Chatterton: a story of the year 1770

Front matter

QJornell Uniueraitg 2Iibrarjj

FROM THE

BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY

Chapter I. Wilkes And Liberty

Was there ever a time that did not think highly of its own importance ? Was there ever a time when the world did not believe itself to be going to pieces, and when alarming pamphlets on "the present crisis" did not lie unbought on the counters of the booksellers ? Poor mortals that we are, how we do make the most of our own little portion in the general drama of history! Nor are we quite wrong, after all. There is nothing really to laugh at in our laborious anxieties about this same " present crisis," which is always happening, and never over. " We live in earnest times : " what is there in the incessant repetition of this stereo-

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typed phrase, but an explicit assertion by each generation for itself that the great sense of life, transmitted already through so many generations, is now, in turn, passing through it ? The time when we ourselves are alive, the time when our eyes behold the light, and when the breath is strong in our nostrils, that is the crisis for us ; and, although it belongs to a higher than we to determine the worth of what we do, yet that we should do everything with a certain amount of vehemence and bustle seems but the necessary noise of the shuttle as we weave forth our allotted portion of the general web of existence.

WeU, many years ago, there was " a crisis " in England. It was the time, reader, when our great-greatgrandfathers, intent on bringing about your existence and mine, were, for that purpose, paying court to our reluctant great-great-grandmothers. George III. an obese young sovereign of thirty-three, had been then ten years on the throne. Newspapers were not so numerous as now ; Parliament was not open to reporters; and, had gentlemen of the Liberal press been alive, with their present political opinions, every soul of them would have been hanged. Nevertheless, people got on very well ; and there was enough for a nation of seven millions to take interest in and talk about, when they were in an inquisitive humoui\ Lord North, an ungainly country gentleman, with

WILKES AND LIBERTY.

goggle eyes and big cheeks, had just succeeded the Duke of Grafton as the head of a Tory ministry; Lord Chatham, throwing off his gout for the occasion, had, at the age of sixty-two, resumed his place as the thundering Jove of the Opposition; Bute and other Scotchmen were still said to be sucking the blood of the nation; and Edmund Burke, then in the prime of his strength and intellect, was publishing masterly pamphlets, and trying to construct, under the auspices of the Marquis of Eockingham, a new Whig party. Among the notabilities out of Parliament were — Dr. Samuel Johnson, then past his sixty-first year, and a most obstinate old Tory; his friend Sir Joshua Eeynolds, fourteen years younger; Goldy, several years younger still; and Garrick, fifty-four years of age, but as sprightly as ever. In another circle, but not less prominently before the town, were Parson Home and Mrs. Macaulay; and all England was ringing with the terrible letters of the invisible Junius. But the man of the hour, the hero of the self-dubbed crisis, was John Wilkes.

Arrested in 1763, on account of the publication of No. 45 of the Jfforth Briton, in which one of the King's speeches had been severely commented on; discharged a few days afterwards in consequence of his privilege as a Member of Parliament ; lifted instantaneously by this accident into an unexampled blaze of popular

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favour ; persecuted all the more on this account by the Court party ; at last, in January 1764, expelled from his seat in the House of Commons by a vote declaring him to be a seditious libeller; put on his trial thereafter before the Court of Queen's Bench, and escaping sentence only by a voluntary flight to France: — this squint-eyed personage, known up to that time only as a profligate wit about town, who lived on his wife's money, and fascinated other women in spite of his ugliness, had now been for six years the idol and glory of England. For six years "Wilkes and Forty-five" had been chalked on the walls, "Wilkes and Liberty" had been the cry of the mobs, and portraits of Wilkes had hung in the windows of the print-shops. Eemembering that he was the champion of liberal opinions, even pious Dissenters had forgotten his atheism and his profligacy. They distinguished, they said, between the man and the cause which he represented.

