazine in 1770,633 Chatterton wrote “Sad Dog” and other magazine stories like it for the new Georgian middle-class, male and female reading market. He establishes Chatterton’s “Sad Dog” story as exemplary of these “rhetorical gestures of hack living”,634 and “Journal 6th” comes across as a kind of vocal testing ground or dress rehearsal for the same kind of publication. Cook argues that such writings are better understood and valued when read in their historical context, as a mid-century fictional form emerging from a fluid new publishing market. “Sad Dog” and “Journal 6th” therefore survive as a record of what Paul Keen suggests was the more common, unremembered “failures and marginal successes” of the creative under-classes, in the ambitious world of eighteenth-century letters.635

Chatterton was the best-known and most infamous of countless ambitious but unknown writers in the 1760s, aiming for publication in the periodical magazines. They were his forgotten “hack colleagues” who constituted this culture of striving, likely desperate Grub Street journalism. Chatterton, Cook argues, was writing from a shared generational perspective as an aspirational, ill-educated middle-class writer, and therefore only ever rose above this “trash of monthly compilations” because of his celebrity as the author of the Rowley works. While most of the others “remain undisturbed” and uncelebrated, “their intertextual piracies gave magazine culture a literary sense that has been too long ignored”.636

Works like “Journal 6th” and “Sad Dog” were popular stylistic fusions, expressing a vocal “tension between satire and literary sentimentalism” and an agency less “moralising” than Pope, Swift or Churchill, and more concerned with the “textual interplay” of fashionable communicative modes.637 Taylor points out that Churchill’s

631 Vicesimus Knox, “On the poems attributed to Rowley”, Essays, Moral and Literary, (London 1782), 249. Quoted in ibid., 81. 632Markman Ellis and Ellis Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39. 633 Cook, "Authenticity among Hacks: Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’ and Magazine Culture," 80. 634 Ibid. 635 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 136. 636 Cook, "Authenticity among Hacks: Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’ and Magazine Culture," 81-2, 94. 637 Ibid., 81.

',* +

satirical idiom was Chatterton’s primary model for this new form of textual entertainment. In his parodies, satiric stance was elevated above object, and “bravado often [took] stage center… and personal stance [was] as strongly defended as… logic”.638 Such stories were representative of transitional fictional forms that blended the earlier roman à clef with new narrative fictions. Chatterton’s “hack” was therefore a fashionable splice of popular genre, social satire and virtuosic, empowering self-performance.

The social currency of friendship between men, expressed in the passionate, improving and literate terms of mid-century coffee house culture and the periodical magazines, to some degree explains Chatterton’s homosocial obsessions.639 Chatterton and Baker’s effusive relationship was modelled on Early Modern notions of the Platonic metaphysical union or soulful friendship between men.640 For Baker’s benefit, Chatterton performed sexually experienced masculine selfhood, and dreamt up rakish characters such as Harry Wildfire and the authorial surrogates of his women’s epistolic fiction. As he writes to Baker in the same letter in which he claims to be the young man’s “Friend, ‘till Death do us part”, Chatterton reports having been “violently in Love three and twenty times, since your departure and not a few times, came off victorious”.641 One need not surmise long to understand what this victory entailed. The whole statement is redolent with irony, sexism and adolescent male sexual power play and ego. Chatterton and Baker were well schooled in the public performance of seemingly private sentimentalism, for sexual gain, having together conceived the plan for Chatterton to scribe a series of fraudulent love letters, pretending to be Baker, and in pursuit of “the Beauteous Miss Hoyland”.642

In these texts, Chatterton’s voice and characterisation are implicated in the Georgian push for the male-dominated public sphere. Women rarely appear in his writings, except as allegorical literary objects or patriarchal commodities.643 Although different in tone and audience, Chatterton’s hudibrastic catalogue of amorous masculine types in “Journal 6th”,644 like his picaresque style in “Sad Dog”, provide different versions of the same “wishful, seductive, impoverished social map”645 of the changing world to which he

638 Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, 182-3. 639 Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History. 640 Andreadis, "Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire," 524. 641 Chatterton, "To John Baker, 6 March 1769," 256, ll.43-44, 51-2. 642 "To the Beauteous Miss Hoyland," 257. 643 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 644 Chatterton, "Journal 6th," 369-71, ll. 173-254. 645 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 73.

',+ #

belonged. The overtly fashionable, satirical tone of his magazine writings are undercut by his covert sense of disempowerment, his homosocial vulnerabilities and insecure masculine power play.

Chatterton’s romantic letters and poems to Baker seem to be the model of cultured and friendly homoerotic conviviality. In a sub-section of “Journal 6th”, Chatterton uses a mock-heroic hudibrastic style to entertain Baker with an urbane and sexually knowledgeable metrical epistle on lovers, swains, bucks and rakes, the four stereotypical masculine behavioural types for female courtship and seduction in the eighteenth century. The poem paints a sociological portrait of possibilities for the two young men, and their generation.

The greater part these stanzas is devoted to a comparison of the buck and the rake, the masculine types Chatterton perceived to be most sexually successful, but quite different in kind and outcome. The buck, he writes, was “a Beast…. To nature and the Passions dead/ A Brothel is his House and Bed”. He was dangerous to women because “his parts/ Were not design’d to conquer hearts”, but instead he “Invenoms every Charmers fame/ And tho’ he never touched her hand/ Protests he’s had her at Command”.646 In this period, a woman’s reputation and marital attractiveness was based upon her own demonstration of virtuous behaviour, and widespread social belief in her chastity.

The rake, Chatterton argued, was a socially skilled, charming and perspicacious “Creature”, who “sees the Passions and can tell/ How the soft beating heart shall swell/… Who with the Soul the Body gains”, through his “Effrontery and Tongue/ On very oily hinges hung”. He was also an inveterate flatterer, heart breaker and sexual manipulator. Unlike the buck, “The Rake in gratitude for Pleasure/ Keeps Reputation dear as Treasure”. In other words, he offered a sexual contract that was consummated through a predatory kind of loving respect, without conjugal commitment. As Chatterton says, the rake’s way to “win the blooming melting Fair” was to be “flattring impudent and free”, for “when the Smile is freely given/ You’re in the highway Road to Heaven”.647 The venereal connotation of the preposition in this line was likely intentional, for the mild pornographic pleasure of Chatterton’s reader, his friend Baker.

