SOURCE: A review of Chatterton, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn, 1989, p. 681.

In the following review, Firchow offers a positive assessment of Chatterton.

Peter Ackroyd is rapidly becoming the next novelist to watch. One sign of his newly acquired status is the appearance of Chatterton, his third novel, in a plush paperback edition featuring gushing blurbs from the New York Times, Time, and other watched places. This event has taken place more than a year after the book’s first publication in hardback and at about the same time as his most recent novel, First Light, is being hailed in triumph from London to New York to Sydney and beyond.

What is the secret of such success? Aside from the fact that Ackroyd writes well, with tremendous verve and wit, it is probably due to his complex yet oddly accessible intertextuality. The sometime biographer of T. S...