For a year or two the patriot had been content with the mere echo of this applause as it was wafted to him ia Paris. But, cash failing him there, and the parliament from which he had been ejected having been dissolved, he had returned to England early in 1768, had offered himself as a candidate for the City of London, had lost that election, but had almost instantly afterwards been returned for the county of

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Middlesex. Hereupon he had ventured to surrender himself to the process of the law ; and the result had been his condemnation, in June, 1768, to pay a fine of 1,000^., and undergo an imprisonment of twenty-two months. Nor had this been all. No sooner had Parliament met than it had proceeded to expel the member for Middlesex. Then had begun the tug of war between Parliament and the People. Thirteen days after his expulsion, the exasperated electors of Middlesex had again returned Wilkes as their representative, no one having dared to oppose him. Again the House had expelled him, and again the electors had returned him. Not till after the fourth farce of election had the contest ceased. On that occasion three other candidates had presented themselves; and one of them, Colonel LuttreU, having polled 296 votes, had been declared by the House to be duly elected, notwithstanding that the votes for "Wilkes had been four times as numerous. Tremendous then had been the outcry of popular indignation. During the whole of the years 1768 and 1769 "the violation of the right of election by parliamentary despotism" had been the great topic of the country; and in the bewiiming of 1770 this was stiU. the question of the hour, the question forced by the people into all other discussions, and regarding which aU candidates for popular favour, from Chatham himself down to the parish

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beadle, were obliged distinctly to declare themselves.

Meanwhile, Wilkes was in the King's Bench, Southwark. His consolations, we may suppose, were that by aU this his popularity had been but increased, that Parson Home and the Society for the Protection of the Bill of Eights had organised a subscription in his favour, which would more than pay his fine, and that the whole country was waiting to do him honour on the day when he should step out of prison.

It came at last : Tuesday, the 17th of April, 1770. There was a considerable show of excitement all day in the vicinity of the ' prison ; and it was with some difficulty that the patriot, getting into a hackney-coach late in the afternoon, made his way, past the cordial clutches of the mob, into the country. That evening and the next there were huzzas and illuminations in his honour; the house of Beckford, the Lord Mayor, in the then aristocratic region of Soho Square, was conspicuously decorated with the word " Liberty ; " and public dinners to celebrate the release of the patriot were held in various parts of the city.

The rejoicings were not confined to London. In many other towns in England there were demonstrations in honour of Wilkes. A list of the chief places may still be culled from the newspapers of the day. From these newspapers we learn, Avhat indeed mi^ht

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have been independently surmised, that not the least eager among the towns of England, in this emulous show of regard for WUkes, was the ancient mercantile city of Bristol. The following appeared in the Public Advertiser of London, as from a Bristol correspondent, on the very day of Wilkes's release : —

" Bristol, April 14:th. — We hear that on Wednesday next, heing the day of Mr. Wilkes's enlargement, forty-iive persons are to dine at the ' Crown,' in the passage leading from Broad Street to Tower Lane. The entertainment is to consist of two rounds of beef, of 45 lbs. each ; two legs of veal, weighing 45 lbs. ; two ditto of pork, 45 lbs. ; a pig, roasted, 45 lbs. ; two puddings of 45 lbs.; 45 loaves; and, to drink, 45 tankards of ale. After dinner, they are to smoke 45 pipes of tobacco, and to drink 45 bowls of punch. Among others, the following toasts are to be given : — 1. Long live the King; 2. Long live the supporters of British Liberty ; 3. The Magistrates of Bristol. And the dinner to be on the table exactly 45 minutes after two o'clock."

Whether the precise dinner thus announced by the Bristol correspondent of the Public Advertiser was held or not must, we fear, remain a mystery ; but that there were several dinners in Bristol on the occasion is quite certain. On Thursday, the 19th, in particular, a public entertainment (possibly the above, with the day altered) was given in honour of the patriot by

"an eminent citizen," and attended by many of the most influential men in the place.

Ah ! the poetry of coincidences ! On that same Thursday evening, while the assembled guests in the " Crown " were clattering their glasses in the hot room, puf&ng their tobacco-smoke, and making the roof ring with their tipsy uproar, there was walking moodily through the streets of Bristol a young attorney's apprentice, who, four days before, had been discharged from his employment because he had alarmed his master by threatening to commit suicide. This attorney's apprentice was Thomas Chatterton.

