EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION.

I. CHATTERTON’S LIFE AND DEATH AND THE GENESIS OF THE ROWLEY POEMS

Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on the 20th of November 1752.  His father—­also Thomas—­dead three months before his son’s birth, had been a subchaunter in Bristol Cathedral and had held the mastership in a local free school.  We are told that he was fond of reading and music; that he made a collection of Roman coins, and believed in magic (or so he said), studying the black art in the pages of Cornelius Agrippa.  With all the self-acquired culture and learning that raised him above his class (his father and grandfathers before him for more than a hundred years had been sextons to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe) he is described as a dissipated, ‘rather brutal fellow’.  Lastly, he appears to have been ‘very proud’, self-confident, and self-reliant.

Of Chatterton’s mother little need be said.  Gentle and rather foolish, she was devoted to her two children Mary and, his sister’s junior by two years, Thomas the Poet.  Of these Mary seems to have inherited the colourless character of her mother; but Thomas must always have been remarkable.  We have the fullest accounts of his childhood, and the details that might with another be set down as chronicles of the nursery will be seen to have their importance in the case of this boy who set himself consciously to be famous when he was eight, wrote fine imaginative verse before he was thirteen, and killed himself aged seventeen and nine months.

Thomas, then, was a moody baby, a dull small boy who knew few of his letters at four; and was superannuated—­such was his impenetrability to learning—­at the age of five from the school of which his father had been master.  He was moreover till the age of six and a half so frequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently causeless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for his reason and thought him ‘an absolute fool.’  We are told also by his sister—­and there is no incongruity in the two accounts—­that he early displayed a taste for ’preheminence and would preside over his playmates as their master and they his hired servants.’  At seven and a half he dissipated his mother’s fear that she had borne a fool by rapidly learning to read in a great black-letter Bible; for characteristically ‘he objected to read in a small book.’  In a very short time from this he appears to have devoured eagerly the contents of every volume he could lay his hands on.  He had a thirst for knowledge at large—­for any kind of information, and as the merest child read with a careless voracity books of heraldry, history, astronomy, theology, and such other subjects as would repel most children, and perhaps one may say, most men.  At the age of eight we hear of him reading ‘all day or as long as they would let him,’ confident that he was going to be famous, and promising his mother and sister