SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Family Romance of Imposter-Poet Thomas Chatterton, Macmillan-Atheneum, 1987, pp. 1-11.

In the following essay, Kaplan provides a psychoanalytic portrait of Chatterton, describing him as a “typical, if extreme,” adolescent who was also haunted by the absence of a father who died before he was born. Chatterton, the critic notes, spent his short life searching for his father in the form of the medieval personages that he fabricated.

Thomas Chatterton was in many ways a typical adolescent. During the seventeen years of his life, he was an exuberant player in the artistic, intellectual, religious, political, and sexual adventures we have come to expect of not-quite-adults. Even his suicide marked him as a typical, if extreme, example of the Sturm und Drang image of adolescence. But he was not merely an ordinary adolescent. He was an impostor, and indeed he grew up in the precise family environment...