CHAPTEE II.

TEE ATTORNEY'S AFPBENTICE OF BRISTOL.

It was in the month of August 1760 that a poor widow, who supported herself and two children by dressmaking, and by keeping a small day-school in one of the back streets of Bristol, gained admission for her younger child, a boy of seven years and nine months old, into Colston's School, a charitable foundation sinular in some respects to Christ's Hospital in London. The husband of this widow, a rough, drunken fellow, who had been a singer, or sub-chaunter, in the cathedral choir of Bristol, as well as the master of a kind of free school for boys, had died a month or two before his son's birth. An old grandmother, however — either the widow's own mother or her husband's — was stni alive, dependent, in some degree, on the family.

For nearly seven years, or from August 1760 to July 1767, the boy remained an inmate of Colston's

School, -wearing, as the Christ's Hospital hoys in London still do, a hlue coat and yellow stockings, and receiving, according to the custom of the institution, such a plain education as might fit him for an ordinary mercantile or mechanical occupation. But, from the very first, the boy was singular. For one thing, he was a prodigious reader. The Bible, theological treatises, scraps of history, old magazines, poetry, whatever in the shape of a printed volume came in his way — all were eagerly pounced upon and devoured ; and it was not long before his reputation in this respect enabled him to lay one or two circulating libraries under friendly contribution. Then, again, his temper, people remarked, had something in it quite unusual in one so young. Generally very sullen and silent, he was liable to sudden and unaccountable fits of weeping, as weU as to violent fits of rage. He was also extremely secretive, and fond of being alone ; and on Saturday and other holiday afternoons, when he was at liberty to go home from school, it was a subject of speculation with his mother, Mrs. Chatterton, and her acquaintances, what the boy could be doing, sitting alone, for hours, as was his habit, in a garret full of all kinds of out-of-the-way lumber.

When he was about ten years of age, it became known to some of his seniors that the little Bluecoat was in the habit of writing verses. It is supposed that a taste for that exercise had been roused in him, as well as in other boys in Colston's School, by the'usher or under-master of the school, a Mr. Thomas Phillips, who himself dabbled in literature, and contributed to periodicals. If so, however, the little pupil does not seem to have taken even the usher into his confidence originally, but to have proceeded on his own account. His first known attempt in verse had been a pious little achievement, entitled "On the Last Epiphany; or, Christ's coming to Judgment;" and so proud had he been of this performance, and so ambitious of seeing it in print, that he boldly dropped it, one Saturday afternoon, into the letter-box of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, a weekly newspaper in high local repute. It appeared in the columns of that newspaper on the 8th of January, 1763. From that day Chatterton was a sworn poet. Piece after piece was dropped by him during a period of three years into the letter-box of the accommodatiag Journal. Only one of these, however, is it necessary to mention particularly — a little lampoon, printed the 7th of January, 1764, and entitled "The Churchwarden and the Apparition; a Fable.'' A Mr. Joseph Thomas, a brickmaker by trade, chancing in that year to hold the office of churchwarden for the parish of St. Mary Eedcliffe, had greatly scandalized the public mind by causing the old churchyard to be levelled, .and the surplus earth and clay to be carted away, as people said, for his own professional uses. For this outrage on decorum he was much attacked by the local press, and nowhere more severely than in the above-mentioned verses of the little Bluecoat; in whom, by-the-bye, there must have been a kind of hereditary resentment of such a piece of sacrilege, as his ancestors, the Chattertons, had been sextons of the church of St. Mary Eedcliffe for a period of one hundred and fifty years continuously. The office had, in fact, only passed out of the family on the death of an older brother of his father, named John Chatterton.

The date does not seem quite certain, but it was probably nearly three years after this occurrence, and when Chatterton was above fourteen years of age, and one of the senior boys in the Bluecoat School, that he stepped, one afternoon, into the shop of a Mr. Burgum, partner of a Mr. Catcott in the pewter trade.

" I have found out a secret about you, Mr. Burgum," he said, going up to the pewterer at his desk.

" Indeed : what is it ? " said Mr. Burgum.

" That you are descended from one of the noblest families in England."