646 Chatterton, "Journal 6th," 371, ll. 231-5, 37, 50-2. 647 Ibid., 370-1, ll. 207, 09-13, 03-4, 53-4, 05, 194, 97-8.

',, +

For the real object of desire in this verse was Baker himself. Chatterton’s humourous hudibrastic verse was a play for positive attention, a sociable attempt to perform his literary virtuosity by entertaining and titillating his friend. “Say, Baker”, Chatterton asks at the beginning of his epistle in a companionable and chatty tone:

if Experience hoar Has yet unbolted Wisdom’s Door What is this Phantom of the Mind This Love when sifted and refin’d?648

His opening question sets up the interrogatory premise of the verse, which is tied off with a parallel closing question: “Now Prithee Friend a Choice to make/ Wouldst choose the Buck before the Rake[?]”. 649 By directly invoking his friend, Chatterton gives the impression of privacy, of the consummation of intimate friendship, as the apparent narrative function of Chatterton’s verse journal. The sharing of thoughts, and the way the questions rhetorically, intellectually distance the conversation from the smutty poetic subject, is itself a pleasurable, ironic literary technique. It is also a technique that establishes communicative contact between the two young men, which in the context of the poem’s content expresses Chatterton’s homoerotic delight in his friend’s entertainment, and his desire for a return of such attentions.

Despite Chatterton’s use of the letter form for its apparent intimacy and honesty, and the risqué coffee-house banter, Chatterton’s style in this verse is a self-performance of interiority. Its apparent egalitarian homosociability is undercut with insecure masculine power play. As poetic narrator and wit, Chatterton separates himself from the world he is commenting upon, musing that “If this is Love my callous heart/ Has never felt the rankling dart”. Distancing himself even further from the behavioural types he is describing, Chatterton comments with feigned rational uncertainty, that “A Rake, I take it, is a Creature/ Who winds thro’ all the folds of Nature”.650 Chatterton’s thoughtful pose is undercut by his carnality. His metaphor refers to the rake’s penetrative vitality, moving with, but nonetheless through the feminine folds and undulations of the Earth’s body. He is a virile player, comfortable and successful in his sociosexual milieu. Chatterton manages to imply that while, as poetic observer he does not claim to be a rake himself, he is an astute observer, a satirist of human nature, and a prurient wit. But he imposes the

648 Ibid., 369, ll. 173-6. 649 Ibid., 371, ll.247-8. 650 Ibid., 371, ll. 185-6, 207-8.

',- #

choice between rake and buck upon Baker, using the power differential inherent in his vocal stance to subordinate Baker in the subjective terms of the poem.

At the end of this section of “Journal 6th”, Chatterton reflects on his own imitative vocal style, in terms of its impact on Baker’s susceptible ear, suggesting that if his “Hudibrastics may be found/ To tire ye with repeated Sound/ So changing for a Shandyean Stile/ I ask your favor and your Smile”.651 Chatterton means to entertain Baker with sexual innuendo and a sharp satirical wit, but most importantly he wishes to impress Baker with his ironic knowledge of the performative realities of masculine behavioural tropes, and his literary virtuosity in stylistic imitation and vocal flexibility. In this epistolary romance, Baker’s letters express warmth towards Chatterton based on the assumption of a shared value concerning homosocial friendship. Chatterton’s writings in return are not in kind, as his poetic self-representation, although warm, is far from rational and egalitarian. His rhetorical posturing expresses his underlying anxiety to establish his relative dominance over Baker, as an entertainer, wit and Georgian man of the world.

In contrast to the friendliness of Chatterton’s powerplay in “Journal 6th”, an even less civilised affective state is represented in “Memoirs of a Sad Dog”, his semi- autobiographical picaresque tale of Harry Wildfire’s descent into debt, iniquity and the rock-bottom professional life of a Grub Street hack. The original Georgian literary low- life, Wildfire exists in a narrative world comprised of atomistic, episodic encounters with his own needs, the repeated cycles of the “decay of fortune”, living on the “brink of poverty”, finding occupations and opportunities that blossom until they disintegrate to nothing, or worse than nothing. Wildfire relates to his reader, who he calls “Mr. Printer” as though writing to the magazine’s editor, how he:

set out in life with a fortune of five thousand pounds, which the old prig, my father, left me with this memorable piece of advice: “Item, I leave to my youngest son Henry, five thousand pounds, with an old book, formerly his grandmother Bridget’s, called The Way to Save Wealth”.652

Wildfire then goes about drinking, whoring and gambling the money away until, at the “considerable decay of my fortune, I began to consider seriously of my departed father’s curious advice; and in consequence of this consideration, resolved to set up for a fortune hunter, and retrieve my affairs in the sober track of matrimony”. 653 Things did not

651 Ibid., 371, ll. 255-8. 652 Chatterton, "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," 652, ll. 14-19. 653 Ibid., 653, ll. 81-4.

',. +

necessarily go to plan for Wildfire. “Alas! Happiness is of short duration”, he cries, pushing his narrative forwards disaster by disaster, fueled by his own cheating, “lying and intriguing”. With the ironic sentimentality and transgressive grit of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, Wildfire’s journey snakes through a string of fallen women and dead-end occupations, all taken on with the motivating necessity of pecuniary desperation and an unrealistic expectation of advancement.

Harry Wildfire’s difficulty, in part, can be reduced to his sense of being a man seeking a foothold and sense of security in what Paul Keen describes as the “ceaselessly transactional world” of the mid-eighteenth century.654 Wildfire tells the story of falling in love with a pretty woman, and his shocked reaction on discovering her profession as a prostitute, and that “Jack, who had paid fifty pounds for his month, insisted on his right of purchase; but Miss Fanny, thinking me a better paymaster, heroically turned him out of the parlour, telling him, for his comfort, that he should have his month another time”. The financial, contractual nature of sociosexual relationships is written into the prose as the inexperienced young Wildfire tries hard to keep up and play the game.

Wildfire’s moments of authorial self-awareness are few, and ineffective in terms of the representation of moral reflection or inner subjective development. His early comment that “I had not veneration enough for the parental character to follow it”,655 is subjectively true, and it is this “modern”, amoral stance rather than the traditional hero’s journey that fuels the unfolding, but essentially unchanging, narrative. In another romantic episode with “Miss L——n”, who was in possession of a reasonable fortune, Wildfire was similarly disappointed in love and wallet, in a way that represented the false and unreliable nature of homosocial relationships. Feeling certain of success in obtaining her, having first “fixed upon, and accordingly dressed at” the task, Wildfire relates that his intended:

raised my hopes, and gratified my vanity by several significant glances; and I was so certain of carrying her off in the end, that I cheerfully launched out five hundred pounds in dress and equipage; which had such an amazing effect, that in three weeks time I had three kisses of her hand and in the fourth week she took a trip to Scotland with her father’s footman.656

654 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 17. 655 Chatterton, "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," 652, ll. 21-2. 656 Ibid., 654, ll. 86-92.

