SOURCE: “Marvellous Boys,” in New Statesman, September 11, 1987, pp. 27-8.

In the following review of Chatterton, Roberts finds shortcomings in the dubious intellectual games and caricatures of Ackroyd's postmodern narrative.

Just as Georgette Heyer may be said to have reinvented the late 18th century for several generations of modern romantics, so the poet-plagiarist Thomas Chatterton invented the mediaeval period for the early 19th-century Romantics. Finally, of course, he was exposed as a faker of texts, so now Peter Ackroyd offers this thriller-romance [Chatterton] about the quest of a modern poet-romantic to discover how and why Chatterton was able to pull the wool over his contemporaries’ eyes for as long as he did.

Georgette Heyer moved her plots along with thrilling hints of sexual ambiguity and cross-dressing; Chatterton provided nostalgic images of a perfect lost world that his fellows, struggling with the implications of the Industrial Revolution, needed to believe...