" I did not know it," said the victim.

" It is true though," said Chatterton ; " and, to prove it, I will bring you your pedigree written out, as I have traced it by the help of books of the peerage and old parchments."

TSU ATTORNEY'S APPRENTICE OF BRISTOL. 15

Accordingly, a few days afterwards, he again called, and presented tlie astonished pewterer with a manuscript copybook, headed in large text as follows : "Account of the Family of the De Berghams, from the Norman Conquest to this Time; collected from original Eecords, Tournament Eolls, and the Heralds of March and Garter Eecords, by T. Chatterton." In this document the Burgum pedigree was elaborately traced up, through no end of great names and illustrious intermarriages, to one " Simon de Seyncte Lyze, alias Senliz," who had come into England with the Conqueror, married a daughter of the Saxon chief Waltheof, become possessed of Burgham Castle in Northumberland, and other properties, and been eventually created Earl of Northampton.

Pleased with the honours thus unexpectedly thrust upon him, the pewterer gave the Bluecoat 'five shillings for his trouble. To show his gratitude, Chatterton soon returned with "A Continuation of the Account of the Family of the De Berghams, from the Norman Conquest to this time." In the original pedigree the young genealogist had judiciously stopped short at the sixteenth century. In the supplement, however, he ventures as far down as the reign of Charles II., back to which point the pewterer is left to supply the links for himself. But the chief feature in the pedigree, as elaborated in the second document, is that, in addition to other great names, it contains a poet. This poet, whose name was John de Bergham, was a monk of the Cistercian order, in Bristol; he had been educated at Oxford, and was " one of the greatest ornaments of the age in which he lived." He wrote several books, and translated some part of the Iliad, under the title of " Eomance of Troy." To give Mr. Burgum some idea of the poetic style of this distinguished man, his ancestor, there was inserted a short poem of his in the ancient dialect, entitled, " The Eomaunte of the Cnychte;" and, to render the meaning of the poem more intelligible, there was appended a modern metrical paraphrase of it by Chatterton himself.

By the Mat of this wonderful piece of genealogical and heraldic ingenuity done for Mr. Burgum, as well as by the occasional exercise in a more or less public manner of his talent for verse-making, Chatterton, already recognised as the first for attainments among all the lads in Colston's School, appears to have won a kind of reputation with a few, persons of the pewterer's stamp out of doors — honest people, with small pretensions to literature themselves, but willing to encourage a clever boy whose mother was in poor circumstances.

It was probably through the influence of such persons that, after having been seven years at the school, he was removed from it, in July, 1767, to be

THE ATTORNEY'^ ■J.PPBENTICE OF BRISTOL. 17

apprenticed to Mr. Jojin Lambert, a Bristol attorney. The trustees of Colston's School paid to Lambert, on the occasion, a premium of ten pounds; and the arrangement was that Chatterton should be bound to him for seven years, during which period he was to board and lodge in Mr. Lambert's house, his mother undertaking to wash and mend for him. There was no salary; but, as happens iu such cases, there were probably means in Bristol by which a lad writing, as Chatterton did, a neat clerk's hand, could hope to earn, now and then, a few stray shillings. At any rate, he had the prospect of finding himself, at the end of seven years, in a fair way to be a Bristol attorney.

Lambert's office-hours were from eight in the morning till eight in the evening, with an interval for dinner. From eight till ten in the evening the apprentice was at liberty; but he was required to be home at his master's house, which was at some distance from the office, punctually by ten. An indignity which he felt very much, and more than once complained of, was that, by the household arrangements, which were under the control of an old lady, his master's mother, he was sent to take his meals in the kitchen, and made to sleep with the footboy. To set against this, however, there was the advantage of plenty of spare time ; for, as Lambert's business was not very extensive, the. apprentice was often left alone in the office with nothing

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special to do, and at liberty to amuse himself as lie liked. From copying letters and precedents, he could turn to Camden's Britannia, an edition of which lay on the office-shelves, to Holinshed's Chronicles, to Speght's Chaucer, to Geoffrey of Monmouth, or to any other hook that he could borrow from a library, and smuggle in for his private recreation. Sometimes, also, the tradition goes, his master, entering the office unexpectedly, would catch him writing verses, and would lecture him on the subject. Once the offence was still more serious. An anonymous abusive letter had been sent to Mr. Warner, the head-master of Colston's School ; and, by the texture of the paper and other evidences, this letter was traced to the ex-Bluecoat of Mr. Lambert's office, whose reasons for sending it had probably been personal. On this occasion his master was so exasperated as to strike him.