',/ #

One can only laugh at poor Wildfire’s betrayal. With a now “considerable breach” in his pocket, Chatterton’s picaresque protagonist “began to shudder at the contempt with which the decay of my fortune threatened me”. Another cycle of need and prospecting for social and financial advancement begins, in which “on former professions of friendship, I posted down to Sir Stentor Ranger, in hopes he would have assisted me”.657 His actual and metaphorical representation of family, professional and conjugal relations is expressed almost exclusively in the economic language of value and commodity exchange. This is not a sociable world of love, commitment and financial establishment, but reflects Chatterton’s sense of the modern man’s social uncertainty, unscrupulous opportunism, commodified need and the survival codes of the eighteenth-century “houseless wanderer”.

In relation to Tobias Smollett’s Peregine Pickle, George Orwell argued that “these petty rogueries” are worthwhile not only because they are entertaining, but also because “by simply ruling out ‘good’ motives and showing no respect whatever for human dignity, Smollett often attains a truthfulness that more serious novels have missed”.658 One might make the same claim of Chatterton’s picaresque, which represents Wildfire not only as victim to the amoral modern world, but a full participant in its venal, cruel and vengeant moral impoverishment. For example, after being exposed for cuckolding an alderman, who then “threatened to prosecute for larger damages”, Wildfire decides to take revenge by seducing his eighteen-year-old daughter Sabina. Once he had “accomplished the grand end – you will guess what I mean. We lived in love and rapture about a month, when her father bid her prepare to marry Mr. Lutestring”. Wildfire at this point cruelly leaves Sabina, telling her to marry Lutestring, despite her heartbreak, “bathed in tears, with a face expressive of the most violent grief”. Wildfire self-consciously prepares his reader for the worst of his own character, and the demise of Sabina’s fortunes at his own hand, by recounting that: “Steeled with impudence as I am, I blush to write the rest, but it shall be out. I informed Mr. Lutestring of my intimacy with his future spouse, and advised him not to unite himself with a woman of such principles”. 659 Like Smollett, Chatterton ventriloquises an ineffective moral code through his picaresque protagonist while simultaneously, gleefully relating Wildfire’s immoral scrapes. His characterisation of

657 Ibid., 657, ll. 206-7. 658 L. Tomoiagă, Elements of the Picaresque in Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Publihing, 2012), 45. Quoting Orwell. 659 Chatterton, "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," 655, l. 156-7; 656, ll. 173-7, 91-4.

'-& +

Wildfire’s occasional retrospective self-awareness, and the suggestion of a moral epiphany that in fact never comes, would have eased readers’ guilt in association with their engrossed enjoyment of Wildfire’s iniquity. But it also represented a new kind of atomistic, amoral, narratorial truth.

Chatterton’s notion of social truth, as expressed in his contemporary fictions, is best understood in the light of Keen’s multivalent notion of the emergent public sphere, which accords neither with Habermas’s “rather stilted” account of “participatory” middle-class culture organised into a purposeful and universally welcoming public,660 nor with Robert Jones’ hopelessly “untidy and disorderly”, conflicted, ignorant and “giddy” public.661 Keen instead suggests a version of history that takes into account the “commercialisation of leisure” and provides a “broader idea of the public sphere in ways that fuse the supposedly incommensurable elements of intellectual curiosity and entrepreneurial zeal, enlightenment and opportunism, political resistance and fashionable indulgence”. 662 Although risking a new universalism even in characterising a singular “fused” notion of the eighteenth-century public sphere, from the “trashy”, “intertextual” chaos that constituted magazine writing in the 1760s, Keen’s approach provides essential context that helps to understand the autobiographical fear and insecurity, as well as egotism and satirical anger of Chatterton’s homosocial style.

Lutestring’s response to Wildfire’s attempt at revenge is to simply acknowledge that although “Sabina has been faulty”, he would marry her regardless, because her father would not give him “less for her fortune on that account; on the contrary, were not my notions of honour very refined, I might make it a means of raising my price”. Wildfire, faced with yet another failure in terms of his own commercial and personal ventures, expresses his astonishment at “how various are the species and refinements of honour” in men.663 Keen argues that there was considerable consumer anxiety in this period, as “the triumph of commerce had produced a state of semiotic flux, which they denounced as “profusion”, a word that translated the dangers of cultural homogeneity into the depreciation of personal taste by conjuring up an almost apocalyptic multiplication and intensification of appetites and imaginings”.664 Wildfire is trying to make his own success

660 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 12. Quoting Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 25. 661 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 9-19. 662 Ibid., 19. 663 Chatterton, "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," 656, ll. 196-202. 664 Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, 19.

'-' #

in this new, endlessly diversifying, “ceaselessly transactional” world. But he is made to feel anxious, confounded and unsettled by homosocial encounters in which the old values are disappearing. He is constantly on the back foot. So much so that even an immoral horse-trader and conman like Harry Wildfire is anxious and angry about his own role within these new social codes.665

Chatterton’s own heartbreak and sense of disempowerment at the disappointing and harsh social and commercial realities of the world of eighteenth-century letters is written with autobiographical clarity in Wildfire’s character and narrative. Chatterton’s attack on Horace Walpole in Sad Dog is the most obvious overlap of the old roman à clef form, which facilitated pseudonymous parodies of real social personalities, and the true fictionality of later eighteenth century sentimental fiction. That Walpole was Chatterton’s parodic object is made patently clear by naming the character after Walpole’s gothic novel, Otranto. His subsequent attack on the older man’s antiquarian interests is simplistic, clearly the furious response of a young man who wishes to humiliate in turn, where he feels himself to have been humiliated. Wildfire relates therefore that:

Sir Stentor had many curious visitors, on account of his antient painted glass- windows; among the rest was the redoubted baron Otranto, who has spent his whole life in conjectures. This most engenious gentleman, as a certain advertiser stiles him, is certainly a good judge of paintings, and has an original, easy manner of writing. That his knowledge in antiquity equals his other accomplishments may be disputed.666

As proof of Otranto’s overactive imagination, faulty information and obsession with “ruinated chapels”, Wildfire then relates that in Stentor’s bemused company, the antiquarian:

looking around the chapel for some moveable piece of age, on which he might employ his speculative talents, to the eternal honour of his judgement, he pitched upon a stone which had no antiquity at all; and, transported with his fancied prize, placed it upon his head, and bore it triumphantly to his chamber, desiring the knight to give him no disturbance the next day, as he intended to devote it to the service of futurity.667

Misreading the Latin inscription and therefore believing himself to have made an important historical discovery, Otranto has “an elegant engraving of the curiosity

665 Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy."; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society; Landes, "The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration." 666 Chatterton, "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," 658, ll. 243-54. 667 Ibid., 659, ll. 289-93.

