THE ROWLEY POEMS
by
Thomas Chatterton
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
The text of this edition of The Rowley Poems is taken
from a facsimile of the 3rd Tyrwhitt edition ( 1778),
edited and with an introduction by Maurice Hare,
published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1911.
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 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