A young attorney's apprentice, of proud and sullen temper, discontented with his situation, ambitious, conscious of genius, yet treated as a boy and menial servant: such" was Chatterton during the two years that followed his removal from the Bluecoat School. To this add the want of pocket-money ; for, busy as he was with his master's work and his own secret exercises in the way of literature, it is still authentically known that he found time of an evening not only to drop in pretty regularly at his mother's house, but also to do as other attorneys' apprentices did, and prosecute little amusements, such as all apprentices like to find practicable. Altogether, the best glimpse we have of Chatterton in his commoner aspect as an attorney's apprentice in Bristol is that which we get from a letter written by him, during his first year with Mr. Lambert, to a youth named Baker, who had been his chum at Colston's School, and had emigrated to America. Baker had written to him from South Carolina, informing him, amongst other things, that he had fallen in love with an American belle, of the name of Hoyland, whose charms had obscured his memory of the Bristol fair ones, and begging him, it would also appear, to woo the Muses in his favour, and transmit him across the Atlantic a poem or two, to be presented to Miss Hoyland. Chatterton complies, and sends a long letter, beginning with a few amatory effusions to Miss Hoyland, such as Baker wanted, and concluding thus : —

"Deae Friend, — I must now close my poetical labours, my master being returned from London. You write in a very entertaining style ; though I am afraid mine will be to the contrary. Your celebrated Miss Eumsey is going to be married to Mr. Fowler, as he himself informs me. Pretty children! about to enter into the comfortable yoke of matrimony, to be at their liberty ; just a propos to the old saw, ' But out of the

20 CSATTERTON.

frying-pan into the fire.' Por a lover, heavens mend him ! but for a husband, oh, excellent ! What a female Machiavel- this Miss Rumsey is ! A very good mistress of nature, to discover a demon in the habit of a parson ; to find a spirit so well adapted to the humour of an English wife; that is, one who takes off his hat to every person he chances to meet, to show his staring horns ! . . . mirabile, what will human nature degenerate into ? Fowler aforesaid declares he makes a scruple of conscience of being too free with Miss Eumsey before marriage. There's a gallant for you ! Why, a girl with anything of the woman would despise him for it. But no more of this, I am glad you approve of the ladies in Charlestown, and am obliged to you for the compliment of including me in your happiness. My friendship is as firm as the white rock when the black waves war 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, turning with the rattling hail. So much for heroics ; to speak plain English, I am, and ever will be, your unalterable friend. 1 did not give your love to Miss Rumsey, having not seen her in private ; and in public she will not speak to me, because of her great love to Fowler, and on another occasion. I have been violently in love these three-and-twenty times since your departure, and not a few times came off victorious. I am obliged to you for your curiosity, and shall esteem it very much, not on account of itself, but as coming from you. The poems, &c., on Miss Hoyland, I wish better, for her sake and yours. The ' Tournament ' I have only one canto of, which I send herewith ; the remainder is entirely lost. I am, with the greatest regret, going to subscribe myself your faithful and constant friend till death do us part.

"Thomas Chatteeton.

'To Mb. Baker, Charlesiown, South Carolina.''

When Chatterton wrote this letter he was fifteen years and four months old. To its tone, as illustrative of certain parts of his character, we shall have yet to refer ; meanwhile let us attend to the mention made in it of the Tournament, one canto of which is said to be sent along with it. The poem here meant is doubtless the antique dramatic fragment published among Chatterton's writings in the assumed guise of an original poem of the fifteenth century, descriptive of a tournament held at Bristol in the reign of Edward I. From the manner of the allusion it is clear that as early as this period of Chatterton's life — that is, before the close of the first year of his apprenticeship — he was in the habit of showing about to some of his private friends poems in an antique style, which he represented as genuine antiques, copied from old parchments in his possession. It was not, however, till about six months after the date of the foregoing epistle that he made his debut in the professed character of an antiquarian and proprietor of ancient manuscripts before the good folks of Bristol generally.