'-( +

executed, and presented it to the society of antiquaries”.668 The depth of Chatterton’s feelings of professional failure, disappointment and humiliation, as a result of Walpole’s rejection of the Rowley manuscripts, are revealed in the narrative staging of this parody.

Wildfire’s removal from the action of this exchange, as Stentor’s watching relative, is a kind of balm. But his atomistic, picaresque narrative assumes a nihilistic tone, the relationship with the world of the angry and utterly broken-hearted. Chatterton’s earlier gratification at receiving a letter from Walpole, offering obligation and thanks to “a Gentleman” for sending “very valuable” manuscripts to peruse, would have been complete at Walpole’s assertion that he “should not be sorry to print them”.669 Given Walpole’s understandable professional assumptions about the nature and source of the apparently antique and precious Rowley manuscripts, and the disparate nature of his and Chatterton’s expectations, it is not surprising that events thereafter did not unfold as hoped for either man. The extremity of Chatterton’s reaction, and its representation in his picaresque parody, is an indication of how deeply he had internalised a version of Walpole as an ideal of literary celebrity and patronage that he was forever denied.

The ending to “Sad Dog” simply reinforces Wildfire’s modus operandum throughout the tale, as well as providing a crude parody of Grub Street journalism as the professional choice of the failed gentleman. Disappointed and frustrated with the ineffectiveness or lack of financial return from his marital and commercial projects, but indefatigable nonetheless, Wildfire relates that “As I did not doubt my invention, and had vanity enough for the character, I sat down to invoke the muses”,670 in hopes that the sentimental and satirical fruits of his literary labours would “give some entertainment to your reader, and a dinner” for himself. There is no success or advancement, no moral education or development, nor much cognitive change in his frame of reference or behaviours for the protagonist of Chatterton’s “Sad Dog”. His depiction of both self and other in this story is emotional, fragmented and insecure, untethered to the old, rational and class-based ideals. Chatterton, as Wildfire, becomes or remains a Grub Street hack, still needing masculine attention, still motivated either to entertain or to satirise, still striving to make a living for himself through the performance of intimate interiority and the masculine

668 Ibid., 659, ll. 310-1. 669 Thomas Chatterton, "From Horace Walpole, 28 March 1769," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 262-3. 670 "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," 661, ll. 376-8.

'-) #

powerplay encoded within his virtuosic displays of literary professionalism, and still failing.

Chatterton’s literary performance of homosocial relationships was implicated in the cultural push for male-dominated bourgeoise cultural power. He wrote stories that would appeal to the gendered middle-class values of his readers, and the emerging social structures of the public and private spheres. However, Chatterton’s vocal masquerading, as a form of disguised self-revelation, spoke of his passionate and troubled relationships with men, both real and imaginary. This chapter has complicated traditional readings of his homosocial writings in terms of eighteenth-century literary sociability, and through feminist and queer perspectives that challenge pathological psycho-biographical readings of his relationships. I have used Heather Love’s “politics of affect” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on the primacy of the homosocial bond in the love triangle, to map the hidden emotional histories of power and disempowerment, desire, resentment and anxiety, that run beneath the surface literary performance of Chatterton’s relationships with God, women, and other men. In the process, new narratives about his precarious relationships and identifications emerge, that capture the perverse energy driving Chatterton’s epistolary and picaresque tales, and their intersection with his self- consciously gendered professional performativity.

'-* ,

, !

Chatterton was a young man of his time. He was ambitious and upwardly mobile, a middle-class solicitor’s apprentice from Bristol, responding to the new vernacular reading and publishing markets, social fluidity and literary sociability of the emergent public sphere. Precocious and sensitive, Chatterton experimented with whatever literary and visual tropes seemed most popular to his inexperienced, but culturally acute eyes. His poetics was gorgeously fashionable and fraudulent, an inchoate grab at whatever professional relationships or commercial opportunities were likely to enhance his literary and pecuniary standing, and his success. More than anything he wished to demonstrate his literary skills as a professional gentleman of letters, to his coterie circle of peers, patrons and publishers.

This thesis has examined Chatterton’s stylistic mediation of the dynamic cultural economy of Georgian England, as expressed through his various textual, visual and antiquarian ventures. By examining four of Chatterton’s main stylistic experiments, this thesis has illustrated the diversity of the Georgian period’s transitional literary and visual tastes and entertainments. By mapping the similarities between these experiments, this thesis has brought a fresh perspective to Chatterton’s concern with style as a performative means of professional self-promotion, through his kaleidoscopic array of genres, voices and modes. As shown in Chapter 2, his anachronistic neoclassical and medievalist experimentalism was a means of reshaping his own biography, literary status and professional expectations into new cultural narratives, opening imaginative possibilities for a “high” vernacular English literature and therefore also for the Romantic literary professionalism his works presaged.

Chapters 3 and 4 examined Chatterton’s multi-modal commercial opportunism in his material and visual works, and the way these works operated as ambitious performances of professional virtuosity. Both chapters bring Chatterton’s previously marginalised illustrative works into critical focus by reading them in the context of the dynamic visual culture of the Georgian period. Chapter 3 argued that Chatterton’s fascination with the

'-+ #

symbolic “thingness”671 of his works resided in the ways he could use them to stage encounters, in person or through letters, with powerful men and taste makers of the period. Progressing this focus on Chatterton’s commercial pragmatism, Chapter 4 examined the way his Rowley works catered to the cultural obsession with the brutal gothic delights of the uncivilised past, through medieval balladry and gothic revivalist illustrations. Lastly, Chapter 5 focused on the perverse energy and gendered politics driving Chatterton’s epistolary and picaresque tales, written for the sensationalist London periodical market. Drawing on the critical interventions of critics such as Heather Love, Terry Castle and Eve Kosofky Sedgewick, this chapter maps the hidden emotional histories of power and disempowerment, desire, resentment and anxiety that run beneath the surface of Chatterton’s commercial performances.

The four case studies have extended existing critical work on Chatterton by offering new conceptions of this style, both as he understood it himself and in the context of Georgian England’s convivial urban literary milieu. In addition, this thesis has challenged the limited critical identification of Chatterton’s medieval Rowley manuscripts with the eighteenth-century culture of literary forgery, arguing instead that these idiosyncratic works also need to be read as instances of his emergent literary professionalism. It has thus extended existing critical work on Chatterton’s medievalist writings and gothic illustrations beyond accounts of his British nationalism, into a consideration of his place in a cultural economy that thrived on Georgian London’s taste for gothic textual and visual entertainments. Finally, this thesis has complicated traditional readings of Chatterton’s homosocial writings and challenged diagnostic psycho-biographical readings of his relationships with other men.

Overall, this thesis has established that Chatterton’s creative methodology was adolescent, inexperienced and imitative, and that the terms of his literary and artistic works were self-serving and commercial. He was not primarily engaged in political or aesthetic commentary, despite appearances to the contrary. Nor was he particularly concerned with his own poetic or artistic technique and development. Instead, his works are carefully curated materialisations of his worldly craving to appeal to the tastes of the London literati and periodical magazine publishers he pursued. The persuasive possibilities inherent in the gifting and exchange of his precious literary things, despite

671 Brown, "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them."

'-, ,

their patent inauthenticity or “disorderly” 672 incompletion, was a vital, functional component of Chatterton’s poetics.

As this thesis has argued, the significance of Chatterton’s chameleon-like style lies in its often poignant, yet compelling expression of the ambition for literary success, and the anxious shortcomings and failures, of the creative underclasses of the Georgian literary economy. Chatterton was determinedly, desperately trying to write his own literary distinction and success into existence, and he was not alone in this effort. The failure of his works, in terms of immediate distinguished celebrity and also in belonging to what was to become the English literary canon, survives as a record of the more common, unremembered failures of Grub Street journalists in the Georgian period.

672 Calè, "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page."

'--

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Addison, Joseph. "The Drummer: Or, the Haunted-House. A Comedy." In The English Theatre: In Eight Volumes: Containing the Most Valuable Plays Which Have Been Acted on the London Stage. London: T. Lowndes in Fleet-street, 1765. Aldrich, Megan. Gothic Revival. London: Phaidon, 1994. Alexander, Christine. "Defining and Representing Literary Juvenilia." In The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, 70-100, 2005. ———. "Play and Apprenticeship: The Culture of Family Magazines." In The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, 31-50. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Andreadis, Harriette. "Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 46, no. 3 (2006): 523-42. Appadurai, Arjun. "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value." In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford University Press, 1987. Baker, John. "From John Baker, 5 January 1769." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 165-6. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Barrett, William. The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol: Compiled from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, in Public Offices or Private Hands; Illustrated with Copper-Plate Prints. William Pine, in Wine-Street, 1789. Beccalossi, Chiara. "The ‘Italian Vice’: Male Homosexuality and British Tourism in Southern Italy." In Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Bell, Ilona. Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bohata, Kirsti. "" A Queer-Looking Lot of Women": Cross-Dressing, Transgender Ventriloquism, and Same-Sex Desire in the Fiction of Amy Dillwyn." Victorian Review 44, no. 1 (2018): 113-30. Borsay, Peter. "The Culture of Improvement." In The Eighteenth Century: 1688-1815, edited by Paul Langford. The Short Oxford History of the British Isles, 183-212. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus." In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson, 161-75. USA: Colombia University Press, 1993. Bowen, John. "Dickens's Umbrellas." In Dickens's Style, edited by Daniel Tyler, 26-45. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

'-/ #

Brown, Bill. "Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them." In A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. "Thing Theory." Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Bryden, Inga. "The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry." In Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, 64-78. Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999. Burke, Edmund. The Sublime and Beautiful. With an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Other Additions. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Oxford: Gale, 1796. Calè, Luisa. "Blake and the Literary Galleries." In Blake and Conflict, 185-209: Springer, 2009. ———. "Blake, Young, and the Poetics of the Composite Page." Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2017): 453-79. ———. "Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page." Books as/and New Media (2016). ———. "Extra-Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page." Eighteenth-century Life 44 (2020): 111-35. ———. Fuseli's Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. "Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry Vii in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill." Word & Image 33, no. 3 (2017): 279-91. Calverley, Charles Stuart. Theocritus: Translated into English Verse. Deighton, Bell, 1869. Camden, William. Camden's Britannia, 1695: A Facsimile of the 1695 Edition Published by Edmund Gibson [Translated from the Latin], with an Introduction by Stuart Piggott and a Bibliographical Note by Gwyn Walters. Edited by Edmund Gibson. Newton Abbott: David and Charles Reprints, 1971. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Ideologies of Desire. Edited by David M. Halperin. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1986. ———. "Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding's the Female Husband." ELH 49, no. 3 (1982): 602-22. Chatman, Seymour. "The Semantics of Style." Information (International Social Science Council) 6, no. 4 (1967): 77-99. Chatterton, Thomas. "Acrostic on Miss Eleanor Hoyland." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 159. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedie, Wrotenn Bie Thomas Rowlie; Plaiedd before Mastre Canynge, Atte Hys Howse Nempte the Rodde Lodge; Also before the Duke of Norfolck, Johan Howard.". In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 174-228. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The Art of Puffing by a Bookseller's Journeyman." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 650- 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

'.& #

———. "Astrea Brokage Letter: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 431-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Auntient Saxon Monuments Dolven All in Bristol” in “a Discorse on Brystowe." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "The Backe of the Guarders Halle with Its Towers." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Backe of the Wardonys Halle." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Battle of Hastings Ii: Battle of Hastyngs by Turgotus, Translated by Roulie for W. Canynge Esq." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 68-88. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Battle of Hastynges I." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 26-43. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "A Brief Account of William Cannings: From the Life of Thomas Rowlie Preeste." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 51-6. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "A Brief Account of William Cannings: From the Life of Thomas Rowlie Preeste." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 51-6. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "[Bristol Castle]." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 118-9. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 6-20. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Castle Warde Logge of Arrowmen." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Chatterton’s Landscape Sketch of Bristol Castle on the Avon River." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton: A Bicentenary Edition. Edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Coynes in Yellow Rolle by T. Rowleie." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "A Discorse on Brystowe by Thos. Rowleie Wrotten and Gotten at the Desire of Wm: Canynge Esqur." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterto, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 93-104. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "“Emendals to Turgotte by Thos Rowleie as by the Letters” in “a Discorse on Brystowe”." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Englandes Glorye Revyved in Mastre Canynge: Beinge Some Accomte of His Cabynet of Auntiaunt Monumentes." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 65-7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Epistle. To the Revd. Mr. Catcott." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 412-19. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