In September, 1768, a new bridge was opened at

Bristol with much civic pomp and ceremony. While the excitement was still fresh, the antiquaries of the town were startled by the appearance, in Felix Farley's Journal, of a very interesting account of the ceremonies that had attended the similar opening, several centuries before, of the old bridge, which had just been superseded. This account, communicated by an anonymous correspondent, signing himself " Dunhelmus Bristoliensis," purported to be taken from an old manuscript, contemporary with the occurrence. It described how the opening of the old bridge had taken place on a " Fridaie " ; how, on that " Fridaie ", the ceremonies had begun by one " Master Greggorie Dalbenye ", who went " aboute the toUynge of the tenth clock ", to inform " Master Mayor all thyngs were prepared " ; how the procession to the bridge had consisted, first, of "two Beadils streying fresh stre", then of a man dressed as " a Saxon Elderman ", then of " a mickle strong manne in armour carrying a huge anlace {i.e. sword) ", then of " six claryons and minstrels ", then of " Master Mayor " on a white horse, then of " the Eldermen and Cittie Brothers" on sable horses, and, finally, of " the preests, parish, mendicant, and seculor, some synging Saincte Warburgh's song, others sounding claryons thereto, and others some citrialles " ; how, when the procession had reached the bridge, the " manne with the anlace " took his station on a mound reared in the middle of it ; how the rest gathered round him, " the preestes and freers, all in white albs, making a most goodlie shewe", and singing "the song of Saincte Baldwyn"; how, when this was done, "the manne on the top threwe with greet myght his anlace into the see, and the claryons sounded an auntiant charge and forloyn " ; how then there was more singing, and, at the town-cross, a Latin sermon "preeched by Ealph de Blundeville " ; and how the day was ended by festivities, the performance of the "play of " The Knyghtes of Bristowe " by the friars of St. Augustine, and the lighting of a great boniire on Kynwulph Hill.

The antiquaries of the town were eager to know the anonymous "Dunhelmus Bristoliensis " who had contributed this perfectly novel document to the archives of Bristol ; and they succeeded in identifying him with Mr. Lambert's singular apprentice, — the discoverer, as they would now learii, of a similar piece of antiquity in the shape of a pedigree for Mr. Burgum, the pewterer. Examined, coaxed, and threatened, on the subject of his authority, Chatterton prevaricated, but at last adhered to the assertion that the manuscript in question was one of a collection which had belonged to his father, who had obtained them from the large chest or coffer in the muniment-room of the church of St. Mary Eedcliffe. And here, whether owing to his

24 CSATTEBTON.

obstinacy or the stupidity of the inquisitors, the matter was allowed to rest.

The general impression that followed the discovery of the author of the communication relative to the opening of the old bridge was that Mr. Lambert's apprentice was really a very extraordinary lad, who, besides being a poet in a small way, was also a dabbler in antiquities, and had somehow or other become possessed, as he said himself, of valuable materials respecting the history of Bristol. Accordingly he became, in some sense, a local celebrity. Among the persons who now took him by the hand, if they had not been already acquainted with him, at least three were of some name and importance in Bristol — Mr. George Catcott, the partner of Mr. Burgum; his brother, the Eev. Alexander Catcott, vicar of one of the Bristol parish-churches ; and Mr. Barrett, a surgeon in good practice. Two of these had a reputation as literary men. Mr. William Barrett, the surgeon, was not only a sedate and prosperous professional man, but of repute as an antiquarian, and was known to be engaged in writing a History of Bristol. The Eev. Mr. Catcott had written a book in support of the Noachian view of the Deluge, and was, besides, according to Chatterton's delineations of him, a kind of oracle on scientific points at Bristol tea-parties, where, " shewing wondering cits his fossil store," he would expound his