'.' #

———. "Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 253-5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The False Step. A Real History: To the Printer of Town and Country Magazine." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 600-4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "From Horace Walpole, 28 March 1769." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 262-3. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. ———. "Governors Hall Front." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Happiness. A Poem." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Historie of Peyncters Yn Englande Bie T. Rowley." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1769. ———. "Historie of Peyncters Yn Englande Bie T. Rowley." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 263- 7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Hobbinol and Thyrsis." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 362-4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Hor. Lib. I, Od. 5.". In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 510. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "If Wishing for the Mystic Joys of Love." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 447. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "‘Intrest Thou Universal God of Men’." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 377-9. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Journal 6th." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 365-76. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Kew Gardens." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 512-42. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The Last Will and Testament of Me Thomas Chatterton." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 501-5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The Letter Paraphras'd." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 686-7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Life of W: Canynge—by Rowlie." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 231-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Map of Medieval Redcliffe ", Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Memoirs of a Sad Dog." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 651-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "“Mynstrelles Songe” in Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedie, Wrotenn Bie Thomas Rowlie; Plaiedd before Mastre Canynge, Atte

'.( #

Hys Howse Nempte the Rodde Lodge; Also before the Duke of Norfolck, Johan Howard.". In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The New Ybuilden Fronte of the Castle." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Nine Deeds." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 128. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Ode to Miss Hoyland." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 158. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "On Mr. Alcock of Bristol, an Excellent Miniature Painter." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 169-70. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Onn Oure Ladies Chirch." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 53. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The Owter Walle of the Castle." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "The Parlyamente of Sprytes." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 106-16. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 143- 51. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Rowley’s Printing Press." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 60. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The Ryse of Peyncteynge, Yn Englande, Wroten Bie T. Rowleie. 1469 for Mastre Canynge." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 259-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Statue of Syre Johannes De Berkelaie." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Storie of Wyllyam Canynge." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 241-7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Theere Was a Broder of Orderys Whyte." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 22. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "This Most Noble Gate Was the Thyrde and Laste Ybuilden by Brightricus or Bythaccus Kg. Of the Westonne Saxans." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "To J[Ames] Dodsley, 21 December 1768." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 157. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To James Dodsley, 15 February 1769." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 171-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

'.) #

———. "To John Baker, 6 March 1769." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 256-7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Mary Chatterton, 30 May 1770." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 587-9. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Miss Hoyland I." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 160. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Miss Hoyland Ii." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 161. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Miss Hoyland Iii." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 162. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Miss Hoyland Iv." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 164. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Miss Hoyland with a Present." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 163. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Sarah Chatterton, 14 May 1770." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 570-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To Sarah Chatterton, Thomas Cary, and Others, 6 May 1770." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 560-3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "To the Beauteous Miss Hoyland." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 257. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "Walpole! I Thought Not I Should Ever See." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 341. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "The Whore of Babylon." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 452-68. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. "“Windowe in the Hall” in the “Rolle of Seyncte Bartlemeweis Priorie”." Illustrated manuscript: Ink on paper. London: British Library, 1768. ———. "Yellow Rolle. Of the Auntient Forme of Monies Carefullie Gotten for Maystre Wm. Canynge by Mee Tho: Rowleie." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 63-5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Clark, Peter. British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World. Oxford Studies in Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Clarke, Martin Lowther. Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Colclough, Stephen. Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695-1870. Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. "Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience." Publishing History 44 (1998): 5.

'.* #

Collins, William. "Ode on the Poetical Character." In A Collection of Papers in Four Volumes: By Several Hands, 34-37. London: printed for G. Pearch, 1770. Connelly, Peter J. "Pope's Iliad: Ut Pictura Translatio." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 21, no. 3 (1981): 439-55. Cook, Daniel. "Authenticity among Hacks: Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’ and Magazine Culture." In Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity, edited by Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan, 80-98. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010. ———. "The Critical and the Curious: Thomas Chatterton's First Reviewers." Romanticism 15, no. 2 (2009): 109-20. Craft-Fairchild, Catherine. "Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 2 (1998): 171-202. Croft, H. Love and Madness, a Story Too True, in a Series of Letters between Parties, Whose Names Would Perhaps Be Mentioned, Were They Less Known, or Less Lamented. G. Kearsley, 1780. Crossley, Nick, and John Michael Roberts. "After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere." Sociological Review Monograph (2004). Culler, Jonathan. "Apostrophe." diacritics 7, no. 4 (1977): 59. Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810- 1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Darby, Barbara. "The More Things Change… the Rules and Late Eighteenth‐Century Conduct Books for Women." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29, no. 3 (2000): 333-55. Dix, John. The Life of Thomas Chatterton, Including His Unpublished Poems and Correspondence. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co. Paternoster Row, 1837. Donne, John. "Elegy 19 to His Mistress Going to Bed." In John Donne: The Complete English Poems, edited by A.J. Smith, 124-6. England, USA, Australia, Cananda, New Zealand: Penguin Books, 1971. Ellis, Markman. "Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London." The Library 10, no. 1 (2009): 3-40. ———. The Coffee-House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011. ———. "An Introduction to the Coffee-House: A Discursive Model." Language & Communication 28 (2008): 156-64. Ellis, Markman, and Ellis Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Engell, James. "Satiric Spirits of the Later Eighteenth Century: Johnson to Crabbe." In A Companion to Satire, edited by Ruben Quintero, 233-56. Oxford: Oxford : Blackwell, 2007. Fairer, David. "Lyric Poetry: 1740–1790." In The Cambridge History of English Poetry, edited by Michael O'Neill, 397-417. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Fenton, James. "Wilfred Owen’s Juvenilia." In The Strength of Poetry, 23-43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Fitzgerald, W. "Horace: The Sensation of Mediocrity." In How to Read a Latin Poem: If You Can’t Read Latin Yet, 101-40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Folkenflik, Robert. "Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great Age of Literary Forgery." Centennial Review (1974): 378-91. Fowles, Severin. "People without Things." In An Anthropology of Absence, 23-41: Springer, 2010.

'.+ #

———. "Thing Theory: Course Description." Columbia University, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/accs/syllabi/thingtheory.pdf. Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56-80. Frye, Northrop. "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." ELH 23, no. 2 (1956): 144- 52. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Routledge, 2012. Gasparov, B., and M. Scott. "Romanticism." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 1219-25. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Gill, Stephen, ed. William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors. Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1987. Goldberg, Brian. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Greenacre, Phyllis. "The Family Romance of the Artist." The psychoanalytic study of the child 13, no. 1 (1958): 9-36. ———. "The Relationship of the Imposter to the Artist." Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 13 (1958): 9-36. Greene, Donald Johnson. The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Vol. 18: Random House Inc, 1970. Gregory, George. The Life of Thomas Chatterton : With Criticism on His Genius and Writings, and a Concise View of the Controversy Concerning Rowley's Poems. Lond.: Lond. : Printed for G.Kearsley, 1789. ———, ed. The Works of Thomas Chatterton : Containing His Life. London: Printed by Biggs and Cottle for T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1803. Groom, Nick. "Chatterton, Thomas (1752–1770)." In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. "Forgery or Plagiarism? Unravelling Chatterton’s Rowley." Angelaki 1, no. 2 (1996): 41-54. ———. "Fragments, Reliques, & Mss: Chatterton and Percy." In Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, 188-209. Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999. ———. "Introduction." In Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, 3-11. Basingstoke & New York: Macmillan & St. Martin's, 1999. ———. "Romantic Poetry and Antiquity." In The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, edited by J. Chandler and M.N. McLane, 35-52. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. "Romanticism and Forgery." Literature Compass 4, no. 6 (2007): 1625-49. ———. "Thomas Chatterton." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature: 5- Volume Set, edited by David Scott Kastan, 445-9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———, ed. Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture. Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999. ———. "Thomas Chatterton Was a Forger." The Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 276-91. ———. "Thomas Rowlie Preeste." In Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, edited by Thomas Woodman, 242-55. Basingstoke, England; New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 1998.

'., #

Groth, Helen, and Paul Sheehan. "Introduction: Timeliness and Untimeliness." Textual Practice 26, no. 4 (2012): 571-85. Grundy, Megan Crosland and Isobel. "Introduction." In The Adventurer: By Lady Mary Pierrepont, edited by Isobel Grundy and students of English 696 at the Univerity of Alberta. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 2000. Guillory, John. "Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon." In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, 85- 133. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT press, 1991. Hagstrum, Jean. William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Harney, M. Place-Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill. Taylor & Francis, 2016. Hartley, Daniel. The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics. Brill, 2016. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford Scholarship Online. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Haywood, Ian. "Chatterton's Plans for the Publication of the Forgery." Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and the English Language 36, no. 141 (1985): 58-68. ———. The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction. Rutherford & London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press & Associated University Presses, 1986. Heys, Alistair. "Visionary and Counterfeit." In From Gothic to Romantic: Thomas Chatterton's Bristol, edited by Alistair Heys, 80-103. Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2005. Howe, P.P., ed. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. 21 vols. Vol. 5. London & Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930. Ibata, Hélène. The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Jackson Toynbee, Paget, ed. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Oxford Vol. 6. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903. Jacobs, Edward H. "Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History." Book History 6, no. 1 (2003): 1-22. Johnson, S., and A. Chalmers. The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper: Waller, Butler, Rochester, Roscommon, Otway, Pomfret, Dorset, Stepney, J. Philips, Walsh, Dryden. J. Johnson, 1810. Johnson, Samuel. "A Dictionary of the English Language." London: Consortium, 1755. Jones, Jennifer J. "Beyond Burke’s Precendent and Back Again: Longinus and the Romantic Sublime." Neophilologus 99 (2015): 175-89. Jourdain, Margaret, ed. Translations of the Odes of Horace. London: J.M. Dent & Co, 1904. Kaplan, Louise J. The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton. New York: Atheneum, 1988. Keen, Paul. Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kelly, Stewart. "Summer Voyages: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett." The Guardian, 12 August 2013.

'.- #

Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1972. Klancher, Jon P. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832. USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Kneale, J. Douglas. "Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered." ELH 58, no. 1 (1991): 141-65. Landes, Joan B. "The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration." In Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, edited by Joan B Landes and Johanna Meehan, 107-32: Routledge, 2013. Langbauer, Laurie. The Juvenile Tradition: Young Writers and Prolepsis, 1750-1835. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ———. "Leigh Hunt and Juvenilia." Keats-Shelley Journal 60 (2011): 112-33. ———. "Prolepsis and the Tradition of Juvenile Writing: Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey." PMLA 128, no. 4 (2013): 888-906. Langley, Batty, and Thomas Langley. Gothic Architecture: Improved by Rules and Proportions in Many Grand Designs... With Plans... Geometrically Explained. Taylor, 1742. Lau, Beth. "Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats." Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 4 (2003): 519-39. Leland, John. The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary: In Nine Volumes. The Second Edition: Collated and improved from the original MS. With the addition also of a general index ed. Oxford: Printed at the Theatre: For James Fletcher, Bookseller in the Turl, and Joseph Pote, Bookseller at Eton, 1745. Lessenich, Rolf. "Preromanticism." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 1104-05. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Lester, G. A. "The Books of a Fifteenth-Century English Gentleman, Sir John Paston." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 88, no. 2 (1987): 200-17. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, Massachussets & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2009. Lukács, György The Historical Novel. London: Merlin Press, 1962. Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. New York and London: WW Norton & Company in association with Yale University Press, 1985. Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian. Walker, 1835. Manuwald, L.B.T. Houghton and G. "Introduction." In Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles, edited by L.B.T. Houghton and G. Manuwald. London UK: Bristol Classical Press, an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Marsden, Jean I. "Modesty Unshackled: Dorothy Jordan and the Dangers of Cross- Dressing." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22, no. 1 (1993): 21-35. Masten, Jeffrey. "Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 367-84. McGann, Jerome J. "The Infatuated Worlds of Thomas Chatterton." In Early Romantics, 233-41: Springer, 1998. Meyerstein, Edward Harry William. A Life of Thomas Chatterton. New York: New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930. Michasiw, Kim Ian. "Chatterton, Ossian, Africa." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48, no. 3 (2008): 633-52. Milic, Louis. "Unconscious Ordering in the Prose of Swift." The Computer and Literary Style (1966): 79-106.

'.. #

Miller, Frances Schouler. "The Historic Sense of Thomas Chatterton." ELH 11, no. 2 (1944): 117-34. Moretti, Franco. "Style at the Scale of the Sentence." Literary Lab (2013). Mowl, Timothy. "A Rococo Poet for a Rococo City." In From Gothic to Romantic : Thomas Chatterton's Bristol, edited by Alistair Heys, 36-52. Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2005. Mullan, John. "Darkness Visible." The Guardian, 10 May 2008. Murphy, Arthur. "The Apprentice: A Farce, in Two Acts." In The British Drama: A Collection of the Most Esteemed Tragedies, Comedies, Operas, and Farces, in the English Language, 69-76. London: Cowperthwait, 1838. Myers, Alec Reginald. London in the Age of Chaucer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Neale, F., ed. William Worcestre: The Topography of Medieval Bristol. Bristol: University Press, 2000. Nitchie, Elizabeth. "Longinus and the Theory of Poetic Imitation in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England." Studies in Philology 32, no. 4 (1935): 580-97. Parker, Blanford. "Modes of Mockery: The Significance of Mock‐Poetic Forms in the Enlightenment." In A Companion to Satire, edited by Ruben Quintero, 493-509. UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Phillips, Ivan. "A Clash of Harmony: Forgery as Politics in the Work of Thomas Chatterton." Critical Survey 24, no. 3 (2012): 23-47. Pope, Alexander. "The Dunciad, Book 3." In The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, edited by Henry Walcott Boynton Boston and New York: Mifflin & Co, 1903. www.bartleby.com/203/. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. USA, UK and Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Rawson, Claude. "Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton." In Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, 15-31. Basingstoke, England and New York, NY: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999. Reeve, Matthew M. "Gothic Architecture, Sexuality, and License at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill." Art Bulletin 95 (2013): 411-39. Richards, Sabrina. "The World in a Cabinet." The Scientist (2012). Published electronically 1 Apirl 2012. https://www.the-scientist.com/foundations/the- world-in-a-cabinet-1600s-41184. Riffaterre, Michael. "The Stylistic Approach to Literary History." New Literary History 2, no. 1 (1970): 39-55. Rothstein, Eric. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-1780. Routledge Revivals. London: Routledge, 2014. Russell, Gillian. "“Keeping Place“: Servants, Theatre and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain." The Eighteenth Century 42, no. 1 (2001): 21-42. ———. "Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing." In Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770- 1840, edited by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, 123-44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Russell, Gillian, and Clara Tuite. "Introducing Romantic Sociability." In Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770-1840, edited by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, 1-23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

'./ #

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia university press, 2015. Siskin, Clifford. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700- 1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Smith, D.F., and M.L. Lawhon. Plays About the Theatre in England, 1737-1800: Or, the Self-Conscious Stage from Foote to Sheridan. New Jersey and London: Associated University Presses, 1979. Southey, Robert. "Preface." In The Works of Thomas Chatterton: Containing Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose, edited by Robert Southey and Joseph Cottle. London: T. N. Longman & O. Rees, 1803. Spenser, Edmund. "The Shepheardes Calender." In The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, edited by J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1926. St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. "‘Standard English’: History." York St John University, https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/changing-englishes/unit-1-defining-english/standard- english-history/. Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. ———. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Stiebel, Arlene. "Aphra Behn." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aphra-behn. Storrs, Ronald. Ad Pyrrham: A Polyglot Collection of Translations of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha (Book 1, Ode 5). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Strachan, J.R. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of John Keats. Routledge, 2003. Suarez, Michael F. "‘This Necessary Knowledge’: Thomas Chatterton and the Ways of the London Book Trade." In Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, 96-113. Basingstoke, England New York, NY: Macmillan & St. Martin's, 1999. Suarez, Michael F. S. J. "What Thomas Knew: Chatterton and the Business of Getting into Print." Angelaki 1, no. 2 (1993): 83-94. Sumner, Kate. "Urban Landscape, Fantasy and Adolescent Identity in Thomas Chatterton's 'Rowley' Works." In Home and Away: The Place of the Child Writer, edited by David Owen and Lesley Peterson, 134-49. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Tanner, Thomas. Notitia Monastica: Or a Short History of the Religious Houses in England and Wales. Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, and are to be sold by A. and F. Churchill at the sign of the Black Swan in Pater-noster-row, London, 1695. Taylor, Donald S. "Introduction." In The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, xxv-xlv. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. Thomas Chatterton's Art: Experiments in Imagined History. Princeton: Princeton Uuniversity Press, 1978. ———. Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

'/& #

Taylor, Donald S., and Benjamin B. Hoover, eds. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton. A Bicentenary Edition ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Thieme, John A. "Spouting, Spouting-Clubs and Spouting Companions." Theatre Notebook 29, no. 1 (1975): 9-16. "The Tokens." https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/collections/whats-on-display/the- tokens/. Tomoiagă, L. Elements of the Picaresque in Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge Scholars Publihing, 2012. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997. Tuite, Clara. "The Byronic Woman: Anne Lister’s Style, Sociability and Sexuality." In Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770- 1840, edited by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, 186-210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Tyler, Daniel. "Introduction." In Dickens's Style, edited by Daniel Tyler. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting in England. Murray, 1871. ———. "Preface to Second Edition." In The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, edited by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Warton, Thomas. The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh Century to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 2, London: Thomas Tegg, 1840. Waters, W. "Apostrophe." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 61-2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Watson, David. "Ode V: To Pyrrha." In The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace: Translated into English Prose… the Whole Adapted to the Capacities of Youth at School, as Well as of Private Gentlemen, 22-3. London: Printed for J. Oswald, at the Rose and Crown, near the Mansion-House, Stock-Market, 1712. Williams, Carolyn D. "‘On Tiber’s Banks’: Chatterton and Post-Colonialism." In Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, 48-63. Great Britain: Macmillan Press, 1999. Williams, Raymond, and Raymond Henry Williams. Marxism and Literature. Vol. 392, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1977. Wilson, Kathleen. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wilson, Penelope. "Lyric, Pastoral, and Elegy." In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, edited by S.F. Gillespie and D. Hopkins, 173-90. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. "The Place of Classics in Education and Publishing." In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, edited by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, 29-52. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wingendorp, G. "Frontispiece to Ole Worm's "Museum Wormianum"." Engraving printed on paper. Leiden: Isaac Elzevier, 1655. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Routledge, 2013. Worrall, David. "The Theatricalization of British Popular Culture: A General Historical Anthropology." In Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773-1832 Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2007.

'/' #

'/(